Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)

This miscellaneous page was nominated for deletion on 7 February 2006. The result of the discussion was keep. An archived record of this discussion can be found here.

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

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

Law school deans (in the U.S.)

I'd like to propose that the notes regarding criteria #6 be expanded to include law school deans, at least in the United States. A law school dean is simply not comparable to a department chair. The American Bar Association sets forth regulations on the operation of law schools which must be followed for such an institution to receive and maintain ABA accreditation. These regulations specify that "A law school shall have a full-time dean, selected by the governing board or its designee, to whom the dean shall be responsible". ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools, Standard 206(a).

Thus, a law school dean may not simply be a professor selected by fellow professors, nor even by the President of the University. Various provisions in the ABA regulations act to require that a law school will have substantial independence from the university with which it is affiliated, so the law school dean effectively holds the highest post within a distinct academic institution. As an anecdotal matter, no one arrives at the decanal position in an American law school without achieving some status in some aspect of the legal community.

I'd add that similar standards are probably applicable to medical school deans, although I have nothing specific to cite for that hunch.

Cheers! bd2412 T 01:29, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Further to the above, I did a bit of research and, unsurprisingly, found that similar standards exist with respect to medical school deans. Specifically, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which accredits medical schools, thereby making them eligible for federal grants and state licensure, sets forth the following conditions:

IS-7. Administrative officers and members of a medical school faculty must be appointed by, or on the authority of, the governing board of the medical school or its parent university.

IS-8. The chief official of the medical school, who usually holds the title "dean," must have ready access to the university president or other university official charged with final responsibility for the school, and to other university officials as are necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of the dean's office.

IS-9. There must be clear understanding of the authority and responsibility for medical school matters among the vice president for health affairs, the dean of the medical school, the faculty, and the directors of the other components of the medical center and university.

IS-10. The dean must be qualified by education and experience to provide leadership in medical education, scholarly activity, and care of patients.

...

FA-12. The dean and a committee of the faculty should determine medical school policies.

Taken together, these requirements indicate that appointment of a medical school dean is outside the reach of the university president, and that a medical school dean must also be a scholar in the field, and must have policy-making authority within the school. Hence, it should be clear that both law school deans and medical school deans are, by dint of their position, inherently notable. bd2412 T 17:24, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

What is the particular issue that these proposed additional guidelines will help clear up? I don't believe that there has been a problem of notable academic deans being deleted at AfD, has there? I feel that we should add guidelines only when they help prevent likely (or persistent) wrong AfD outcomes; otherwise the guidelines become too unwieldy. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 17:56, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Actually, exactly this topic came up at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David Epstein (law professor), where another editor asserted that these guidelines exclude law school deans as the equivalent of department chairs (which I then did the research to address). bd2412 T 16:51, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but in his case there was little doubt that he was notable anyway by other criteria. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:02, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Still, the point was raised, and his holding of that position should have been dispositive if these criteria were implemented correctly. bd2412 T 19:51, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

• (unindent) As far as I can see, the point was brought up by yourself. I don't yet see any reason to change this policy for law deans. I have to admit that I find the "precedence" for that (the named chair rule) the weakest part of this policy. --Crusio (talk) 20:09, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

  For the record, Niteshift36 was the first to bring up the fact of this person being a law school dean, and my research was in reponse to Amthernandez going ballistic over the assertion that law school deans are inherently notable (which, pursuant to the above-noted ABA regulations, they clearly are, as are medical school deans pursuant to the above-noted LCME regulations). Deans of medical schools and law schools are nothing like "named chairs" (whom the Dean typically has power to appoint), and if the rules are ambiguous enough to allow such a frivolous argument to be made, then the rules need to be clarified. bd2412 T 01:11, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• Oops, my bad about who brought it up first in that AfD. The point is rather immaterial, though. As for Deans having the power to appoint a named chair, that goes for any school, Law, Medical, or other. No Dean however, will be able to make such an appointment on her/his own: there is always a search committee and basically it is they who decide. --Crusio (talk) 07:36, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• Part of the distinction arises from the nature of law schools in the United States - every American law school is a wholly postgraduate institution, meaning that an applicant must have already received a four-year bachelor's degree from a college or university in order to even be considered for admission to a law school (medical schools have the same restriction). Of course, no law school graduate may practice law in the U.S. without passing a state bar exam, which is why bar associations wield such expansive influence over the operation of law schools. This is why those law schools that are affiliated with a university tend to operate as institutions functionally separate from the university itself. They have their own libraries and other facilities, graduation ceremonies, distinct alumni associations, etc. The substantial restrictions imposed on the operation of law schools is one reason why, with over 5,750 accredited institutions of higher education throughout the United States, there are only 200 accredited law schools. Think about that - in the entire country, which has well over 5,000 colleges and universities, and over a million lawyers, there are only 200 law school deanships. bd2412 T 08:50, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

