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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by For great justice. (talk | contribs) at 02:00, 7 May 2006 (→Please! No More RuleCruft!). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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

See Wikipedia:Notability (academics)/Precedents for a collection of related AfD debates and related information.

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]


Maybe a good test would be to consider whether this is someone graduate students (and faculty) in the field recognize by name. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.232.249 (talk • contribs)


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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
  • 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)

Professors ain't professors

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)[reply]

In America, practically any academic is called professor. In most of the rest of the world, only the most senior academics are professors. Regards, Ben Aveling 10:33, 26 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... that's interesting. I don't know about most of the world; I've only lived in two places: Italy and the US. My exprience is that a professor in the US is, at least, an assistant professor with a Ph.D., whereas in Italy a professor ("professore") is anyone who teaches at any level (university, high-school or elementary!!). BTW, in Italy a Doctor is anyone who has received his "laurea" (equivalent to a Master's degree).--Lacatosias 18:48, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In Britain, each academic department has a limited number of professors. The other faculty are known as readers and lecturers. David D. (Talk) 15:26, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Internal criteria (let Academia decide who is notable)

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)[reply]

  • 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)[reply]

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)[reply]

There's more to "running out of Wiki" than just having enough disk space. Is there anyone out there who is happy with Wikipedia's response time? Response time isn't just a factor of number of users; it's also driven by the size of the database that each user request has to deal with. But even if we had endless processing power, it would still be worth trying to keep a lid on adding every last prof whose students want to add an article: there are presently 157 entries under Category:Psychologists. Let's suppose there are 9000 colleges and universities worldwide; let's suppose we average only one article on Psych profs per institution. See the issue? -- Mwanner 21:55, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

  • Sounds to me like an irrational phobia of a Great Wikipedia Paper Shortage Klonimus 18:33, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • No, it's the problem of how you wade through a category that lists 9000 psychologists, most of whom have nothing new to add to the sum of human knowlege. It's like the problem you face doing a literature search-- the more garbage you have to wade through, the more difficult it is to find what you need. Why put useless stuff in to begin with? Because it's too much trouble to make the value judgements? That's just off-loading the problem onto the reader. -- Mwanner 21:09, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
      • Why are you wading through the category anyway? I (and I assume most people) come to pages on Wikipedia two ways: by looking for a particular person, or by being linked to someone from an article. Category:Psychologists doesn't list all psychologists in Wikipedia; most of the psychologists are only listed by nationality. And most of those articles of no interest to me or most of the other non-psychologists looking for stuff. It is much more important to me that the important mathematicians and authors I'm looking for be listed, then some arbitary list of articles be kept short.--Prosfilaes 03:09, 30 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
Ah, but heaps of crap absolutely are published, up to and including hoax articles. So it's not just minutiae that's the problem, it's garbage, too. -- Mwanner 22:13, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
See, for example, the famous 1996 prank in which physicist Alan Sokal persuaded a Duke University journal called Social Text to publish a bogus article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Mwanner 22:53, May 18, 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)[reply]
Just out of interest I did a search for any publications including Ahn, Blum or Hopper at ISI Web of Knowledge. I only came up with five publications between them. Those five publications have been cited a grand total of four times by independent research publications. This is not notable. What other publications do they have that isiknowledge would have missed? As far as I am aware there are no significant journals missed by that source.
von Ahn L, Blum M, Hopper NJ, Langford J
CAPTCHA: Using hard AI problems for security
LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 2656: 294-311 2003
Times Cited: 2 (1 self cite)
Hopper NJ, Langford J, von Ahn L
Provably secure steganography - (Extended abstract)
LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 2442: 77-92 2002
Times Cited: 3 (2 self cite)
von Ahn L, Hopper NJ
Public-key steganography
LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 3027: 323-341 2004
Times Cited: 0
von Ahn L, Blum M, Langford J
Telling humans and computers apart automatically
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 47 (2): 57-60 FEB 2004
Times Cited: 0
TRAUB JF, BIRNBAUM JS, HARTMANIS J, REDDY DR, TAYLOR RW, VYSSOTSKY VA, HEARN A, YOVITS M, ZEIGER P, RICE J, HUSKEY H, STEWART R, FEIGENBAUM E, ARDEN B, CORBATO F, COX J, BLUM M, DODD G, CONTE S, HAMBLEN J
QUO-VADIMUS - COMPUTER-SCIENCE IN A DECADE
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 24 (6): 351-369 1981
Times Cited: 2
David D. 18:22, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding Pokemon, remember that Wikipedia policy is not consistent, and that Wikipedia tolerates things it does not condone. These things are nowhere more true than with regard to inclusion/deletion policy. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 21:10, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

  • 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)[reply]
    • 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)[reply]
      • It's too low because what really counts is the longevity of the article and/or the number of citations each year. Many articles are published that never see the light of day. Most are not notable. I assume we don't want wikipedia to be like a phone book. David D. 21:42, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Wikipedia articles aren't like phone book entries because, if nobody links to an article and you never enter the name yourself, you'll never see it. So it doesn't really matter if so-and-so writes an encyclopedia article about his favorite professor, it's not like it's competing for page space with somebody who matters. m:Wiki is not paper. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:54, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Serious question: by this argument, why aren't vanity pages allowed? I could provide plenty of verifiable information about myself in an article, and if nobody links to it... android↔talk 22:23, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
        • Difficulties with verifiability. We *do* permit people to submit their own biographical entries, provided the information provided is verifiable and encyclopedic (eye color, pet's names, job, favorite hobbies, no, but "author of a bestselling novel" yes). There's a sliding scale, pretty much like the one I suggest for professors. My suggested gold standard for profs is international publication. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:09, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • Using myself as an example again, it is too low a standard as none of my papers have, as yet, been cited well beyond the average for physics papers (which is around nine), and I haven't published hundreds of papers either. Average Earthman 11:40, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • As a university professor myself, as much as I'd like to have a Wikipedia bio page, this hurdle seems too low to me as well. Significant academic journals are inherently "international" in both readership and availability. Just because I have a handful of well-regarded (by my research community) papers in well-regarded journals doesn't make me interesting to anybody outside my particular field. And those folks can get all the info they need about me from my university profile page (which most serious academics have anyway). Wikipedia isn't meant to replace Google; let's stick with a policy that if you have to add your own bio page, you don't deserve one. ;-) cmf 10:07, 27 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • There is a policy against autobiographical pages. A University profile page is more ephemeral than Wikipedia and doesn't permit for internal linking; if a professor is mentioned in an article, it's easier to link to a Wikipedia page rather than finding the webpage for every citation.--Prosfilaes 02:07, 28 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm interested in your citation criterion--it seems intriguing. I'm not sure that it would be particularly workable, though. What's wrong with an article about an average physics professor? If he happens to have written a paper I've read I may well want to look him up on Wikipedia. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:11, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        • Well, this would have to be somewhat adjusted to match the various subject areas, but it is simply measuring the worth of academic works by the number of fellow academics who consider it to be worth referencing. In physics, the average is 9, so if you've published twenty papers and the most any have been cited is ten times, you're not sufficiently notable to warrant an article yet (as it will be quite likely to get out of date). If you've got 1000 papers, you might be notable by sheer volume, if you've ten first author papers with more than 50 cites, or 1 first author paper with more than 250 cites, then perhaps an article may be warranted - so for example Thomas Dietl is notable as his paper in Science in 2000 on ferromagnetism in zinc-blende magnetic semiconductors has over 500 citations (and basically sparked off million dollar research programmes in the US, Europe and Japan). But I would suggest that people write proper stubs - if you're justifying the article by their work, then you should know their work enough to provide links to key articles. This isn't the only requirement for an article of course, awards, significant patents, lucrative contracts with US universities and media work are also factors to consider. Average Earthman 14:27, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • Well it's interesting that you're using the word "notable" and "warrant". In practice I think Wikipedia has dodged the "does this subject warrant an article" question by letting editors create articles that they want to create, deleting obvious nonsense, and merging more trivial articles into appropriate articles on a wider subject. We can do this, because unlike a paper encyclopedia we're based on hypertext and we aren't limited by space or deadlines. I'm happy with this approach, and I'm not convinced that there is any reason to change it. Can you think of a reason why we should delete an article someone has written that is good but happens to be about a minor professor? --Tony Sidaway|Talk 14:57, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • Sure. In a word, clutter. You wrote, "if nobody links to an article and you never enter the name yourself, you'll never see it". Not so. These folk will be entered into categories as Psychologists, Physicist, Sociologist, etc., etc.; these categories will grow from their present, reasonable size to, potentially, thousands of entries. Thus, for people browsing via the categories, a manageable situation will grow unmanageable. If clutter doesn't matter, why bother keeping anything out? It seems to me that an important part of the work of crafting an encyclopedia is making these (admittedly difficult) judgment calls to save the readers from having to wade through a load of useless fluff. -- Mwanner 23:12, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
        • What's wrong with an article about an average physics professor? The same thing that's wrong with an article about an average family doctor or an average barrista; verifiability. It would violate one of the fundamental policies of Wikipedia. How am I to verify information about an "average" person? Moreover, such pages are often made by the person themself, or a friend, and are extremely vulnerably to vanity-style information. -- Corvus 22:07, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • The average physics professor is trivial to verify the existance of; check the journals. If you email the universities they worked for, they will send you some information about the professor under question. You can call them non-notable -- and the notability of some Wikipedia articles that pass AfD recently has dropped quite low, to bring up the s****l debate -- but there is quite a bit of verifiable information. They aren't average people.--Prosfilaes 00:52, 18 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think Tony Sidaway's proposal has a lot of problems. First of all, "internationally recognized" isn't even well-defined. What does an "internationally recognized" journal even mean? That it's carried in the library of at least one other university in one other country? Considering the vast size of the journal collections at the libraries of the premier universities, we're talking an extremely large number of journals. And since each journal is going to publish tens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of scholars over the years, that's a large number being multiplied to become even larger. The number of academics who have ever published in an "internationally recognized" journal is HUGE. Having articles for each one of them leads to a huge amount of clutter. It's not a disk space issue; it's a clutter issue. Besides categories, we would need far, far more disambiguation pages for common names. And probably, no one would ever care about any of these articles except that person and his or her immediate colleagues in the same department at the same university. Instead, academics should be held to the same standards of notability as other people would be for biographical entries. If an academic is near the top of his or her field, has hundreds of other scholars citing him or her, makes the news, or publishes a seminal book, then that would make the scholar encyclopedic. —Lowellian (talk) 08:43, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

