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Suggestion to avoid CV-like pages

I've been thinking about the concerns expressed by editors who support the proposal directly above, that pages that pass this guideline often end up looking like CVs. It seems to me that such pages can in fact be notable, but that they are unencyclopedic if they have no content related to Criterion #1 of this guideline – not so much an issue of WP:N as of WP:NOT. Therefore, I suggest that an additional bullet point be added at the end of the specific criterion notes for Criterion #1, something along these lines:

  • Although page notability may be established by using the other criteria that follow, the Wikipedia community considers pages to be unencyclopedic if they resemble curricula vitae, and lack content that describes the nature and the impact of the scholar's work. Such pages, even when notable, may be tagged with Template:Like resume, and should be expanded to include the kind of content that satisfies Criterion #1.

--Tryptofish (talk) 23:07, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

To some extent, I agree. In particular, these articles should generally not include a complete list of the subject's publications. But (1) that's a content issue, not a notability issue, and as such off-topic here, and (2) far too many editors use the excuse of "it looks like a cv" in deletion nominations for perfectly adequate articles or stubs that merely state the subject's education and employment, both of which are perfectly valid things to include in such articles. I think adding any such language would encourage too much abuse of this type. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:40, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Good points. Would it help to add a sentence like: However, the fact that a page currently looks that way is not a valid reason for page deletion.? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:52, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment. I don't see any need for such moves. The articles that a few people are complaining about are WP:Stubs, and guidelines already provide plenty of precedents for dealing with such, like Category:Academic biography stubs. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:21, 3 September 2017 (UTC).
  • Since your proposal deals with content rather than Wikipedia's standards for having an article, I think it is better placed in Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not or some other suitable location. Personally, I think English Wikipedia's basic criteria for the notability of persons should expand on the meaning of "significant coverage": the independent, non-promotional, non-routine, reliable secondary coverage of the subject should be sufficiently detailed that a reasonably complete overview of the person's life can be written. A reasonably complete overview includes major life events, accomplishments, and other significant influences spanning most of the person's lifetime. isaacl (talk) 03:06, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
    • The people whose life events are best documented are known as celebrities, and yours is a very celebrity-centric view of notability. For creative professionals, it is through their work, not their love affairs or appearances, that they become notable. So it is through independent note of their work (for instance, citations or awards), rather than through tabloid profiles, that we should judge them to be notable. Otherwise we would be left with only biographies of celebrities, and become little more than a tabloid ourselves. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:50, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
      • To me, life events includes awards received, and increasing real-world notability of released work products. Basically enough secondary coverage is needed to flesh out a biographical sketch that goes beyond a bare list of work output. This includes professional influences, collaborations, career path analyses, and other important aspects of any professional's life. isaacl (talk) 14:02, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
By your standard of coverage of the subject ... sufficiently detailed that a reasonably complete overview of the person's life can be written we'd have no articles on Fibonacci, Shakespeare, Spartacus, John Harvard, most of the popes, or almost any of the pharaohs. EEng 17:57, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Well, it's a starting point for discussion, not a set-in-stone proposal. As a first approximation, we could start with expanding the criteria for persons born after 1900, for example. The problem is that English Wikipedia continues to try to set up hard-and-fast rules to substitute for editorial judgment, because the community clings to its "straw poll followed by trying to convince others to change their vote" form of decision-making. As mentioned by Clay Shirky in his talk "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy", eventually it becomes far more cumbersome to try to cover every possible situation with a rule rather than having a hierarchical decision-making structure that can adapt guiding principles appropriately for individual cases. (For instance, an editorial board could make decisions on having an article based on impact of accomplishments or role in society, rather than trying to infer this from the quality of secondary coverage.) But as of yet those who participate in these types of discussions on English Wikipedia either continue to believe the present straw poll mechanism is better, or they are unwilling to cede their veto power to a hierarchy. isaacl (talk) 19:53, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
If you're aiming to change the editorial governance structure of Wikipedia, you're far from in the right place. And if you believe that the sort of rule you propose would eliminate opinion from deletion discussions, leaving us only a mechanical calculation for whether someone does or does not pass, you're dreaming. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:03, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
In fact, I said the opposite: people try to put rules in place hoping that a mechanical calculation will work, but it inevitably doesn't, as shown time and time again in online social communities. In recognition of the current system in place, I made a suggestion to try to shift more emphasis towards ensuring there is adequate secondary coverage to create a biography with the level of information appropriate for an encyclopedia. But I fully realize it won't be a magic bullet to end discussion on the matter. isaacl (talk) 20:09, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Isaacl, It is not usually a good idea to bring up the same issue on multiple pages, trying to shop around for some place where people might agree with you. There is no harm at all in raising the question in the appropriate place (which in this case is right here), but not it re-litigating it--here or elsewhere. Consensus can change, but when I am faced with disapproval on a proposal of mine that I think important, I wait several years before I re-start the discussion. By that time, there is a better chance that consensus might actually have changed. DGG ( talk ) 05:18, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion. Personally I find unless a discussion on a specific topic is started on one page and notifications placed on appropriate pages, it's kind of luck of the draw if anyone sees a thread that may be of interest, and so it can be helpful to kick around ideas, particularly when they are still in a formative stage, in different places. I appreciate though that some may feel differently. isaacl (talk) 06:21, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Support in principle, but it needs a rewrite. There's no such thing as "page notability"; subjects have notability, and even within that context, notability only applies to article subjects (e.g., it doesn't constrain what can be the subject of a section or included in a comprehensive list). So, the wording is all wonky, even if the main theme (articles that are just CVs are WP:NOT failures) is spot-on.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:34, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Oh, I'm facepalming myself about the "page notability" thing – you are of course right. But based upon the discussion here, I'm not going to do any revising at this time, and I'm not going to pursue it at any other talk page. Insofar as it goes, it was a useful discussion: editors look negatively upon CV-like pages, and such pages ought to be fixed if the subject is notable. Use Template:Like resume whenever needed! --Tryptofish (talk) 19:32, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Thumbs up icon  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:53, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Request for comment on an AfD

I was hoping those who watch this page could help with an AfD discussion for a professor at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Massimo Negrotti. So far, there has been no discussion, outside of the subject of the article himself. Angryapathy (talk) 17:03, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Peter Hillmen

Hi, I'm interested in writing an article above the above academic, responsible for a breakthrough treatment for Chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I've written about some of the results here: [[1]]. Do you think this academic is notable? I wouldn't want to write the article only for it to be deleted. Thanks! DrVogel (talk) 11:03, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. A major factor is how his citation record compares with similar. See WP:Prof. Xxanthippe (talk) 11:26, 6 February 2018 (UTC).
He is a full professor at a major UK university. He has several thousand citations. An article about him will not be deleted due to notability concerns. Rentier (talk) 11:33, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi Xxanthippe and Rentier, thank you very much for your kind (and incredibly fast!) replies DrVogel (talk) 23:04, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

RS Question

Knowledgeable souls invited to comment at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#European Journal of American Studies. Thanks. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:31, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

National Academies of Sciences of other countries

Should members of an Academy of Sciences of another country (not US) be eligible for Criterion 3? If so, which countries would be included and which would not (and why)? Gelbukh (talk) 04:28, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

A difficult question to answer with precision. It will have to be dealt with on a case by case basis. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:35, 21 February 2018 (UTC).

Recent revert

I saw this revert: [2], and I do not understand the rationale for it. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the reverted edit really just made Criterion 4 consistent with the existing language for Criterion 1. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:26, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Maybe I was reading too much into the change, but it seemed like the sort of substantive change that would require discussion to me rather than a minor and uncontroversial change. As currently (and not very frequently) used, criterion #4 is for contributions like writing a widely-used textbook. The modified version of criterion #4 would, as I see it, convert that criterion into something much more closely resembling GNG, where we can only accept someone as having a broad impact on education if we can find published testimonials of their impact. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:30, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
I think it's a sensible addition. In practice, how would we know that a textbook is "widely used" unless we have a source that says so? – Joe (talk) 19:32, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Thanks, that makes sense. On the other hand, I agree with the original edit insofar as we don't want to source it to something like the person's CV or university webpage. Is there a middle ground that would work? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:34, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
The typical argument I would imagine using for #4 is to run a search for university course syllabi and show that many of them from many different universities use a text as required reading. That's not adequate sourcing for saying in the article itself that the text is widely used, but it can still justify stating the existence of the text in the article and using its wide use as an argument for keeping in an AfD. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:36, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
A web search of syllabi sounds like original research conducted by an editor, which isn't a sound basis for an article.
If there are no independent sources at all, then how are we to write a neutral article? Neutral about a BLP doesn't just mean tone; it also means not writing solely what the BLP and their publicity department want us to write. If there actually are no other sources, then I do not think that an NPOV-compliant article is possible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:00, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
Having sufficient content for an article and having sufficient significance for an article are two different things, even for subjects for whom we use GNG instead of PROF. (Or else, why do you think we don't count local newspaper stories as being good for GNG, even though they clearly provide properly-sourced content for an article?) "Original research" is something we should avoid doing as a way of providing content, but is completely normal and even encouraged (by WP:BEFORE) as a way of assessing significance. So the article content in such a case could be simply that the subject wrote a textbook on X (easily sourced, sometimes even with significant amounts of detail on the textbook from reviews). The significance assessment is whether that textbook was a significant accomplishment (one that is used at hundreds of universities, say) or something non-notable (used only locally). It is not problematic from the point of view of WP:NOR because it doesn't need to go into the article, but it can still provide ammunition in either direction at an AfD. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:11, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
We do count local newspapers for GNG, although CORP (and CORP alone) requires that there be at least one source that isn't the subject's hometown or small neighborhood newspaper. The local newspapers still do count, because one non-local newspaper plus one or more articles in your neighborhood newspaper is an indication of notability, where as a single non-local source by itself is not.
The basic purpose of the notability guideline is to figure out what subjects we can write policy-compliant articles about. Let us grant, arguendo, that writing a popular textbook is what's meant by "affecting a substantial number of academic institutions", rather than doing something that causes institutions to change their policies or practices. And let us grant, arguendo, that if a textbook is popular, this means that we need an article on its authors and editors, rather than on the textbook itself. You are basically proposing that if you search "site:.edu syllabus "Campbell Biology"", and if some sufficiently high number of hits is returned – and even if no independent source can be found about some or all of the five editors named on the cover of the most recent edition – then we will still be able to write BLPs about all five of those editors (and however many editors there were for each of the previous and future editions) that comply with all of the content policies. Those policies include:
  1. WP:NOT, which says that you must be able to cite independent sources for all subjects, and
  2. WP:V, which says that all articles must be based upon third-party sources.
How do you think that these policies will be complied with, in a case for which your best efforts (which I know to be not inconsiderable) have found exactly zero third-party sources about the BLP? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:42, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
Re: "The basic purpose of the notability guideline is to figure out what subjects we can write policy-compliant articles about.": I know that's what we *say* it is for, but I don't believe that it is actually used that way, nor that it has been for years. How it is actually used is as a stand-in for significance, not depth of sourcing. We should stop being hypocritical about that and, in cases like this one where we have other more accurate ways of assessing significance, use them instead, not try to shoehorn GNG-based significance tests into places where they don't belong. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:34, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm interpreting this reply as "I admit that it is impossible to write a policy-compliant article in that situation, but I don't think the community cares about that, in practice." If my understanding of your position (a valid one, though not one that I happen to share) is dramatically wrong, then please tell me how you would write a policy-compliant article for a subject for which no independent sources can be found. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:54, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
I am interested in the answer as well. In practice, the articles about GNG-failing academics are based on primary sources such as research articles by the subject, university websites and databases such as Google Scholar or WorldCat. Examples: Douglas Ulmer, Parisa Mehrkhodavandi, Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, and my own creation, Korbinian Strimmer. I think the prevalent line of thinking is that these sources, though primary, can be presumed reliable. I was initially opposed to this and (unsuccessfully) nominated a few articles about obscure academics for deletion. However, seeing that the sourcing standards are low across the board, I decided to go with the flow. I think that the community decided to set the notability standards low enough to create a big class of articles that cannot be written according to WP:V and WP:NOT but also cannot be deleted. One non-academic example is Francesca Fusco, based largely on primary sources. The AfD argument "The amount of articles she's in as an expert is pretty staggering" is isometric to keeping academics based on citations alone. Rentier (talk) 17:45, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
I think notability is separate from verifiability, that our articles should have both, and that what have been discussing here so far is only (one form of) notability. From that point of view, of the articles you list, Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer is in far better shape than Parisa Mehrkhodavandi: Harich-Schwarzbauer's article is largely based on sources that are reliable enough for the factual information they are used for, while Mehrkhodavandi's is largely based only on Mehrkhodavandi's own publications, and has no sources at all for the education and career milestones it details. I wouldn't argue for deletion of either one (they are both notable) but Mehrkhodavandi needs a major rewrite (it is not verifiable in its current form) while Harich-Schwarzbauer's article is acceptable if mediocre in sourcing quality. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:04, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
  • I think the addition is CREEP, either you convince the AfD participants with this argument for notability or you do not, using reason and whatever evidence supports that reason, but there is no need to further delimit evidence. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:33, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
  • I do not see it as instruction creep, and I'm pretty well convinced now that the change was a good one, and the revert should be undone. What all the back-and-forth about a textbook has missed is that, if a textbook really is widely used, there will be independent book reviews of it. We accept the requirement for independent sourcing for Criterion 1, and it's illogical to treat Criterion 4 differently unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I'm not seeing a compelling reason. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:38, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
    • The independent book reviews will generally say nothing about how widely used it is, because they are published at similar times to the book rather than later when its usage becomes more clear. Therefore they are useless for #4. This change makes #4 even more unlikely to be used than it already is. Saying that a contribution of this type will likely pass WP:AUTHOR instead is a cop-out. (Also, I don't know how much effort you've put into finding reviews of lower-level textbooks, but they aren't anywhere near as likely to exist as reviews for specialized monographs.) —David Eppstein (talk) 19:48, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
    • I'm not sure why you thought you needed to basically say the same thing you already said, but obviously we disagree - the revert should not be undone. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
      • Actually, I did not say earlier which way I thought we should go, but if you find me unbearably repetitive I'm not sure why you felt the need to comment on it. I realize that book reviews do not predict the number of sales, but they do comment on how significant and useful a textbook is. Anyway, this is a small issue, and not one I would want to fight about. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:42, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
        • I think book reviews will generally only be useful in this context when they are reviews of later editions. Those do, on occasion, say that the original edition of the book has become a standard text. XOR'easter (talk) 21:15, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
          • That's an excellent point. And if a textbook has become widely used over time, there will be later editions. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
            • Sure, but the book reviews are mostly irrelevant, because David isn't talking about writing Biology (textbook). David is instead saying that if that textbook is widely used, then you should use the fact that it's a notable book as a justification to write about Neil Campbell (scientist), Lisa A. Urry, and about 25 other editors over the years. We can find independent sources for some of those academics, without doubt (Campbell himself got an obit in The New York Times). But I'm equally convinced that we won't find SIGCOV in INDY sources for others in that long list. You might think of it as inherited notability: If an academic writes a textbook, and everyone reviews the book and ignores the author, then David's saying that the academic inherits notability from his textbook. The community's standard for non-academic authors is that when they write books, and everyone reviews the books and ignores the authors, then you get articles about the notable books but not about the ignored authors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
              • Well, if they're one in a line of 25 or so for the same textbook, and maybe not even credited on the cover, then I think the argument will not be very strong, and WP:BIO1E will surely be raised. I was thinking more of people like Michael Rosen (mathematician), about whom our article says he "is known for his textbooks" and whose textbook A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory appears to be standard as an undergraduate text [3] (note: link goes to an open forum and would not pass the proposed change to the criterion) despite being in a graduate textbook series. And yet, although I found six published reviews, none of them says anything about wide use [4] [5] [6] MR0661047 MR1070716 [7]. This author should pass #4 for this text, but wouldn't after the revision. Passing AUTHOR as a consolation prize isn't helpful, any more than having any other criterion become subsumed by GNG or AUTHOR would be helpful — what is the point of having a separate criterion when you need to pass an entire other notability guideline to pass that criterion? —David Eppstein (talk) 03:32, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
                • What's the point of having an article that outright fails NOT and WP:V? What's the point of having an article if every word in it is based on what the subject (and his employer and his publisher) has written?
                  Isn't there more to this criterion than just textbook authors? If not, then maybe it really should be deleted as being redundant to NAUTHOR. (Campbell's Biology had different editors for different editions.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
Even reading all of the above threads, I'm still not seeing any issues with the edit that was removed. If someone's work has made a significant impact in academia, that will be reflected in independent secondary sources. I'm not seeing a compelling reason above why the edit should have been removed, so I'm in favor of reinstating what seemed like an uncontroversial clarification from a policy standpoint. Kingofaces43 (talk) 19:12, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
I don't think it's a clarification. I think it's a fundamental change from an impact-based notability requirement to a source-based notability requirement. If you're going to do this you might as well remove #4 altogether. Or can you provide evidence of even a single article that would be notable only through #4 under the new version, and not through other notability criteria? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:08, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
I also think that it is a change rather than a clarification. XOR'easter (talk) 21:07, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
Change is unneeded instruction WP:Creep. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:15, 26 February 2018 (UTC).
Based on this recent string, it looks like we're getting increasing WP:CONSENSUS (though obviously not agreement from some editors) for restoring the edit. No actual creep has been established. If someone is trying to claim notability based on their personal assessment of impact, that's WP:OR among other policy issues mentioned above. That criteria 4 is a pretty clear assessment of WP:WEIGHT, and you need sources for that. The change is only clarifying what's already enforced by policy, so CREEP isn't really applicable for this particular change. Kingofaces43 (talk) 23:37, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
Both OR and WEIGHT refer to the content of articles and have nothing to do with the notability standards. And no, there is no consensus for restoring the change. Rentier (talk) 00:28, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
It's still a content factor being considered, namely the impact of the subject. Beyond that, WP:GNG already explicitly mentions no original research in determining notability, so no, it does not only apply to content. The spirit of OR is that we as editors refrain from making calls of this degree, but let sources spell it out for us. In terms of consensus, someone has to make an argument that sticks in terms of policy, etc. No particular issue has been brought up with the edit that does that. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:38, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Re GNG: the whole point is that WP:PROF is a different notability guideline than GNG. So there is no reason to import concepts from GNG into it: if we were going to do that, what would be the reason to have a separate notability guideline? And I repeat: can you point to a single example of an academic for whom the new criterion would be useful by providing notability not provided in any other way? —David Eppstein (talk) 02:45, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Although I personally expressed support for the change, I'd like to say that I don't feel strongly about this, and it looks to me that there is not a consensus for making the change. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:34, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
The problem with handling this as "an impact-based notability requirement" is that we're saying that editors should decide, without a single WP:INDY reliable source to support them, whether that alleged impact happened. Just imagine if we did that for, say, journalists, romance novel writers, etc. I love the "impact-based" aspect, but I don't want some random editor, paid or otherwise, to be deciding all by himself whether the impact happened. I want an actual reliable source to say that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
That way lies academics getting articles because their subject is marketing and they got themselves into published "50 most promising" lists. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:56, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
"50 most promising" lists almost never provide WP:SIGCOV. Even when they do (which anyone who spends as much time at CORP as I have can tell you, they don't), I'd rather have "50 Most Promising Somethings" from a place with a reputation for fact-checking and editorial control than from a random Wikipedian, whose main qualification is that he figured out how to click the Edit button. Wikipedia editors are not reliable sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:53, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Scopus and Web of Science

I recently removed this edit by Egaudrain, and they posted on my talk page asking for clarification. I figured it would be better to mention this here instead.