If there are no objections from anyone familiar with American law schools and medical schools, I will specify in the appropriate section that in the United States, deans of law schools and medical schools are likely to be inherently notable. bd2412 T 18:38, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

• I don't think this would be a good addition (and I have been a faculty member at an American medical school). --Crusio (talk) 18:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Agree with Crusio. I don't see that it matters how many or few there are. I think this rationale confabulates "important person at work" with "historically notable" Pete.Hurd (talk) 21:47, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
    • Then why have criteria number 6 at all? Our standards explicitly hold that a person is "notable" if they have "held a major highest-level elected or appointed academic post at an academic institution"; I have bothered to perform the labor of providing evidence that law school deans and medical school deans hold exactly such a post (and no contrary evidence has been introduced here). Perhaps no amendment to the language of the criteria is necessary, as I can constantly keep a lookout for deletion debates regarding deans of such high-level, independent, professional institutions, and I can duplicate the evidence of this standard being met in each such debate. But that seems an awful waste of resources, since the criteria can simply be clarified to accept the evidence as provided. bd2412 T 22:53, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
      • You have not "provided evidence", you have asserted your opinion. The guidelines explicitly exclude deans and that exception has not been inserted by accident. --Crusio (talk) 00:24, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
        • What? I can assure you that the American Bar Association guidelines for accreditation of law schools are not my "opinion" - as great as it would be to be in a position to direct the level of independence with which all 200 such institutions are to operate, those are someone else's "opinions". Furthermore, those "opinions" are binding on every law school in this country. Those, along with the comparable rules governing medical school accreditation, constitute the evidence to which I was referring. bd2412 T 01:12, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

• Of course those are not your opinion. But it is your opinion that those ABA guidelines imply automatic notability for deans of law schools. --Crusio (talk) 01:32, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

• What the ABA guidelines do is make it clear that a law school dean is the "highest-level elected or appointed academic post at an academic institution". There is no place for opinion to enter into it, unless someone is proposing to remove criteria 6, which I have not heard yet. As you have been on the faculty of an American medical school, let me ask you, was the dean of that school lacking in notability? bd2412 T 01:49, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

• (unindent) The highest official is the president or chancellor, not a dean, regardless of what school. --Crusio (talk) 02:17, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Albany Law School. William Mitchell College of Law. Thomas M. Cooley Law School. I could go on. bd2412 T 02:34, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

This discussion thread makes a case that academic standards for publishing and hiring in law might actually be significantly laxer than other areas. If so, we should apply more scrutiny to law deans, not less — if one can become a dean of a major school of law on the basis of a slim-to-nonexistent record of academic publication and jurisprudence, we'd need some other part of the record to shine in order to have something to say about the subject other than the mere fact of his or her position. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:46, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm not ready to base notability criteria on someone's rather spiteful blog post. I would prefer to refer to a source that at least meets our own qualifications for use as a reference, such as Daniel Rodriguez, The Market for Deans, University of San Diego School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series, No. 08-037 (July 2008), publication forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2010), available on SSRN. It begins, "Deans are extremely important figures in the performance of American law schools in modern times. And given the growing complexity of legal education, we can expect that the importance of law school deans and deaning will only expand in the coming years". I also wouldn't put too much stock in an analysis of the academic qualifications of the Dean of Harvard Law School, because the school is prestigious enough that it can afford to roll the dice on a decanal candidate with an atypical background for the position. Paradoxically, it a Harvard Law School Dean would be inherently notable for having been the Dean of Harvard Law School (just as the newly minted CEO of Microsoft would be instantly notable for holding the position, even compared to someone who had helmed a lesser software company for decades. bd2412 T 21:43, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Basically, the argument that law deans are somehow more intrinsically notable than other deans strikes me as special pleading. Kagan's probably a bad example in this regard because she's clearly notable, but I just don't see the evidence for this as a general principle, and this case shows that in some cases law deans may be significantly less accomplished academically than one would expect deans in most other disciplines to be. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:47, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