Full professors and notability

I strongly feel that the "notability" requirements for academics should be set higher than merely being a professor with a publishing history. To be included, an academic should have to be an important researcher in his or her field. Remember, our main goal here should be making Wikipedia the best encyclopedia possible. Adding tens of thousands of articles that are of no use to anyone does not improve Wikipedia, and actively degrades it. There is a worse problem, though. The process that allows articles to improve over time depends critically on there being more than a couple of editors who are capable of contributing to any given article. An article about a typical university professor is unlikely to have more than one or two informed contributors. This leads to poor quality and possibly biased articles. Academics who are not at least world-renowned in their own field should not be included.--Srleffler 21:20, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If we applied the same selectivity to sportspeople, we should start purging Wikipedia of thousands, or even tens of thousads, of articles on not particularly famous baseball, cricket and football players and others. How many of the players in any given American professional baseball team are "world-renowned"? I suppose Babe Ruth may qualify. And Joe DiMaggio, I guess. But that's probably it. I doubt any living baseball players are known outside the U.S., and many probably aren't known to any but the fans of their own team. Wikipedia is already extremely inclusive in some areas. At the moment we include any professional sportsperson and every fictional king from Tolkien's works. The notability criteria for academics should be camparable to the ones for sportspeople.
WP:BIO speaks of something it calls an "average college professor" as below the notability threshold. What I assume Americans may mean by this - we don't have colleges where I live and teachers at a comparable level are not called "professors" - is somebody teaching undergraduates at a small college with no doctoral programme, somebody who presumably has written an unpublished dissertation and published a few mostly uncited papers.
My personal view is that full professors at major research universities should at least always be given the benefit of the doubt. People who has advanced that far have already at several point in their career been deemed notable by their peers and will also influence future generations of academics as doctoral advisors. Other than that, there are other criteria which could be applied to include individuals who for some reason never get a professorship.
The thing about "one or two informed contributors" isn't something we can do anything about, I'm afraid. If the number of contributors should determine whether an article should be kept, that would just increase the systemic bias already in existence. Some of the best articles are written by only a few contributors and some of the worst have been produced by an unlimited supply of random bypassers who think they know something about the topic. Tupsharru 22:39, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Isn't becoming a full professor exactly academic recognition of achievement? Sure there are other factors, such as teaching ability and ability to get grants that play into becoming a prof., but a professor (generally with tenure, if applicable to the academic system) is almost by definition notable. They must have been recognized by their peers for their academic achievement to become a prof.; that is what being a prof means. For myself, I have no trouble with lots of stub articles, because having stubs increases the chances more material will be added. Note, this is NOT to say unverifiable information should be included. That is a wholly separate issue. It seems to me that being a full professor is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for inclusion in Wikipedia. --Hansnesse 01:02, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't think just being a full professor makes someone notable. It merely indicates a promotion to a certain level be one's employer. Each employer (e.g., university, college, institution) and department within that institution sets its own standards for promotion to full professor these vary wildly not only from institution to institution but within each institution among departments and from year to year as staffing levels, political situations (and tenure and promotions decisions are rife with politics) and economic issues change. I understand the value of having a stub with the hope that it will be filled in later, but if we have lots of stubs of semi-notable people, it lends itself to the inclusion of lots of other stubs for semi-notable people, which is not a good thing. Crunch 03:43, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I assume that you are referring to conditions at American universities. In educational systems with a higher degree of regulation, appointment to professorial chairs is not just an internal matter within a department and not as arbitrary as you describe (which is not to imply that less than happy decisions are never made). I agree that for the U.S., simple criteria as "full professor" can not be applied for all institutions, as American academia is simply too diverse and unregulated. Nevertheless, I would still trust whoever or whatever appoints professors at, say, Harvard or Yale or the University of Chicago to know what they are doing. Tupsharru 08:55, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, Crunch, I disagree here. For example, every professional sports player is one simply because their employer (the team for which they play) has decided to promote them to a high level, based on their merits. Although I agree with you that there is some variation in who gets chosen for full professor, it's not as variable as you make out. The standard at almost all research universities is that someone becomes a full professor if they have "an internationally-recognized academic reputation". When one is up for such a promotion, typically a large number of leaders in the field are contacted (upwards of 20) and their opinions solicited. In short, if someone is a full professor at a university with a reputation for research, then you can rest assured that they are considered notable by the community. (Now, of course, it is a different story at teaching colleges.) By "reputation for research", I'm including (of course) the Ivy League schools, but this would include most large state universities in the US as well. Actually, I think if we vetted a list of universities which we decided were of sufficient "research caliber", allowing every full professor, or even tenured faculty, at those institutions into Wikipedia would be quite reasonable.--Deville (Talk) 13:42, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Be inclusionist, they are more important than sports stars, etc. However, articles must be limited to verifiable information, and not be vanity pieces, which is a much simpler criterion. JeffBurdges 19:29, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

William Connolley

VFD debates first one at [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/William Connolley unresolved, the second one at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/William Connolley 2. Normally it'd be deleted striaght off, but what if you're a wikipedian and have friends to vote for you in vfd? Dunc|☺ 1 July 2005 09:38 (UTC)

Precedents

I have started collecting links to previous VfD/AfD debates (and a few at this moment ongoing ones) at Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Academics/Precedents. Perhaps this could help get this discussion moving towards a consensus. I have mostly just added those I have myself participated in, as those are the easiest for me to find. Please add others you have seen. Tupsharru 20:16, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good stuff, I'll have a look around. - brenneman(t)(c) 01:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another proposal

If being a professor emiritus were truely notable, then shouldn't all professor emiritus be listed in their schools' list of notable faculty? Consider the list of notable UB Berkely faculty and this list of Emeritus Faculty in EECS at UC Berkely. Only one name - Lotfi A. Zadeh is common to both lists. If the rest of the professor emeritus in EECS at UC Berkely aren't worthy of being included in a list of notable professors associated with UC Berkely, then are they even worthy of having a wikipedia article in the first place? Likewise, if being a professor emeritus at UC Berkely isn't enough to warrant a wikipedia article, then why should being a professor emeritus at any university warrant a wikipedia article?



Instead, I propose that a wikipedia article only be created for an academic if (1) there are a large number of inbound links to that (non-existant) article, already, or if (2) it is linked to from another article with a lot of in-bound links.

Any other alternative would result in the creation of ultra-low traffic articles - something which the John Seigenthaler debacle has demonstrated not to be a good thing. Due to the lack of scrutiny that they recieve, low-traffic articles are among the best candidates for containing factually inaccurate information, and maybe it's just me, but I think a non-existant article is better than a factually inaccurate article. TerraFrost 21:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The number of inbound links is a standard not connected to anything but Wikipedia. Even if professor emiritus is too low a standard, the standard needs to be set on the objective standard of how important they are. If they're notable enough, their name will bring in enough readers.--Prosfilaes 22:20, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I understand your inbound links comment, but if they're notable enough for people to read about them, then shouldn't they be notable enough to have other articles linking to theirs? TerraFrost 22:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
So we couldn't have written a sudoku article until there were a suitable number of links from other pages? Standards for notability in Wikipedia should be independent of Wikipedia.--Prosfilaes 01:59, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think this too narrowly defines notability. If we take non-academics as a guide, I don't think that anyone would argue against the inclusion of, for example, a Commissioner of Internal Revenue (of the United States). Yet there are only three articles for such a person (as I write this...), and two of the three are only linked to a couple of times (one is linked to heavily, due I think to a template used). I agree, however, that the balance is between (i)Comprehensivness and (ii)Time required needed to vet an article carefully. I think, however, that this proposal is too far in the direction of missing contributions. Nothing, of couse, should remove the requirement of verifiabilty, that is a seperate criteria. --Hansnesse 01:30, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (of the United States) is actually an okay article because of (2) - it is linked to from another article with a lot of in-bound links. If, however, it wasn't relevant enough to be linked to in the IRS article, I'm not so sure the articles existence would be warranted, either. TerraFrost 01:50, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I was not clear, I think. I was refering to the lack of links to actual commissioners (the people in the list on that article), such as Fred T. Goldberg, Jr., who for instance, only has two inbound links (at present). My apologies for the confusion. --Hansnesse 01:55, 11 January 2006 (UTC) Rereading... My mistake. --Hansnesse 01:57, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What is your suggestion of what constitutes a lot? Fred T. Goldberg, Jr., the aforementioned former commissioner of the IRS, has only two articles linking to it (other than this). Moreover, of the two articles which link to it, there are only 8 articles and 6 articles respectively (excluding redirects and this page) linking to them. I say this, not really to press for a specific tell-all number, but to argue that important people can have few linked pages at any point in time. The only way to develop an encyclopedia is to admit that it will at times be incomplete. --Hansnesse 02:06, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TerraFrost, I don't think anybody has claimed that the Berkeley professors you link to wouldn't be "worthy" to be mentioned. Your argument seems to be based on the misapprehension that Wikipedia is somewhere close to finished and that anything sufficiently important either has an article or is at least mentioned somewhere. I think that idea is entirely mistaken; as large as it is, Wikipedia is full of gaping holes in its coverage. Trying to fill such holes will inevitably lead to articles occasionally being created that not yet have any inbound links. Tupsharru 16:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

High bar

Perhaps if we could start with obvious keep and work down? How about writing a textbook that has had more than a single edition printed? This could concievable fail the "audience" test for books, and if the gets pushed up than lots will fail. I don't think any texts on Algebraic ring theory have sold more than 50,000 copies. - brenneman(t)(c) 04:49, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the "obvious keep and work down" method, and I think your suggestion on textbook authorship is good too. But I still think it is important to look at criteria which indicate importance within academia, the "academics' academics", if you wish. What do you think about the criteria I suggested above? Can we agree, for instance, that all members of the Royal Society are notable enough? Tupsharru 08:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would certainly agree there, anyone in the Royal Society, or the American National Academy of Science, would certainly be worthy of inclusion.--Deville (Talk) 13:30, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

[I like the emeritus list. It makes it evident that not even full professors at top-notch universities are necessarily famous. I would propose being famous among the grad students as the key selection criterion. Using the emeritus list, just walk into an EECS or CS department anywhere in the world and ask the first grad student who is Elwyn Berlekamp or Michael Stonebraker. The student will respond "coding theory" or "postgres". There are many people on the emeritus list who don't meet this test of, say, two-thirds of grad students having a clue.] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.232.249 (talk • contribs)

I think that's simultaneously too vague and too restrictive. Vague, because grad students aren't the same thing as the academic community for the field, and some disciplines are larger than others. Too restrictive because an important emeritus that isn't "famous" still probably deserves an article. Still, someone who easily passes your test will surely be notable: it's just that we shouldn't write policy that way. Mangojuice 06:07, 2 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Textbooks are very bad criterias for inclusion, as its often people who arn't very good at research who are writing the textbooks. Worse, multiple editions usually means the book is just designed to rip off students, and the person really isn't important. OTOH, a book translated into another langauge is a clear keeper. Why not just use the same criteria as scientists use, like quality of journals (impact factor). Note: impact factor is highly highly field specific, and is almost meaningless for some fields, like mathematics, but its used quite frequently by other sciences. JeffBurdges 19:37, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A Pragmatic Suggestion

One goal of such a policy should be (IMO) making sure that the quality of articles is high by keeping a balance between the number of people contributing and the number of articles. The number of articles in an area should be some fraction of the number of people who are likely to read and edit the articles. This will ensure that enough work goes into each article to make it meaningful.