Basically, we want to avoid adding personal thoughts too much to guidelines that approach WP:SOAPBOX territory, and the current addition wasn't something that could really be used in notability discussions. I'd argue that the paragraph needs some additional cleanup in that regard, but I also just noticed the state it was in too. While we normally don't need sourcing in guidelines as opposed to mainspace, some of the descriptions of different databases are approaching needing sources too. Basically, if it's something simple like Google Scholar doesn't list articles before X year, that's an ok caution for the guideline. We basically want to say these are the main databases in the field, and here are concrete cautions for each of them. Something like the previous edit though falls into less of a factual description and gets more into editorializing type thought.

As a more general comment outside this specific edit (this does fall into personal experience by discussions with other scientists), but a lot people consider Web of Science > Scopus > Google Scholar in terms of citation metric reliability because Google Scholar is more prone to citing non-peer-reviewed literature (and sometimes Scopus to a lesser extent). I haven't gone looking for formal sources on that one though, but that might be a concept worth looking into sometime in the future. Kingofaces43 (talk) 17:51, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Our guideline already cites reliable sources according to which, for computer science, we should use GS and not use WoS: see the last bullet point. However the reasons for doing so are specific to CS publication patterns and have nothing to do with the commercial nature of the databases (Egaudrain's complaint). —David Eppstein (talk) 18:10, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, that indeed varies by discipline (I do see a fair number of computer science manuscripts posted on what other disciplines would call non-peer-reviewed gray literature). There's a bit more demarcation in other disciplines though, so computer science is a fair call out there. Kingofaces43 (talk) 18:15, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
I think it's appropriate for the guideline to draw attention to the limitations of various metrics, as it pretty much does now. That way, it helps avoid overly simplistic arguments in AfD, based on claiming that a particular metric makes something an open-and-closed case. But I, too, think that being commercial or privately owned isn't really worth using as a justification to be cautious. However, what really stands out to me as a problem is how the section starts out by saying that these services are expensive. So what? Being expensive has little or nothing to do with whether the metrics are useful or not useful for evaluating notability. We don't disqualify paywalled material for sourcing, so I see no reason to disqualify expensive services for editorial decisions. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:25, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
All three available databases (including the free GS) are commercial and non-transparent. This needs mention. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:28, 9 March 2018 (UTC).
Thanks for the clarification, Kingofaces43. My edit was indeed based on the tone of the rest of the description of the databases. There is a great deal of variations across fields and this is not limited to computer science being an exception. Web of Science decides what journal it accepts or not based on...? (The fact that the criteria are opaque is not an opinion.) I know at least one journal in the field of auditory sciences that was declined referencing in WoS on the basis that "there are already too many journals in that field". I'm not talking predatory journal, but a real, albeit small scope journal. In fact "auditory sciences" is not recognized as a field in itself in WoS... All this would be without consequence if people didn't try to follow these guidelines perhaps a bit too conservatively and used a bit more caution. I came to this reading an admittedly old discussion about the notability of an auditory researcher (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Monita Chatterjee). In the arguments made, someone cited that the researcher in question had an h-index of 21 on Google Scholar, but someone argued back that GS was not reflecting the "true" RS citations (whatever RS is). That shows to me that some importance is given to these numbers while their relevance is highly field specific, and their trustworthiness debatable. So I would argue that perhaps editors should be cautious when they make decisions about fields they don't know, and the purpose of my attempted edit was to add a general word of caution about how much bibliometric resources should be trusted. All this being said, I totally agree that the section needs a bit of cleanup. Egaudrain (talk) 22:48, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Just commenting on "RS citations", normally "RS" is used on Wikipedia to refer to reliable sources, but that's for sourcing content. It's very odd to refer to publications that way when discussing the notability of the person who wrote them. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:30, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! I should probably have googled it... If one wants to use h-index or number of citations as a notability criterion, then it makes sense to question whether the source providing these numbers is reliable. Since it seems that Google Scholar is not reliable for certain fields, and Web of Science is not reliable for others... perhaps we should have a more general statement that if bibliometrics are to be used, they should be provided through a reliable source for the field. Which, I guess, only someone from the field would know. And there wouldn't always be a nice reference to cite for it. I don't think anyone wants to list what source is considered reliable for what field, already because not everybody will agree on the definitions of these fields... -Egaudrain (talk) 00:27, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Michael Efroimsky

Does this scientist meet our notability requirements? I put a notability tag on yesterday and the subject removed it, saying that the NASA link he added was sufficient. I don't think it is but would prefer guidance to replacing it myself. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 06:21, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

The first thing to do in assessing the notability of scientists is look at the citation record in GS. This gives an h-index of 22. For a very highly cited field this is marginal, but probably over the bar. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:08, 22 March 2018 (UTC).
Ah, but you're forgetting that we multiply by 0.7 in the case of anyone dickish enough to come to WP to argue for their own notability. EEng 12:54, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Looking at the page without doing further research, it looks like marginal notability to me. For one thing, it should be tagged for connected contributor issues (where EEng would multiply by 0.7, I feel sorely tempted to multiply by 0.0 whenever I see this sort of thing). I'm less of an h-index fan than some other editors. According to the page, he has co-authored two works that might or might not be influential (the two cited sources). What I would do is look into the ways other experts have cited those works. If there are independent sources saying that the work has been significantly influential, I would regard that as establishing notability (and would want to see those sources cited on the page). On the other hand, if the citations are more routine and there does not appear to be independent assessment of importance, I would want to see the page deleted. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:22, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Just to "come to WP to argue for their own notability" is not so dickish sometimes. Our coverage is so incredibly erratic that the question often naturally arises - I've been asked that privately by a couple of super-notable people of the "wrong age" (now long retired) to have got articles "naturally". A perusal of Category:Lists of members of learned societies shows the problem clearly, where the lists are complete. I think it's important we all keep in mind how very poor WP is this respect. When I worked at the Royal Society List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2012 was over 50% redlinks, as were the preceding years (of course all the redlinks were male, but that's another story). Now that's much better (no thanks to me - mainly User:Duncan.Hull). Obviously removing tags etc is bad, but to ask the question is entirely natural. I got a laugh at a conference by suggesting that dying was much the most reliable way to get a WP bio ..... Johnbod (talk) 13:00, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Acting chancellor

I'm just curious if acting chancellor or vice-chancellor of a university are given an automatic free pass over WP:BIO ? --Saqib (talk) 09:54, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean about a free pass, but in my opinion having a temporary appointment, by itself, does not ordinarily establish passing WP:PROF. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:16, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
@Tryptofish: By free pass I meant to say if temporary appointed chancellors qualify for a WP article under WP:PROF. --Saqib (talk) 05:17, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
Only if they're otherwise notable (e.g. through GNG or a different PROF criterion) or the position becomes permanent. I wouldn't think that the temporary appointment would be good enough by itself for #C6. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:25, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
@David Eppstein and Tryptofish: OK on the basis of this discussion, I initiated an AfD on a acting vice-chancellor, however an editor @FloridaArmy: says the subject still meet PROF#5 because the professor held the office of vice-chancellor. So does it means an acting VC passes PROF#5? --Saqib (talk) 15:11, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree with the others who have already weighed in above and I don't think that interim or acting status passes muster. For someone who is a vice-chancellor, president, or provost it should be a moot point for most people because they should meet other criteria as highly respected, senior scholars. But by itself an interim, acting, or otherwise temporary appointment doesn't pass muster for this criterion. If there is confusion on this point and widespread consensus then we should edit the policy to clear it up. ElKevbo (talk) 16:45, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
@ElKevbo: It would be better to make some changes to the policy to avoid confusion. I can see we've several BLPs on acting vice-chancellors. --Saqib (talk) 16:52, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
I am strongly opposed to making changed to a policy while there are several AfDs underway. Even if done with the best of intentions and the support of the vast majority of editors it still feels...slimy? It's far better for us to weigh in on the AfDs and use those processes as another way to see if there is consensus to make this change; we may be in the minority and the policy may need to be clarified to say the opposite what we think it should say. ElKevbo (talk) 18:13, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree that we should not change the guideline right away. I took a quick look at the AfD and the bio page and, although I won't participate in the AfD after having taken part in this discussion here, I think that it is a poor test case for the issue of "acting" appointments. The subject is not someone in an acting position, but rather is someone who is "former" in multiple positions because of now being emeritus. (I have not looked at any measures of scholarly impact.) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:09, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
I also didn't think that the subject was in an acting role; in addition I thought subject passed GNG. Anyways, the article is deleted now.  M A A Z   T A L K  08:11, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Editors here need to know about this

Draft:RfaProf. Frankly, I'm rather appalled to discover that the discussion there has been going on without a notification here. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:21, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Well, at least most of us are spared the vast amount of talk page dissertations it has already generated (now including mine). Not that these seem to be altering the draft much. I think it is good to have preliminary discussions for such a major proposal. But clearly it will end up here, so people may like to board up their windows now, if not retreat to the storm cellar or hide in the bath. Johnbod (talk) 15:02, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
Appalled, really? If you want to talk there, there is a talk page. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:23, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
The point was not that I wanted to talk but thought that I couldn't. The point is that an effort to revise this guideline should include a notification at this guideline. It's the same thing as if editors created a page to discuss Alanscottwalker without notifying Alanscottwalker. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:36, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
Well, I don't know. I assume you are not saying it's required, but I don't see why whomever those people are can't talk about whatever they want to talk about, without a notification (you are correct about talking about a User, but talking about a guideline does not seem the same, at all): they may abandon it, they may refine it, they may later seek additional input, etc. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:57, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
I'm saying that "Appalled, really?" was not helpful. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:02, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
Well, "appalled", seems serious over-reaction. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:06, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
(ec) But "rather appalled" was?? I see nothing but benefit in attempting to improve a long and significant proposal for change in the draft space, before bringing it here. Looking at the talk page, it hardly shows a cabal at work. Johnbod (talk) 17:07, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
I also see I see nothing but benefit in attempting to improve a long and significant proposal for change in the draft space, before bringing it here. However, it is unfortunate that the existence of the draft was not notified on this talk page as it gives critics the opportunity to allege that the process was carried out in some way surreptitiously. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:23, 1 May 2018 (UTC).
OK, I'll accept that. I apologize. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:10, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
I am also an editor who found it strange that this page, where the highest concentration of editors interested in WP:Prof is to be found, was not notified of the discussion of the draft. More informed input input could have occurred at an earlier stage. I think that Tryptofish has nothing to apologise for. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:49, 1 May 2018 (UTC).
There was never anything preventing the OP from giving a neutral notice, here, which is the custom with notices -- moreover, multiple long-time editors here have been giving input there, what's the point in criticizing them, they are not doing it in secret, it's on a public page. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:43, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
I speak only for myself and for me, it's both an etiquette issue and a game theory issue. Typically, we have venues where these discussions are supposed to happen; that's why we have watchlists. Further, holding this sort of conversation in a smaller forum is a method to develop a proposal. Creating consensus in a larger group is mathematically harder to achieve. I don't probably want a change so I'm hostile to a semi-private working group trying to move the ball while I'm playing defense. Chris Troutman (talk) 11:11, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
Disagree about typicality of discussing proposals, they spring-up everywhere often on some talk page User or otherwise, and they regularly involve long spit-ball conversations between various users. It's a fine thing for people to be conversing and thinking about. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:40, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
I thank Xxanthippe for the kind words. As far as I'm concerned, it's no skin off my back to say I'm sorry and move on. I was right to indicate that editors here needed to be aware of that discussion, and it was a mistake on the part of those discussants not to put a notification here right away. But it's legitimate to say I should have worded it neutrally. I was genuinely troubled by the lack of notification, but I didn't need to say it here. Similarly, some other editors probably would have been wiser to let what I said go, instead of raising an issue about it, because there has now been too much talk here about how notification should have been made instead of about the merits of the possible changes – but it is what it is. Anyway, I think we should move on. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:28, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
Others may think that creating this draft without an explicit notification here is a tactical mistake but it's by no means required. Editors are free to work together in smaller groups as they discuss ideas and create potential drafts of possible proposals. On the same token, other editors are free to chime in without being explicitly invited and to draw other editors' notice to the discussion. So while the initial note here was a little bit brusque I don't think that anyone has done anything wrong. Continue discussing and collaborating, here or there! ElKevbo (talk) 22:38, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Sergiu P. Pașca

Notable? - Biruitorul Talk 01:18, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

I haven't given it a deep examination, but seeing that he is a junior faculty member, I'm guessing not. Unfortunately, we get a lot of not-yet-ready pages about promising young academics early in their careers. But other editors may disagree with me. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:33, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Some possible food for thought...

Machine-Generated Knowledge Bases describes how a team used AI and 30,000 existing WP articles on computer scientists on WP to create a trained basis set, then fed it a large set of names and papers (200,000+) from which the AI came back with about 40,000 people not documented on WP but that the AI believed had similar coverage, with the argument that we (WP) are missing these articles.

There's plus and minus to this both ways in terms of notability in general and NPROF, I'm dropping this here for discussion/consideration. --Masem (t) 14:59, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

I took a quick look at List of computer scientists and Category:Computer scientists. I'm not going to actually count, but I find it unlikely that we really have 30,000 such bio pages, which makes me wonder how the AI researchers chose their populations. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:36, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
It would make more sense if one dropped the word "computer" from Masem's comment. Many of the people in the public "first 100" quicksilver data set are medical scientists. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:08, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
They chose 30000 existing WP articles on all scientists as a training dataset, but their first released dataset is on 30000 computer scientists, 85% who don't have wikipedia articles. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:16, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
That being the case, I think it's pretty obvious that PROF criteria vary as a function of the field of scholarship, so if they are building criteria that are not specific to computer scientists but applying those criteria specifically to computer scientists, that's potentially a source of error. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:51, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Looking at the first nine scientists in that "first 100" set, two have had WP stubs created in the last four days (Adrian Luckman and Andrea Gore). I think we are looking at the possibility of a flood of stub biographies in the near future. - Donald Albury 22:07, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Are you saying that's a bad thing? Anyway, see Wikipedia:List of Wikipedia articles created using Quicksilver. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:17, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
I do say that it is a bad thing. There is too much dross coming through already. Also, many people do not wish to have BLPs on Wikipedia out of a concern for privacy, so let's not force them to. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:33, 8 August 2018 (UTC).
That's not a reason not to have an article on someone. If there's nowhere cclose to enough sourcing, sure, but if the person is discussed in reliable sources and in a manner that doesn't blatantly violate BLP, then we should have an article on them. --Masem (t) 23:41, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
As long as we are talking Quicksilver's generated output and applying just enough human checks and additions (read: not bot created) , then it should be fine. --Masem (t) 22:38, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
I think the human checks are essential and non-trivial. I would not want to see a mass of stubs that end up at AfD. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:49, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
I haven't finished looking yet, maybe 2/3 of the way through the 100 names. So far I have found 8 articles, seven created since August 3, and one, Miriam Adelson, which was a redirect until 3 August. Four are very short stubs, with a couple already nominated for deletion. The other four are longer, particularly Miriam Adelson, but then, she is married to Sheldon Adelson. So, about 10%, maybe more, of that first 100 have had articles started in the last five days,and I expect that will increase. Once the list of 40,000 is widely available, we are looking at, potentially, thousands of new biographies about living persons being added in the coming weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if someone writes a bot to convert all the people in the database into WP articles. The bot-approval process may be able to control that, but someone could get impatient and run a bot without approval, or run one that is throttled down enough to fly under the radar. There will also be some mis-identifications. The entry for one of the "first 100" is already linked to a WP article for someone else. We will have to watch for data from Quicksilver being added to the wrong article. - Donald Albury 23:51, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
I would also not want to see a mass of stubs that end up at AfD, but for a different reason: if it happens for many of these people, it probably indicates a problem with the nominator rather than with the stub. I've already removed one badly-misplaced A7 tag on a subject from this set who easily passes at least two of the WP:PROF criteria (Leanne Redman). If people want to run around deleting things, there are other subjects where the search for bad things to delete is much more likely to be fruitful. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:18, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
Huh. Andrea Gore (passes WP:PROF#C5 at the very least with a named chair, and also WP:PROF#C8 as editor-in-chief of Endocrinology), Leanne Redman and Wendy Troxel are all redlinks now. XOR'easter (talk) 18:25, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
See User talk:Warren5th. XOR'easter (talk) 18:33, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
I'd recreate all three of these articles, but somebody would probably get mad at me for that. XOR'easter (talk) 18:39, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
@XOR'easter: They were only deleted to enforce a prior block on the creator, so there's nothing wrong with recreating them yourself. – Joe (talk) 18:52, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
They were deleted out of process and my contributions to the Redman article, at least, should be restored rather than recreated. By my count Beetstra deleted eight of the Quicksilver articles: Polina Lishko, Leanne Redman, Wendy Troxel, Christina Economos, Victoria Talwar, Susanna Larsson, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, and Andrea Gore. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:31, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
Part of the issue is that Quicksilver used a selection of 30,000 articles on academics, but we have no way of knowing if that was a "good" set relative to notability. Anyone can create an article, and whether it stays or not depends on if someone else sees it and AFDs it. Since Quicksilver argued that the additional 40,000 they have posed as having equivalent coverage to the 30,000 is a reasonable metric, we aren't sure if that 30,000 all really are appropriate for an article or not. (It would be better if we provided Quickserver the right subset of 30,000 that we considered in no danger of AFD for notability and had it work from that, then there could be reasonable assumptions that 40,000 new articles could be added by bot...) --Masem (t) 18:45, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
All we need then, is enough volunteers to review 40,000 or 50,000 articles about academics to find 30,000 we think are worthy of using in the training set. :-) We also should make sure that any articles created by bots are reviewed properly, somewhere between draft and new page patrol. - Donald Albury 00:07, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Help with notability for Ann Bowling

