User:MRotten

Areas of my expertise:

• Human Immunodeficiency Virus
• Biochemistry
• Proteins
• Beer brewing
• Things that are/aren't funny
• Pseudoscience and quackery
• Sex
• Politics
• Religion
• Parenting

Areas in which I falsely claim to have expertise:

• Sex
• Politics
• Religion
• Parenting

Persuasive Argument for Dropping "Importance" Rating for Scientific Topics:

I don't think it's appropriate to assign "importance" to a biological topic. CRISPR, for example, would have been a niche topic if a highly derivative and simplified version of it wasn't such a handy biotechnology tool. Is the bacterial immune system notable on it's own merits, or is it only notable because a now-ubiquitous biotechnology tool was developed from it? I realize that this is a pretty tired argument around Wikipedia, but I think it's worth revisiting for assigning "importance" to articles relating to biology.

According to these GLs, a "top" importance topic must be "extremely important, even crucial, to its specific field" - so essentially, for a topic to be considered important, it has to be important. This is not a helpful guideline. Ignoring that, how narrow is the definition of "field"? The word "specific" indicates that the field can be made arbitrarily narrow. Lambda phage is certainly crucial to the narrow field of lambda phage biology, an argument that can be made for virtually any topic of biology, so aren't we implicitly deciding on the importance of a field and/or sub-discipline, and moreover deciding that based on arbitrary criteria? In my opinion, this is a fool's errand.

According to the Virology project guidelines, there's an alternative route to "top" importance: if a topic has achieved "international notability within a field". Dealing with "international" first, I wonder if any biology laboratory on the planet would be ignorant of lambda phage, and how many nations "international" encompasses. Yet the "Lambda Phage" article is somehow "high" importance, not "top" importance. Then the "notable" part of the definition for "top" importance - I would propose that any topic that has been published is notable by definition, because it has been noted in the scientific record. Like "world class" and "superfood", "international notability" is not scientific because it lack precise meaning. By extension, "importance" as defined by the breadth of notability is then also meaningless. Importance could be re-defined, of course, but I am not aware of a definition that is both meaningfully specific, and widely supported.

The scientific publishing industry has demonstrated many pitfalls in assigning importance. It's nonetheless necessary to decide what subset of submitted manuscripts the journal will publish. Unlike assigning importance to topics in Wikipedia, assigning importance to manuscripts is narrow in focus, in that it considers only the submitted manuscript (not an entire topic), and "importance" is the expected frequency that others will cite the published article (. Even then, when the question is focused and has defined criteria, this is not a perfect system. A rejected manuscript, when it is eventually published elsewhere, is sometimes much more influential than the rejecting editor predicted. Conversely, an accepted paper might be infrequently cited. Journals often get it right, in that manuscript published in high impact factor journals are often heavily cited. However, the citation rate could be self-fulfilling in that, regardless of quality or importance, an article published in Science will be read (and therefore cited) more frequently than if that same article had been published in PLoS One.

I think we should learn from scientific publishing, and do away with evaluating the "importance" of a topic. Publishing and funding organizations have to consider importance in order to distribute limited resources (page allocation and research funding, respectively). Wikipedia is different. We don't have to subject ourselves to the pitfalls of assigning importance values to scientific topics because we're not distributing some limited resource. I propose that this metric be scrapped altogether for biological topics simply because it serves no purpose. MRotten (talk) 17:56, 31 July 2018 (UTC)