There are, I think, about 1200 fully acredited four year colleges in the US. Williams College has 291 voting faculty, with 59% being tenured. Amherst College has 177 faculty. These are small colleges, so using them as a basis will lead to an underestimate of the number of tenured professors. Doing the arithmetic: 291 * 59% * 1200 = 206,028 is likely an underestimate of the number of tenured US faculty. It seems unlikely to me that this number of articles would be well maintained by the wiki process. However, I would like to know how many articles there are, and how many people actively work on them in a year. I'm sure this information is easy to find, but I don't know how.

A pragmatic approach is to set a target, say 10,000 articles about US professors. I don't know if that is a "reasonable" number but it is less than 10 per college. An estimate can be made of the number of professors selected by any policy, and this estimate can be compared with the number thought to be a reasonable total.

Another approach is more empirical, but might require some extensions of the wiki mechanism. I don't know how to query for statistics in the wiki, but there might be a way to determine the percentage of articles of some kind that are stubs. If the current policy results in many stub articles, then the inclusion criterion should be made more restrictive; alternatively a very low percentage of stubs would suggest enlarging the database.

Cre 19:33, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what the requirements are for tenure in a four-year college in the U.S., but rather than looking at all "professors" at American four-year colleges, you should (to get a more reasonable figure to begin with) limit yourself to people at the uppermost steps of the career ladder at actual research universities. In either case there is no reason to introduce an arbitrary limit at some particular figure. Tupsharru 11:29, 26 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rough Guidelines

I, for one, don't agree with the guidelines. For one, "producing or popularising a significant new concept, theory or idea" is impossibly subjective.

For another, a Festschrift or high award is the way the academic community shows notability and is entirely objective; there's no reason we should second-guess that. If someone has earned a Fields Medal, it's entirely against the spirit of WP:NOR for us to argue whether they are notable. Just as importantly, I doubt a blanket inclusion of those people will mean a huge number of articles.

(I've left the honorary doctorate out, as I don't think it's entirely on-point. I suspect the majority of honorary doctorates are to non-academics. I suspect that an honorary doctorate from a major (i.e. not Northwestern Oklahoma State University, although it is genuine) should also be a sign of notability, but I really don't know that much about who gets them.)

I added Friedrich Wilhelm Levi on the basis of a biography in a collection of symposium lectures. I should go back and add more about his actual mathematical accomplishments, but that takes more time to digest. He works as a concrete somewhat edge case, IMO, if someone wants to discuss why he shouldn't be included.--Prosfilaes 01:36, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A Festschrift recognises notability. Just like a wikipedia page (cough), it is evidence of notability, but it doesn't bestow notability. I can imagine that someone who was not notable would very occasionally get one, academia being what it is, but I can't imagine that someone who has earned a festschrift would not show up heavily in a citation search. What defines a high award is subjective, significant new knowledge is subjective, even significant citations is subjective. We could pick an arbitrary number, but really, it differs from field to field. The problem is that notability itself is subjective. I've tried to keep the focus on the least subjective criteria that seem likely to include all notable accademics.
I agree that a significant percentage of honorary doctorates are to non-accas, and are all too often a return for favours granted. While they might help a case, I couldn't see someone having an honoury doc as being sufficient on its own to prove notability. Likewise, biographies get written for all sorts of reasons. They too suggest notability but don't prove notability.
I agree that the guidelines I've proposed are not exhaustive and are not always going to be easy to follow. But I think they're better than nothing. What changes would you suggest? Regards, Ben Aveling 02:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
These guidelines should provide some concrete simple rules to end the discussion quickly. WP:Music says "Has released two or more albums on a major label or one of the more important indie labels" and other rules, which just indicate notability, but those bright-line rule makes many decisions simple, and removes the need to discuss many pages. A Festschrift or a major award rule should mean that many articles that might have to be discussed don't have to be discussed. The size of AfD is a problem, and people get stressed constantly having to defend articles. Bright line rules are good.
What defines a high award is much simpler then what defines a notable individual, and once it's been agreed that a certain award is a high award, we don't need to argue it again, and if there's a lot of discussion of people under the high award rule, there will be a good body of precedent as to what is a high award.
I would suggest that a Festschrift or a major award be sufficent to include the biography of an academic.--Prosfilaes 02:53, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How would we measure a festschrift? Would this count? What defines a major award? We can probably agree on a short list of awards, but these things are still subjective. And can you imagine an individual who would have earned either without a recognised publication record? Regards, Ben Aveling 03:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We measure a festschrift wisely. It's subjective, but less. I want a guideline I can cite and end the debate, instead having to argue every time about what recognized publication record is.--Prosfilaes 06:28, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we can try it and see. If it doesn't work, we change it. So long as we're agreed that we are accepting the festchrift as evidence of notability, not claiming that it bestows notability? Regards, Ben Aveling 06:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New version

Please check out my revision to the criteria Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Academics. I tried to take the current version an flesh it out, particularly paying attention to (1) the need to write it as a firm guideline (but not a policy), (2) being informative about the norms of achievement in academia, (3) stating the policies briefly, and explaining them separately, and (4) softening the policy a bit, so that notable professors would be included, not just people who are generally notable that happen to be professors. I think it's an improvement; I'd like to see some discussion on it. Mangojuice 21:35, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As no discussion has taken place, I've just made my edits to the main page. See above paragraph for the motivations. One more note: I didn't include the comment about "Festschrifts" as there's no need to be so specific: anyone who gets one ought to be notable for other reasons (especially my criteria 2: known as an especially important figure to others in the same field. Mangojuice 14:17, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Notability for Academics

I think there is no objective criteria for notability but would like to suggest that the following achievements merit automatic notability(as they are result of extensive peer review process):

Anil Kumar,24th Feb.2006 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.138.112.252 (talk • contribs)

I just put bullets in the list above. Tupsharru 07:02, 9 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree: those all count as prestigious awards/honors, per criteria 8. Mangojuice 14:06, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
WP:PROF should redirect to this page; the only reason it doesn't is that this page did not exist at the time the redirect was made. But perhaps this page should also be moved to either Wikipedia:Notability (people)/Academics or Wikipedia:Notability (academics) to be consistent with the previous move of Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies to Wikipedia:Notability (people). Tupsharru 07:02, 9 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A few points

It seems to me that the criteria for inclusion may differ for different disciplines.

  1. In my discipline (philosophy), fame is often a matter of association, so the best philosophers all collect at the top of a small number of major universities (i.e., university of employment is a good criteria for judging notability). I suspect that the same doesn't hold true for disciplines like physics. I suspect that it would be far too expensive for universities to do that (physicists cost more than philosophers), so the talent is more evenly distributed in physics than in philosophy (i.e., university of employment may not be a good criteria for judging notability).
  2. A significant portion of value is determined by usefulness. Couldn't we decide our policy by determining if the articles would be useful? That is, we can refuse to allow someone to make a stub on every academic, but we can allow one to create a significant and informative article on even a somewhat minor figure. In my field, information about instructors of any Ph.D.-granting institution (and some very few of the highest regarded Masters-granting institutions) is valuable information, and would be useful to someone who is applying to graduate schools, or looking for a place to do a postdoc, or figuring out whose books to read. (Without information on these people, these decisions we make are less than well-informed.)
  3. Different subjects have different standards of value. There are a bunch of different psychological experiments that all show pretty much the same kinds of things, so the value of their research is best recorded in the articles on attention, change blindness or cognitive bias or the like, rather than in articles on the academics themselves. On the other hand, some disciplines are largely book-driven or involve holistic theories (such as the humanities), and the information in these disciplines is probably better conveyed by comprehensive information about that academic's work being in an article on the academic himself/herself, rather than on the individual topic (e.g., Truth, Good, Beauty, History, Public policy).