Hi, I'm normally a wikignome and almost never work on bios, but I ended up working on an academic bio because I came across someone who needed help. Because of my inexperience, I'm having a hard time figuring out if she is notable enough. Here is her Google Scholar entry, but I don't really know how to interpret her stats (they seem solid, but I don't know). I and some other editors have been working with her over at Draft talk:Ann Patricia Bowling, and I strongly suspect she is notable enough - she designed a questionnaire to determine old people's quality of life, and she says she's won some book awards but I just don't really know what are good next steps to decide either way. Can anyone help out with this? -Furicorn (talk) 00:31, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Based only on a quick look, I think that there is a pretty good chance that she does meet the criteria for notability at WP:PROF. Her h-index and citation numbers look good. It would be a good idea to find pages here about other academics who study aging and quality of life or something close to it, and then look up their Google Scholar numbers: if her stats are similar to others in her field that are already here as bios, that would be a strong argument for notability. (I see she says that she has colleagues who have bio pages, so those would be reasonable people to start with.) But if others doing similar work have much higher rates of citation, that would point towards not creating the page. If you can reliably source that she has held full professor appointments (not lower) at multiple universities, and has won non-trivial awards, then I'd say you are there. If you get partway along all of that and would like more feedback, feel free to post here again. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:17, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Citation record is stunning, albeit in a very highly cited field so, unless there is some other issue, notability should be unchallenged. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:32, 31 July 2018 (UTC).
@Tryptofish:@Xxanthippe: Here is what I have so far. I don't know how significant this award is but she claims to have won "Highly Commended in the Basis of Medicine section" from the British Medical Association Medical Book Awards (used to be called Medical Book Competition I believe) twice:
  • Bowling, Ann. Research Methods in health (4th ed.). Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education, Open University Press. ISBN 9780335262755. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help) allegedly won in 1998, but I can't find any list of who won that year
  • Bowling, Ann (2017). Measuring health: a review of subjective health, well-being and quality of life measurement scales (4th ed.). Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education, Open University Press. ISBN 9780335261949. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help) allegedly won in 2015, and I've at least found evidence she was shortlisted on page 11 of this PDF, but I can't find a list of winners
Searching for one of her books, I noted that it is cited at Participation bias, which seems positive at least
She says she was elected Fellow to the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians, but I can't find any way to confirm that.
She lists her professorships as Professor of Health Sciences, University of Southampton (2012-17), where she is now Visiting Professor. Previously Bowling was Professor of Ageing at St George's, University of London (2010-11), Professor of Health Services Research at University College London (1995-2010). I can only confirm that she is currently Visiting Professor at University of Southampton because it is listed on her staff page, but if there was a way to confirm the others it sounds like she would pass the bar.
I'm still working on figuring out who her colleagues are for comparison, but I'm glad to hear that someone feels her citation record is stunning. -Furicorn (talk) 03:19, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
She seems clearly notable to me - she's worked at several top-tier UK medical schools. User:Bondegezou is an academic in related fields & might be able to comment. Johnbod (talk) 03:31, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
@Johnbod: does anything need to be done to confirm her work history? -Furicorn (talk) 05:44, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
It would help - also adding the many books that are missing: see here. Johnbod (talk) 12:46, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
I strongly urge caution in adding lists of books and journal articles to Wikipedia articles. These are meant to be encyclopedia articles, not excerpts of the subjects' CVs. ElKevbo (talk) 13:49, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Currently there are only the 2 textbooks, both now on their 4th editions, and 6 papers. This seems to be the sort of career that essentially works through books and papers - in rather a humanities fashion than a typical scientific researcher way - so if notability is a concern (and I'm not sure it needs to be) a few more of these are probably good. Johnbod (talk) 14:01, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
The point that I'm trying to make is that simply listing books or articles without providing explanation or context isn't very helpful for readers (or editors trying to determine notability). If a book or article is important enough to include in an encyclopedia article, it probably warrants an explanation to help readers understand why and how it's important. ElKevbo (talk) 14:12, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Fine in theory, but as we know, in practice working out and describing exactly why an academic is significant is (at least until the obituaries come in) often extremely difficult, and rather few of our academic bios even attempt it. Johnbod (talk) 14:15, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
She used to be in the Faculty I'm now in at UCL. I'd say definitely notable. "Research Methods in Health" is a commonly used textbook. Bondegezou (talk) 06:51, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
@Bondegezou: can I cite you as a source for that post? Is that even valid? -Furicorn (talk) 07:26, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
@Bondegezou: also is it a big deal to be a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians? I don't know the UK so I have no sense of this. -Furicorn (talk) 07:55, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
You can quote my opinion, but I can't imagine it has that much weight! FRCP is a pretty big deal, but I don't think being an FRCP automatically makes one notable.
To try and find some more useful arguments, I note "Research Methods in Health" has been cited over 4600 times according to G Scholar, while another of her books, "Measuring Health", has been cited over 2000 times. Bowling (2005), "Mode of questionnaire administration can have serious effects on data quality", doi:10.1093/pubmed/fdi031, has been cited over 1200 times. The following are RS book reviews of "Research Methods in Health": [8], [9], [10]. Here's a book review of one of her other textbooks: [11]. Bondegezou (talk) 09:13, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks @Bondegezou:, that is all very useful and I've tried to work it into the draft article. With regard to citing you, I actually meant more about citing you that she worked at UCL. Someone else managed to find citations for her work at University of London, but evidence of her UCL post has been a bit scarcer, so I was trying to think of ideas on how to source that. -Furicorn (talk) 18:45, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
I figured out I could get evidence that she was Professor in 2009 based on the "About the Author" in one of the Google Books sites for an earlier edition of one of her textbooks, but I still need sources for the entire term -Furicorn (talk) 18:53, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
After reading what other editors have said here, I'm reasonably confident that she is sufficiently notable to have a page about her. About sources to cite on the page, it basically comes down to WP:RS. And about that part of the discussion about listing her writings, it's very much the case that our pages should not be CVs, so such lists should be kept minimal as a matter of encyclopedic style, but on the other hand, knowing about her publications is useful information for an editor to reassure oneself that she is notable. It's particularly useful if an independent secondary source can be cited about her publications, as opposed to citing the publications themselves. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:20, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
For reference, she listed the following 3 people as colleagues Emily Grundy (google scholar), Carl May (google scholar), and Virginia Berridge (no google scholar). Having them listed in the talk page got them slapped with notability warnings by a discussion participant, and have lots of sourcing problems, I think with better sourcing they may be notable enough. Certainly I think if Berridge's page is correct, then she seems likely to be notable enough based on her multiple honorary fellowships. -Furicorn (talk) 23:45, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

For anyone here who might have some thoughts, I posted some follow up questions at WP Bio/Sci&Aca/Talk#Help on sources for Draft:Ann Patricia Bowling -Furicorn (talk) 03:37, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Sabine Brunswicker

Does this social scientist with a GS h-index of 12 seem notable? I don't think so but wanted to hear the opinions of other editors before nominating it for deletion. IntoThinAir (formerly Everymorning) talk 22:55, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I think she might be. Without knowing the field at all (or being much clearer about it having read the article) it seems a rather tiny corner. Johnbod (talk) 23:57, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
GS h-index of 12 is low for a very highly cited field. Going strong, but could be WP:Too soon at present. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:17, 31 August 2018 (UTC).

Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists

While I would not question the notability of a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, I wonder if this younger organization meets the meaning of the ACADEMIC guideline. I was looking at Draft:Laura Loewen where this seems to be the main claim for notability. In searching around, I saw that we have at least one other draft pending Draft:Joanna McGrenere and some accepted, but maybe questionable, articles where this qualification is mentioned, for example the relatively new article on Sean McGrath (philosopher). — jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 07:32, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

From our article (with a slight whiff of copyvio?): "The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the RSC was established in 2014 to represent emerging generation of intellectual leaders in Canada. It elects 80-100 members each year, who showed high level of accomplishments at early stage of their careers. At the time of election, members of the College must have received PhD or equivalent degree within past 15 years. Nomination of candidates for the College follows similar procedures as nomination for the Fellows of RSC." Not strong evidence for notability by itself, I'd say. Johnbod (talk) 13:51, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Expand criterion 5 to cover any tenured professor at a major institution of higher education and research

The recent embarrassing denial of a Wikipedia page for Donna Strickland before she won a Nobel Prize was not an aberration: The Wikipedia admin community as a group isn't very good at judging who is a notable academic. But I wouldn't expect it to be; most of us here are not professors ourselves, and aren't up on what's considered significant in the many, varied fields of academia. The "named or distinguished professor" criterion does admit a number of people, but it's skewed towards late-career researchers (it takes a long time to get to that level), even though a lot of significant discoveries are made early in academics' careers. The population of named and distinguished professors also tends to skew white and male, even in comparison to academic fields in general.

Wikipedia will do a better job including notable academics if it honors the peer review that academics themselves do for notability though the tenure process. Major research institutions do not grant tenure lightly, or to anywhere near all their faculty. Especially in an era of tight budgets, they're not going to give a lifetime, high-salary guaranteed job to an academic unless that person has convinced their fellow experts that they've produced notable work with significant impact. The significance of that work is not always easy for lay people like most Wikipedia editors to find or recognize, but peers in the field know it well. (Strickland passed that peer review when she was promoted to associate professor, the usual initial rank for tenured professors in the US and Canada.) And once an academic has a page on Wikipedia, others knowledgeable about their field, or interested in their work, can fill in more details that can make the notability of the scholar's work more apparent to a general audience.

This proposal is not meant to replace or substitute for the more general overhaul of the Academic Notability criteria that I gather is underway. It doesn't solve all the problems the current criteria have. But it's a tweak that is, in my opinion, long overdue, and can help Wikipedia better represent the diverse and ever-growing world of notable scholarship and academics. 13:03, 3 October 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by JohnMarkOckerbloom (talk • contribs)

  • Absolutely not Wikipedia's notability criteria are not meant to praise some and punish others. We have to draw a line because subjects included cannot be covered fairly or comprehensively without the presence of suitable source material. There are far too many tenured academics in the world and there are not enough authors writing about these academics as subjects. Our articles would be insufficient if we allowed inclusion. Further, you mark yourself as an un-informed neophyte by suggesting that "once an academic has a page on Wikipedia, others knowledgeable about their field, or interested in their work, can fill in more details". Per WP:OWN, no one has a page on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has an article about them. We do not invite those with conflicts of interest to advocate for the article's subject. Rather, we trust objective dilettantes to collate the applicable source material. I take specific issue with your premise. You claim this was a "recent embarrassing denial" and I don't see it that way. Wikipedia runs on principle and should not seek to placate a reactionary public ginned-up by certain political elements. If you think the writing of an encyclopedia should hew to the preferences of your feminist friends, then you are as misguided as Jimbo; neither of you should be advocating policy. Chris Troutman (talk) 13:42, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose And I would direct interested editors to a current discussion at WT:N related to this, about the issue of why women and other disadvantaged groups seem to not have articles due to notability. There's a lot of problems being brought up (not necessarily due to NPROF, but this proposed language would definitely make NPROF a problem). But the core point here is that we're unfortunately a volunteer project and editors work on articles that interest them. That creates a bias against academics (who are not "pop stars" in the average editor population). There was no reason Strickland couldn't have had an article before the Nobel (only that the previous version in 2014 was a straight up copyright violation), just that no one bothered to create it. --Masem (t) 13:54, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
  • The rejection of this draft was not surprising - it did not make a very strong case for notability for those outside the field. Most Associate Professors at this or any other university are not notable. The idea that those who do get a page then see it improved by others is sadly only true sometimes. Johnbod (talk) 14:03, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose full professors at major research universities will likely meet the other criteria. I just don’t trust the community as a whole to not read this as “any full professor” at AfD. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:03, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
I try to track the WP coverage of new FRS's at the moment of their election. For the List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2018 exactly 50% of the men elected already had bios, but 83% of the women (a much smaller group). This was the first year this has happened, & no doubt the result of Women in Red etc. In fact the male 50% is well up on earlier figures too. See talk page for calcs. Johnbod (talk) 14:23, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose Tenure is a pretty low bar, there must be hundreds of thousands of them. Tenure alone as a criterion runs foul of WP:MILL. As a concept, tenure is rather US-centric too. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:16, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I'm in favour of loosening the notability criteria for academics, but tenure is not a good barometer. It's too variable outside of North America. In fact, I don't think academic rank is a particularly good indicator of notability in general. Publication/citation metrics are more widely applicable and more closely track what we should actually be concerned with (breadth and depth of coverage, not personal achievements). – Joe (talk) 17:38, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Authored vs. Wrote

Only a minor thing, but to me 'authored' is just a pretentious alternative to 'wrote'. There are three instances of the former in this guideline. Any objections to this being changed? It's possible the terms have subtle differences in meaning. Again, thoughts on this? Thanks. 5.81.164.16 (talk) 13:50, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

I'd leave it, as is. Anybody can write anything. The writer of a book or journal article is an author; they authored a piece. Others merely write. Chris Troutman (talk) 14:18, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
In medicine at least, many "authors" have not written any of the paper. Johnbod (talk) 14:25, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
I would not have a problem with the change, although on the other hand I don't see a strong need for it. One can parse the differences between "authored" and "wrote", but they really do not differ that much for our purposes. In my experience, most senior university people in the US tend to talk about "papers I wrote", more than about "papers I authored". Persons who "merely wrote" something will be distinguishable from more substantive scholars based on the impact of their work (although I can also see that as a good reason to keep it as "authored", in order to cut down on arguments at AfD). On multi-author papers in the biomedical sciences, the author who actually did most of the writing is typically the first author, who may be a graduate student, rather than the senior, last, author, who would be notable here – except when the first author is bad at writing. In any case, all persons listed as authors on a paper are expected, in theory, to have taken some part in the writing (even if it's just a proofread at the end), so we are unlikely to really have an AfD where the decision hinges on whether the subject was an author or a writer. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:28, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
"Wrote" strikes me as better sounding but not required. There are (somewhat) Reliable Sources, even though no definitive answers. American Heritage Dictionary (5th ed. 2011) has a useful “Usage Note” on “Author” (p. 120) which says that “the verb Author has been criticized for its transitive use as an unnecessary or pretentious synonym of write, though note that it typically refers to the writing of material that has been published – and not to unpublished texts such as love letters or diaries. So the words are not exactly synonyms.” The AHD Usage Panel has sympathized with the traditional preference for "write", though by falling percentages over the editions. In the 3rd. edition of the AHD (1992) 74% of the usage panel did not allow the sentence He has authored a dozen books. The verb coauthor fared better as being “well established in reference to scientific and scholarly publications... since the people listed as authors routinely include research collaborators who have played no part in the actual writing of the text but are nonetheless entitled to credit for the published results.”
Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) (pp.147-148), which is often more permissive, gives examples of “author” as a verb going back to Chapman’s Homer in 1596, but notes that it was not common. It opines that “the fuss over this verb has been somewhat overblown” but is “used chiefly in journalism ... and is easily avoided by those who dislike it.” It concludes that “the most useful function of author would seem to be in connection with joint effort in production of a piece, and in connection with things like computer games that are not regularly associated with writing.”
There are surely other references, but you might say "that's all she authored".ch (talk) 04:24, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
"That's all she authoressed"? EEng 19:02, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for you detailed analysis. As I mentioned above, I favour wrote/written, but there's no consensus to change so let's call it a day and leave the text as it is. Thanks for all the contributions. 5.81.164.16 (talk) 11:26, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Katrin Meissner (scientist) - query on notability

Hi, I came across this draft while reviewing the WP:AFC queue. I wonder if a member of the project could advise as to notability. --K.e.coffman (talk) 18:39, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Take a look at her citation profile on Google scholar which would give a reasonable pass of WP:Prof#C1. If the editor who declined the Donna Strickland AfD had done the same he would have found an even stronger case for her. Please give me a ping if it goes to AfD. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:27, 28 October 2018 (UTC).
@Xxanthippe: I've accepted it. It's in far better shape than the Strickland draft was when I declined it, but it still needs help. Finding some sources and adding them to the article would be appreciated. Bradv 01:29, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
From her GS profile [12] over 8000 scientists had cited her work before she was awarded a Nobel Prize. There were 8000 sources: no more were needed. The mistaken rejection of the AfC came from a failure to follow the WP:Prof guideline. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:26, 29 October 2018 (UTC).
This is a good place to discuss Meissner. But let's not relitigate who was or was not at fault about Strickland. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:26, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Hmmm. Borderline. I don't see any secondary sources discussing her achievements, and her career and awards don't suggest she is notable by virtue of passing some WP:PROF criteria. Her citations are respectable (triple digits for a number of papers), but they are not sole-authored... my personal rule of thumb is 100+ citations of at least one solo-authored paper. I guess is we take her most cited paper (3 authors, 500+ cites) and divide it we get 100+ per author, so, I guess I am ok with calling her notable, if barely. That of course is just my own test, since it's not like our policies define what is a sufficient number of citations, etc. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:16, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
Lots of highly-successful academics don't write any solo-authored papers, or at least none of any significance. And author ordering is also meaningless in some fields. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:24, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
Yes, it depends on the field. Solo autorship is much more common in social sciences. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:54, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
It is pretty much the norm in art history, literature studies, but pretty rare in anything lab- or ward-based in medical or genetic research. So not much use as a general yardstick. Johnbod (talk) 16:48, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, the article does have a scholarly book that pretty much says, 'hey world, look at Katrin Meissner's work (and identifies her as a leader), calling her out specifically (and highlight's no one else in that section), so there is that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:16, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Proposal for addition to specific WP:PROF notability criteria

As a special sub-issue that came up in the debate about the new Wikipedia page for Nobel laureate Donna Strickland, and the question why she did not have a Wikipedia page before that, I would like to propose the following addition to WP:PROF: At the end of section Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#Specific_criteria_notes, we should add:

For establishing notability via criteria 2,3,5,6 and 8, publications (including websites) by the institution concerned (university, awarding institution, academic journal, scientific society) are considered reliable references. Examples: a news item on the web page of the MacArthur foundation can reliably establish that a person received a MacArthur fellowship. A listing on a university's official website can establish that person holds a Distinguished Chair. A listing on the website of an academic journal can establish that a person is one of the journal's editors.

I think we need this addition because:

  • In the Strickland case, this was the reason why the original article draft was rejected declined (cf. the essay User:Bradv/Strickland_incident by the user involved) - not because Strickland was not notable (she had been an OSA fellow, and OSA president), but because that notability was not confirmed by third-party sources.
  • This is a general issue with the specific criteria of WP:PROF. There is unlikely to be newspaper coverage about, say, most major fellowships. We are making it unnecessarily hard for academics that do meet the notability criteria to be included.

