Talk:Nobel Prize controversies

Clean Up - Emphasis
I believe the facts and contents are largely alright and should remain unaltered or let others add in relevant sources over time. Perhaps the expressions, styling, etc., can be tightened up a bit in the article so it reads smoothly and more like a good piece of encyclopedia. I also noticed that due to the hyperlink nature of wikipedia, attractive, potential hightlights (like words origin, study, topicality, instant updates to verify discussions floating 'in the air', at any one time, etc.) can indeed be included, and read—to enliven up the pages like no encyclopedia, serving the public instantly! Great Stuff and unique work by our wiki-contributors and editors here! Thank you! Yzphub 10:38 Jan 09, 2007.

2007 Controversy
Norway Should Apologize for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

The order
Why are the controversies listed in reverse chronological order? i think it should be display the "normal" way BJI904000 (talk) 19:28, February 6, 2020 (UTC)

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Controversies after being awarded
It seems that the wikipedia page only mentions controversies at the time of the award. I think it is a major omission not to mention controversies caused by the laureates' actions following the award, especially since many news sites include the Peace Prize in their articles (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43567007)Ethiopia's Abiy Ahmed: The Nobel Prize winner who went to war This article should be expanded to include Aung San Suu Kyi because of the Rohingya genocide and Abiy Ahmed because of the Ethiopian civil war. 72.141.243.42 (talk) 01:03, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
 * List have leads that define them, in this case "Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has occasionally engendered criticism and controversy". Many recipients do things in the years following conferment of a Nobel Prize but the Noble committee is not clairvoyant and we can not take them to task for not possessing such powers. It seems like name calling and axe grinding, which does not belong on this list. We should probably stick to the list's lead definition. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 03:16, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Still, it's a major omission. In 2022, we have a fairly recent laureate who is committing major war crimes, and we're fine with this? If Putin had won the 2019 NPP, it would have seem perfectly logical to criticize the conferment retroactively in light of the situation in Ukraine; he is the same man now that he was then, and many people would have criticized the conferment at the time. However, relatively few people in the west knew Abiy Ahmed in 2019; It is very likely that within inner Ethiopian circles the decision was criticized and deemed absurd - especially in light of the fact that the "peace" with Eritrea, for which he received the award, was more of a military pact to attack a third party. I feel that this is a matter of "African lives don't matter", since its all happening so far away and we wouldn't want to raise a controversy about the 2019 conferment just because it turns out that the event for which the prize was awarded turned out to be a military pact that led to the death of tens of thousands, ethnic cleansing, sexual violence, starvation, hundreds of thousands of homeless people, and the destruction of centuries of cultural heritage and critical infrastructures. Let's not make a "controversy" out of this. נוף כרמל (talk) 16:44, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not the place to right great wrongs or grind axes, for, or, against some political figure. Also have a look at WP:SOAPBOX. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 18:20, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Nobel Prize 'Won'?
Surely Nobel Prizes are awarded?

There may be a competitive element in some fields but replacing 'won' with 'awarded' softens the judgmental aspect of 'won' ever so slightly - in the right direction!--Damorbel (talk) 09:09, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Matthaei-Nirenberg
The mention of the neglection of Heinrich Matthaei, who conducted the original Poly-U experiment while Nirenberg was in Berkeley and who published with Nirenberg the first two papers in the Proc.Nat. Acad. on the same footing, is correct, but not the interpretation of the reference to Judson. The recollection of Matthaei, that Nirenberg told him to make the laboratory notebooks more unprecise to gain more credibility was months before the Poly-U-Experiment and concerned an unpublished work. Matthaei, who was experimentally very precise (contrary to Nirenberg at the time), referred to it in a half joking manner. But sources for the neglection of Matthaei in the Nobel Prize 1968 would be interesting. Nirenberg mentions Matthaei in his published Nobel Lecture only cursory. Matthaei left the NIH in the spring 1962, but worked 1961 hard and "round the clock" along Nirenberg and Robert Martin on the enciphering of more pieces of the code. The concept of the experiment was from both. But it was Nirenberg (at that time totally unknown in the community like Matthaei) who presented the results in August 1961 in Moscow at the International Biochemistry Conference (with Watson and Crick attending), at which they both gained international recognition (or at least Nirenberg, in Cricks "What mad pursuit" he mentions only Nirenberg, contrary to Watson in "Genes, Girls and Gamow"), and Matthaei left the NIH in spring 1962 to work in Germany on the code. Nirenberg seems to have degraded him subtly in the course of the 60s to a Post-Doc role (see Nirenbergs version here), who followed his orders, a rather misleading description. By the way, the description of Judson in The 8th day of creation, for which he interviewed Matthaei, is much more detailed.--Claude J (talk) 04:58, 23 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Removed the whole thing (edit here). One source does not describe a controversy at all and the other reads like after the fact "sour grapes". Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 13:16, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

there is something with vandalism happening
so basicaly i was on wikipedia (not logged in) and i ws on the nobel literature prize controversies part and after it said "the nobel prize in literature has had many controversial awards and snubs" the snubs part was clearly a violation of the rules on wikipedia so i edited it out and then i came back and saw it again so for anyone who is doing this why