My conclusion from these points is that perhaps different criteria are needed for different fields. KSchutte 21:49, 12 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with your conclusion. (1) I don't really understand. (2) is an interesting point, but the value of the information isn't what's being judged. WP is not paper, but WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information: we draw the line somewhere in between, that we call "notability." The information in my local phone book is indisputably useful information, but most of it isn't notable. (3) is your most interesting point, but I think the guidelines are already attempting to treat academics in different fields appropriately. Different criteria aren't needed: rather, we need criteria that are general and reasonable to apply to various disciplines, respecting the differences among academic fields. Mangojuice 19:19, 13 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the fact that a large number of people would be interested in information about these subjects sufficient to make them notable? If they're not already notable, the only reason this is so is because the information that would make them well-known is not available. (Your phone book objection isn't appropriate; that's clearly not the kind of information I'm talking about.) KSchutte 06:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I did some calculation in my head, and I think the fact that someone is a prof at a PhD-granting school would gain them at most about 100 hits a year. This is not enough: we clearly can't include all topics that would interest a mere 100 people a year, or we'd be duplicating nearly the entire internet. So, no. Mangojuice 14:08, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That is a ridiculous standard. Have you ever clicked on the "Random article" link in the margin there? Let me do it ten times and see what comes up: List of largest empires, Gerhard Louis De Geer, The Mark Steel Revolution, Landon Pearson, Handicraft-subsistence production, Embarrassment, Richard Lenski, Sweden general election, 1970, LED printer, Nerve plexus. Okay, now given this survey, should we conclude that these articles belong or don't belong in an encyclopedia? Well, most of them are quite stubbish and contain only the very most general content about their subject. Is this what we want from an encyclopedia? Clearly not. (Wikipedia is not Wiktionary.) Encyclopedias are supposed to be "vessels of information". My point: It's better to have extensive, verifiable, useful information on minor subjects than it is to have a bunch of stubs about notable subjects. How much information is in an article about an academic will determine how many hits it gets, not how notable its subject is. If somebody writes a particularly good article on, for example, Jerry Fodor, that content is what will determine how many people read it. This is going to be just as true for less important subjects like, for example, Brian Kierland. If we want to attract experts to the 'pedia (and I hope that this is one of our aims), we probably need to have information in the 'pedia that is useful to those experts. KSchutte 16:48, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd also like to remind you, "There is no official policy on notability." (from WP:N). From Wikipedia in eight words:

"Notable: A view is generally considered notable if it is potentially information of value or interest in some way to a significant number of people, or to some perspective, or its omission would leave a significant gap in historical human knowledge of a subject. Even minority, controversial and discredited views are often notable. Often it is valuable to see how people thought, or competing views of the time. By contrast many fringe views are not notable by this definition, because they are not sufficiently significant or had little or minor impact in their field as a whole."

You choose to emphasize the phrase "significant number of people" and I think that this is an inappropriate emphasis. The emphasis should be placed on "potentially information of value or interest". By merely being academics at Ph.D.-granting institutions, information about academics is valuable. You act like just anyone could acquire such positions in academia. This is incredibly dubious. There are high standards for these jobs and not just anyone can get them. If Georgie Porgie has a job at a Ph.D.-granting institution and he has written a book and a couple of articles, then I want to know what is in that book and those articles without having to read them myself. This information is valuable, and it is the only kind of information that will encourage experts to join the wikipedia community. For some reason, you think the wikipedia community should include only experts on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Paris Hilton, and J. K. Rowling. I think this is supposed to be an encyclopedia and ought to encourage scholarly information rather than delete it. I'm sorry if I'm ranting, but you are just making me angry. Try to give me some argument for your position instead of just asserting it. I won't be convinced by you just saying "nuh-uh, that's not how it works". How it works is what's at issue. Don't beg the question. KSchutte 18:07, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm very sorry if I made you angry, that wasn't my intention. It's one thing to debate the notability of academics, and it's another to debate the guideline about notability for academics. I concede you have good points about the notability of academics: I would encourage you to use them in AfD debates as much as you want. However, I don't think they're good for a guideline. I want to respond, mainly, by talking about what a good guideline here should be: that's why I am interested in this topic.

First of all, a good guideline would be a useful guideline. To me, this means that it should (1) be understandable and useful to ordinary editors, (2) it should be backed by a strong consensus, and (3) be obviously reasonable. Point 3 I include because the point of guidelines is to help debates about deletion: if the guideline is not obviously reasonable, then every time it is cited, new debate may break out about the guideline, which makes the guideline not that helpful. (Point 1 is why I think we should avoid, at all cost, field-specific guidelines. They could be more accurate, but usefulness is more important.)

Second, a good guideline should give positive, not negative criteria. This is important because if an article is improperly deleted for being non-notable, this causes more harm to WP than if a non-notable article is improperly kept. Therefore, it's important that arguments on AfD have good traction, especially when arguing that an article meets the guideline. Naturally, it's very difficult for a guideline to have both positive and negative criteria, or you'll get weird cases that meet both critera, and then what? A corollary to this is that the guidelines should always work: there should be no exceptions that meet the guidelines and yet might not be notable. Therefore, third, the guideline should be conservative in implying notability. Of course, the guideline should also explicitly state that it is a conservative guideline, so that its use in AfD debates is proper.

Now, to respond to your points. First of all, you espouse the position that all profs at PhD-granting programs should be considered notable. I disagree, but my disagreement isn't really that important. I do think there's a definite lack of strong consensus on that -- look at the rest of the discussion on this page: people repeatedly object to criteria that would lead to all or most academics being considered notable. But the guideline doesn't exclude those people being notable either. In fact, many of them probably are notable... and if the guideline explicitly says that exceptions exist, this would leave you space to make your argument in an AfD debate.

That all said, maybe the guidelines do set too high a bar. Perhaps we could remove the word "particularly" in guidelines 3 and 4, the word "especially" in guideline 2, and rewrite guideline 8 to replace "prestigious" with something milder like "significant" or "notable". We could also note that certain normal career milestones for academics are a kind of honor: tenure (possibly, at least at a top school), full professorship, named professorship. I'm reluctant to say that being hired can be considered an honor, but maybe being hired at a top school? Or maybe, we could add a conservative blanket guideline like "tenured professor at a school highly ranked in the prof's field". Also, it could be worded better to make it clear that it's a conservative guideline. Mangojuice 21:15, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your comments and my anger has settled down a little. I'm so used to arguing with children over on the talk page of Philosophy that I must have temporarily forgotten that there are sane people in the world. You may be right that different criteria for different disciplines may not work the best for a guideline. (Though, it does seem that in practice the value of articles on academics can be determined by largely different criteria in the case of a priori and theoretical disciplines, empirical disciplines, and "creative" disciplines.) I'd like to change my recommendation, then. It seems to me that we ought to have a disjunctive guideline. That is, our criteria ought to be either special notability (like the kind in the current guideline) or beyond-stub amount of information of at least decent quality (I suppose we could just pick some arbitrary amount). I just think 'pedians are way too delete-happy for articles on this topic, and that might be a way to curb it (and maybe encourage people to write longer, informative articles!). Let me know what you think. KSchutte 03:53, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Quite reasonable. The thing is, with academics, a CV is already a beyond-stub amount of information, but I personally feel that if all we can write about someone is their CV, what's the point? Especially considering that most of the CV is filled up with publications that, while possibly of real value academically, are of no interest to most readers. Also, as a practical concern, I think a lot of people want to keep out vanity articles, and allowing an article that's no more than a CV would open the floodgates in a way people would find distasteful. I'm going to take a stab at rewriting the guidelines a bit: it's worth explicitly mentioning inclusionist arguments, with some reasonable discussion about them. Also, as a final point: wikipedians may be too delete-happy here... but it wouldn't do any good to combat that with an inclusive guideline unless that guideline can become an official one! Mangojuice 12:46, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe we might find a way to describe "beyond-stub amount of information of at least decent quality" that would get around this objection. One way in which this could be done for most scientists and humanities scholars (though maybe not for "creative" disciplines like drama, art, music, etc.) is to require that the information presented be more than just a list (i.e., we could insist that they actually describe the content of their books and papers or the nature of the experiments).
I, personally, don't think vanity pages on academics are much of a threat. Most of the academics who meet the Ph.D.-granting institution requirement know how to write with an objective POV (of course, there are exceptions), and they know their research better than anyone so they can describe it best. I know that this wouldn't fall under the wikipedia definition of "vanity", but I suspect you have something like this in mind. For an example of a page written by its subject that contains extremely useful information about his work, see Nathan Salmon.
Are people really so obsessed with their professors that a large number of articles fitting under the official "vanity" definition are created? Indeed, that would be delightful news. I thought we academics were quite a bit less popular than whatever local band is down the street. KSchutte 15:38, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Two responses. First of all, about "beyond-stub information of decent quality"... this is really about debates on AfD, and any article that has beyond-stub information (verifiable information, at least) of decent quality already rarely gets deleted, so I don't think we need to include it in a guideline. Heck, this is already the philosophy of a lot of people on WP: if a subject is at least potentially notable, and there is more than stub-level verifiable information about it, it passes the basic test of deserving a place on WP. So, I don't think we need to bother explicitly with that; it's already part of the general WP philosophy, and very sound. Rather, let's make sure that the guidelines are such that any academic we can write something non-trivial about is probably notable for one of the reasons we list.
Second, I'm talking, specifically about autobiographies. Just because academics, largely, are able to write NPOV articles on themselves does not solve the problems these articles can create. Nathan Salmon is not a problematic example because it wasn't created by him... but I do wonder if all of the personal biographical content is externally verifiable. But in any case, it's not as important whether *I* think this is a problem: it's clear the community thinks this is a problem. Mangojuice 17:46, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would also like to see more focus on the actual work/research of academics, but I disagree that the condition that KSchutte suggests above (that the article describes "the content of their books and papers or the nature of the experiments") should be a sine qua non, as an article can establish notability in other ways. An example: I wrote the article on Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a Swedish mathematician, and so far, long after creation (on Jan. 27, 005), it still has not one word on his contributions to mathematics, other than on an institutional level. I'm simply not capable of writing that, and I prefer not to make a fool out of myself by trying (although adding some pseudo-mathematical gibberish might actually be a useful way to provoke somebody to correct/rewrite it...). But I think the article establishes notability in other ways. Sometimes an article is needed just to give some idea about the biography of a person who is linked from other articles. I also think it is quite clear that an article like this one would never be deleted on AfD (but you can try to delete it if you wish). Hence, this is not a useful criterion. Tupsharru 07:36, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recognize areas of expertise

I think the key criteria is that the professor is "an expert in their area by independent sources". And depending on what that "area" is, they may not be affiliated with an Ivy League or "top 25 school". Ivy League schools aren't necessarily strong in my areas of expertise (geography, criminology), with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania. Instead of a rigid criteria as that, I would be happy if someone let me know if they found an geography professor article. I could help judge its merits, notability, come up with the independent sources, and clean-up the article. For other topics, (e.g. Physics), I am unqualified to make the determination.