The addition does not, in practice, amount to a weakening of criteria. Third-party reporting, where it exists, would not rely on more than official statements by the organizations involved. Markus Pössel (talk) 12:33, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Addition: An alternative would be to add such clarification to each of 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8 separately, with a pertinent example in each case. Markus Pössel (talk) 13:07, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Minor correction of terminology: in the Strickland case, the original article draft was not "rejected", its submission to go into article space was declined and at the same time the originator was invited (in the templated message and on their talk page) to make improvements or seek assistance – they only made two edits back almost two months earlier, and did not return. This doesn't affect the proposed change to criteria. . . dave souza, talk 16:44, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for the correction! Markus Pössel (talk) 17:45, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
  • If any change is made, it should not be done here, but to the GNG, as the issue is not at all specific to academics. In practice, commonsense nearly always allows this, although the policy strictly does not. In general WP:PRIMARY does not properly recognise cases where a "non-independent" source is much the best or even the only source (museums do not allow outsiders to bring in step-ladders and tapes to measure paintings, for example). But good luck with changing these. In this specific case, I suspect that User:Bradv did not realize (as I did not initially, looking at the draft later) that being President of the OS was a strong claim for notability (which being one of the 22,000 Fellows is NOT!). We might possibly tweak Criterion 3, which talks only of members/fellows of organizations. In this case (the Optical Society, which is little-known to the general public) being a fellow counts for little, but being the President apparently does. Johnbod (talk) 17:47, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
One correction to that: Only very few of the 22,000 members of the OSA are fellows – fellowship is reserved for those "who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics", and only about 0.5% of OSA members are fellows [13]. So I believe User:Bradv was correct in considering this, in principle, as fulfilling the specific notability criterion about fellowships. I'm not aware that this specific issue is sufficiently general, but of course proposing a change here doesn't keep anyone from proposing a more general change. Markus Pössel (talk) 18:30, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Correcting the correction "the number elected each year is limited to approximately 0.5% of the current membership total" - they elected about 100 this year, & I doubt most of them are notable (list at the link you gave). Johnbod (talk) 21:33, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Just a point of clarification. The bylaws of OSA (restricted content) specify that the number of fellows are limited by no more than 10% of the total membership of the society. The 0.5% limitation is by year but is not actually part of the by laws. The number accepted through the nomination process changes based on the member growth year to year. This is also very similar to other prestigious organizations such as IEEE Fellows (0.1% of membership but of a much larger organization with 400,000 members). The people who are nominated are done so by their peers, past OSA fellows, and obviously their importance isn't going to always meet notability requirements for Wikipedia or even main stream press, but they are notable in their field and the nominations require citation and justification. - Tinynull (talk) 22:01, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, that is correct. But I would argue that this procedure by definition meets criterion 3, "a Fellow of a major scholarly society for which that is a highly selective honor (e.g., the IEEE)", but since that is an issue separate from the proposal up for discussion here, we should probably not pursue this particular aspect further. Markus Pössel (talk) 06:42, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
  • A problem with Criterion 3 is that it does not explain/define "highly selective and prestigious scholarly society" - what exactly separates them from "run of the mill" societies. Expecting a random AFC reviewer to just know that the XXXXX Society is such a "highly selective and prestigious scholarly society" is quite unreasonable. It's mostly for this reason that AFC needs a wide variety of subject specialist reviewers (and a way to designate submitted drafts for the relevant subject area - akin to stub sorting or deletion sorting). Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:10, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, those criteria do require some judgement on the part of the reviewer, and a more specialized system, if it an be implemented, would be great, I think! Markus Pössel (talk) 18:30, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
In general, the commenters should already be doing the heavy lifting on establishing the prestige, etc., not the closer. If no one made the case that an organization meets the bar, then the criteria isn't fulfilled. The closer should have enough background to understand the subject, but they generally shouldn't be making such judgement calls to such a degree. Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:23, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Kingofaces43, I presume by your mentioning "commenters" and "closers" that you have the AFD process in mind. However, the AFC process entails reviews by individuals, it's not a discussion/consensus process, a decline or accept is done by one person, so the guidelines/criteria do need to be fairly specific and comprehensive. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:04, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Looks like I skimmed over the C part then and misread D. Still, a reviewer for AFC then should be expected to have sufficient background to make the call. If they don't, they should be stepping out or else asking someone else. Kingofaces43 (talk) 22:49, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Someone who's just starting at AFC is probably more likely to consult the text of WP:PROF explicitly (and then possibly asking more experienced editors if something is unclear). We would be helping such a person (and others consulting WP:PROF) by explicitly stating what a good judgment call regarding references would be, in the specific cases mentioned here. I think in all such situations, the proposed addition is potentially helpful. And so far I do not see any downside to it. Markus Pössel (talk) 07:00, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Agreed. But I think we're getting side-tracked here; my proposal doesn't touch upon those issues, as far as I can see. Determination whether or not a prize, or fellowship, or scientific society was major or not would have to proceed as it does now. The proposal just says that once that decision is made, you should be able to use said institution's statement about their own prize/fellowship/membership as a reliable source. Markus Pössel (talk) 20:33, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
  • No, we should not be using non-independent sources. Institutions like schools have an interest in promoting their employees, so we'd need non-involved references. If no reliable and independent sources have written about it, the same question as always—then why should we either? The Strickland biography happened correctly. It contained no independent sources, so it was properly rejected. Now, of course, there's a plethora of independent sources about her, so now we have an article. That's exactly how it's supposed to work. No one could have been expected to guess that she'd win a Nobel. Seraphimblade Talk to me 18:38, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
This is not a general issue of a school promoting their employees though. It is about a narrowly defined set of statements about simple facts: named chair yes or no, specific prize won yes or no, fellowship yes or no, editorship yes or no. Can you think of any halfway realistic example where a university would not give a person a named chair, but claim they did? A prize-winning institution not give a prize to a specific person, but announce they did? And so on? That is precisely the point: In all the examples we are talking about here, if the institution wanted to promote the person in the specific way we are talking about here (chair, prize, fellowship) it is in their power to do so directly. For the highly restricted set of facts we are talking about here, the institutions in question are reliable sources . Markus Pössel (talk) 19:03, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, Seraphimblade's "traditional" WP response is nonsense. Membership of national academies and the like is normally and rightly referenced to the academy's own website, rather than the potentially much less reliable media write-ups of the press release. Johnbod (talk) 21:30, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
It shouldn't be "yes or no questions" as far as "Is the subject a...?". There's no inherent notability. Notability is one "yes or no" question: Is there a substantial quantity of reliable, independent source material from which to write about this subject? Our sources tell us whether something is notable, by whether or not they have, to some reasonable extent, noted it. We should always follow, never second-guess, those sources. Schools often write about all their professors on their websites, so that's not substantial coverage, just directory entries. And while some people say "But then we wouldn't write about most professors!", well...so what? We also don't write about most doctors, lawyers, plumbers, or garbagemen. All those people do work that's valuable for society too, but most of them are not individually notable. If most professors also aren't individually notable, then well, we should not be writing articles about them. But we shouldn't be writing articles about them that are "supported" by involved, non-independent sources. Independence of sources is absolutely critical to neutrality, and is a requirement, not a nicety. Seraphimblade Talk to me 22:21, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
There is inherent notability for large numbers of people, including fellows of the main national academies and elected members of national assemblies (let's not worry about sportspeople for now). Numbers of such people only have references to the academy/parliament etc website. And that's just fine (for a stub). Johnbod (talk) 22:35, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
  • @Markus Pössel: Excellent proposal! As I have noted in several places over the past few days, this is exactly what's needed. What other reliable source can there be for membership in an academic organization (or most others, for that matter) than the organization itself?--Eponymous-Archon (talk) 20:47, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I think Seraphimblade is widening the discussion much beyond the scope of discussing the proposal. The specific yes-or-no criteria (major fellowship, major prize, named chair) are in the current consensus version of WP:PROF. And my proposal is about one specific way we can make deciding on those listed yes-or-no criteria simpler for the editors making the call, without sacrificing reliability. That people meeting those criteria are notable is set down in WP:PROF. This is about situations where there is no doubt these criteria are met (because again, which prize-giving organization would publish a false announcement about somebody having won their prize?), but some editors are in doubt whether they can formally accept that fact. Markus Pössel (talk) 07:00, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
  • It seems that there are two separate issues here. First, has the person been distinguished (given an award by a group, been elected to an organization, etc.)? It seems obvious to me that in most cases we can answer this question using materials from the group or organization in question or other sources including the person's current employer if those materials are reliable. Second, is the <award/title/etc.> sufficiently noteworthy to meet our criteria for notability? I think that this is where most of the difficulty occurs because I'm not sure if we can always rely on the same source given their lack of independence. In other words, it should be easy to determine if someone has been given an award by an organization but we may not be able to rely on that organization's own materials to determine if the award is noteworthy.
Is this an accurate summary of this situation? ElKevbo (talk) 22:08, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I think that is an accurate summary. My proposal addresses only the first aspect, since what you describe as obvious (and I agree) is not clearly stated in the current WP:PROF criteria, and a number of editors apparently interpret the general requirement for reliable third-party sources as meaning that materials from the group or organization should not used in this way. Markus Pössel (talk) 06:48, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
  • I'm undecided about the proposed addition, but I have these observations:
    • It's fine to use the MacArthur or Nobel websites as sources for saying that a person has won. It's fine to use an institution website for saying that the person's position title is such-and-such, and it's fine to use a journal's website for saying that the person is on the editorial board. Those are simple facts, and source independence is not an issue.
    • But using an institution website to say that a person has done important work involves a value judgment rather than being an objective fact, and that's where having an independent source is necessary.
    • I think it's possible to overreact to the Strickland incident. Wikipedia is not supposed to be perfect at any given moment in time, and can always have further, correcting, edits. I really don't think the AfC process was such a big deal or that it reflected some underlying inadequacy or bias. What was really needed was more editors making better edits to create a good biography page, and there's nothing remarkable about that: it's Wikipedia's steady state.
--Tryptofish (talk) 23:26, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree that using an institution's website for more general statements (and in particular for value judgements) is a no-no. My proposal is restricted to the specific cases you appear to agree with: title using a university web page, prize won or not using the prize-giving institution's website, simple factual information within the institution's direct purview. And I do think the addition would be useful, beyond Strickland. The general rule of requiring independent references is a very good general rule, and probably every editor reviewing AfCs will have that rule at the forefront of their mind. That's why it would make sense that in those few and very restricted cases (like the one covered by this proposition) where institutional are reliable, such editors upon looking up the specific notability criteria are reminded of what's what for those specific criteria. Makes their work easier, leads to more article drafts that do meet notability criteria and thus should be included, to be included. Markus Pössel (talk) 06:39, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Modified proposal to take into account the discussion so far

In the discussion so far, the following objections/issues have been raised, which I will try to address in a re-formulated version of the proposal:

  • Several editors have pointed out that, in general, institutions are of course not reliable references, for instance when it comes to value judgements about their own members – institutions have an interest in making their members look good. Thus, the additions should make very clear that this is about simple factual statements (is someone a member or not, has a chair or not, won a prize or not) only.
  • Specifically it has been pointed out that institutions should not be considered as references for whether or not a specific prize, or fellowship, is itself sufficiently major so as to imply the receivers' notability. The original wording was not clear enough on this.
  • A number of editors have put this in the context of WP:AFD or WP:AFC. I believe that for this context, it is important that the information about references be specifically appended to each of the special notability criteria separately, since reviewers involved in either AFD or AFC might not re-read the whole section, but possibly look for specific criteria only.

Here, then, is the new proposal, which I believe takes all these issues into account:

  • to specific criterion 2 (awards), add the sentence: For documenting that a person has won a specific award (but not for a judgement of whether or not that award is prestigious!), publications of the awarding institution are considered a reliable source.
  • to specific criterion 3 (fellowships), add the sentence: For documenting that a person has been elected member or fellow (but not for a judgement of whether or not that membership/fellowship is prestigious!), publications of the electing institution are considered a reliable source.
  • to specific criterion 5, add the sentence For documenting that a person has held such an appointment (but not for a judgement of whether or not the institution is a major one!), publications of the appointing institution are considered a reliable source.
  • to specific criterion 6, add the sentence For documenting that a person has held such a post (but not for a judgement of whether or not the institution is a major one!), publications of the institution where the post is held are considered a reliable source.
  • to specific criterion 8, add the sentence * to specific criterion 5, add the sentence For documenting that a person has held such a position (but not for a judgement of whether or not the journal is a major well-established one!), publications of the journal or its publishers are considered a reliable source.

Depending on whether or not they are deemed necessary, we can also leave out the counter-examples in parentheses, since the formulation is already fairly restrictive. Markus Pössel (talk) 08:52, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

I welcome the new wording. Thank you, Markus Pössel, for these additions which certainly clarify the criteria.--Ipigott (talk) 09:10, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Nice, but this is simply restating WP:PRIMARY, so it's rather redundant. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:25, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
  • I agree that this is a redundant restatement of existing policy. Unfortunately, we seem to increasingly need redundant restatements of existing policy, because editors involved in NPP/AfC/AfD/etc. tend to zero in on the exact wording of "rules" rather than applying common sense. So support in principle, though for the sake of readability I think the added wording would be better as a single footnote. – Joe (talk) 09:35, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
I think that it is not redundant (at least, no more redundant than other guidelines that clarify the more fundamental policies) for the following reasons: the policy WP:PRIMARY notes that use of primary sources is a matter of editorial judgment; the proposed additions would do what guidelines can/should do: clarify a consensus about editorial judgment for that particular instance. Secondly, similar to what [User:Joe Roe|Joe]] wrote, but may be with a more positive spin: the addition would help inexperienced editors in their decision-making. Also, I think that the discussion so far shows that using this kind of primary source in this specific sense is not common sense for all editors even within the narrow subset of editors participating in the discussion here. Markus Pössel (talk) 10:45, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
OK, I think the following shows in a nutshell why the proposed additions are not redundant: One standard wording in the template when AFC is declined is
"This submission's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article—that is, they do not show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject (see the guidelines for academics). Before any resubmission, additional references meeting these criteria should be added (see technical help). If no additional references exist, the subject is not suitable for Wikipedia."
That shows very clearly that a common interpretation of WP:PROF as it now reads is that all notability criteria, not excluding the specific criteria like prizes, chairs etc., require secondary sources, and that absence of such secondary sources is a reason for declining an AFC submission. So while I agree that using primary sources in the very restricted context specified in the proposed addition should be common sense, current practice, as embodied in this frequenly used template text, does not currently reflect that common sense. Hence the need for an addition to WP:PROF. Markus Pössel (talk) 10:54, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
I re-read the text right now, and it says nothing about primary sources being sufficient in the specific instances named in this proposals. It does clarify, at length, what sources can be used to satisfy specific criterion 1, but nothing of the sort for 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 – so as it stands, there is a significant imbalance. Could you please point out concretely where the proposal repeats something that is already stated in WP:Prof, in support of your counter-argument? Markus Pössel (talk) 06:28, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
Hi Xxanthippe, since consensus is about more than counting votes, I have tried to address your concerns in my previous comment. If you still disagree, could you please say a bit more about your reasons? In particular how the specific admissibility of primary sources included in my proposal is already contained in WP:PROF? Markus Pössel (talk) 14:52, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support Although future improvement is always welcome, Xxathippe's oppose is not well grounded in part because of the confused language, I note below, and we actually do need to say these things explicitly because they are not clear. (But, yes, drop the exclamation points)Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:57, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
What is confused? Xxanthippe (talk) 21:40, 13 October 2018 (UTC).
See below in the section "Confusion". Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:34, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
@Markus Pössel: I have some concerns about the draft of your portion, as it is now. First of all, it is not a Request for Comments, as Wikipedia defines it. It's a request for editors reading there to come here, and it troubles me that it is written in a non-neutral manner. You state that the proposal will reduce the likelihood of the Strickland problem happening again, which is something that not all editors here agree to be true, and you present reasons for supporting the proposal, along with refuting reasons that have been given in opposition. It seems to me to be canvassing. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:31, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
I have changed the formal wording Request for Comments to make clear that, as you say, that is a formally different procedure. I initially only commented on the originally Op-Ed, was then asked to possibly submit a write-up of my take to the Signpost, and I initially had the same concern of this being seen as canvassing/campaigning. Several editors were kind enough to lay out the reasons why this was neither canvassing nor campaigning in their replies to my initial Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom#Comment, and encouraged me anew to submit. Only then did I submit my draft, and the editors then went as far as to make it part of a double Op-Ed with the original one. If you disagree with their assessment, feel free to add your voice over on that page. Markus Pössel (talk) 06:52, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, and I know that your intentions were good. And I still support the proposal. I think that it was sufficient to note here that some editors may have come here from a non-neutrally worded notice, but I also think that there will be consensus in favor of the proposal regardless. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:30, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
OK! FWIW, I hope for the signpost op-ed, once it is published, to reach people with a variety of views. Markus Pössel (talk) 15:40, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. I think this is a step in the right direction, and more or less matches my own practice in creating academic biographies here. I doubt it will solve the problem of bad AfC reviews that don't take into account our academic notability criteria, but at least it will give us ammunition when the bad AfC reviewers try to excuse their bad reviews by claiming that, really, they understood all along that the subject met our academic notability criteria but that the claims of notability were inadequately sourced. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:38, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support somewhat reluctantly, as really this should be made clear in the general policy, as the issue is by no means restricted to academic biographies. Johnbod (talk) 15:24, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support, per common sense, although it would probably be good to address this in the GNG as well. Kaldari (talk) 19:21, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support This is really just codifying standard and sensible practice in the area of academic biographies, but I think having that codification down in print will help people less familiar with that area to get up to speed. XOR'easter (talk) 20:32, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support Leads to the right conclusions. Academia is an area where high status and prestigious appointments are often not reported by secondary sources, but are reported reliably by primary sources.--Carwil (talk) 18:21, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support sans "!" - Nicely codifies a ready standard to be clearer. The counter-notes are beneficial, but the exclamation points aren't needed. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:35, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support I think this would've helped with Strickland. It's worth noting that, were a reporter writing a news article about an academic for a journalism outlet, they would consider a listing of their position on a website and things like that a reliable source. There's no need to add in the extra step for basic factual info. - Sdkb (talk) 01:37, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. Rationale: 1) Some other Wikipedias, like Polish, are already more inclusive of academics b) it's ridiculous how low our notability criteria are for some professions, in particular, sportspeople. Since it is impossible to raise them (any attempt to do so is torpedoed by the few fans of whatever sport is discussed), might as well lower the bar for other clearly encyclopedic professions, and academics are a great choice. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:48, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. This should be common sense, but as we all know, common sense is not all that common. Sometimes you just have to spell it out in words of one syllable and accept that instruction creep happens. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 17:58, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support but as Kaldari points out, will this proposal have any effect at GNG? AugusteBlanqui (talk) 22:48, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
As it stands, the proposal is only for WP:PROF. It would probably be a good thing to see how WP:GNG might need to be adapted to include this specific case, but that would be a next step. Markus Pössel (talk) 14:48, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Confusion