It shows that in one case, not in "some cases". Provide another example of a law school dean who is similarly "less accomplished academically" and can not otherwise be shown to be notable based on general notability criteria, and you'll have "some cases". bd2412 T 22:10, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

You mean like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Phillip Saunders? —David Eppstein (talk) 22:20, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Not to split hairs, but obviously the dean of a Canadian law school need not have the level of authority and autonomy required by the American Bar Association. I should qualify my initial statement, then, to say that American law school deans are inherently notable, which is a function of the unique nature of American law schools, as compared to legal education departments in other countries. bd2412 T 22:27, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

So now you're arguing for special treatment of American academics vis-a-vis those in other countries, as well as special treatment of legal academics vis-a-vis those in other disciplines? —David Eppstein (talk) 23:14, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Actually, no. This conversation is about law school deans, not "academics" by country or by discipline. Would you say that university presidents are deemed notable because they receive special treatment relative to academics in other disciplines? I would refer you, again, to the ABA requirements which set forth objective standards giving American law school deans greater authority and autonomy than deans of other departments typically enjoy. bd2412 T 23:29, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

You have documented standards for the authority that deans of law enjoy. You have not documented any basis for comparison between those standards and those of other disciplines. As for university presidents, I am not aware of any restrictions on the disciplines they might be drawn from. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:52, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Are you asking me to prove a negative, with respect to the lack of comparable authority and autonomy of deans of other academic units? As for university presidents, I do not contend that any such restrictions exist. In fact, a university president may come from a wholly non-academic background, perhaps coming straight from Congress or a major CEO position. Law school deans may also be drawn from wholly non-academic backgrounds. Plenty come straight from being a federal judge or head of a government agency or from the Congress. In that sense, they are the same except that the law school dean (typically) must have a law degree. Our criteria deem notable a person who "has held a major highest-level elected or appointed academic post at an academic institution or major academic society". Under the requirements set forth by the ABA, the deanship of an American law school is such a position, irrespective of the academic background of its holder. bd2412 T 00:21, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

So you keep saying. Maybe if you repeat it enough times it will become true. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:59, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I invite you to read the ABA accreditation requirements, you'll see that they set forth precisely the criteria that I have claimed. These are not optional. A law school that does not meet them does not get accredited, and its students are unable to sit for the bar or practice law in almost all states. If you doubt that the dean is the "highest-level elected or appointed academic post" within a law school, that is also addressed by the ABA accreditation guidelines. bd2412 T 01:07, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

The part I doubt is whether most law school are independent academic institutions of the type intended by this clause. It is not supposed to apply to the highest-level post within an academic department or school or college or research center or program, only to the university as a whole. You are arguing that the clause should be extended, in this one case, to apply to an academic subunit of the university with what seems to me inadequate justification. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:14, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

The ABA accreditation requirements require that law schools be autonomous. As far as I know, this is exceptional (perhaps existing also for medical schools, but not much beyond that). However, I welcome you to provide evidence that such a level of autonomy is the norm for accreditation in other disciplines. In fact, there are several freestanding American law schools, not attached to any college or university. Would you agree that they are "independent academic institutions"? bd2412 T 01:24, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

The freestanding ones, sure. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:50, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

So you would agree that the dean of a freestanding law school such as the Appalachian School of Law or a Miles Law School - or even one of the unaccredited Lincoln Law School branches - would be inherently notable under our current criteria? bd2412 T 02:21, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

We have deleted articles about heads of schools before, if we were not convinced that the school was particularly significant. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:27, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Then the criteria needs to be reworded to indicate that. Right now, it fairly expressly states that someone who "has held a major highest-level elected or appointed academic post at an academic institution" is inherently notable, without incorporating the sort of qualifier that you have just added. bd2412 T 03:20, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Criterion 5: named/personal chair?

