Talk:Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Latest comment: 4 days ago by 2A00:23C8:7B0C:9A01:AD4B:6795:4308:4857 in topic Nobel laureates
Good articleMassachusetts Institute of Technology has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
January 22, 2005Featured article candidateNot promoted
May 10, 2006Good article nomineeListed
December 16, 2006Peer reviewReviewed
January 14, 2007Featured article candidateNot promoted
July 29, 2008Good article reassessmentKept
August 27, 2008Peer reviewReviewed
October 4, 2010Peer reviewReviewed
July 4, 2011Good article reassessmentKept
Current status: Good article

This fixation on rankings edit

The MIT article has just been worked over with successive additions, reversions, and new additions, all to promote its lofty achievement of high ratings by various magazine articles. This gets so tedious. For the record, I will stipulate that MIT, along with Caltech probably, are the two best science schools in the nation. That said, there are a group of editors, usually hiding behind anonymity, who insist on bloviating on over these rankings and engaging in Citation overkill

Those who do this may think they are serving the interest of their favored school. However, many of us take umbrage (for those who didn't attend Hah-vard, MIT or Yale, that means "become annoyed about"), as I was saying, we take umbrage about the endless, pestering small edits, adding one reference at a time, then fixing it, then correcting a double space, then another typo, then another word, and then starting all over again with yet another reference. I care about clarity and substance, and so like many other reviewers I read these edits, and compare them each step along the way. There are a couple of schools that collect these ponderous edits like fleas on a dog - Georgia, Wayne State, every stinkin' one of the Ivy League articles, and now MIT, Stanford and Cal. Every day these seem to have a slough of additional, pedantic edits to review. --Just to declare that they are special.

Many of us take further umbrage at editors who hide behind anonymity. Yes, Wikipedia allows Anon to edit. But the hard truth is, many of us start our review of Anon's work with a negative bias, as if we might assume they are hiding something, like a connection to the school's media department, perhaps?

Time to create a real user account, with a Talk page that invites dialog, and to declare your conflicts of interest. Everyone has 'em. Jax MN (talk) 19:23, 8 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

According to WHOIS data (https://whois-referral.toolforge.org/gateway.py?lookup=true&ip=18.29.1.178, https://whois.domaintools.com/18.29.1.178) for 18.29.1.178, that IP address is for Massachusetts Institute of Technology Room W92-167, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA. If that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
BTW, https://officesdirectory.mit.edu/information-systems-and-technology says that that room is the office of Vice President for Information Systems & Technology Mark V Silis. Solomon Ucko (talk) 21:13, 8 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks Solomon. Anon, I understand, too, that for college administrators or media relations people it can be frightening to consider that Wikipedia summary articles are out of your control. Many of us who police these articles for vandalism also police them for bloviating, puffary, bad references and unsupported claims. Again, MIT is a well-known and highly-regarded school. I frankly don't care if you work there yet make the occasional edit, as long as your edits are factual, encyclopedic in style, and consistent in scope with peer organizations. Since many of these college and university articles tend toward bloat and tend to focus on ratings, rather than fight to rid the entire class of such articles of all but summary treatment, I would vote to allow some of it. But please, note your conflicts of interest, and limit each paragraph to a few high-value references, eh? Jax MN (talk) 22:13, 8 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

Associated Press, November 10, 2023 edit

MIT has just said that it will not give academic suspensions to students who physically prevented Jewish students from entering the campus.

The school originally said it would give out academic suspensions. However, after protestors complained that this would lead to loss of their visas, and that they would get deported, the school changed its mind.

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tensions-running-high-new-england-campuses-protests-israel-104805935

I think this should be mentioned in one of MIT related articles, but I'm not sure which article would be best.

What do others think?

SquirrelHill1971 (talk) 18:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

I think you would do well to review WP:NPOV and WP:DUE. ElKevbo (talk) 22:32, 13 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for your comment and suggestion. SquirrelHill1971 (talk) 14:59, 14 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

WP:DUE / inclusion of relative prestige in lede edit

Dear @GuardianH: and @ElKevbo:, I was wondering if you could advise me on how to expand the “Rankings” section (I would also like to change it to “Reputation and rankings”) here. From the Stanford talk page, I gather that I may need material explicitly supporting the position that MIT’s reputation for innovation, wealth, and rankings have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world (if eventually permitted back in, I wish to revise the lede statement to include wealth). This is what I have collected so far (pardon me for the messiness):

  1. Wealth:
  2. Rankings:
    1. That rankings contribute significantly to prestige:
    2. That MIT accordingly ranks (academically, not by prestige or desire rankings) among the best institutions in the world:
  3. Innovation / research (that MIT is perceived globally as a model for innovation and higher education):
  4. That MIT is prestigious in general (non-academic rankings and more):

Let me know if any of these may help to resolve the WP:DUE body weight issue previously encountered!

Cheers, Marcustcii (talk) 13:40, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

I worry that you are begging the question. You'll make more progress and we'll get a better article if you first find high quality sources that discuss the university's reputation and then summarize what those sources say (as opposed to only looking for sources that support the conclusion that you've already assumed). ElKevbo (talk) 23:33, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
Good point, sorry! What if I put aside all talk of rankings for now and focus on finding more articles like the ones I linked from JSTOR (excluding the KAIST one, which certainly reads far more like a newsletter) discussing the type of STEM-focused education MIT represents and its general reputation? Would that fit with the high quality sources that might improve the article, or do those journal articles I linked not yet meet the standards we’d want? Marcustcii (talk) 00:23, 31 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
Also, being a veteran scholar of higher education yourself (whereas I am interested in the field but have little experience to show for it), do you have any recommendations as to where I could start finding the type of sources you’re talking about? Is there a specific set of journals or databases that you might recommend? Marcustcii (talk) 00:29, 31 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
@ElKevbo: I’ve found two more sources relating to this university in general: Etzkowitz’s MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science and the less MIT-focused The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era by Graham and Diamond. Etzkowitz in particular seems to have written extensively about MIT’s role in the development of American higher education — would you consider that as (a) an appropriately qualified source and (b) belonging more to the history of the institution or its reputation? (While I am mostly looking for sources on its reputation, I’d love to be able to contribute to any part of the article). Marcustcii (talk) 19:41, 31 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
Sorry but I can't answer those questions without reading those materials. The publishers are certainly reputable so it looks like you're on the right track! ElKevbo (talk) 21:10, 31 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Nobel laureates edit

Says "As of October 2023, 101 Nobel laureates [...] have been affiliated with MIT", but the linked list includes only 24 such laureates. The linked list does include a disclaimer about different methods of counting and possible consequent "inconsistency" in numbers, but 101 to 24 seems a blatant contradiction rather than an "inconsistency". 2A00:23C8:7B0C:9A01:AD4B:6795:4308:4857 (talk) 01:16, 24 March 2024 (UTC)Reply