A notability tagging incident on English Wikipedia some ten days ago is receiving ongoing media attention. It would be a good idea to get the facts straight.
The rather curt onwiki discussion is at
The articles targeted were some of those authored by User:jesswade88, who is known for her work on STEM and the gender gap.
That ANI report makes it clear enough that this was a spree resolved by blocking an IP address. Nothing is said there about any actual deletions. It would be helpful if it could be confirmed that nothing was actually deleted on grounds of lack of notability.
Jess Wade was on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4 speaking about this incident. She began with comments about WP demographics that made me wince a bit. She made clear her positive feelings about WP, editing and Wikimedia, but that of course is less sensational than the narrative of a "hostile environment". There was quite a lot of Twitter comment, with some people swearing off editing WP: which is pretty much what the spree was designed to achieve, surely. Others indicated they were inspired to edit.
There have been articles in the Daily Telegraph:
And in the Daily Mail:
These are pretty bad journalism, in terms of respect for the facts. It appears to me that the enWP admin response was perfectly adequate, rather than there being a systemic problem there.
The Woman's Hour interview was reasonable, the press reports unreliable. I think the point here is that good intentions aren't enough to curb the latter: the Mail's article of 2 January about Jess's project
is of course very upbeat, but that hardly entitles the Mail to a hatchet job in December.
Charles