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Myself being ethnically at least 3/4 Jewish, I have always felt skeptical about this kind of arithmetic.
Both von Baeyer and Metchnikoff would be puzzled to see their names mentioned here. Von Baeyer was a son of a German lieutenant general, and hardly cared much about the Jewish roots of his Lutheran mother. Metchnikoff was born into the family of an officer of the Imperial Guard, baptised Russian Orthodox, raised as a normal Russian noble and, just like von Baeyer, had little time for the Jewish origins of his mother.
It is even more surprising to see on this list the name of Sir Roger Penrose. Well, yes, one of his grandmothers was of Jewish origin. Is that sufficient to count him in?
Feynman's Wikipedia page contains a reference to Feynman specifically declining to provide information for a book on Jewish Nobel laureates being compiled by Tina Levitan. He was an avowed atheist, uninterested in Jewish sociology, and found the concept of linking Jewish-ness to academic worth or professional achievement as opening "the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory". While he was certainly born into a Jewish family, given his public stated atheism and a particular instruction to not be included on any lists of Jewish Nobel laureates, it seems actively perverse to include him.
I agree with him. That statement violates WP:NPOV. It sounds like something that would be written in a jewish-supremacist blog. In reality, the nobel prize is eurocentric with over half of laureates being from Europe (54%). Using statistics in a biased manner to suggest inherent superiority in comparison to the entire rest of the world is not neutral point of view. Greenlion88 (talk) 15:33, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Googling it extensively I only found 3 sources talking about "110x" their proportion of the world's population - this article, a reddit post, and a blog website run by an individual called romanjews.com. If you claim that something is repeated over the years by reliable sources - you should actually name the alleged reliable sources.
The problem however is not that it is necessarily statistically false - the problem is that it's not WP:NPOVbecause a wikipedia editor created it (again only seen here, on a reddit post, and presumably copied to the blog website from this article) and then misused it to imply something that is misrepresenting. Again - 88% of nobel prizes are given to someone in Europe or USA. (source). And the nobel's eurocentric status is well known and discussed in reliable sources like The Guardian and The Economist.
That statistic effectively implies that everyone everywhere in the world has equal access to the nobel prize and one group beat them all by getting 110x their share. Wikipedia editors should not themselves create statistics that misrepresent ideas to heap laudatory praise on one group over another. Greenlion88 (talk) 21:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, your opinion certainly may be shared here, to a point (WP:NOTFORUM), but it sounds like there is a consensus to retain the information as written. The sources are linked in footnotes 4 and 5. Andre🚐22:02, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely none of the sources in footnotes 4 or 5 include the "110x" statistic. "0.2% of the world population" and "27% of Nobel prizes" is not the problem. The problem is that a Wikipedia editor created the 110x statistic themselves.
Biased misrepresenting calculations w/o context? Why not crunch up the numbers of the homicide rate per capita of Black Americans vs all other Americans and present it w/o context too in a wiki? Or how about the deaths per capita by government actors of Palestinians vs Israelis? A creative person can think of a million calculations that while factual are misrepresentative. Greenlion88 (talk) 17:51, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see what's biased or misrepresentative about it. Regardless, it's been around for a long time and there's a consensus to retain it. Andre🚐18:33, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well like I said earlier - the misrepresentative part is that the statistic implies that everyone everywhere in the world has equal access to the nobel prize and one group beat everyone else in the world by a huge amount. That's probably why none of the reliable sources calculated it that way. But I concede that the consensus is against me so I'll accept it now.
Would it be acceptable to at least add a sentence of context after it? For example: "Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population. However, 88% of Nobel prizes have been awarded to persons from either Europe or USA and the prize has faced criticism for being euro-centric. [source of stat][sources of euro-centric criticism]" Greenlion88 (talk) 19:59, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That seems irrelevant anyhow. There are Jews in many countries in the world, many of them for example in Israel, which is not in Europe but West Asia, Argentina which is South America, Canada, which is not the USA but North America, Russia, which well, I doubt you meant Russia when you said Europe even though it's Eurasia. See Jewish population by country. You can separately add something about the Nobel Prize's Eurocentricism if you have sources, to a different article, but unless you have a source that talks about both that, and the Jewish Nobel laureates, it's WP:SYNTH on this article. See why? Andre🚐20:15, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
