Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)

This discussion was begun at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper, where the early history of the discussion can be found.

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Thoughts on Inclusion of Professors

Include:

• All tenured faculty at four year colleges and graduate schools.
• All Professors at Ivy League, and other top 25 schools. (Being selected to teach at top 25 school is pretty notable, even if you don't get tenure.)
• All professors who are fellows of their professional socities IEEE,ACS, ADSA etc.

Exclude:

• Adjunct Professors
• Non tenured faculity at 2 year schools.

Klonimus 06:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Do you realize how many stub articles a policy like this would invite? There are perhaps thousands of universities in the US alone, each of which has dozens or hundreds of tenured professors. The vast majority of these people are not notable. Many of them are, and we should judge them individually by their contributions to their respective fields, not assume notability merely because of a title. Wikipedia is not a directory of professors. Gamaliel 07:03, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

There are more than 3000 colleges and universities in the U.S. alone. Even a small college can have 100 or so tenured facutly. The proportion of faculty with tenure runs very high (80%+) at many schools. Anyone care to guess at the total number of tenured faculty (or equiv.) worldwide? -- Mwanner 12:30, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

Tenured professors frequently (usually?) have to have a published history of works. "Publish or perish" is the phrase I've heard bandied about. Most of these works are offline, as in not googleable. Give the new stubs the benefit of assuming good faith. Professors are obviously notable to their students. How notable is the only question.

And the entire WP article database, in all languages, was under 4 gigabytes as of the end of April, 2005. Wake me when we've exceeded a few terabytes, then we might need to worry about "how many". Until then, I don't see any reason to destroy knowledge contributed in good faith based on opinions of notability. Categorize and index the data well, and we'll have no problems.--Unfocused 14:15, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

It's not a question of gigabytes and terabytes, it's a question of clutter and disambiguation-- at some point every other article will need a disambiguation page. And a lot of the articles published under publish or perish dictates are, predictably, awful. -- Mwanner 14:56, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

It's not a matter of disk space, but usability. And it's nice that professors are notable to their students, but that should be irrelevant. How notable they are to people not directly associated with them is how we should judge encyclopedic notability. Gamaliel 16:49, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Mwanner & Gamaliel, are we supposed to delete knowledge from the Wiki because you don't know how we're going to index, classify and present it? Perhaps it's just me, but I haven't seen the problems you allude to. --Unfocused 06:30, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that the term "tenure" is not generally applicable outside the USA, or at least North America. Ditto "Ivy League". In the UK we have three informal classes of university, the topmost of which, the so-called "Blue Brick" universities, would probably correspond to "Ivy League".

I would tend to say that an academic published in an international journal of record should probably have an entry because those reading his papers may want to look him up in an encyclopedia. This guy made Proc. ACM so he definitely counts by that score. There may be tens of thousands of people with the title "professor", but there are only so many international journals. Even so we're unlikely to be deluged with professor articles. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 14:41, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

there are lots and lots of international journals on all kinds of subjects. I think we should only have people who have won some important award or are otherwise gods. Not only for academics but also sports people and all other as well. -MarSch 15:12, 16 May 2005 (UTC) Oh, by the way, what is tenured? -MarSch 15:13, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Well yes there are lots of international academic journals (I'm not talking about the International Journal of Bricklaying), but they tend to carry significant academic output. Why are important awards necessary? How about the player who gets knocked out in Wimbledon singles quarter-finals by Serena Williams? How about the guy whose sole reward for five years research on the genetic structure of liliales is to have his work published and highly regarded by his peers? He may not have won any prize (so lay-people, who care about that kind of thing, may not have heard his name) but people are still going to read his articles and want to know more about him. That's precisely where encyclopedias come in useful. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 15:28, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Well, sure, if we could define a list of academic journals that were sufficiently rigorously peer reviewed, I could accept that, just as I could accept the idea of all tenured (or equiv) profs at "Ivy League, and other top 25 schools", if we could come up with such a list. But the idea of trying to come up with those list is enough to make me say, well, maybe we need to limit it to profs with scholarly books to their credit. Mwanner 16:05, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

The idea that books are better that a journal is a fallacy, books don't get peer reviewed, peer-review isn't the be all and end all, but it generally makes publishing erroneous results more difficult, some people sneak things into books that wouldn;t fly in a journal--nixie 08:05, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I see no need to draw up a list. We can just use our judgement. Personally I'd tend to ignore publication in journals with limited circulation. By the way not all academic publications are peer reviewed. And then there are monographs--I'd take more note of those on an international imprint such as Elsevier, OUP, and the like, and perhaps less with smaller outfits, though this should not be a hard rule. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 17:42, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

