Are we looking at different things? I just wrote a whole long comment on this after poking around on WP about it, and I'd be glad to know if I got things completely scrambled. Because what I see is a page created in 2018, and a _lot_ of intra-WP coverage of the process that led to there not being a page before 2018, all of which squares with what this article says.

I'm probably misunderstanding something, but I do see some 2014 dates at the bottom of the page linked above. ISTM wikipedia was informed of this scientist in some fashion in 2014, and those contributions were deleted or set aside or whatever. I'm happy to be educated on this, but at least we can say that the process is obscure.

Of course the point is that GP's whinging about headlines is silly. Her Nobel paper was published in 1985.

You're right, I missed the stub from 2014. It was speedy-deleted for copyright infringement.

That would be a valid justification in general, but I'm curious in this particular case. Was this an infringement of another encyclopedia? Perhaps that publication could have been identified in the deletion note? Maybe even cited in the page itself? Basic facts about a human (birthdate, alma mater, publications, etc.) are not subject to copyright anyway, so a long flowery essay about the scientist could have been edited to the bare essentials. However, I suspect no such long flowery essay actually existed in 2014. After all, Strickland was a woman who hadn't won the Nobel.

Of course these questions are unanswerable due to the specific type of the deletion. Curious.

It's perfectly possible to find the source of the infringement with a little investigation. The user who created the page has a comment on their talk page notifying them that Donna Strickland page has been nominated for deletion due to "unambiguous copyright deletion". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SteplightJohnson#Spe...] There's a link to the source that was copied, [http://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/leadership_and_volunteers...]. That leads to a 404, but in the Wayback Machine, I found this on Dr. Strickland: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130426010318/http://www.osa.or...] And the second paragraph is a word for word copy of the summary from the first edit in the history of the page, "Created page with ''''Donna Strickland''' is a past president of the Optical Society. She has worked on several committees within the OSA. She has been on the editorial board of O...'" [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...]

So do you agree with the original deleting editor that quoting a press release is copyright infringement? We seem to be venturing farther and farther into Crazytown here...

Good job on chasing this down!

Well, the article was copy pasted from a web page with a big old "Copyright ©2013 The Optical Society" at the bottom. So yeah, it's textbook copyright infringement; press releases (or publicity blurbs, in this case) are protected by copyright law. I don't think the Optical Society was likely to pursue legal action against Wikipedia for this, but it's perfectly reasonable for Wikipedia to enforce a policy of "don't copy paste copyrighted material into articles."