Perhaps the lack of clarity is here: "once the facts establishing the passage of one or more of the notability criteria above have been verified through independent sources, non-independent sources, such as official institutional and professional sources, are widely accepted as reliable sourcing for routine, uncontroversial details." The use of "independent sources" is muddled. A person is the subject, and is independent of a society or association. The society or association has recognized (noted) the person, so why would the society source be deprecated? Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:23, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

That is possible. But re-reading WP:IS, e.g. a prize-giving institution would not be an entity with "no vested interest in a given Wikipedia topic and therefore is commonly expected to cover the topic from a disinterested perspective". Prize-giving institutions are presumably very interested in their own prizes. It is just that, when it comes to the bare fact of who was awarded the prize, their interest and Wikipedia's interest in truthful coverage of a subject are aligned. Seems to me that in this case, announcements from the awarding institutions do not constitute an independent source, but are still reliable. (OK, that also means that if the additions to the special criteria should be made, there would need to be a pointer to them in the Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#General_notes section, to avoid internal contradiction.) Markus Pössel (talk) 12:01, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
And a newspaper is interested in its own journalism subjects, and a book is interested in its own subject - in either case and in the case of a society, others, not the person, have taken note of the person. Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:59, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Still, a prize-giving institution is much less independent from its specific prize than a newspaper is from the ever-changing parade of subjects it reports on. Although possibly I might missing some nuances due to being a non-native English speaker. In any case, moving forward, I think that this would be a good reason to insert the proposed addition, which clarifies the matter at least for the particular situation addressed. Markus Pössel (talk) 13:29, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
The subject is not the prize, prizes are not academics, the subject is the person. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:37, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
That seems to be handled differently by different editors, though. In the Strickland essay by Bradv, for instance, he judged the information that Strickland was a fellow of the OSA not to be supported by a reliable secondary source. My conclusion is once more that the clarification is helpful/necessary. Markus Pössel (talk) 14:21, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
I think that there is also significant confusion about the word "reliable." I suspect that some editors are using in the narrow, technical sense that is described in WP:RS but others are using it in a more familiar sense. I recommend only using it in this discussion and this guideline in the narrow, technical sense used in other similar documents (policies, guidelines, etc.) and other synonyms be used when another sense of the idea is intended. In other words, I think it's incorrect and confusing to focus solely on reliability when discussing whether a university's website is a sufficient source; it may be reliable in the technical sense (e.g., reputation for making corrections) but not a high quality source for this specific information given the unavoidable conflict of interest in promoting faculty accomplishments and institutional reputation. ElKevbo (talk) 15:59, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
There is absolutely no conflict of interest in an institution recording its own membership, awards, or job titles, which is what the wording is clearly restricted to. Johnbod (talk) 17:38, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
I am not sure what you mean. From what I can see, the proposed additions can be seen as a reference to the statement in WP:RS "specific facts may be taken from primary sources". Do you suggest that "reliable" be changed to "sufficient" in the text of the proposed additions?
Also, can you think of any realistic example where the "conflict of interest in promoting faculty accomplishments and institutional reputation" would affect the very specific simple factual statements that the proposed addition is about? I can think of no circumstance under which a university would deliberately give out false information about the fact that a faculty member holds a named chair at that same institution, for instance, for promotional purposes. Or where the institution awarding a specific prize would be tempted to lie about a specific person receiving that price. That just wouldn't make sense. Markus Pössel (talk) 16:28, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
there are some circumstances where they can cause error, tho it does not affect the actual criteria: I have seen press releases from the least competent PR staff use "Professor" when the title is actually "Associate ..," or "Assistant ...", they often omit earlier positions & they have been known to omit the "co-" in co-author or co-winner. But I have in 12 years only seen one single error on a person's departmental web page (It was a false claim for a PhD; the article was deleted.) I have never encountered an error here in a person's formal CV, which is the best of the primary sources when it can be located. In real life, significant errors or omissions on that are cause for dismissal. DGG ( talk ) 15:31, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
Thank you – given your example, the wording for my proposal should probably be changed to "...staff lists or staff pages at the institute, departmental or institution-wide level" to exclude press releases. Markus Pössel (talk) 16:06, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
I would prefer to keep curricula vitae in the allowed category. The reason is that the staff listings usually only give the current position while the cv usually gives the person's history of education and employment, and (as DGG says) is reasonably reliable because fraudulent cvs are grounds for dismissal. (On the other hand, less formal individually controlled sources such as faculty home pages can and sometimes do have problematic content such as joke titles that people not in on the joke might take seriously.) —David Eppstein (talk) 01:41, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
This whole thing seems to confuse "reliable" with "independent". I think we might need a Wikipedia:Reliable does not mean independent page to go right next to Wikipedia:Secondary does not mean independent.
The bold-faced proposal is pointless. Yes, Markus is correct that For documenting that a person has won a specific award (but not for a judgement of whether or not that award is prestigious!), publications of the awarding institution are considered a reliable source. But whether the source is reliable not the real question here, is it? The question isn't whether www.example-society.org/2018-award-winners.html on Example Society's website is reliable for the fact that Example Society gave an award to Alice Expert. The main question for notability is whether "the world at large" paid any attention to Alice Expert. Getting an award from Example Society is evidence of attention from Example Society; it is not evidence of attention from the world at large. Notability requires the attention from the world at large.
On the bigger question, I don't see how it is possible to write a truly neutral article if you have zero independent sources. If the only POVs you can include are the POVs of Alice Expert's employers, boards that she's a member of, etc., then you cannot achieve neutrality. We would never accept this for a business or political leader, and IMO we should not accept it for a living academic leader. (Please do not bother me with any garbage about academia being inhabited by disinterested beings that care only for their research and never for self-promotion; we know that's not true.[14][15][16]) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 1 November 2018 (UTC)
The only "garbage" appears to be your over-broad baseless claim: "Getting an award from Example Society is evidence of attention from Example Society; it is not evidence of attention from the world at large." That statement in many ways appears to be just nonsense as a general statement - in what world, are all these societies not part of the world at large? They are not in some other world, they are in the world at large. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:47, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
On the contrary, for this specific proposal, whether or not the sources are reliable is the question. The wider issues you are mentioning are not part of this specific proposal discussion. That e.g. a specific prestigious award establishes notability for academics is set down in the current version of WP:PROF. The specific proposal here is merely about whether the fact of whether or not specific prestigious award X was indeed awarded to person Y can be reliably established by, say, the listing of recipients on the awarding institution's website. You are of course free to disagree with the more general statements in WP:PROF, but that should be a separate discussion, independent from this very specific proposal. Markus Pössel (talk) 14:43, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Implementing the proposal

My proposal, even in its modified form that takes into account the initial suggestions and criticism, has been up for more than a month now. Pointers to the discussion have been on the WikiProject Biography talk page here, the talk page for the essay on the Strickland incident by User:Bradv here and the WikiProject Women in Red talk page here for that time. I've also described it in my portion of the triple Op-ed for the October 28, 2018, Signpost.

From the feedback, mostly for the modified proposal, I gather that there is a general consensus in favor of the modification among almost all of those who have replied. I believe I have addressed the critical comments (in part by going from the original to the modified proposal), and also the one "Oppose" vote – I also note that the "Oppose" vote did not object to the content to the proposal, but rather stated that the content was already (implicitly) part of WP:PROF.

A number of supporting comments have noted that the proposal encodes "common sense" or "standard and sensible practice". My takeaway, re-reading all the responses, is that there appears to be a consensus about the proposal, and also that the proposal is widely seen not to be a big change – that is, not a significant departure from current practices, but instead a codification of what is already there. To the best of my Wikipedia experience and abilities, I believe that the way this has gone meets the WP:CONLEVEL standard of changes to guidelines being "best made slowly and conservatively, with active efforts to seek out input and agreement from others", and the practice described in WP:PGCHANGE: the modified proposed change appears to reflect the view of those within the community who have commented, and some of the comments have helped to avoid "accidentally introducing new sources of error or confusion".

I will implement the changes now (minus the exclamation marks, to which there was an objection). Thanks to everybody who contributed to the discussion! Markus Pössel (talk) 19:36, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Nira Yuval-Davis

I wonder if any editor here would be interested in taking a stab at this article. The subject appears notable under WP:AUTHOR and WP:PROF, but the draft is clearly written by somebody with a COI. If there are editors interested in "adopting" this draft, that would be great. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:20, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

BLP was declined correctly because it is abysmally written. There is a clear pass of WP:Prof#C1 on basis of subject's citation profile on GS so there is room for improvement. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:11, 15 November 2018 (UTC).
Hi K.e.coffman – I've gone through the article and tried to remove what NPOV language I could find. Is that sufficient, or is there more that remains to be done? Markus Pössel (talk) 16:25, 23 November 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Christine Mitchell

I would like some help (at least a review of the draft) with Draft:Christine Mitchell, concerning a Harvard Medical School bioethicist who (arguably) has led in the development of nursing ethics or the ethics of care.


Further, I believe that the growing field of bioethics education is young, and I believe that Christine Mitchell is one leader / person / bioethicist who is shaping bioethics education in North America. She is not unique, but to my observation she seems to be one of a select view. Perhaps both ABPD (the Association of Bioethics Program Directors) and the topic of 'bioethics education' deserve individual articles (though current interest in these specialty articles would at present be limited), but at present I am trying to develop a biographical article. MaynardClark (talk) 04:20, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

List for major institutes where being a distinguished prof is criteria for notability

Can we have a list, or atleast general criteria for recognizing what institutes qualify as major. Daiyusha (talk) 07:09, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

You could start with List of research universities in the United States. I don't know of a similar list for other countries, though — we have for instance Rankings of universities in the United Kingdom but not something that distinguishes major or research-level universities from jumped-up trade schools. The problem is bigger in India and Pakistan where there are (I have heard literally) thousands of small private "universities" that consist of some guy and a web site. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
The Russell Group for the UK, but of course there aren't any distinguished professors there. – Joe (talk) 07:59, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Quentin Summerfield

Hi, I wonder if someone could look at this draft to assess notability. I'd like to get this clarified before I tell the submitter to fix the promotionalism. --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:08, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

certainly notable. DGG ( talk ) 06:44, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
From cites on GS clearly passes WP:Prof#1. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:16, 7 January 2019 (UTC).
Probably also WP:PROF#C3. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:42, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

MIT Technology Review TR100

Is this an notable enough award to satisfy The person has received a highly prestigious academic award or honor at a national or international level.?Slatersteven (talk) 10:42, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Michael Zinigrad

There's something that (to me at least) smells fishy here. See discussion on the talk page. Some extra eyes are welcome, perhaps I simply need to ask my shriink to increase my meds to quelch this bout of paranoia... :-) Thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 21:19, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

You don't need any (more) meds. An h-index of 14 is unlikely (but perhaps not completely impossible) to pass WP:Prof#C1. Give me a ping if the BLP goes to AfD. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:25, 18 January 2019 (UTC).
According to whom? Your own biased opinion? Chris Troutman (talk) 23:32, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
An AfD will test the case for paid editors who wish to lower the standards of WP:Prof even further. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:36, 18 January 2019 (UTC).
(ec)Thanks for having a look. Well, that's the problem. I see an unlikely claim of 200 publications that are in rather obscure journals and have hardly been cited (and if the sample I took is representative, many of those are self-citations). But then there are claims of honorary degrees that seem to be real. I'm not sure I can square "mediocre scientist" with honorary degrees... If it weren't for those degrees, I'd take it to AfD. As it is, I'm hesitating. --Randykitty (talk) 23:44, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
The number of papers published or where they are published is irrelevant for WP:Prof. What counts is the impact they have made and that seems to be small by comparison with others. The claims of honorary degrees are in Russian and not available to me, but I am surprises that honorary degrees should be given to a person with such a moderate citation record. There are also some questions about the standing of Ariel University [17] where the subject works. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:37, 19 January 2019 (UTC).
My opinion: I don't think it's fair to call Langmuir an obscure journal (I've heard of it and it's far from my field); maybe some of the others are, but his publications appear to be in legitimate rather than predatory venues. His citation counts are not enough to make a convincing case for WP:PROF#C1, and rector (at a university where this is a lower position than president) is not quite enough for #C6. The honorary doctorates are suggestive but not conclusive. So I'm leaning against notability (and would say so in an AfD) but could perhaps be persuaded in the other direction by additional information. The discussion on the article talk page is not so much about notability, though, but whether the article has been puffed up with inappropriately anecdotal and badly sourced material. If it has, the correct response is to strip down those parts leaving the non-controversial facts of his academic career in their place. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:04, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
Langmuir is indeed a fine journal and so are some of the others on his GS profile [18]. However the number of citations given (766, less than 4 cites per paper with the alleged 200 papers) seems below the number that might be expected. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:42, 19 January 2019 (UTC).
I'm more interested in the peaks than the averages. But I agree that they're too low. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:51, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
Speaking only about honorary degrees, my experience is that there can be all kinds of reasons for awarding them, not necessarily for scholarly impact. So perhaps those degrees, by themselves, should not be given too much weight in evaluating notability here. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:25, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
An insightful comment. In the nether regions of the world's academia honorary degrees may be given for political influence rather than scholarly achievement. The latter does not seem to be the case here. This BLP is ripe for an AfD to test these matters. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:43, 19 January 2019 (UTC).

Notability Criterion 3 and the Indian Academy of Sciences

Regarding notability criterion 3, which states: The person is or has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society) or a fellow of a major scholarly society which reserves fellow status as a highly selective honor (e.g., Fellow of the IEEE).

At a current AfD for Anand Ranganathan, a question has arisen about this criterion. Ranganathan was elected as an Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS), a position he held from 2002 to 2006. These positions are elected and restricted to early-career researchers (35 and under for a maximum of 5 years, IIRC) and they are both rare and prestigious. Some useful data: IAS has 1068 current Fellows, 89 women Fellows, 716 deceased Fellows, and 11 deceased women Fellows. The Academy also has 54 Honorary Fellows and 154 deceased Honorary Fellows. Since the Associates program began in 1934, there have been 346 Associates who no longer hold the position. There are presently 66 Associates and 51 women Associates, In 2018, 23 Associates were elected, the same as the number of new Fellows that year. It seems clear that both Associateships and Fellowships are rare.

I believe that a Fellowship in the IAS would indicate notability under criterion 3. I have !voted based on my view that an Associateship is not sufficient to meet this criterion, and been challenged by an IP. I invite comment here in search of consensus on the status of an IAS Associateship in relation to WP:PROF. Any editor contributing here or to the AfD, I ask to evaluate the question and Ranganathan independently and I seek any and all views without regard to their conclusion. I am perfectly comfortable to be told that my view is in error or to be disagreed with, and to abide by the consensus view of these Associateships, whatever that may be. Thanks in advance for all contributions. EdChem (talk) 03:05, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm intentionally looking at and responding to only your question here, and I'm not going to get involved with the AfD or the bio page. It seems to me that if the Associateship is intended only for academics who are at an early career stage, then I would say that it does not satisfy the criterion. It's a too-soon situation. I don't know enough about the Fellowship to offer a definitive opinion, but if it is something for academics at the full stage of their careers and it is selective to a degree that is similar to honors from other countries that we accept as satisfying the criterion (and not simply selective by India's standards), then I'm OK with it satisfying criterion 3. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:44, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
comment. I know nothing about the topic, except from the sentence "Indian Academy of Sciences, not to be confused with Indian National Science Academy or National Academy of Sciences, India"... that I have read somewhere in Wikipedia. More information could help the passer-by to educate her own opinion. Thanks in advance ! Pldx1 (talk) 17:58, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Criterion 2: Marquis Who's Who

Last point of Criterion 2 states Biographical listings in and awards from vanity press publishers, such as the American Biographical Institute, or from publications incorporating a substantial vanity press element in their business model, such as Marquis Who's Who, do not qualify for satisfying Criterion 2 or for partially satisfying Criterion 1. I find myself a bit confused with this. Does it mean "Marquis Who's Who" listings are not notable, or are they in special cases "for partially satisfying Criterion 1"? I've been here on this project for while, but I don't remember ever working on academic-related articles. I would appreciate a detailed reply, thanks in advance. --KCVelaga (talk) 06:25, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Marquis Who's Who listings are an embarrassment to the subject, or should be. They are a scam to get their subjects to buy their books, and they should serve as a reminder to the subject that they were scammed. When these things are actually publicized by the subject (as on a curriculum vitae) they are a red flag to Wikipedia editors to be much more strict about vetting information from those self-published sources than we might otherwise be. They certainly do not count towards notability in any way. Not for criterion 2, not for anything else. Is that clear enough? —David Eppstein (talk) 06:43, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: Thanks for clarifying. I completely get it now. KCVelaga (talk) 11:37, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Notability of taxonomists

I have recently seen a fair number of short articles or stubs pass through the new page queue that cover taxonomists, both in zoology and botany. Clifflandis has been very productive in this area. They all have in common that they have a certain (sometimes large) number of taxonomic descriptions to their name. While some of these (e.g. Ida Mary Roper) come with a good amount of other coverage, many (e.g. Elisabeth Ekman, Jessie Milliken, Euphemia Cowan Barnett; or to pick a non-Clifflandis one, Lothar Seegers) are just on record for a number of scientific publications, and for being a referenced taxonomic naming authority. In botany, this means they are listed at List of botanists by author abbreviation, which is independently and officially curated; there is no such list for zoology, AFAIK.

Strictly speaking these do not satisfy our notability requirements for academics as currently written. The closest might be "a significant impact on their discipline", but that generally would be overstating the case. Naming species isn't hard, rare, or (post-19th century) particularly impactful. They sometimes have published a lot, but taxonomic descriptions don't usually draw in the big cite numbers. And I don't think that the "highly cited" criterion applies to taxonomic names, even if the taxon were referred to every time as "Taxon Author".

On the Pro side, there does seem to be a tacit practice of giving these a letter-of-the-law notability pass. (As has been pointed out to me, they are also often linked as authority in taxoboxes, and having them sit there as redlinks sucks.)