Maybe a solution... While I've personally been staying away from userboxes, it might be helpful if we had userboxes or user-categories for "Geographers", "Criminologists" or something to denote my areas of expertise, and maybe that could work here too. With such a system, it would be easier to find people to assist in making such determinations as to a professor's notability and find sources. I realize the number of userboxes or categories would increase significantly, but these would not be the same as the problematic (political, ...) ones but would be useful towards furthering the Wikipedia goal of creating a free encyclopedia. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:22, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I see we have Category:Wikipedians by interest, Category:Wikipedians by profession, and Category:Wikipedians by education, which may be useful. I'm not sure I like how Category:Wikipedians interested in criminology is worded, though. If someone is a professor or graduate student in this area, they are more than "interested" and doesn't really get at their expertise. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:30, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And there's also Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest C-D. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:32, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds great in principle. In practice, does anyone ever actually try to consult experts in AfD debates? If not, this is.. kinda moot. Unfortunately. :( Mangojuice 20:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If I came across say a Physics professor, I think it would be worthwhile consulting Wikipedians knowledgable in the subject area first before putting up for AFD. However, you're right that most people wouldn't bother. Aside from user categories, we also have Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science and Portal_talk:Physics as possible places to seek expertise. Though, also not ideal. Recognizing expertise is certainly one of the weak points of Wikipedia — a broader issue than this proposed policy. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 22:03, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Or if AFDs could be organized somewhat by subject area in addition to dates? I regularly try and scan the list of AFDs for each day to see if something pops out at me. But, if they were organized in someway by topic, then maybe I could watchlist it? -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 22:06, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Here is an interesting thought: Could we make it a criteria for deletion that the most relevant project page has been notified of the proposed deletion (with some reasonable margin of time for the relevant people to notice it)? That is, when I recently discovered that some idiot thought Paul Boghossian should be deleted, I immediately went to Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy and let all the philosophers know that somebody who knows nothing about philosophy was trying to delete a notable and potentially informative article. Similarly, perhaps every time a geography professor comes up for deletion, the Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography (if there is one) be notified, and if there isn't one, just a note on Geography. It seems that this might be a useful way to get the appropriate people deciding on the merits of the article, rather than just random AfD voters. KSchutte 02:01, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't think we could. That would be a policy change, not just a guideline, and I think folks would strongly resist something so bureucratic. Mangojuice 12:55, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The porn star standard

It's quite rare for Wikipedians to delete a porn star's biography. One sees enthusiastic comments such as, "Great performer!" on their AfD nominations even though the person in question did little more for humanity than have sex in front of a camera. So when I see a proposal to delete a university professor's biography, I ask whether this person is as significant as the average porn star. This may not be a fair analogy: just about anyone who earns a Ph.D. is far more notable than all but the greatest of porn stars, in my view of the world. So I supplement this with a quote from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf: "You can't afford good liquor on an associate professor's salary!" The average porn star probably does enjoy good liquor and doesn't even need to pay for it.

By this measure, a tenured full professor at an accredited university is as notable as a porn star because:

  1. A full professor can afford good cognac.
  2. Maudlin notions about adding to human knowledge.
  3. Let's not try to count any more reasons.

Respectfully submitted, Durova 00:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hear! Hear! Furthermore, has anyone tried to delete an American Footballer? What have they done for the world other than provide a temporary bit of excitement for a few football fans and yet work of teachers/professors etc affect millions into the future. Every footballer has a bio and yet we ignore academics. Madness Maustrauser 13:00, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I really don't like this kind of argument, and it comes up with maddening frequency in AfD debates about academics. Let me point out: (1) different types of topics are different, and can have different standards for notability. The bar for academics should be low, not because the bar for other topics is similarly low, but because academics are public figures and generators of ideas, and that makes many of them notable people. (2) WP has systemic bias. We all know that. The fact that WP contains too many porn stars and too many fictional characters is unfortunate, it's not a justification for making more mistakes. Two wrongs DON'T make a right. That said, yes, most full professors at accredited universities probably are notable, but it has nothing to do with how they compare with porn stars, and especially not with how much money they make; it has to do with their academic accomplishments. Mangojuice 14:41, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Easy there, this is only semi-serious. I happen to subscribe to those maudlin views about the importance of adding to human knowledge. Durova 18:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Peer Review

Really, peer review is an international standard. Wikipedians themselves submit to it. At least in the physical sciences, notoriety is measured by citations in peer-reviewed journals, and especially the heavy-hitters like Nature and Science. Anyone with a Ph.D. can get articles published, and occasionally lots and lots of them, without contributing anything to their field (e.g. read Betrayers of Truth, by William Broad and Nicholas Wade).

Only the active academics in any given field are truly qualified to determine whether someone's contribution(s) is noteworthy. And IMO, the only reliable measure from the outside are citations. One or two papers in the major, field-specific publication, with 50-100 citations is a solid academic career, at least in those areas with which I'm familiar. Someone with several papers in that range is well-known by his or her peers. A Science or Nature paper cited hundreds of times is seminal.

Also, I believe it is dangerous to try and place a value on any one discipline. Just because no one's heard of the world's leading parasitologist doesn't mean he or she doesn't merit a Wikipedia entry -- in fact, I would argue that is precisely the role of an online encyclopedia. Google will provide me all I need to know about John Curtis Estes. These days, academic search engines, e.g. Thompson's Web of Science, have citation databases that can be queried by author, providing a quick sense of how prominent an academic is in their field.

I'm a new Wikipedian, so I apologize in advance if I've either broken protocol or am out of sync with this discussion. If nothing else, however, I'd like to point out how vital this discussion is. We live in a time when the most basic tenets of science are yet again being tested. The World Wide Web is increasingly a vehicle used to smuggle pseudo-science passed the rigors of peer review to support an agenda or ideology. And again IMO, that is why any metric of an academic's contribution to their discipline must come from others within that discipline. Todd Johnston 15:23, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Too tough

This policy sets the bar too high. We should include articles on any person as long as the information is verifiable from a reliable source. It requires a certain (albeit low) degree of notability to have information published in a reliable source, and I feel meeting the criteria of verifiablility is enough to meet the criteria of natability. Lower the standards, no reason to deprive the poor professors of their rightful place in the world's largest encyclopaedia. Loom91 15:04, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On any person? We already have disambiguation pages for many names (see John Williams (disambiguation), William Morgan and James Brown (disambiguation), for example, or Johnson, with its many links to further disambiguation pages (for Ben, Bill, Bob, David, Jack, Joe, John, Joseph, Mark, Paul, Robert and William)). Start multiplying the number of biographical articles we have, and the dab pages will multiply and become longer, possibly to the point where you can't find what you are looking for. Yes, notability criteria should be as fair and even-handed as possible across Wikipedia as we can make it, and there are categories where fancruft has gotten obsessive, but I don't think the answer is to drop all criteria for notability. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 16:45, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ultimately WP:V is the final determiner of whether an article should be included, as Loom91 says. However, I don't think this sets the bar too high: it's trying to say when someone is OBVIOUSLY notable, and it doesn't say that people who don't meet that criterion aren't notable. Is that clear enough in the proposal? It needs to be clear. Mangojuice 17:09, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • About Dalbury's concern, surely we can't limit the breadth of our work just because it won't be easy to find anymore? That's the job of the search engine (our own or 3rd party). Any person is notable to a sufficiently small group of people, and we shouldn't deprive that group. What mangojuice says, I don't think the non-exclusionist nature of the policy is sufficiently clear. Loom91 18:47, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • You bring up a good point. We should not avoid including an article on a notable topic just because it starts to get hard to find the right articles. However, when we make the argument that WP is not paper, this is an important counterargument that we should be selective. I disagree that every person is notable to a sufficiently small group of people.. or rather, I don't think that means that every person is actually notable. I'll try to make the guideline more clear about its non-exclusivity, but feel free to edit it yourself if you want. Mangojuice 17:31, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • I think this (the "everybody is notable to somebody" thing) is a too general issue to discuss on this particular page. Either way, I think we need to have a threshold of obvious notability, just to be able to avoid some AFD debates over academics altogether, just as there is a policy to keep all members of national legislatures or all professional sportspeople (many of whom are really less notable than most professors - but it is a convenient place to draw a line, and we would have an annoying amount of AFD debates over obscure baseball and cricket players if it did not exist). Recipients of a certain set of awards, members of national academies etc. In addition, full professors at major research universities are (in my experience) never deleted, at least not if the article is even a half-decent stub with no suspicion of a copyvio. I think that could actually be pointed out in the guideline, but with the caveat that it may be debatable exactly what qualifies as a "major research university". Lower level academic teachers are more frequently deleted (associate professors/lecturers etc, depending on the system) unless some particular notability is demonstrated. Tupsharru 17:51, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Redirects for quasi-notable children and students of notable academics

For an only quasi-notable child, or even PhD student, of a notable academic, is it acceptable to create a redirect to the notable academic? I've seen redlinks for children of academics who might one day be notable, but arn't yet. It seems best to create a redirect, instead of changing the redlink to point to the parents page, if they might be notable in the future. JeffBurdges 16:09, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think redirecting one bio to another is confusing. It's fine if it's something like (say) a maiden name redirecting to a married name, but a child redirecting to a parent? It's bad to do that unless there's actually a section to direct it to. BTW, just because there's a redlink doesn't mean the article should actually exist. Many people just automatically link lots of words everywhere, without thinking whether or not an article should exist. Mangojuice 17:24, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh redirecting to a family subsection would obviously be preferable. And you would never redirect unless the person is actually discussed briefly in a family/students subsection. But can you even redirect to a subsection? Also, I just noticed "what links here" works for deleted pages. I wonder if you could redirect to its own "what links here" page? Might be a nice way to say "We arn't going to address this person's notability yet, but here is all the other notable stuff around them." JeffBurdges 17:52, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • You can't redirect to a "what links here" page because it's not an article; you can only redirect to articles. Pages like the "what links here" page, prior versions of articles, et cetera, can only be linked via an external link, and luckily, redirects to external links don't count. Mangojuice 15:43, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, point taken. JeffBurdges 02:33, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

failure to meet any of the criteria

If an academic fails to meet any of the criteria established in this guideline, then someone who wants to keep the article needs to present an argument on how the subject is notable. I think is appropriate to add something to that effect, instead of simply saying that failing to meet the criteria does not establish non-notability. Ultimately, of course, notability is established by consensus of editors, and guidelines can be ignored by a consensus. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 19:39, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Common arguments

I don't really like the "Common Arguments" section of this guideline. A guideline shouldn't tell people how to debate about something. It should set a standard and explain how that standard ought to be used. This section seems totally out of place. KSchutte 21:41, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alternate proposal for notability