See also m:instruction creep

If someone wrote a good article explaining the that particular geneticist was notable and what the focus of his scientific study was, then I doubt many would vote to delete. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about stubs that say "Professor X teaches at Y and wrote article Z" Gamaliel 16:49, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Then somone should stick a cleanup-expand tag on that article. VfD is being turned into emergency cleanup Klonimus 06:38, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps, but I already note a difference of opinion. Here's what looks to me just such an article: about a young cryptologist and steganography specialist who's had papers published in Proc ACM, but still people are voting to delete. I don't think there's a problem with that--clearly we have different ideas of what is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia. With time I've found that my opinion has tended to focus more on verifiability, and I worry far less about notability, which I have come to regard as a chimera, and I worry not at all about other issues such as namespace. Others do not take so relaxed an attitude. There's room here for all of us and we smush it all together and look for a rough consensus. That's fine with me. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 17:42, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Klonimus's suggestion is simply a bad idea. Professors aren't notable simply because they have tenure or teach at a particular school. They achieve notability as people in most professions do: by their accomplishments. It's not who they are, but what they've done. There are exceptions in other areas, of course. Members of a Royal Family are notable for who they are even in though it's likely that they will never do anything notable. This is not the case for most fields of endeavor. By the way, tens or hundreds of thousands of living professors completely misses the point. Simply being alive today doesn't make a professor more notable than the hundreds of thousands of dead, non-notable professors. Quale 16:34, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

I disagree since the academic job process is so selective that even being appointed assistant professor at Harvard makes you notable. This is no different from being a freshman member of parliament. Klonimus 06:38, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Even a freshman member of parliment has a constituency and the power to vote on decisions that can change people lives, you can't seriously be making the argument that this guy is on par with an elected government official--nixie 07:17, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

The idea of Professorship in the US is distinctly different from what it is in Australia and the UK. I know Australian academics with distinguished publication records (30+ peer reviewed journal pubs and book chapters) that are not yet professors, whereas it's is very simple (albeit competitive) to get an assistant professorship in the US. This guys position and publication record simply do not warrant inclusion, just because he works in a field of interest to geeks does not make his achievements more worthy of inclusion. The proposal by Klonimus is ridiculous. --nixie 06:58, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

• The above proposal is too broad. It's a good idea to set some criteria but these are definitely not it. Thousands of stubs = not a good pedia. Merge the lot of them. Radiant_* 13:36, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

Academia has plenty of ways of its own to define notability:

• Publication record and citations. This is weighed in at every appointment to a professorial chair, and when somebody applies for project money from various national bodies. As for books:
  • It was pointed out above that books are not peer reviewed. They are, however, frequently reviewed in prestigious journals in their field.
  • Dissertations are usually scrutinized by people outside the author's own university.
  • Some books are published by particularly prestigious or picky publishers.
  • Popular books may not count for much in academia itself, but give the author a different type of notability.
  • Has a book come out in several editions? Is it used as required reading in universities (outside the author's own institution)? Is it a standard reference for people in the field?
• National or international prizes and awards;
• Honorary doctorates from other important universities;
• Membership in Royal and national academies of sciences and letters.
• Editorship of journals or other publications which include papers or articles by other significant auhors.
• Being a doctoral dissertation advisor, a "Doktorvater" as the Germans call it, certainly puts the person in another league than somebody who just teaches undergraduates.
• Has a Festschrift been dedicated to the person? Who were the editors and contributors?

At each point, one has to weigh the relative significance or prestige of the entities one takes into the calculation. Is a particular journal/academy/prize in itself significant enough to bolster the importance of the author/academy member/recipient? In practice, we already do this all the time, so this is nothing new, but we might agree on certain basic guidelines just to get some things out of the way. (For instance, perhaps it may be agreed upon that all fellows and foreign members of the Royal Society are notable enough for an article? Can anyone think of a FRS who would not deserve an article?)