Criterion 5 currently reads:

"The person holds or has held a named/personal chair appointment or "Distinguished Professor" appointment at a major institution of higher education and research."

I'd like to propose deletion of "personal" from the above. In my understanding, a "personal chair" is just any full professorship other than a named chair or a departmental chair, i.e. as Professor#Most other English-speaking countries says, "a professorship awarded specifically to that individual". Are we really such a position at a major institution is automatically notable? This would seem to contradict Note 13, "Lesser administrative posts (Provost, Dean, Department Chair, etc) are generally not sufficient to satisfy Criterion 6". So a personal chair is notable, but being department chair isn't?? Unless the restriction to "major" institutions meant to be highly restrictive, rather than just meaning e.g. any accredited university? I'd welcome others' thoughts on this. Regards, Qwfp (talk) 17:35, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

my understanding of personal chair is a chair created specifically for a person or in honor of a person, as distinct from a ordinary chair without specific designation. Chair in department chair is not the same use of the word--normally, it means chairperson in an administrative sense only. DGG ( talk ) 23:17, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

The idea of #named/personal chairs" seems rather specific to the US academic context. I think this criteria should be changed as well to allow for better inclusion of non-American academics.·Maunus·ƛ· 15:53, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

My point was that named and personal chairs are not specific to the US, as both exist in the UK. However, named chairs and personal chairs are two separate and different things with different degrees of prestige associated with them (a named chair being more prestigious than a personal chair). As no-one has disagreed with my proposed change after 5 months i'm going to delete 'personal' from Criterion 5. Qwfp (talk) 19:37, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Then they are specific to an English speaking academic context - they certainly don't exist in Denmark. I'd like to propose a complete removal of this criterion or a rewording to something like "high level academic position" which would respect that not all academic traditions may even have the possibility of professorships. ·Maunus·ƛ· 17:56, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

There seems to be a problem with people trying to apply this criterion -- adapted, it seems, mainly to American academia with its apparent love for bombastic titles -- to professors elsewhere. Please take a look at Talk:Tommy Möller and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tommy Möller, where I have made an admittedly rather long-winded comment trying to explain how named chairs can't be used as a cut-off point for Swedish professors. OTOH, the water has been muddied in the last roughly 15 years through reforms of the academic ranking system. Not sure what the case is in other countries in Europe that have the Lehrstuhl type of professorships, or have had them in the past, but criterion 5 seems to be poorly adapted either to existing differences between systems or to differences over time in changing systems.

(As for Möller, he could possibly squeeze in under criterion 7 as a frequent commentator in media on Swedish politics -- I had heard of him before this discussion, but hardly more than that -- but "substantial impact" would seem to be going quite a bit to far.) --Hegvald (talk) 06:06, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I suggest adding to this criterion that it covers any holder of a professorial chair (that is permanent or has some degree of continuity) in systems where that is the highest available distinction within the university and where named chairs are either very rare or non-existent. --Hegvald (talk) 07:32, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

• I don't support this change. As it is, I already find the assumption that anyone having a "named chair" in the US is notable rather tenuous. The proposed change would basically make every European professor notable, which I doubt is the case. If an academic is notable, we really don't need this criterion, as other will be other accomplishments (awards, notable publications, high citation rates, etc) that will show this. --Crusio (talk) 08:04, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

I was going to say the same thing. There are some charity-endowed named professorships at universities that usually must be given to someone. So, at those institutions you always have someone auto-notable based on that. On the other hand, I've not seen cases where notability depended solely on that, i.e. every prof biography I've see that met that criterion also met some other criteria. So the criterion appears pretty redundant to me, and I suspect it may be possible to game it, just that I haven't seen any biography like that yet. Tijfo098 (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I might have created a test case with Paul Kettl MD. I'm not sure of any other reason for notability other than criterion 5. (not a named chair) Jesanj (talk) 03:39, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

I suspect I'm posting months after anyone's stopped watching this thread. I think I. William Zartman may pass under this criterion and for no other reason. Is there much encyclopedic to this article? JFHJr (㊟) 05:51, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