A lot of the debate above is getting pretty numerical, i.e. trying to figure out how many publications, or how many citations, a professor needs to have to become notable. But how about an (admittedly somewhat vague) notion as follows: if there is an article on an academic, and an author of this article can describe why the professor's research is notable, then we keep the article? In other words, any article on a person which can only say "Professor X is a full professor at Y U." is not worthy of inclusion, but any article which says something like "Professor X has worked on mitochondrial micro-obfuscation for years and was one of the developers of the notion of transient aggressive bipolarity, which is now a commonly diagnosed medical disease" is? It seems to me that if a researcher's contribution to the big picture can be summarized by an outside observer, this is notable enough. --Deville (Talk) 05:26, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, but I think we capture that with criteria 4 and 5 in the current draft; such a prof would have a notable new idea or concept attributed to them, or a highly-regarded piece of research. Mangojuice 06:01, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this; in some sense my proposal is really a proposal of how we make an objective assessment of whether or not Criteria 4 and/or 5 apply to a given academic. It's nearly impossible for a layman to really judge what is "important" in a given scholarly field, and I think most Wikipedia editors would fall into that trap. However, the notion that "a given professor has made a contribution which can be described and contextualized by a layman" is much easier to determine, because either the article does it or not.
I admit that this would be more inclusionist than some people would like for this. However, I think as long as someone has written an article with the motivation of describing research contributions, this is fine. My guess is what people are really trying to avoid is "I took Calculus from this guy and he is awesome so I will write a WP page about him", no?--Deville (Talk) 13:25, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I like your interpretation -- care to add it into the examples section? I think what people are really trying to avoid is autobiographies, particularly the verifiability problem of WP:AUTO. Think about the example you gave in your first comment. If the summary of Professor X's research could be sourced, it's fine. But what if only Professor X himself could make that summary? It may be true, but if it's not verifiable it doesn't belong on WP. Mangojuice 14:53, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely agree with what you're saying. In fact, I happen to think WP:AUTO is actually more lax than I would make it; I've seen several instances of autobiographical edits, and I don't think I have seen one, in namespace, which makes Wikipedia better. And this goes double for the academic bios. And any statements from a professor about his own research will usually violate WP:V as well. And in any case, if the only one able to summarize a person's research is that person, then it's almost definitely not notable by our standards.--Deville (Talk) 22:02, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, they sometimes make it better. For example, Robert M. Solovay showed up to correct his thesis title, which had an error in it that I had faithfully copied from the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Granted, he could have asked someone else to correct it, but I don't know that that would have happened, since he doesn't edit WP on a regular basis. So I'd be against a blanket prohibition. I don't know where the line should be, exactly. --Trovatore 22:12, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. I wouldn't be for a blanket prohibition precisely because of examples like that. Moreover, this would be impossible to enforce. But I think I would, in general, be against anyone writing a summary of their own work, or, even worse, a summary of how their work has impacted the academic community as a whole. I would be very sceptical of the POVness in such a case.--Deville (Talk) 22:34, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Academics working on their own articles definitely can make them better, especially for those academics working in the humanities, or in broad general theory. I'll bring my own friend and faculty member, Nathan Salmon, back into this conversation. He succinctly and clearly described the four arguments for which he is most notable. (He also gave some fairly interesting verifiable personal information.) No one else would have been able to do this who hadn't read all his books and articles...Sure, he may have overestimated his esteem, but that is extremely easy to fix. The benefits outweigh the negatives by far. Now, whether it would be valuable to have non-notables doing this, that's a different question. See: Celia Green for a potential (though not definite) example. KSchutte 16:03, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WP:PROFTEST

I've boldly created a shortcut as WP:PROFTEST, seeing that WP:PROF is taken already. Flamewars please ensue below... It seems superfluous to add that any quoting of WP:PROFTEST should still be qualified with "proposed standard" or the like. Sandstein 20:25, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea; WP:PROF can probably be reused when this proposal becomes a guideline, as it's not used that much. I've removed the shortcut notice from Wikipedia:Notability (people) to discourage use of it for now. —Quarl (talk) 2006-03-22 20:48Z

Naming consistency

I've renamed the page to from Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Academics to Wikipedia:Notability (academics) for consistency. Also I've advertised this page on WP:CENT and Template:Notability. —Quarl (talk) 2006-03-22 20:51Z

Instruction creep

This page strikes me as a serious case of instruction creep. Rather than try to set inclusion standards for every profession, I would much rather we spent our time and energy trying to improve the general standards at WP:BIO. I strongly urge that this guideline be merged back to the main page to prevent the further balkanization of our standards. Rossami (talk) 21:47, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some comments:
  1. Well, as it stands, WP:BIO is explicitly balkanized with respect to profession. While the standards are all morally the same (notable and verifiable), the standards are explicitly different in terms of practical application. For example, the stated standards for actors is different from those for sportpeople which is different from those for artists, etc. Now, of course, this begs the question as to whether this should be so.
  2. I happen to think that it should. The different communities have different sizes and different effects on the world's populace. For example, the set of all professional athletes is much smaller than the set of all professors. Thus it may make sense to include, say, "all athletes in a professional league" and at the same time not make sense to include "all faculty at all universities". Since the academic community is larger than the sports community, it's at least arguable that we should retain a smaller percentage of academics than athletes, and thus have more rigorous standards for inclusion for academics. In any case, the two communities are so different that it certainly makes sense to me that the practical application of "notable and verifiable" could differ wildly between the two professions.
  3. All of the philosophy aside, from a pragmatic point of view, it seems that this sort of thing is extremely necessary. WP:AfD is simply chock-full of debates about notability of academics. You see the same arguments every day, it's almost always contentious, and this suggests strongly to me that the WP community is very much not in a state of consensus about what makes an academic notable.
  4. I think that the eventual fate of these discussions will (and should) be integrated into WP:BIO. Right now this is just a hashing out of guidelines.--Deville (Talk) 22:28, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm strongly against merging back to WP:BIO. It comes down to this: what's the point of a guideline? It's not a law, it's not a rule, what it is, basically, is an attempt to explain community consensus, because that will be useful. This is natural, in light of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules; if the guideline isn't useful or doesn't reflect consensus, then by default, it'll just be ignored. There is a lot of disagreement and uneven arguing in AFD debates about academics (look through some of the precedents if you want to see evidence). The best outcome here is to find consensus, whatever it is, and let people know about it. And I do think academics articles make a quirky little corner of the wikipedia topics, because there tends to be lots of verifiable information about academics, even everyday ones, which by WP:V we should include... but on the other hand, most academics probably aren't notable... so where do we strike the balance? So I definitely think that it's worth finding consensus about when articles on academics should be included or not. And yes, ultimately, WP:BIO should be changed to reflect this as well. Mangojuice 23:54, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just a note to everyone; I've just now updated the precedents page to add in debates currently open. I found seven. This is not a huge number compared to other subtopics like WP:MUSIC and WP:WEB, but the debates are quite back and forth. What bothers me in them are mainly two points: people being uninformed about consensus (they often have some vague idea of the "professor test") and people worrying too much about notability vs. verifiability. Anyone who's interested in this topic, check out the curent debates: Wikipedia:Notability (academics)/Precedents#Not yet closed Mangojuice 21:06, 23 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
At the risk of repeating what's been said so many times, I think this shows pretty strongly why we need to be having this discussion right here. One hears the same old arguments at every professor's AfD.--Deville (Talk) 05:39, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ditto everybody. This (proposed, at present) guideline deserves to be separate from WP:BIO. There are plenty of precedents which indicate its merit. KSchutte 16:06, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This is SO wrong! 67.109.101.226 22:46, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Could you clarify why you think this is so?--Deville (Talk) 23:07, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is confusing, unecessary and a bad case of instruction creep

There are already plenty of tools to deal with absurd examples. For great justice. 16:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

India and other developing countries

In India and some other developing countries, the stress is not so much on research, but more on teaching. Some of these professors may not have any academic publications to their name, but are highly notable by virtue of their presence on several policy-making bodies of the government(s) or on the board of directors of well-established companies. I believe that such profs merit articles on Wikipedia. --Gurubrahma 05:03, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Teachers fundamentally aren't notable. If they're notable as politicans or directors of companies, then this page is moot on their notability; this page is only for articles which claim notability through academia. I don't think being on the board of directors of even the largest companies in the world is notable, however; it's too private and too ill-documented.--Prosfilaes 05:23, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
eh? and I believe pornstars are fundamentally notable? Being on the board of directors of the largest companies in the world is definitely notable, especially if one serves on boards of two or three companies. Annual reports of all these companies are available on their websites in pdf format, it is well-documented. --Gurubrahma 05:43, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Pornstars are more notable because they're public figures, known across a large area. Teachers are generally known only to their students, and there's nothing keeping their notability alive after their deaths. It is documented that they are on the board of directors, but that's all; their lives aren't recorded, and what they do isn't recorded. You'll note that most of the people listed on List of people on multiple governing boards are notable for other reasons like being politians or at least CEOs. Most of them are also increadibly boring. People should have articles because people want to look them up.--Prosfilaes 06:16, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Most pornstars are not (IMHO) notable. But we have different - lower - standards for them and pokemons, and for the same reason. AFDs on them attract people who are generally less critical than the type of person capable of thinking academics are interesting. If an academic is notable because of their 'service' then they are notable because of that, regardless of being academics. Notability (academics) aims to set sufficient grounds, not minimum grounds. Regards, Ben Aveling 10:44, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm horrified that you think whether you find them boring is a good criteria. That's exactly why these kinds of proposals are bad for Wikipedia. We should make objective decisions about whether facts are verifiable, and report them without bias about what we think is interesting. For great justice. 16:21, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, Wikipedia shouldn't be a wastebasket for every piece of verifiable information, and WP:NOT makes it clear it's not. Furthermore, it's actively dangerous to have information that no one is looking up, since it makes an good place for libel to stick around. Wikipedia should not be an idealistic tool that contains information just because it's out there; it should be an encyclopedia recording facts that are interesting to readers, so (a) people will want to look something up on Wikipedia and (b) we aren't wasting our time writing stuff that no one will read.--Prosfilaes 18:24, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If an academic has little research but has other important and verifiable contributions (like, say, having made controversial comments covered in the news, or having an important post), they are probably notable under the general requirements of WP:BIO, and we don't need to cover that kind of issue here. Mangojuice 14:27, 30 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Survey