Disclosure: I personally am in favour of these articles; I think it's exactly what an encyclopedia should contain, and if we could replace each article consisting of a plot summary of a web cartoon series instalment with one of these, I'd be happy. But every time I see one in the NPP queue, I'm aware that technically I should send it to AfD. I am therefore hoping that we can pull in some comments here and arrive at a general rule about how to assess the notability of scientists whose main claim to notability is that they have named taxa. A general threshold (established at least x currently recognized taxa) might be an idea. My personal take is that such a threshold might be the way to go. - If something like that is agreed on, it should be added to the specific criteria notes. Notifying Wikiproject Tree of Life, and New Page Patrol; if any other projects come to mind, please add. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 22:05, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Elmidae I think my analysis closely tracks yours. Are you, or anyone else, maybe Clifflandis aware of what results, if at any, people with this notability claim have had at AfD? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:22, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
I've got one lingering at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shinobu Akiyama, which was what made me want to clarify the matter. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 22:28, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I don't think you can have a numerical criterion; all taxa are not equal in this respect. Someone who establishes a new family and 10 new genera is more notable than someone who adds 11 new species to a genus with 100 species slready. Naming species is often part of a review of a larger group, and the taxonomist may be notable for this. But I agree that merely naming a few taxa doesn't by itself constitute notability. It has to remain a matter of judgement. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:39, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
  • There is Luigi Aloysius Colla, which I created in June 2006, and which has not been expanded since then. That may not be quite as sparse as some of your examples, but I do have to admit that his claim to notability is very slim. The article has survived more than 12 1/2 years without being challenged. I do think that naming species is evidence of potential notability, but I don't have it in me to fight hard to keep Colla if his article is challenged. - Donald Albury 22:53, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
Actually his political roles might well get him through, plus his 2 described species are very important. Johnbod (talk) 01:20, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
If you search IPNI, there are 918 records including "Colla": [19] Peter coxhead (talk) 12:33, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Without commenting on the merits of any specific individual, I think a reasonable alternative would be to create a series of "List of" articles collecting taxonomists by class (or at some other level, if that is too broad), to which individually non-notable taxonomists could be redirected. bd2412 T 23:09, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
Alternately, if a taxonomer is only active in one clade, they could be merged to a section of the clade's article on relevant researchers that have worked on that taxon. But probably the 'list of..' format is more useful. --Nessie (talk) 02:52, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
Note that the pure lists of names already exist (List of botanists by author abbreviation, List of zoologists by author abbreviation) - we would be looking for some added value here. One might consider a scope along the lines of List of transgender political office-holders; i.e., a one-line (or a few lines) entry with a bit of background.--Elmidae (talk · contribs) 21:00, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I didn't even know there were any taxonomists left anymore, what with Uber and Lyft and so on. EEng 15:19, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I don't think very many people would agree to make all researchers in some scientific specialty automatically notable. And if a taxonomist hasn't named a species, what have they done to deserve to be called a taxonomist? So we need something beyond that, for an individual article — high citations, significant and ongoing media coverage of their work, etc. For the run-of-the-mill taxonomists, either just naming them at their species article or in some cases a list would be a better solution. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:41, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
    just naming them at their species article – it's unlikely that a taxonomist who had only named one species would be considered notable. high citations doesn't make sense for authors of taxa since every scientific article about that taxon will (or should) include the authority at least once, often complete with bibliographic information. What makes authors of a "reasonable number" of taxa or a few "important" taxa inherently notable is that they are mentioned repeatedly in reliable sources, from scientific articles to horticultural encyclopedias. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:51, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Don't all taxonomists name taxa after themselves (or get crossnamed by fellow taxonomists in cruel jokes) - thus forever enshrining their names in Latin form on the back of some beetle or other taxa?Icewhiz (talk) 19:56, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
    Naming a taxon after yourself is a massive faux pas. There are a couple current taxonomists who are widely reviled as glory-seeking "taxonomic vandals". The behavior that has earned them this reputation often involves naming species that were (tentatively or definitively) identified as new in the work of another researcher, but which were not formally named in that work. This deprives the person who originally "discovered" the species from having the opportunity to name it. However, even these taxonomic vandals don't go so far as to name species after themselves. More notable taxonomists are more likely to be the namesake of a species (whether intended as an honor or a joke) described by somebody else. Plantdrew (talk)
    I apologize then for impugning the field with the false self-naming claim - however aren't nearly all taxonomists (with a tenure of some years) enshrined by their peers (as a joke or honor, the inner humor in this field being rather obscure for the outside observer who knows little Latin or taxonomy) on various taxons? The end result is the same, regardless of the naming mechanism. Icewhiz (talk) 08:33, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I have my name on two taxa - a nothogenus and its sole species. I don't consider that to make me notable. There should be some fuzzy threshold. (Monographers are more likely to be notable.) Lavateraguy (talk) 19:35, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
  • This is tricky because WP:PROF as a general framework is probably what should be used, but WP:NACADEMIC criteria may not really apply the same. How would you compare the productivity of someone who named 100 species vs published 100 papers in a different field? I'd be really wary of that, so maybe the best criteria is if there is secondary coverage of the person with respect to their scientific work. If there's nothing more than a university webpage or obituary, I'd probably say they're not notable. If they had some independent coverage, then I'd drift towards yes. I think it's just going to be a gray zone unfortunately. Kingofaces43 (talk) 22:45, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Publishing 100 papers counts for nothing in satisfying WP:Prof. The only thing that counts is the influence of the papers on others in the field as measured by citations. The same for naming species. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:43, 11 March 2019 (UTC).
Taxonomists fall into a really weird place with regards to citation impact. Taxonomy is the only scientific field where 250 year old publications are routinely cited (albeit in an abbreviated format that won't be picked up by citation impact analytics). Plantdrew (talk) 03:23, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
The only? I don't know about "routinely" but I have occasionally cited Euclid. And I'm sure the classicists might have a word or two about what they cite as well. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:54, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
That's actually what I was getting at. We as editors really shouldn't be using things like citation counts, publication counts, etc. since it is rather arbitrary. Numbers of species descriptions is even trickier than that, which I why I'd argue to stay away from those metrics almost entirely. If someone was a modern day Linnaeus, we should have secondary sources that make the case for us instead. Kingofaces43 (talk) 06:01, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
  • The "list with added value" proposal by Elmidae above sounds reasonable to me. XOR'easter (talk) 15:31, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
    It's reasonable, but doesn't solve the issue of what counts as notable. Kingofaces43 mentions "secondary sources", but what do these have to contain to count? Multiple secondary sources contain citations of taxon authors, as Plantdrew notes. For me the issue is different: what is useful for our readers? I think that when there are "enough" (10+?) articles on taxa with a particular author then it's useful for readers to wikilink to even a brief article. I suppose wikilinking to some kind of 'list with notes' would work, but where else do we do this? Is there an example I can look at? Peter coxhead (talk) 17:25, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
Admittedly the above example is the only one I'm aware of. (I believe List of cryptids was of that type once, but it got bluelinkified following a certain amount of friction). --Elmidae (talk · contribs)
List of American supercentenarians is perhaps a good example. --Randykitty (talk) 18:50, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
But if you compare the proposed list with List of American supercentenarians#100 oldest American people ever, the entries all have articles, which is the intention behind lists like List of botanists by author abbreviation (A). If the 100 oldest American people ever are intrinsically notable, then so are taxonomists who named say 20+ taxa. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:42, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
Your example proves no such thing about the implication from naming many taxa to notability. If we compare, e.g., list of cosmologists, all of them have articles, too, because they have all been deemed notable enough to have articles. Their notability does not come from being on the list; that would be circular. They are on the list because they are notable. There are many other cosmologists who are not notable and not on the list. Similarly, if we are to have a list of taxonomists, I would argue that it should only include taxonomists notable enough to have their own articles, through whatever we agree is the correct notability criterion for taxonomists. But that criterion should not be "because they are on the list". —David Eppstein (talk) 21:03, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: we agree. My point was that I'd asked for a list that included items not sufficiently notable for an article with information in the list instead. The example given doesn't meet this request. No list in Wikipedia can create notability. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:48, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
We're not going to ever have a List of non-notable taxonomers. Perhaps a better example is Glossary of leaf morphology. All the entries are important enough to be included to help readers understand other articles. A few terms have articles, but most links are wiktionary redirects or to sections of other articles. Something similar could be done with phycologists or mymecologists or whatever, without an expectation of each entry linking to an enwiki article. --Nessie (talk) 22:24, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
But each entry would link, to the article on the species. More generally, I think the articles are non-problematic and useful as part of the hyperlinked network of the encyclopedia . The guiding rule is NOT PAPER. The real reason for notability considerations is to avoid being swamped with articles which will be only promotional or vanity, but these won't be. I've never thought it a priority to make such articles, but why should I object if someone else does? DGG ( talk ) 23:58, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
I think you mean link to the article on the taxonomist. Otherwise I agree entirely. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:36, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
It ought to be possible to look up a species and from there find the other species credited to the same taxonomist. That's just basic, old-school benefits of hyperlinking. Having a list that binds together articles on species would be a straightforward way to do this: an article on a species links (perhaps via redirect) to the list of taxonomists, which then links to the articles on the other species, organized by taxonomist. (Having redirects to the list page would also prevent redlinks in infoboxes.) Restricting a list to having only blue-linked items is one organizational scheme, but it's not the only way to do things. Here, we have a situation that calls for a navigational structure in a way that doesn't necessarily apply in other sciences. XOR'easter (talk) 17:11, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
You're much much more likely to find that in the approriate category within Category:Taxa by author ( 1,442 ) than on an individual author's article. Ideally though, yea, it should be listed on the taxonomer's article as well.--Nessie (talk) 17:27, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
To answer your question Peter coxhead, passing mention wouldn't really count in secondary sources which is the same standard for other topics. If there's an indiscriminate list of people who named species within a genus or something citing a specific species like Lycorma delicatula (White, 1845), that doesn't really count towards notability. Instead, you need something at a minimum like, "Professor X identified many of the species in genus Y". Essentially, it has to be sources saying they did something of note beyond just naming species, and it has to be focused on the person rather than the subject material's importance. Kingofaces43 (talk) 15:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
@Kingofaces43: they did something of note beyond just naming species Firstly, you can't just "name" a species; you have to provide something in the way of a description/diagnosis (what depends on the nomenclature code). Secondly, the implication is that describing a species is not "of note"; I simply disagree. Describing a species and having that species name and description accepted by reliable secondary sources (which is what is needed for the person to be referenced as the author of a species name) is in and of itself of note. Just a few names won't accumulate enough "note" to be "notable", but for me, 20 does and 100 certainly does. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:09, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
I'm speaking in relative terms, and when I say name, I do mean the general description process that you mentioned. It's a big deal for any new student to get published in a journal, etc. It's expected for a professor. That's an approximate parallel here, though with some differences. Naming a species relative to taxonomist notability could be similar to how we generally don't consider primary research publications highly significant as standalone, but reviews and other secondary sources are. It's an application of the "average professor test" in WP:PROF. If they just named a species, their name goes next to the species name in the article and that's about it. If someone has put the notability of that taxonomist in context for us, then that can warrant an article. Kingofaces43 (talk) 17:52, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
So if I understand you correctly, you would agree with Peter coxhead that Someone who establishes a new family and 10 new genera is more notable than someone who adds 11 new species to a genus with 100 species already - i.e., scale and impact matter. The thing is, such work in taxonomy may have huge carry-on effects and be in use for a century, and still not garner the author any great coverage, beside their name being cited every time someone cites the taxon (which, as discussed, is not a usable metric). - We may well be looking at the old notability pitfall here that basically says you are shit out of luck until someone writes your obituary :/ --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 21:41, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

The examples given are nice well written articles that do no harm and some good, but none of them are critical to have. Maybe I am a heretic for stating this, but it matters less where we put the notability bar for taxonomists, while it matters a lot that we clearly specify where that notability bar is located. That way, Clifflandis and other excellent editors will be encouraged to continue writing without the risk of wasting time on articles for deletion. It also saves time for NPP reviewers and AfD evaluators. Hence, thank you Elmidae for raising the issue. I hope it leads to clear guidelines, whatever those guidelines are. Martinogk (talk) 14:33, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

  • Quite simply, if someone's sole "claim to fame" is naming a species or two, then that alone does not merit them inclusion. In this day and age, with molecular techniques the rage, it's not uncommon for grad students or early career scientists to name taxa, or for taxa to have many "authors" in group publications. While the author's name becomes permanently attached to the name, dutifully filed and cataloged, the taxon itself may have little to no significant secondary coverage for decades after initial publication, and even then, it is often the taxon that gets significant coverage, not the author. We should not act as fans who think anyone who names a taxon is any more special than a regular scientist who publishes regular research that doesn't happen to produce a taxon name. The fact that the author's name is repeated with every full printing of the scientific name should not be construed as being a "highly cited" author. The fact that many taxon authors are kept in databases like ZooBank or IPNI on its own lends no more evidence towards WP:GNG or WP:SCHOLAR than being in the phone book: they are directories, Wikipedia is not. Many scientists who name taxa can satisfy GNG or WP:SCHOLAR by other mechanisms. If they don't, then Wikispecies is probably the better place to document their existence. --Animalparty! (talk) 00:40, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I concur with AnimalParty, who said all I would have in half the space.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:45, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Confusing structure and vague metrics

Comments are requested on a proposal for a new structure for organizing the notability criteria of academics, without changing any of the actual criteria. Martinogk (talk) 23:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

There are many words of wisdom in these notability criteria, but even as an academic with promotion committee experience at a major university, I find the structural layout strange and many of the metrics vague and/or unhelpful. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for non-academic Wikipedia editors to successfully use these guidelines. In light of the Donna Strickland mishap, I think we can do much better.

The nine notability criteria are really only five (#1,4,6,7,8), while #2,3,5 are evidence metrics to determine if those notability criteria are met. I would like to restructure the section into four notability criteria, with subheadings for the relevant evidence metrics, into something like this:

1. The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline

  • Citations
  • Notable research awards and honors
  • Elected member/fellow of a notable scientific society
  • Academic rank, such as named chair
  • Invited plenary talks at conferences organized by a notable scientific society

2. The person’s academic work has had a substantial impact on society

  • Generated new laws or public policies
  • Changed clinical practice
  • Generated widely used technical innovations, software, etc
  • Wrote/created widely dispersed books, music, art, theater, etc
  • Government advisor, scientific advisory committee member or testified to national legislature on scientific matters

3. The person has had significant national or international educational impact

  • Author of a text book commonly used in high schools or colleges
  • Author of a notable general audience book on a scientific topic
  • Contributor to scientific education through popular media

4. The person has made significant contributions to academic organizations

  • President/rector of a notable university or scientific research institute
  • President of a notable scientific organization
  • Editor-in-chief of a notable scientific journal

To be notable, an academic would only have to pass one of A-D. The most common would be A, but there are also academics who pass B, C or D, but not A. The evaluation metrics must obviously be much more specific, using the current page text with some added precision, items and explanations, and keeping existing bullet points for things that do not count.