Abdullah raji (talk) 16:55, 21 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Good catch, fixed in the end. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 18:46, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Nordhaus
Nordhaus' work that earned him a Nobel prize in economics was thoroughly debunked by Steve Keen, Jason Hickel, and others. In essence, Nordhaus' work is climate denial/minimization that ignores all scientific work on climate change and makes up its own baseless damage estimates. Nordhaus makes assumptions like inside work won't be impacted by climate change and that climate effects have no correlations with one another. - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856?cookieSet=1 - https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=pGI0R1w_Xws - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-10/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of-climate-change-is-misleading-and-dangerous-heres-why/ - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/06/the-nobel-prize-for-climate-catastrophe/
 * Sources would have to show a controversial conferment. Only one source, foreignpolicy.com, shows any. William Nordhaus has "Linden, Eugene (October 25, 2018). "The economics Nobel went to a guy who enabled climate change denial and delay". Los Angeles Times. 2018." Would probably need sources showing a more widespread controversy. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 22:00, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Pinter controversy
Entries on this list need to describe a controversy, more than just "made the award controversial". All sources cited state the controversy was a perception in some quarters that Nobel academy's choice of Pinter had ulterior motives, re:


 * BBC - Indeed, the Nobel academy's decision could be read in some quarters as a selection with an inescapably political element.
 * National Review - Plucked from obscurity, recent winners like Elfriede Jelinek, José Saramago, and Dario Fo reveal the anxiety of those 18 Swedes to be in what they think is the fashionable swim. And this year they have extended the entertainment by picking Harold Pinter
 * The Wall Street Journal - the ludicrous elevation of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq
 * Independent - the Nobel committee has explicitly said his opposition to "oppression" was a factor in the award.

That controversy needs to be described. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 02:37, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
 * The BBC article starts by saying "Few people would deny Harold Pinter is a worthy recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. As a poet, screenwriter and author of more than 30 plays, he has dominated the English literary scene for half a century". Worth mentioning if we are going to cast doubt on his worthiness.
 * The quote from the National Review does not even mention there was a controversy.
 * The Independent and WSJ sources are opinion pieces so any use should be attributed to the authors of the articles. "Editorial commentary, analysis and opinion pieces, whether written by the editors of the publication (editorials) or outside authors (invited op-eds and letters to the editor from notable figures) are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author, but are rarely reliable for statements of fact".
 * Burrobert (talk) 06:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I think you are missing the point here. Its not a question of columnists attribution or whether Pinter deserved a Nobel prize, its a question of whether there was a controversy, and if so, what was it? All choices by the Nobel academy are controversial in some way (someone is always going to grump about the choice) - to be on this list there has to be some cited wide spread controversy, so much so that news organizations note it at the time of conferment. All of these sources seem to describe the same controversy, even the National Review - "politicking rather than literary appreciation", and the --- BBC seems to be summarizing it re:"academy's decision.... inescapably political element". Since this is not a List of Nobel laureates there are two choices, either we cite an identifiable Nobel Prize controversy or we remove Pinter from the list. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 14:37, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes the key questions are
 * (1) was there a controversy? and
 * (2)if so, what was the controversy?
 * The BBC source does not mention there was a controversy over his selection. It does say that Pinter was "one of the more controversial figures to be awarded this prestigious honour" because of "his outspoken criticism of US foreign policy and opposition to the war in Iraq". Does this fit into the subject of the page?
 * As I mentioned above the Independent and the WSJ sources are opinion pieces from two individuals who did not agree with the decision to award the prize to Pinter. They would justify saying something like "Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens disagreed with the choice of Pinter". Is this a controversy?
 * I won't comment on the NR source. Firstly, I don't have access to the full article. Secondly, "most editors consider National Review a partisan source whose statements should be attributed".
 * Burrobert (talk) 15:23, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Nobel Prize controversies
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Nobel Prize controversies's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "nyt": From World War II: Texts of Soviet–Japanese Statements; Peace Declaration Trade Protocol. New York Times, page 2, 20 October 1956. Subtitle: "Moscow, October 19. (UP) – Following are the texts of a Soviet–Japanese peace declaration and of a trade protocol between the two countries, signed here today, in unofficial translation from the Russian". Quote: "The state of war between the U.S.S.R. and Japan ends on the day the present declaration enters into force [...]" From Confucius Peace Prize:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. Feel free to remove this comment after fixing the refs. AnomieBOT ⚡ 12:44, 3 November 2023 (UTC)