As this discussion has been relatively stable for a while now, I think it's time we took a poll to confirm the support of the community. Please sign under "responses" with either * '''Support''' ~~~~ or * '''Oppose''' ~~~~, with an optional sentence or two explaining why. More substantial discussion should not go in this section; please create a new section for it. Mangojuice 12:43, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Withdrawn, per Francis Schonken, below. Mangojuice 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Responses

  • This is totally not a {{historical}}, it's a recent and active discussion. As for instruction creep, we have a section on that in the discussion above, if you want to see the counterarguments. Briefly, articles on Academics are on the border between where we ought to rely mainly on WP:V vs. WP:N, and the "prof test" is vague and causes lots of confusion on AfD debates. Mangojuice 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose as above. This is harmful instruction creep. Stop it! 67.109.101.226 22:45, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Knowledge of Field in Voting

Something that hasn't been mentioned much (at all?) above is the potential importance of soliciting views from at least one (better, more) people in the field of the professor for all but the most plainly nn AfD debates. At this point, I would not encourage others (and am not willing myself) to put in the effort to make pages for even the highest respected academic music scholars because there seem to be too many delete decisions being made by voters who don't have a sense for how different fields work. For instance, citation indices do not exist for most humanities fields (and most humanists do not publish on the web or even maintain bio web pages). Before voting to delete a musicologist (or any academic), I would hope that Wikipedians would have some idea about the relative weight of awards (which of these would not establish notability: a Kinkeldey, a Siemens, a Pirrotta?). It may be that, at the least, the criteria need to be split among scientists, social scientists, and humanists before any headway can be made. --Myke Cuthbert 01:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Someone did mention this earlier. It's my hope that we can create a general cross-field guideline, to avoid too much detail. I don't know which of a Kinkeldey, a Siemens, or a Pirrotta award would be the most significant, but presumably they have articles, and that would be my first step; my guess (without looking into it) would be that they'd all establish notability. Ok, now I'm looking them up... it seems none of them have articles, so I would say that's a good place to add some content to WP! But on WP both the Kinkeldey and Siemens prizes have been worth mentioning in articles, while I find no mention of a Pirrotta prize. If you want to generalize any of the language, go ahead, and if you want to add some more information about fields you feel aren't covered well, try to do so, especially in the "examples" or "caveats" section. If you find that you're unable to clarify things that way, I'm interested in hearing why, but perhaps there's a new criteria we need. As for soliciting experts, I would love if more people would do that, but I feel that guidelines should urge this very gently. We should not be trying to dictate behavior to people, but rather making a natural guideline that's informative and applicable. Mangojuice 02:23, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please! No More RuleCruft!

Enough already. There are plenty of guidelines, about guidelines about guidelines. There is virtually nothing that is verifiable that needs rules like this. Please stop. For great justice. 00:40, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

From the position that any verifiable has a place in Wikipedia, that's reasonable. However, if we do continue to delete hard-to-verify articles that are just places for libel to hide (like any biography is prone to), we need rules for that.--Prosfilaes 03:01, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I find this request by For great justice upsetting, to say the least. We're trying to help! This guideline has been used, and I think it's been helpful in AfD, helping people make more intelligent decisions. And let me point out for anyone who isn't already aware, that For great justice seems to make it a practice to vote keep in just about every AfD debate he comes across; I've never seen a delete vote from him. WP:AGF, but it's like he wants people not to be able to have rules that can argue for deletion, because he doesn't want things deleted. Mangojuice 03:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
My personal voting history has no relevance to this guideline, it's just an ad hominem attack. I don't want true, verifiable things deleted, and I don't want endless rulecruft that allows anything someone doesn't like to get deleted just because they don't like it. For great justice. 05:30, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This is not the page to argue against deleting verifiable things. That's standard practice on Wikipedia, and it is no more relevant here than arguing WP:NPOV would be at Talk:Albert Einstein.--Prosfilaes 07:26, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just because you don't like that a guideline makes something get deleted doesn't make that guideline rulecruft. JoshuaZ 05:33, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And just because you don't like an article doesn't make it collegecruft. Notability is a disruptive, unhelpful and inherently POV. It has not place in building an encyclopedia. For great justice. 05:42, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Besides the standard answers, these rules are about living human beings. Bad articles about living human beings can create bad press and potential legal risks for Wikipedia, as history has shown. Removing those potentially libelous articles that aren't read frequently and aren't easily verifiable is very important for Wikipedia's continued existance.--Prosfilaes 07:26, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Articles which are bad should be edited to make them good. Information that is libelous and impossible to verify should be removed. That has nothing at all to do with 'notability' and is already covered by other policies. 67.109.101.226 22:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The only way to find out whether an article is impossible to verify is if you spend the hours to look up the material. The problem is many articles that no one looks at to check whether they are bad, libelous or impossible to verify.--Prosfilaes 03:11, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
'Spending hours looking up material' is the process of writing an encyclopedia! Sorry, but if you're not interested in doing research and writing, you're in the wrong place. Deletion of things that you're not interested in researching is not the answer. For great justice. 15:56, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This guideline is really not deletionist. Look at it: it gives many reasons why an academic may be notable, and tries explicitly to prevent people from arguing for non-notability. I agree with you that deleting an article that's imperfect because you're too lazy to improve it is a terrible thing, and it does happen a lot. But if you want to see the kind of thing this guideline is REALLY trying to prevent, take a look at Isotope's comments on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Christopher Winship. Mangojuicetalk 16:42, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree - Isotope is voting without reference to existing policy. Making more policy will not fix this, since he's not interested in what there is. Less is more in this case, since a few well understood and clear policies is better than masses of ill written, poorly understood and only marginally supported policy. For great justice. 18:00, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Great! If we ever have a question on an article, we'll just ask you to go look it up for us. In fact, since the problem is articles no one has questions on, each day we'll just randomly pull a couple of the biographies of living people and have you verify that they aren't libelous. Okay?--Prosfilaes 17:41, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The concept is bogus. It's your POV vs someone elses. Is 'Christopher Winship' verifiable in the sense of the Wikipedia policy (and in compliance with sources, WP:NOT etc)? If yes, he should stay, if not, he goes. Easy. For great justice. 16:55, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This is ridiculous. It's not about libel. It's about 'what I like'. AFD is not normally a forum for people who believe they have been libelled. Thank God. That's why we should stick to verifiability. That way, if someone complains, it's either verifiable from a source, or it's not. There's no arguing about whether or not a group of people once came up with a guideline about what they like being used as a criteria. For great justice. 17:56, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, AfD is not a forum for people who have been libelled. Court is. Which is why we want to reduce the number of articles where people can add "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." and nobody ever notice. Go get people to delete the guidelines about notability, and then come back to us.--Prosfilaes 03:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Duh. That's why it's important to verify facts that go in. It has nothing to do with notability. For great justice. 17:15, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why didn't you stop the Seigenthaler incident? Could it be perhaps that verifying all the facts that go into the Wikipedia is an impossible job, and it will be all the more difficult the more articles we have, and the more obscure the subjects those articles cover? --Prosfilaes 18:15, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see how that's relevant. A non-verifiable fact was added to an article. It was spotted, and removed. The system worked. Notability, as usual, had nothing to do with it. For great justice. 18:36, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
So the system is working perfectly fine when libel stays in an article for years and gets legal threats directed at Wikipedia? The fact is, the people who run the site and have to pay the lawyers disagree.--Prosfilaes 19:30, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I don't see any input here from 'the people who run the site and have to pay the lawyers'. I think it would certainly be safer from a legal standpoint to delete everything, but that's not a great option. It seems to me that heavily edited articles are just as much of a liability as seldomly edited ones, and that you have not made any case for the validity of notability as criteria. For great justice. 07:03, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a phone book. It's not about deleting things from some 'dislike' of the person or whatever. It's about deleting things that don't belong in an encyclopedia. Regards, Ben Aveling 10:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Existing policies cover entering telephone books (WP:NOT, 6.Genealogical entries, or phonebook entries.) There is no need for more rulecruft. Please read and understand existing policy before making more bad policy! In any event, nobody is arguing for entering telephone books. That's rubbish. There are no cases that can't be dealt with with existing policy. I agree that we don't need more instruction creep. Especially not crap instruction creep. 67.109.101.226 22:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
First of all, remember there's a big difference between policy and guidelines. I don't think this page aspires to be policy at all, just a guideline. Heck, WP:N isn't even policy. Second, this guideline is more about protecting articles on good subjects than about removing articles on bad subjects. Check them out: they have a lot of reasons why academics' articles should be notable, and very little about when an article on an academic is not notable. In fact, it specifically says that just because something doesn't meet these criteria doesn't mean it's not notable. Third, you're being really rude. Obviously you know a lot about Wikipedia policy and such, but you have almost no edits apart from this kind of criticism. You're calling our work crap, but you're hiding behind an anonymous IP number even though you're obviously an established user. Mangojuicetalk 16:39, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Of course WP:N is not policy. A lot of people think it is bogus. It doesn't matter whether the intention is deletionist or whatever, it is still bogus. Academics are notable to people who are interested in them, and not notable to people who aren't interested in them. Some of them have enough verifiable information about them to write an article that is more than a stub. It's that simple. For great justice. 16:55, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously, you're a relativist about this. So to you, no guideline will ever be useful. However, most of us on Wikipedia find guidelines useful. You say "a lot of people think (WP:N) is bogus." Who, besides you? I know an awful lot of people cite notability concerns constantly on AfD debates, and I've seen many people pick WP:V over WP:N (as should be done). But people who think WP:N is a bad idea? Show me. Mangojuicetalk 18:14, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Re who finds it bogus - it's been voted on numerous occasions, check the archives on those votes for individuals. In fact, just read any talk page on anything to do with notabiliyt. They are full of people who don't agree with it as a concept. I find the core policies of verifiability, sources and npov to be very useful, it's just fatuous guidelines that I find useless and counterproductive. Good, well written and useful guidelines are, of course, useful. But we have them already. For great justice. 18:23, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I was surprised to discover that WP:N is not, and effectively never has been, an official guideline. However, WP:BIO is. I have to say, I'm with you that Verifiability and WP:NOT are all we really need. However, WP:BIO and related guidelines (like this one is trying to be) are there for a good reason: to help ensure fairness and consistency. Take a look, if you will, at Simon Strelchik. I believe the page redirects somewhere, but if you go to it and see what links there you can find some hotly contested AfD debates and two DRV ones as well. To sum it up, Simon Strelchik was a municipal election candidate (not even elected) and so definitely falls below the politician threshold on WP:BIO. It was nominated for deletion at least once by pm_shef, who is the son of Strelchik's opponent, and supporters of the article brought this up. Things got pretty ugly between pm_shef and those editors (many of whom turned out to be sockpuppets). The situation, obviously, was regrettable and ugly. However, the guidelines were the one thing keeping the debates useful. Because of them, no one could argue the WP community was being unfair to this candidate, and in the end, the article's desinty will probably end up being decided in a way consistent with how we've handled similar articles in the past. To put it another way, you're allowed to disagree with a guideline and vote your conscience as you see fit. I don't think the existence of those guidelines is holding you back, except perhaps that if you don't explain why you disagree with the guideline you'll have a hard time influencing anyone else. So you may be right that the existence of guidelines may have a negative effect on you. But I think guidelines have a very positive effect on the community, which is really more important. Mangojuicetalk 18:18, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can't look up Simon Strelchik, because it has been deleted. This sort of thing cuts to the heart of what I'm talking about. There is verifiable information about this person out there. He stood for public office. I have litterally no idea why anyone would oppose me being able to look him up if I want to (of course, as you point out, his political opponents would not want me to look him up). Under the current system, it appears that his opponents POV carried the day - instead of the principle that verifiability governs what goes in, there was a battle about whos POV should prevail. I find that very damaging. If we had held fast and said that anyone for whom there is enough verifiable information to write an article stays in, the battle would never have taken place, and we would be consistant. For great justice. 18:41, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can still go to [2] even though the page has been deleted. For simplicity, here: 1st afd 2nd afd 2nd DRV. I agree with you, if we ignored notability and included all verifiable information, there would be consistency. However, there are two compelling reasons not to do this. The first is WP:NOT, specifically, "WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information." Some things aren't encyclopedia-worthy, period, and shouldn't be included. Admittedly, this doesn't say why there shouldn't be an article on any academic, although in the worst cases, articles on very unimportant academics may be effectively phone book or directory-type entries with no other importance. The second is based on a community consensus that we should try to stick to articles for which we can keep them verifiable and NPOV. This is a major problem for obscure subject. Simon Strelchik, for instance, was a municipal election candidate in some city I'd never heard of before in Canada. I was able to fact-check some of the claims in the article, and revise things that were incorrect or not neutral, but it was a lot of work, on a topic that not only do I have no interest in, but the vast majority of people have absolutely no interest in. The WP community seems huge, sure, but that doesn't mean we can spend that kind of effort on every obscure article. Basically, the alternatives we have are to allow this kind of article to exist, which will probably not be neutral or verifiable, effectively indefinitely, or we delete them. Articles that aren't neutral or verifiable, and exist for a long time, are harmful to Wikipedia. This reason can be related to the policy that "WP is not a free webhost", too: perpetual articles that get no attention effectivey turn WP into a free webhost; if a contributor is makes an article in bad faith (or to promote its subject), not deleting it effectively means the content remains HERE forever, which is much like allowing them their own home page on Wikipedia. Mangojuicetalk 20:09, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
OK. We agree that WP is not an indescriminate collection of information, but the problem comes when we try to define that. A collection of people who have run for public office is not indescriminate. It is a deliberate cataloguing of information. You say that 'Some things aren't encyclopedia-worthy' well, that's fine, but the devil is, again, in the detail. What you are really saying is that 'My POV is that X is not encyclopedia-worthy'.
I agree with you that, in the case of bios with no more information than that the candidate existed, no reasonable article can be written, and it should redirect to a list, which is a suitable way to deal with that. A list of candidates that ran in X election is an easily verifiable, and not 'indiscriminate' collection of potentially useful information. I don't think we disagree on the idea that articles should be NPOV and verifiable, I just don't see why we need more pseudo policy to enforce that.
Your argument seems to come down to whether or not there is an active community to maintain the article and prevent vandalism or POVmongering on the subject. I agree that that is a concern, but I don't think deletion is the solution. There are other ways to ensure that an article is factual than to delete it. There are plenty of articles that have active communities maintaining them that get attempts to delete them (or actually get deleted) because people think they are 'nn'. For great justice. 20:35, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for coming into this late, but Justice, I have one question for you: are you claiming that every academic who has a postion anywhere should be included in Wikipedia? You're saying that notability is POV, and thus we should include every verifiable fact in the Wikipedia? I admit I'm having a bit of trouble of figuring out what it is you're arguing for. Thanks! --Deville (Talk) 14:58, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hi there! I am saying that the standard set of verifiability set out in WP:V is high enough that every academic who has enough verifiable information from credible sources could easily have an article without any problems. There might even be fewer than there are now. I am saying that the concept of notability is inherently POV, while verfiability is much more objective. (There are issues of exactly what is a credible source, but these are, in practice, much easier to agree on). Have a re-read of WP:V, it is much more rigorous than most people think. For great justice. 17:02, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You talk about POV as if it's always bad. It's not bad at all for editors to have different points of view about the project. WP:NPOV is about articles, not policies, guidelines, or debates. Notability, I suppose, does encourage each of us to decide for ourselves what we think is notable and what isn't, and it leads to certain problematic behavior from over-the-top deletionists. On the other hand, WP:NOT isn't that clear about the scope of Wikipedia, and "WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information" needs interpretation from people. Notability guidelines came into existence via personal interpretations about WP:NOT and related issues (like the issue of perma-stubs, or concerns over the possibility of making an article conform to WP:V or WP:NPOV. They're there to summarize community consensus about what we do and don't include. Now, maybe we shouldn't act this way as a community. But we do, and we did before the guidelines, it's just that we did so with less uniformity and fairness. Furthermore, this isn't going to change so easily. But let's bring this back on topic. Is there a reason specific to this proposal for why you don't like it? Mangojuicetalk 16:25, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry to be late in getting back to you - personal points of view have no part in writing articles or deciding what information should go into the 'pedia. It's as simple as that. For great justice. 02:00, 7 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Of course applying your POV to what is included is bad. My POV is that we have much too much mathcruft, and that's not notable to me at all. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for wikipedia, it's verifiable, so I guess we're stuck with it. 165.254.38.126 15:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please don't mess with other people's comments. You obviously think that Wikipedia should have the mathematical articles, or you wouldn't say "fortunately for wikipedia", so your whole comment is being disingenious.--Prosfilaes 17:43, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
May I ask how much is "enough" verifiable information? The reason I ask is because, at least in the US, pretty much every academic has a webpage, on which they have all of their publications and CV etc. In short, for pretty much any faculty member at every American university (and most European ones) there is enough information online to write a short bio for this person. I think the community concensus, so far, is that we should not include all of these people.--Deville (Talk) 18:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please read Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Third-party (i.e., independent), reliable sources are needed. Note that personal websites are considered to be among the most unreliable of sources. You need third-party sources for most of the facts in the article. An academic's web page may only be used as a source to fill in minor, non-controversial, non-extraordinary details. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 23:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, read that, and WP:V too. This issue has been discussed to death. Simply a self written web page is not a reliable source. A third party article would probably be. 165.254.38.126 15:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