I am curious to know what other editors think about this. Martinogk (talk) 17:40, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Sympathetic to the intention, but this will take forever to get agreed. A couple of things stick out at once:
"Elected member/fellow of a notable scientific society" is no good at all, as the many societies with members & fellows into 5 figures are all notable. You need something like the present: "highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association". Similar issue with "Editor-in-chief of a notable scientific journal" I think, and the other ones in 4). In many contexts "notable" is far too low a bar.
"Wrote/created widely dispersed books, music, art, theater, etc" - given you have 2 science book criteria, you don't need this here. These should be covered by WP:CREATIVE etc.
You complain that currently you find "many of the metrics vague" - is most of 2) much better? Johnbod (talk) 18:28, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
You are quite correct. All the lettered items need a much more precise definition than I gave. The existing text can sometimes be used for this, while other bullet points need further enhancements and clarifications. My intention is not to lower the notability criteria, but to clarify and restructure in a more logical fashion. For example, being an elected fellow could be one of several metrics to determine if the research has had significant impact, but it should not be a stand alone criteria, as some elected fellows are not that notable. Martinogk (talk) 19:06, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
To some extent separating the type of contribution from the way the contribution was recognized, rather than the current listing that mixes both kinds of things in one list, makes sense.
However, I have significant concerns with the teaching section. Currently, major national or international level awards for excellence in teaching can be considered through criterion 2; this would eliminate that. (See e.g. a current deletion discussion where this is highly relevant, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hanan Mohamed Abdelrahman.) Authoring a commonly used textbook sounds like the sort of thing that should be relevant, but it is very unusual to have any usable documentation of this sort of claim; even book reviews of textbooks are much less common than reviews of other classes of books. "A general audience book" by itself should not usually be enough; we have a separate criterion, WP:AUTHOR, for book authorship, which usually involves both multiple books and always requires multiple published reviews of the books. Similarly, contributions through popular media cannot be enough for notability by themselves; we need other independent sources that take note of these contributions. And many notable educators were involved in setting national educational policies, also not mentioned in your criteria.
Beyond the teaching section, one current issue with several of our criteria and especially C1 is that it is biased towards fields where publications are journal-based and citation counts are high. For book-based fields, citation counts are usually the wrong way to test impact of publications; instead, you should be looking at published book reviews. And I don't know why you put "organized by a notable scientific society" as a constraint on when an invited talk should count; in my experience this is a separate thing from the significance and prestige of a conference. To pick a random example, NeurIPS, a very major conference in artificial intelligence and machine learning, is self-organizing rather than society-sponsored. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:32, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your very thoughtful comments David. The AfD for Hanan Mohamed Abdelrahman is a perfect example of the difficulty with having the same guideline to define notability for academic researcher, academic educators as well as academic administrators. There would be more clarity and less confusion for WP:NPP reviewers if we defined specific criteria to determine if an academic is notable for their educational contributions. Whatever criteria we use in terms of authored text books, teaching awards, public education, etc, they will and should be different from the notability criteria for academic researchers. Since one glove does not fit all hands, this is how many university promotion guidelines operate, with different promotion criteria for different tracks such as research, education or clinical excellence. David, you have clearly thought much more carefully than I have regarding suitable notability criteria for academic educators. Maybe you could take a first stab at drafting such a section? Martinogk (talk) 21:48, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Just a quick comment on this sensible discussion and a suggestion.
The comment is that we do not want to keep the bar too low, so that every Tom, Dick, and Assistant Professor gets in, but neither do we want to make it too high, so that people are deleted who appear borderline because they are hard to source. The criteria in other biographical areas are much looser than for academics. To take on example at random, WP:NBASKETBALL requires that the person have appeared in one game as either a player or head coach in, among many others, the USSR Premier Basketball League as early as 1923 (I’m not making this up). WP:NGAELICfor Gaelic games, if you have played at senior inter-county level in the League. Likewise WP:NBASE provides that if you have played in a least one game in the KBO League ... well, you get the point. We are in line with other areas if we include borderliners at the cost of including some clunkers.
The suggestion is that an obituary in national newspaper be a criterion of impact. They are harder to find for living persons, though.ch (talk) 22:36, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
ch: Nice comparison and reflection. While I would not advocate to lower our notability criteria to that level (A two hour scientific guest lecture at Udmurt State University in 1932!), I think we could learn from the sports world by making our criteria much more specific and clear. That will help both content providers and NPP reviewers. Martinogk (talk) 23:23, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
It's easy for sports biography criteria to be specific and clear. But (in case you're not aware) there's a strong feeling among most of the community outside any particular sport, and many inside, that our sports bio criteria typically set the bar much too low (possible sign of a peasant's revolt here). Criteria for politicians are also generally specific and clear, and much tighter; you don't hear much complaining about those. Specificity and clarity aren't so easy to achieve for academics, as the archives here show. Johnbod (talk) 02:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
A peasant's revolt? Count me as a peasant. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:16, 3 March 2019 (UTC).
With respect to teaching with measurable impact, typically we can measure the impact of resources on online learning platforms. — Charles Stewart (talk) 00:07, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
Changing the structure of the criteria is going to break every link/reference made to this guideline in archived discussions from the last 13 years. I'm not sure that's worth it just to improve the organisation.
As an aside, please let's not treat the Strickland "mishap" as a failure of these guidelines. It wasn't. She clearly met the criteria long before the Nobel. The fact that we didn't have an article on her between May and October 2018 was the mistake of a single AfC reviewer; the fact that we didn't have one for the 15 years before that was a collective failure of our editorship to write one. – Joe (talk) 08:18, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
break every link/reference - Call the new criteria A-F and archive the old ones in a footnote. EEng 10:29, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Nice suggestion! Martinogk (talk) 13:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, I'm a nice person. EEng 14:03, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you all for an interesting, constructive and fruitful exchange with good ideas and suggestions. Based on the discussion, I have restructured the article into four notability criteria, with subsections for different metrics. It is just a restructuring, and I have not changed any of the actual notability criteria. In fact, the criteria are verbatim the same, except for some very minor edits such as changing "awards" to "educational awards" in section C2. Having said that, it would be great if some of the metrics could be expanded on and specified in more detail. It is my hope that this new structure will make that easier and also show where the existing gaps are. For example, under C2, it would be nice to clarify what types of educational awards count towards notability. Martinogk (talk) 22:19, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Martinogk: I really appreciate your efforts and your boldness in implementing the changes discussed above but I think we need to give other editors more time to weigh in before changing this guideline. It would probably be helpful to make this a formal RfC or at least post notes to some of the relevant Talk pages (e.g., WT:N, WT:UNI) to ensure that other editors have a chance to see and participate in this discussion. ElKevbo (talk) 23:15, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Given that this is a guideline (and not just an essay), which was accepted by the community after an RfC, I think that a major overhaul would need to go through another RfC, too. --Randykitty (talk) 23:21, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
I agree on the need for an RFC, and am generally supportive of the proposed revisions. I think they are better organized than our present guidelines and don't really constitute a substantial change in criteria. One aspect that I would hope we could also cover, though, is a problem area of our current guidelines: what to do with scholars in book subjects (rather than journal subjects), for whom citation counts are inappropriate and book reviews are what count? It's all very well to say "go to WP:AUTHOR instead", which is more or less what we have been doing in practice. But in many cases our current guideline misleads the nominators of deletion discussions into proposing book scholars for deletion when they have few citations or few cited works, only to run into a snowstorm of keeps because they have many well-reviewed books. I think we could avoid some wasted effort on discussions of notable scholars by putting something about scholarly books into part A of this guideline. Maybe just "see WP:AUTHOR", maybe that a scholar may be considered notable if they have multiple books from reputable publishers, each having multiple reliably published reviews (although that seems like a pretty low bar). —David Eppstein (talk) 23:59, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Pretty much agree with that. One factor not currently recognised in any notability quidelines, which I think is sometimes relevant, is (for pages up for a while) the level of views. I can see the objections for using this for pop culture, sport etc figures, but if an academic who seems borderline notable, and is not contoversial etc, is getting a steady 30 views a day, that tells you something. Johnbod (talk) 02:32, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Long ago we used to also consider the number of incoming links from other articles. I think that if a scholar is cited as an authority in many Wikipedia articles, they're probably notable. Of course that would also likely lead to abuse in which less-notable academics spam their publications across Wikipedia and then use that spam to argue for notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:51, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
@ElKevbo: Sounds very appropriate with an RfC. I think you know better than me how best to solicit that. Sorry if I was too quick. Note that the article history now provides a very specific restructuring proposal that people can look at. David and Johnbod, you make very important points. The first point is also related to time. A newly published book will not have many citations (yet), while it may have many positive book reviews, making the author notable based on that. Regarding the other two points, many Wikipedia articles are based on academic research, and in order to judge the quality of a particular reference, it can be useful to look up the Wikipedia page about the cited scientist. Hence, Wikipedia articles about academics serve dual purposes, unlike an article about e.g. a basketball player, a senator or a trombonist. Martinogk (talk) 13:54, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Martinogk: No worries! We appreciate your boldness and helpful suggestions!
David Eppstein and Johnbod: I would strongly oppose any addition or change to this notability guideline that incorporates references in or data from Wikipedia. I agree that in some ways those measures could be interesting and useful but they're too problematic (very easy to abuse, confusing and circular, etc.) to use. We need to stick both the letter and the spirit of core policies and practices such as WP:RS. I agree with the above discussion that it may be appropriate and useful to make an explicit reference to WP:AUTHOR (and perhaps even WP:GNG) to ensure that everyone understands that just because someone isn't notable under these specific, niche guidelines they may still be notable under other guidelines that are different or simply more broad. ElKevbo (talk) 15:23, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
I agree completely with that. At best, a lot of wikilinks means that there may be notability, but it could also mean a determined spamming effort. It should not be an argument in deletion discussions. --Randykitty (talk) 15:28, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
I wasn't suggesting using incoming links, & I'm not sure David Eppstein was either. ElKevbo, can you explain how using long-term views would be "very easy to abuse, confusing and circular, etc.", short of a borderline-notable academic being ready to click onto his article several times a day for weeks or month on end? We've already got "confusing", most people seem to find. Johnbod (talk) 15:52, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
I simply think that it's circular to use Wikipedia data to establish or measure notability because the entire purpose of evaluating notability is to determine whether a subject merits an article. If we were ever in a situation where the only convincing criteria for notability is that somehow an article already existed for a lengthy period of time and received a substantial number of views then we'd be in a really strange place! In fact, I imagine that most editors would not find that argument convincing since it seems that (a) the article should have never been allowed to remain in article space for so long and (b) we've now opened up a situation where editors are encouraged to create articles for subjects that may not meet our traditional notability criteria but try to keep the article under wraps for a lengthy period of time in the hopes that it will somehow gather a lot of incoming links. I think the spirit and intent of WP:RS and WP:V are clear and wave us away from using this as a consideration. ElKevbo (talk) 16:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
I can't see what this strange (and strained) hypothetical has to do with it, frankly. I'm certainly not suggesting it should the "only convincing criteria for notability", but a factor that might be brought into consideration for some of our many borderline cases (which tend to be what people are looking at this page for). Nor do I see the relevance of WP:V. Johnbod (talk) 17:00, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
What I said above for links, also goes for page views. A fair number of views may suggest that notability may be found and an effort should be made. However, it cannot ever be an argument that there is notability. --Randykitty (talk) 17:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
I'll just add that pageviews have long been accepted as a valid argument for WP:PRIMARYTOPIC puposes, and rightly so. Johnbod (talk) 18:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Yes, I agree that it makes sense in that situation where the discussion is not about whether the topics are notable - it's presumed that they are - but which one should be the primary topic. ElKevbo (talk) 20:43, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Section 4 is unacceptable as it refers only to scientific entities. A better phrase would be scholarly or professional Xxanthippe (talk) 01:17, 15 March 2019 (UTC).

Good suggestion. I like scholarly. Another option is academic. Martinogk (talk) 01:32, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
There are other places where scientific is used, as if there are no other forms of scholarship. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:48, 15 March 2019 (UTC).
Yep. This also covers humanities professors, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:43, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
  • Generally support. I agree that several of these are not criteria but metrics for other criteria. I'm not going to argue the fine copy-editing in any detail.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:43, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Just wanted to point out to this Wikipedia:Draft rewrite of Notability (academics) if people are not aware of it. Egaudrain (talk) 08:32, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Brief and neutral statement

@Martinogk:, what is your brief and neutral statement? Currently, the RfC listed at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia policies and guidelines is far from brief and I have doubts as to its neutrality also. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:47, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I think that page just copied what I wrote on this page on March 2, as I did not add any new text yesterday. I am obviously not knowledgeable on how to post an RfC. How can it be fixed? Would appreciate any help. Martinogk (talk) 11:35, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I added a sentence on this page just below the RfC box, hoping that will fix the problem, but I am not sure that is the right way either. Martinogk (talk) 11:46, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
As noted at WP:RFC, Legobot copies from the end of the {{rfc}} tag through to the first timestamp after. It doesn't check who added the text, when the text was added, nor does it summarise or edit for length. So if there is a a lot of text and no meaningful request between those points, that's what you get at the RfC listings. These are updated once an hour, see here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:07, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
OK, thank you! I really appreciate your help. Is it okay now? Martinogk (talk) 13:45, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Recent change to verifiability policy

There is a discussion on a recent change to the verifiability policy (WP:V), Special:Diff/877788621, that has implications on the notability guideline for academics. If you're interested, please participate at WT:V § Must and should. — Newslinger talk 07:41, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

equivalent position to distinguished professor outside US

The guideline (NPROF#5) currently does not specify what such equivalent positions are. Can we try to brainstorm some and then we can add it to the guideline as a footnote/section? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

At the University of Canterbury in New Zealand the top 15% of continuing (i.e. permanent) academic staff have the rank 'Professor' and the next 15% have the rank 'Associate Professor' - see https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/about/hr/academic-promotion/. I expect the other NZ universities are similar. What are percentages for the top US ranks? Nurg (talk) 01:02, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
Hmmm. Harvard University Professor ([20]) notes that about ~25 professors have that title. Total number of faculty: ~2,500 ([21]) or ~5,000 (our entry for Harvard University) but its ref [22] suggests "Unduplicated, Paid Instructional Faculty Count: 2,107" . Tenured professors there seem to be about 25-50% of total, ex. in Arts and Sciences, 444 out of 930, in Engineering, 48 out of 75. As for distinguished professors, I couldn't find a statistic of definition of this position for Harvard, through it is occasionally used. Ex. [23] lists Edward Benz as "Richard and Susan Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine". And we have List of professorial positions at Harvard Law School (unreferenced) and several related subcategories. Extrapolating from our unreferenced list for Harvard Law school, it has ~50 named professorships but based on [24], only 80 tenure track and total of 90 or so positions? Weird. Faculty list at [25] does not use named titles, but reviewing the linked pages, a quick sample of the first ten does suggest half of them are named. But then maybe Harvard is a special case... Looking at my old department ([26]), 2 out of 22 positions are Distinguished, 6 positions are not professors (but when you say continuing, I know at least two of those 'non-professors' there have been there for 10-20 years :D). Lastly, in [27] this book, "Memoirs of a Provost" of Baylor University (faculty: 1,250) it talks of creating about a dozen to twenty 'distinguished professor' positions, and mentions that University of Notre Dame (similar faculty size) had about 50. It is worth noting Baylor also created a separate title of 'university professor' (see also their official description here: [28]). How many they have now? I couldn't find a complete listing, but their Institute of Religion has 100+ faculty ([29]), through they separately list 12 distinguished and 5 (only?) regular professors here: [30]. Their sociology department does not list any distinguished positions ([31]). We can review other universities, but IMHO the guideline is intended to cover the ~1% or less of the faculty, not ~15-30% (through I don't mind making it less restrictive, but see discussion below). It's the distinction between doing one's job well enough to continue on the promotion track and reach tenure (for countries where it is applicable), which for universities, we can expect 25-50% of the faculty on tenure tracks to do do, and do it so well that you receive a rare honor, which is I think what NPROF#5 was intended to. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:47, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
  • WP:NPROF #5 specifies "a named chair appointment or distinguished professor appointment ... or an equivalent position". I did not realise that that was based on US criteria. Looking at one school of the Australian National University, for example, the School of Literature, Language and Linguistics [32], there are 44 academic staff. 3 of those are Professors, and 3 are Associate Professors. The others are senior lecturers, lecturers, a reader, a researcher, and a couple of casual academics (tutors are not listed). Of the 3 professors, one holds a chair. I would take WP:NPROF #5 to mean that, in that faculty, only the one who holds a chair would have presumed notability on that criterion. Whether any of the others were notable would depend on whether they meet other criteria of WP:NPROF, or any other Wikipedia notability criteria. I think most other Australian universities would be similar - few professors, and even fewer who hold a chair. RebeccaGreen (talk) 15:15, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Habilitation

Polish Wikipedia policy for notable academics suggests that habilitation is sufficient. I was a bit surprised that this term seems to have never been discuses here (archive search returns nothing). Granted, it's a European thing, but it merits a discussion. Particularly considering the issue I raised above, which represents a rather US-centric criterium. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:15, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I know of an academic with a habilitation who was appointed at the senior lecturer level. He has since been promoted to Associate Professor level and I would not try to make a case for his inclusion based on WP:NPROF. One case, I realise, but I don't see how habilitation is sufficient for WP notability... in some areas, that would mean all academics in some departments would be automatically eligible. EdChem (talk) 07:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Although it depends on how Habilitation is delivered across countries, I think that it does reflect some level of recognition by selected peers in a field. So I would think that it doesn't count for nothing, but it may not be sufficient on its own. Just like being Professor shouldn't be sufficient on its own (we all know a Professor in our country that has the title, but doesn't fit the concept of academic notability). For a instance, let's consider a situation where notability is justified largely on the basis of publications. Since the significance of publications is hard to evaluate for people external to the field, in cases where the sheer numbers seem borderline, I can see that an Habilitation could be use as a further testimony of recognition of impact in a field. Egaudrain (talk) 08:16, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I don't think that having a habilitation means much (if anything) for notability. It just means that somebody is qualified to be a candidate when a professor position (any level) is open. If they become professor and do that job well, they may then become notable, but not necessarily so. Think of it this way: people usually habilitate 5-7 years after their PhD. They are still early-career academics and those are rarely notable already. --Randykitty (talk) 11:33, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
@Randykitty First, I don't think there's anything in the guidelines at the moment that precludes early-career academics from being considered notable if they meet other criteria. With that logic, you should also exclude from criteria any award that is specifically for young academics. Or you could even set an age limit to make sure "early-career" academics do not meet the criteria. I don't think that's very productive, and instead we should focus on the sole merits reflected by Habilitation. And that's my second point: this seems to vary across countries, and maybe fields. In my experience (could be my field and/or my country), Habilitation does not happen within 5-7 years after PhD, but more like 10-15 years after PhD. I'm assuming that everywhere it serves the purpose of granting someone the right to officially supervise PhDs. The logic, at least in France, is that you must have co-supervised a number of PhDs (used to be about three, but criteria seem to be relaxing). In today's reality, at least in mine, that means you'd go through a number of postdocs before you're given an official (co-)supervisor role, and then the students need to do and defend their PhDs... Even with short 3-year PhDs, completing all this in 5 to 7 years seems a little bit tricky. Now, you say the only merit of Habilitation is to show that someone would be eligible to become professor. That's nice and great for countries where research is only directed by professors. But again, that's not the case in countries where there are large research institutions (like CNRS in France, where people are not Lecturers / Associate Professors / Professors, but just researchers). And even in countries where research is only done by professors, because it is a position before being a title, there are many other reasons than scientific contributions that could lead to someone becoming professor (like when a retiring professor chooses their heir to the chair). All this to say that if being professor plays any role at all (even minimal) in deciding notability, then I see no reason why habilitation shouldn't (again, even minimal). Egaudrain (talk) 14:45, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Please read my comment again. I said "rarely", not "never". Of course there are junior scientists who for some reason or another meet one of our inclusion criteria. --Randykitty (talk) 15:28, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Some non-English Wikipedias view all full professors (in well regarded institutions) as notable - we don't. Habilitation, per my understanding, does not always imply academic rank and is in any event less than full professor. Icewhiz (talk)
While this risks veering this discussion of topic, I am wondering if those other Wikiepdias aren't doing it right. Over the last few years I tried and miserably failed to deal with sport spam, i.e. the fact that criteria of inclusion for sportspeople are really low. Two examples: 1) I was told by a cricket fan that one-sentence bios of 19th century players who participated in a single game, scored a single point, and about whom we know nothing else will be kept because they, the fans, created the policy, and they will outvote anyone interested in changing it. Which of course was correct, as when I proposed to change the policy, nobody else was interested in changing the status quo. 2) I had similar experience with trying to change the notability criteria for cyclists; long story short the relevant guideline is imprecise and states that any participant of some types of races is notable, but said type of races are not even indexed anywhere. And again we have a ton of bios about cyclists who just rode in some low-key event and the articles are kept due to NPSPORTS. Yes, I think I tried and RfC and again, nobody cared, or not enough people cared to over-rule the cyclist fans, so the usual no-consensus for change situation occurred. At which point I stopped caring about sports bio since they are effectively untouchable. But if the treshold for sportspeople is so low, why do we try to uphold higher standards? An academic with few publications put about as much effort and had about as much impact as a low-level yet 'speedy keep' sports bio. If we cannot standardize to higher standards, maybe we should standardize to low-standards, just like those non-English wikis you mention do. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:07, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I think the bar for sports notability is too low. However in the vast majority of cases there is reliable independent secondary sourcing for a sportsfigure. WIth NPROF sometimes our only reliable source is the university bio of the academic. Hardly an independent secondary source. I think the answer to raise sport notability but I think lowering the notability threshold in an area where good sourcing is already hard to come by for some who are notable under existing standards is the wrong move for its own reasons. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 13:16, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
(ec) Poitrus, I agree completely with you about the sport spam. Often enough I am forced to close such AfDs at keep because of the overwhelming "keep" !votes. Those 19th century cricket bios are indeed absolutely ridiculous. But if we descend to that level all over WP, then we just become Facebook. The solution is not to water down everything until it matches the sports stuff. And don't give up. Remember how years ago WP was ridiculed for having detailed articles on each and every Pokemon character? That got cleaned up in the end. And recently a lot of "supercentenarian" fancruft has been cleaned away, too, after years of staunch defenses by the fans ("she's 111, that's notable", "she had 8 birthdays in a row that were all covered in the local newspaper, that's continuing coverage of multiple events so 1E does not apply"). Let's hope that the same happens with the sportsbios while meanwhile we keep up reasonable standards here. --Randykitty (talk) 13:24, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
And Barkeep is of course right, too. Every major newspaper has a sports section, filled with reliable info on even the most minor sportsfigure. But as far as I know, science supplements are invariably less frequent (if the newspaper even has them) and rarely focus on the person of an academic, instead of on their work. We have to live with that (but still should get rid of those 19th century permastubs). --Randykitty (talk) 13:26, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
(ec) I think the Hebrew Wikipedia confers notability on full professors (at least in the top Israeli universities) - I can't find the notability guideline there at the moment, but I think so (for mayors/local-council heads - even very small ones - it is for everyone (even very small ones)) - I don't think that's a bad notability guideline in the Hebrew Wikipedia (getting full professorship in a top Israeli university is hard - very hard - and usually occurs in one's late 40s or 50s, and is impossible without good publishing output) - but the amount of Israeli full professors (or Polish professors with a habilitation on the Polish Wikipedia) - is limited. I don't think it's a good criteria for the English Wikipedia (as the English Wikipedia covers a number of different English speaking countries + non-English speaking countries - and you have a whole set of different academic standards (from MIT - to small time colleges in the backwoods). We already effectively lower the bar in NPROF (below GNG). As for sportspeople - I think the bar there in SNGs too low - particularly in NFOOTY - take a look at User:Levivich/Footy AfDs (which is trying to evaluate NFOOTY). Icewhiz (talk) 13:28, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I'd also like to lower the WP:PROF bar, in line with other SNGs. Habilitation (≈ tenure in North America ≈ Reader in the UK ≈ etc.) would be one good rule of thumb. But I've been banging that drum for a while. – Joe (talk) 16:56, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

