Review Comment:
Compared to the previous version of the paper, the authors have made significant improvements, addressing several issues that I had identified with regard to the methodology and evaluation. They have also addressed some technical shortcomings by implementing a much needed entity linking step. They have remade the evaluation and entirely rewritten the corresponding section. Finally, they have also gracefully accepted some of my suggestions as future work. I appreciate all these improvements and the significant efforts that the authors have put into this new version of the paper, sufficiently addressing most concerns about technical issues that I had listed in my previous review.
However, I still have serious concerns about the motivation and framing of the paper. The authors have built a system to generate Wikidata triple statements using text from Wikipedia which is general and applicable to any biographical entity, yet they are presenting its purpose in a misleading way, i.e., as a way to augment only a specific subset of under-represented biographical entities. The previous version of the paper clearly showed that if the tool is applied uniformly to all biographical entities, it is not able to address under-representation, because the whole set of biographical entities is improved, and the ones that are already over-represented are likely to be improved even more.
When the reviewers pointed out this issue, the authors’ solution was to hide the issue from the readers. They completely removed the over-represented entities and focused only on the under-represented ones, measuring how much they can be augmented. This choice seems highly questionable, effectively bending the results to preserve a flawed framing. This makes the paper worse, not better.
The other important issue that has not been adequately addressed is the definition of "Transnational", a novel invention by the authors which both me and Reviewer 1 had criticised. The authors attempted to improve the definition by looking at the ethnicities of all writers in the corpus and then keeping only those who originate from certain former colonies or are part of ethnic minorities in Western countries. It is true that compared to the previous version of the paper, the definition has now been made clearer. However, the term “Transnational” is still confusing and not supported by the literature, or even by its dictionary definition ("extending or operating across national boundaries").
I find this approach very problematic and question whether it is at all useful or needed to classify people in this way, especially considering that the system developed by the authors can clearly be applied to all writers without “othering” certain groups of people. What is the purpose of this strange classification system? The authors claim that they want to “avoid a colonial view”, but then specifically select those authors who come from former colonies or who belong to an ethnic minority in a Western (i.e., non-colony) country. In my view, any classification that divides people based on whether they ethnically originate from a former colony or not is inherently colonial.
In their efforts to exclude "false positives", i.e., anyone who is not "Transnational" enough according to their particular definition, the authors are effectively redefining whiteness / non-whiteness through proxy terminology. They seem to admit to this when they state that a white person from South Africa should not be considered "Transnational" regardless of where they were born or which countries they lived in. If "Transnational" means non-white, then I need to ask: Is it acceptable for a team composed exclusively of white European researchers to judge who is or isn’t white, who is or isn’t Western, who is or isn’t colonised, who does or does not belong to a minority?
My answer is no. As a fellow Italian — a descendant of colonisers who repeatedly invaded multiple regions of North Africa, mercilessly murdering tens of thousands of people, oppressing indigenous populations and stealing their wealth — I believe that any such attempt is harmful, even when the people who do it have the best intentions (as they do in this case). It is never up to the colonisers to define the identity of the colonised.
The more I read the paper, the more it seems to me that it cannot be fixed without completely reframing it and removing the focus on addressing under-representation, an objective that has arguably not been achieved by the authors. Moreover, compared to the original paper, the flawed dichotomy Western/Transnational is still there. The engagement with anti-colonial scholarship is still limited to a few references. The positionality statement requested by Reviewer 1 — which should be a requirement when discussing these topics — is one bare sentence in a footnote. This paper desperately needs to be reviewed — or even better, co-authored — by an expert in post-colonial studies.
As things stand, I unfortunately need to recommend Major Revision again. I am well aware that this evaluation may result in rejection due to the journal's two-strike policy, but given the issues above, it might be preferable for the authors to rework the paper and resubmit it in a different form, as the technical work has merit but is unfortunately dragged down by the highly misleading framing.
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