JSTOR test?

This wouldn't work for the sciences, I don't think, but in the humanities virtually every journal in JSTOR is a major, well-regarded journal. By and large, major journals publish notable scholars and notable scholars publish in major journals. Anyone with more than a couple articles in JSTOR can probably be assumed to be a significant figure in her field. I'm not proposing this as a hard-and-fast rule or even close (objections: while every journal in JSTOR is a major journal, not every major journal is in JSTOR; most people don't have access, etc.), but as a way to get information about borderline cases. As I say, it wouldn't work in the sciences because of co-authorship, which could allow a grad student or lab assistant to be all over the database, but in the humanities co-authorship is rare. Chick Bowen 02:23, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other databases include Ebsco Host, Elsevier (sciences), and Hein (law). For sciences, maybe we need a higher bar - more than "a couple articles". And of course, if an academic has published in Nature (journal) or Science (journal), then they would be considered notable. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 02:33, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And I've used Web of Science and Social Sciences Citation Index to see how much an author or article has been cited. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 02:37, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

All true. But the nice thing about JSTOR is that there's a principle of selection in the journals included (Ebsco, for example, is huge and includes lots of tiny journals). Chick Bowen 04:05, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

JSTOR is useful for including older journals as well, but although there are a few journals in German, French and other languages, it is still dominated by English language publications. One has to keep that in mind. Tupsharru 05:51, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This is true, but there's a reason for this: in the sciences at least, almost all of the best journals are published in English (I can't speak for the humanities, although I think the same is true there). Many good journals are published in the US, and of the rest published overseas, most of these are in English as well. As just one example, look at the titles of articles in the most recent version of Zeitschrift für Physik: every one is in English, and this is typical. For good or for ill, English truly is the lingua franca of scholarship today. --Deville (Talk) 15:07, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am speaking of the Humanities. The current situation is not quite as you depict it, but it was even less so a few decades ago. In the humanities research doesn't age as quickly as I assume it does in the sciences. Not everything old is entirely dated, even when it has to be read with the awareness that the context has changed. In addition there are large fields where hardly anybody publishes anything in English. Hardly anybody would write in English about Swedish literature or Swedish history; the audience for qualified academic articles in such fields can be expected to know Swedish anyway (how else would you use the sources?). Articles in English are for the most part either popular or have an obvious international topic. How large a percentage of studies on German, French or Italian history or literature do you think are written in English, as opposed to German, French or Italian? I personally have no idea, but I would expect it to be a much smaller part. Tupsharru 15:37, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I certainly stand corrected on the humanities part. Of course, one should note that here, on the English Wikipedia, there will always be a systemic bias towards those scholars who publish in English, simply because that's who the editors here will know. --Deville (Talk) 19:28, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In music history, much of the best scholarship is still published in languages other than English. While a number of German language music journals participate in JSTOR, most Italian and French do not. Deville's statement must be qualified as for the sciences only. Many of the top researchers I work with barely read English and certainly do not write in it. Presence in JSTOR would establish notability to my mind, but absence would not be NN. --Myke Cuthbert 03:11, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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