  • First, habilitation is in no way similar to tenure in North America, it's two very different things (one is a qualification that may even be obtained by a jobless person, the other confers job security). Second, I know plenty of tenured or habilitated academics who are not notable in the least. I am 100% against lowering the bar here to the above-referenced 19th century cricket levels. --Randykitty (talk) 17:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Yes, and a British Readership is different by both. My point was that they represent roughly equivalent milestones in an academic career, not that they're functionally the same.
Lowering it to cricket levels would be saying anybody who has written a published academic paper is notable – I suggested that once, but I don't think it would ever get enough support.
In my view the obsession with GNG-style sourcing as the One True Standard of notability is regrettable. We don't have to have a lengthy treatment of every subject. Wikipedia isn't just an online Encyclopaedia Britannica. It's also supposed to incorporate "specialised encyclopaedias, almanacs, and gazetteers" of catalogable fields of knowledge, like geography, sport, or academia. How on earth can it be a bad thing that our readers can search for the name of an obscure 19th cricketer and find out the basic facts of his life? And wouldn't it be cool if they could do the same for the author of an obscure 19th century academic paper on wicket manufacturing? – Joe (talk) 21:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Well, part of the issue is ethical, at least for some of the living, how close for the obscure individual does a Wikipedia article come to invasion of privacy or doxing. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:18, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Joe Roe Except more reliable independent secondary sourcing about 19th century cricketers is out there than about professors who write obscure 21st century papers about wicket manufacturing (whatever the century). Regardless of how just our different SNGs are in comparison to each other, I am opposed to broadening this standard given the need to so often rely on university bios which are clearly neither independent nor secondary but are the closest thing we have in many circumstances to a reliable source. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

If a person is otherwise notable it can be noted that a person holds a habilitation, but a habilitation by itself does not confer notability on the en Wiki just as holding a full professorship does not. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC).

Certainly not evidence of notability; nor is the next rung up the ladder. It would be useful if we had an idea of how many of these are awarded annually, in say Germany. I suspect the number is large. @Joe, I have been arguing for years that we have far too many biographies of all types; most of them get tiny views, and don't add to what the first 3 google hits tell you anyway. Meanwhile our highly viewed articles on topics improve at a glacial pace, in large part because the dwindling percentage of our editors who actually write text at all are obsessed with writing new bigraphies. I'd ban all new biographies, except for the newly-notable, for at least 6 months. The benefit to the rest of the encyclopaedia would be enormous. Johnbod (talk) 00:20, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
@Johnbod: sadly, although I have sympathy with your view, I think it would make no difference to the expansion of existing articles, which is much harder work than creating stubs. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:53, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I also wish our core articles were better (especially in the topic areas Johnbod and I share an interest in), but I don't think it's an either-or situation. If I have a spare hour, I can write a short biography of someone who has made a contribution to human knowledge. I rarely find the time to devote to overhauling a topic overview. – Joe (talk) 11:01, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

It seems to me that all(?) other Wikipedia editions regard full professors at well-regarded institutions (typically understood to be a country's best universities or equivalent research institutions) as notable. I believe that, in practice, this is also the usual result of AfD discussions here as long as the article is written in an encyclopedic, well referenced and not unduly promotional manner. If someone wrote an article on a typical full professor at Harvard, Yale or some other university that is generally considered to be among the best in his/her country, would the article typically be deleted if it was written in an encyclopedic manner?

The English Wikipedia is known on other projects for having unusually high (at least in theory) and very complex notability criteria for academics. They are written from an American perspective, require a significant degree of familiarity with the research and higher education sectors and in different countries to be understood and interpreted correctly, and often lead to somewhat arbitrary results across disciplines, countries, and depending on the editors who happen to participate in the discussions.

I believe that a criterion like "a full professor or equivalent at a well-regarded university or research institution is generally assumed to be notable" would greatly simplify AfD discussions on academics and make them more predictable and understandable. It easily identifies an individual as someone who has reached the top position in the research hierarchy of their country, based on the recognition of fellow academics, in a way even non-experts can easily comprehend. Someone who is a full professor in this sense and at a well-regarded institution is by definition a figure of at least some public interest. I don't think such a criterion would in practice lower the bar to a very significant degree.

I don't think a Habilitation in itself is sufficient, but in the countries where the Habilitation exists, there is quite a step up from just having a Habilitation to becoming a full professor (Ordinarius or modern equivalent) at a well-regarded university. --Bjerrebæk (talk) 08:44, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

About US full professors, there is a case that all full professors at very high-prestige US universities may be notable, but that, for high-quality US research universities that are not in the (approximately) very highest tier, it's really the promotion from full professor to full professor with a named chair that meets the criteria here. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:07, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Law school Deans. Med school Deans. Are they notable?

I recently submitted a new article about a man who had been the Dean of three different US accredited graduate-level law schools that grant juris doctor degrees.

An editor declined the submission. On the basis that the subject had only been the Dean of the three law schools.

The law schools of which he had been Dean all had Wikipedia articles. One was the fifth-oldest law school in the country in continuous operation. Another was a "highly selective" US News & World Report tier 1 law school, considered one of the Princeton Review's Best Law Schools of 2018.

The editor said the subject of the bio did not satisfy Wikipedia:Notability (academics) criterion 6.

That criterion says the person is notable if he/she: "has held a highest-level ... administrative post at a major academic institution...."

Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#Specific_criteria_notes, point #6, adds some gloss. It says that "Criterion 6 may be satisfied, for example, if the person has held the post of president or chancellor (or vice-chancellor in countries where this is the top academic post) of a significant accredited college or university, director of a highly regarded, notable academic independent research institute or center (which is not a part of a university) ... etc. Lesser administrative posts (provost, dean, department chair, etc.) are generally not sufficient...."

"Dean" means different things, depending upon context. Undergraduate school deans and law school/med school Deans are very different animals.

In the case of US graduate-level law schools, the Dean of the law school is the person who has the highest-level administrative post. It is not a "lesser" (i.e., non-highest level) post.

This differs from being a dean (or department chair) at a US college (such as a dean of students at an undergraduate college, or a dean of the college of arts and sciences at an undergraduate university with a number of colleges), where that position is often not the highest-level administrative post. This undergraduate dean - context suggests - is what the reference in Note Point 6 refers to.

Even the poorly referenced Wikipedia definition of dean notes this difference between being the Dean of a law school/med school, and being the dean of a college/university.

It is worth noting that the law school or medical school may not even be affiliated with any undergraduate institution. Consider Brooklyn Law School. Or the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. It makes no sense to say a Dean of Brooklyn Law School is notable, but a Dean of Harvard Law School is not.

Law school Deans are at least one cut above deans of primarily undergraduate divisions within colleges and universities. There are over 4,000 universities and colleges in the US. There are only about 200 ABA-accredited US law schools. And students in the US go through undergraduate university first, before they go to graduate-level law school.

I believe this reference to "deans" should be revised in WP:NACADEMIC. Recognizing (as the Wikipedia entry for Dean does), the difference between undergraduate deans (of undergraduate colleges, etc.) and graduate law school and medical school deans. The second grouping should be recognized as notable. That way, we won't have to worry about editors nominating for deletion (or not allowing on Wikipedia) articles such as that on former Harvard Law school Dean Albert Sacks - whose only claim to notability in his article is that he was ... a law school Dean.

BTW, there is a country distinction here. In some countries, one can become a lawyer by undergraduate study. Not in the US. So the approach that is best to adopt may differ by country. 2604:2000:E010:1100:8069:D17F:7325:3D9 (talk) 03:43, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

You are incorrect when you say that deans are the highest-level academic post in their institution (except in the special case of standalone law schools like Hastings). That would be the university president, provost, or chancellor (whatever they call it at that particular university). Deans are a much lower-level administrative position, too low to be notable ex officio. They have to earn their notability the hard way, through scholarship or press coverage. I should point out also that, although deans often hold an ex officio endowed professorship, those also don't count towards academic notability — that's only through professorships given for scholarship at a level beyond the usual full professor level. And your longwinded request to carve out exemptions for one particular field of scholarship comes across as special pleading. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
Sorry but I'm not convinced, either. I briefly considered arguing for or discussing an exemption for deans of particularly important, prestigious, or independent (despite being part of a larger university) schools but I couldn't even convinced myself of that especially since most of those people will be notable even outside of their administrative position. ElKevbo (talk) 13:51, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I personally do not see why a law/med school dean should be considered differently than the dean of any school within a university. The argument that they are somehow different is not convincingly made. The dean of a reputable school of business, say the Wharton School isn't somehow a lesser posting than the dean of a reputable law school. To attempt to set law/med schools apart as disciplines more notable than any other is, to say the least, improper. A school of law that is independent of any other overseeing organization is a different case. The person who is dean of such a school has no reporting lines above them other than a board of trustees or some similar body. Such a person is the senior posting for the school, and as such would have considerably more responsibility than the dean of a school within a larger institution. You note Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as a medical example, yet that school is not independent at all. The dean of that school has a president above them to report to. So I would say the head of a fully independent organization, whether called a dean or no, is by WP:NACADEMIC notable. If they have a reporting line within a larger organization then their responsibilities are less and therefore fail WP:NACADEMIC. That's the line in the sand. It needs to be drawn somewhere. If we decree that deans of law/med schools are notable by being deans, then so should all deans. Setting them apart is wrong. --Hammersoft (talk) 16:13, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
    The IP copied a few of the points I made in a previous discussion on a particular law school dean. As I said there, I think that we can split the hair on this and find ways to increase the weight given to law school and medical school deans without necessarily considering them to be inherently notable. As noted, there are only about 200 accredited American law schools, and about 170 accredited American medical schools, and there have been far fewer than that in the past, so if we exclude interim and acting deans, we are talking about perhaps a few thousand people who have historically been dean of either type of institution. I would think that some degree of notability could be presumed for people who served as deans of schools considered to be in the upper echelon of the field, for those who have served as deans of multiple law schools or medical schools, or for those who served as a dean for an exceptionally long time (for example, for more than a decade). Furthermore, law schools and medical schools are different. I think this is demonstrated by the fact that Wikipedia has an individual article on every American law school and medical school, but has comparatively few articles on individual schools of arts and sciences or schools of education, for example. bd2412 T 16:58, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
      • I don't see how having fewer schools of law/med makes them inherently more notable. I also do not see how law/med schools are somehow more prestigious simply by way of having more complete coverage on Wikipedia. That would be a circular argument; Wikipedia says they are notable therefore they are notable. I don't see how differentiating between law/med schools and other disciplines is justifiable. Would Albert Einstein be less notable than Hugo Black simply because the former was a physicist and the latter a lawyer? Similarly, I don't see how a law school is inherently more notable than an education school based on discipline alone, nor the deans thereof. If you want to etch out a narrow case for deans of schools that are in the upper echelon, it might be dicey to do but possible. I could see a stronger argument for schools that attained status as an upper echelon school while under the direction of a particular dean. However, I think both such narrow cases are corner cases that would rarely arise. If a person becomes dean of a highly prestigious school, it's likely they are notable for things other than being a dean before becoming so. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:27, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
        • If every university could have a law school and a medical school, there would be many more than there are. That was actually the case prior to the American Civil War, when there were no national governing bodies accrediting professional programs at all, and someone could even become a doctor or a lawyer on their own by studying relevant texts and having someone already in that line of work sign off on their being competent to be in that line of work. The poor training of many people in the medical field was exposed when dealing with the high numbers of illnesses and injuries occasioned by the war, which propelled investigations leading to the establishment of the Association of American Medical Colleges in 1876. The best source for the history of all this is James J. Smith and Lucy S. Shaker, Looking Back, Looking Ahead: A History of American Medical Education (2003). Lawyers, considering themselves equal to doctors in the ranks of the professions, basically copied this with the establishment of the Association of American Law Schools in 1900. These organizations, in turn, established a series of principles that set legal and medical education aside from most other fields of education, specifically that a) no university can have an accredited law school or medical school except as accredited by these national bodies; b) law schools and medical schools are required to a have dedicated space, usually their own dedicated building, as well as resources reserved for use of only students in that school, such as a dedicated law library; c) no student may matriculate to such a school without obtaining an undergraduate degree; and d) it is generally impossible (with very rare and difficult exceptions) to enter the practice of the profession itself without obtaining a degree at an institution accredited by the national body. One can become a businessperson without a business degree at all, or a teacher without an education degree, or an artist or writer or architect without a degree in the corresponding field. It is, legally, virtually impossible to become a doctor or lawyer without passing through one of the relatively small number of institutions accredited for that purpose. The AALS also requires that all law schools "shall have a full-time dean who devotes substantially all of his or her working time to the responsibilities of being a dean, including the dean’s responsibilities as a member of the faculty". With respect to law schools, the unique autonomy of the institution has been described as follows:

Both the ABA's Standards for Approval of Law Schools and the AALS's Articles helped to create and perpetuate the uniqueness of the law school within the university. Requirements as to faculty teaching loads, academic standards for students, academic freedom and tenure, and law library independence helped create and maintain a position of strength within the university. The university administration recognized that the law faculty should control its own curriculum, its student body, and its own faculty and decanal appointments. The law school was even to have its own separate alumni association.
- James P. White, "Legal Education in the Era of Change: Law School Autonomy", 1987 Duke Law Journal 292-305 (1987)

I am sure that comparable literature can be found for medical schools. In short, there are external sources confirming the proposition that these entities are different from other kinds of university schools and colleges, and that their deans exercise an autonomy and authority within them that differs from those of other university and college deans. bd2412 T 22:49, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
I am also sure that comparable literature could be found for medical schools and possibly a few other disciplines such as theology and engineering. But I'm not eager to go down the road of deeming some disciplines more notable than others. More importantly, I'm still confused as to why these people don't qualify as notable using the other criteria or even the general notability criteria especially if they're as highly qualified as your argument seems to be making them out to be. ElKevbo (talk) 00:17, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
The same issue exists for university presidents. If someone creates an article on a past president of a relatively minor university, with sources sufficient to show that the person held that office, but without providing much more, the article will not be targeted for deletion as non-notable, but rather will be targeted for improvement. One could easily ask why university presidents don't qualify as notable using the other criteria or under the general notability criteria. The answer is that they generally do, and keeping the articles allows this information to develop. bd2412 T 03:10, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
Unconvinced by tendentious and verbose special pleading. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC).
agree w/ both editors above(Johnbod and Xxanthippe)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:03, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
And so do I. --Randykitty (talk) 17:22, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
@Xxanthippe: I want to push back a bit against the "tendentious and verbose" objection; I don't see either the one post by the unregistered editor or the three posts by bd2412 to be either. More importantly, I worry that this objection will stifle discussion and discourage those editors from making further contributions in Talk pages. ElKevbo (talk) 03:05, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
For the record, I have cited peer-reviewed or otherwise reliable external sources explaining specific characteristics of law schools which directly impact the notability of the deans of such institutions. Citation of evidence is the exact opposite of "special pleading". However, I have at the same time not proposed that all law school deans should be considered inherently notable, but that those who serve in such offices for an exceptionally long tenure, or who hold that office successively in multiple institutions, should be. I consider such notability a placeholder to encourage the search for sources, which are not always immediately available in electronic form for deans who served in the pre-electronic age. bd2412 T 03:35, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Just a note: I am not a fan of using the wording "inherently notable". Most of us "know" this actually means presumed notable, which is a far better way of stating this, but some editors especially some newer ones, take it at face value to mean intrinsically notable regardless of sourcing policies and guidelines. I maintain that we do acknowledge certain things as having "Inherent Wikipedia-style notability", and as such are not normally challenged. This is only because we generally accept that "others have deemed it worthy of being written about" but if challenged we defer to policies and guidelines for minimum allowable sourcing.
Comments: Anyway, I do have an issue with the presumption that a professor with a chair might be notable but the esteemed person, that many times was responsible for allowing the appointment of a chair, sometimes being the dean of a school (not just a department) alone. Many times a dean has achieved independent notability just not as "academically papered". In some schools a dean has more "power" than others. While a dean may be allowed to "appoint" a chair with advice and consent of a provost or president (or both), sometimes I have seen this as a given meaning the appointment (or even removal) by a dean will not be questioned. I just think this should be considered when we are discussing any "presumed" or possible notability of a dean when the position gives certain "authority". Some schools do give this authority to a dean alone as there may not be a provost. A dean could be in that position for many years whereas a chair may have a one year appointment (or two or three) subject to review but some chairs are reviewed annually. A school may have several chairs "rotate out" while the same dean is in charge. Maybe I am looking at this wrong but the "boss" that can appoint or remove a chair should have some consideration of presumed notability. To me it seems some chairs are the property of the school and some chairs are the property (not sure if this is the correct terminology) of a certain professor, even specifically carrying that person's name. I would think these types of appointments require board approval. At any rate, I can see why a dean of certain schools would have "presumed notability" especially considering the quote by User:BD2412 above. A look at certain college structures makes it clear of the authority given to some deans. This may be a "US-only discussion" but as a fact would offer an "exception" when this is evident. Otr500 (talk) 08:09, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
This is one place where I would change the standard. They are more autonomous that the Deans of other colleges within a university. Law does use different standards. (The extent to which this is actually rational is another matter--I think it rather reflects the political power of those in this field). Medical school deans similarly can be autonomous, (and again this may not be rational , and in this case reflects the ability to get money for the university) DGG ( talk ) 16:51, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
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