Note that there is a certain risk of disciplinary bias, in that the world of natural sciences is more international than fields like history and literature. A brilliant Albanian physicist is more likely to be published in international journals than a prolific Albanian scholar of Albanian literature. Don't put all weight on the international character of somebody's production in disciplines like these. Tupsharru 17:48, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

• The proposed standards at the top of this page set the bar way too low. We would be inviting tens of thousands of unverifiable sub-stubs. We would never accept such a low standard for business people. Tenure is a very poor way of judging anything except endurance. Being hired by an Ivy League school is also a poor indicator since it's more closely linked with luck, location, contacts and personal preference than ability. Fellowship in a professional society is not significant though a serious leadership role in the organization may be. I like MarSch's simple standard above. Examples like Tony Sidaway's guy whose been published and highly regarded by his peers but has not yet won any prize get discussed on a case-by-case basis and dealt with as exceptions. Citations are generally a good criteria if we have verifiable access to a citation database. Authorship is redundant with other criteria in the general criteria for inclusion of biographies and may not need to be an academic-specific criterion. Rossami (talk) 19:15, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand why you claim that having published profs and whatnot would end up with "unverifiable substubs". If you have a chap who teaches at a university and is published, he is inherently verifiable. He's got a faculty or school, a phone number, an address for mail, a bibliography can be compiled easily. At that rate you could even set the bar as low as published grad students and still not end up with substubs. It's possible to write an unverifiable substub even on a very famous person, even Charlie Chaplin, but that has nothing to do with whether we are setting the bar too high or too low for professors.

I don't mind if we let anyone published in any international academic journal into Wikipedia, what harm is done if we get a few people writing stubs that never expand? It's not like the developers are screaming "slow down, we're running out of Wiki!" --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:50, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

professorial publishing not inherently notable

Nearly all professors publish. They have to in order to get raises and promotion. There may be exceptions in the visual or performing arts for profs who produce or perform rather than writing.

In general, most of the material profs publish is not notable. The usual test is whether their work is subsequently used as a reference for other publications by their peers. Most professorial publication concerns the minutae of a narrow area of current inquiry within a particular prof's already narrow subfield of specialization.

While professors may be notable to their colleagues and students, in most cases they do not have a meaningful public life that would warrant an article here.

In general, biographies should be written only of public figures.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 19:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Ah now it's back to "notable". Let's just allow that academics do tend to publish interesting stuff that other academics, and even laypeople, like to read about. Isn't that notability enough? So Professors publish because that's their job? Yes, but they also don't get to publish a heap of crap. There is competition for publication.

You say Most professorial publication concerns the minutae of a narrow area of current inquiry within a particular prof's already narrow subfield of specialization. Yes, why is this is a problem? Do we say "sorry our systematics on Wikipedia can only go down to the leval of family. Genera are just too specialized?" Do we say that it's okay to have an article about a professor who publishes on the philosophy of science, but not a professor who publishes only on burial customs of Middle Kingdom Egypt?

In general, biographies should be written only of public figures

Well yes, but a piece on Professor X containing a bibliography would be very appropriate for Wikipedia. It would mean that it would be a useful resource for information on this chap. I'm not interested in who he's married to or whether he's been on Desert Island Discs, but I am keenly interested (as a layperson) in what he does. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:56, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

• The quality of the publications of professors can in some way be categorised, simply by how many times their paper is cited in other papers. Also note that if a physicist publishes ten papers that get 100 citations each, that is rather more notable than 200 papers with 5 citations each (particularly since this includes self-citations). The free and easy way for Wikipedians to check this is with Google Scholar ([1]), although it does tend to miss some papers and undervalue the total number of citations (and would be a little tricky to be sure you're correctly checking for a Prof. John Smith). So, for example, while I wouldn't be completely surprised if nobody here has heard of Prof. Bart J. van Wees, he has a pretty substantial publication record, including one paper with over 600 citations (average in physics is ten) to his name, which rather suggests influence in the field, even if nobody here could explain what a paper titled Quantized conductance of point contacts in a two-dimensional electron gas is talking about. I mean, seriously, what's more important, a Pokemon character or a research scientist? Shouldn't Wikipedia cover important things as well as popular things? Average Earthman 21:17, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Proposal by Tony Sidaway

• Keep it simple, stupid

If a reliable academic bibliography of works published in internationally recognized journals or major academic book imprints can be compiled, that compilation can be placed into Wikipedia under the author's name. Verifiable biographical details may be appended. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

• Uh, that's too low a standard. By that level, I would qualify for an article since I've published in internationally recognised journals. Average Earthman 21:20, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
• That may be so. But why is it too low? Weren't the articles worth reading? If someone comes along and finds your work interesting enough they could well want to write an article. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:27, 18 May 2005 (UTC)