According to the source for his named professorship, he is the author of seven books, the former president of an academic society, has held named professorships at three different institutions. He's frequently quoted as an expert in the media. And 14 of his publications are listed in Google scholar as having 100 or more citations each. In short, he passes multiple WP:PROF criteria, and is a bad example for whatever point you might be trying to make, except possibly for the point that some of our articles don't adequately describe the things their subjects are notable for. That's a reason to improve the article, not to delete it. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:44, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Notability guideline for academic journals

• I have created a first draft of a notability guideline for academic journals. Please feel free to comment/correct/complete, etc. As it would seem to relate to this guideline, I am posting this notice here, too, so that interested editors can contribute either on the draft's talk page or here. Thanks. --Crusio (talk) 12:48, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
  • In case others are looking, this is now located at Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals). –Paul Erik ^{(talk)(contribs)} 05:33, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Presidents/chancellors of smaller schools

Curious — would the presidents of smaller private schools be considered to pass criterion 6? I have enough information to create stubs on several presidents of Geneva College who did nothing that would make them notable aside from being the Geneva president, but I don't want to do work for articles that will only be deleted. Nyttend (talk) 23:53, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Presidents of academic societies

The guideline 6 has been challenged at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Elizabeth Ann Nalley with respect to a president of the American Chemical Society DGG ( talk ) 21:39, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

will these do for notability?

1. Distinguished Scholar award from the Communal Studies Association 2. Myers Center Award

? 212.200.205.163 (talk) 15:44, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

a) This type of question should probably be raised on WP:Help desk.

b) Neither the Communal Studies Association or the Myers Center seem to be notable so I'd say no. That's just me though.--RDBury (talk) 13:58, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Article of interest

People who have been involved in this guideline might like to comment here: Talk:William_Connolley#WP:ACADEMIC. MickMacNee (talk) 18:55, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Membership to Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and WP:PROF#C3

There are a couple of new articles whose only claim to notability is the subjects' membership to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. (Some of the articles in question: Helge Holden, John Grue, Erling Størmer, Kristian B. Dysthe.) Could someone help me to determine if membership to this academy is sufficient to pass WP:PROF#C3? Le Docteur (talk) 16:51, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Hooshang Heshmat

Claims of notability for the academic Hooshang Heshmat are not supported by any reliable secondary sources. This article could be saved from deletion if sources can be found, but if not, what should be the outcome of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hooshang Heshmat? --Gavin Collins (talk|contribs) 11:56, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

• If you look at the article, you'll see that Dr. Heshmat is not in academia -- having a doctorate doesn't make one an academic. Also, this talk page isn't for the discussion of the notability of individual academics, nor is it for asking leading questions about article deletion discussions, it's for the discussion of the notability guideline for academics in general. -- ArglebargleIV (talk) 18:11, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Connes on citation counts

From a recent interview with well-known mathematician Alain Connes [1] (p.14):

“ I think the number of quotations is a very very strange measure. If you look at citations in mathematics then it doesn’t make sense because there are very hard papers which very few people have read, and in fact there is really an inverse correlation between the difficulty of a paper and the number of people who actually read it, let alone quote it. ”

—David Eppstein (talk) 17:17, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

• How true, I love it! Especially since I am wrestling at this very moment with my presentation (10 days from now...) for the 4-year renewal of our institute, of which citation analysis and impact factors is an important part... :-) --Crusio (talk) 17:22, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Criteria for becoming a Professor in the UK

My understanding is that the typical criteria for becoming a professor in the UK at government funded institutions for higher education is that there is "sufficient evidence of sustained output of high quality, peer-reviewed research publications or other equally recognised forms of research output, and evidence that they have made a significant contribution to the discipline and earned an international reputation." This would seem to me to imply everyone in the UK who is a Professor at such an institution has been judged by an appointments panel to meet a requirment such as No 1 on our list: "1. The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources. " What are the substantial problems with this interpretation? Best wishes (Msrasnw (talk) 16:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC))

I don't know that there is a problem. Professors in the UK are like full professors in the United States, and full professors at research institutions tend to pass this guideline (though, of course, if one failed to do so they would still be non-notable, university appellation notwithstanding). RJC ^Talk_Contribs 19:58, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Failing the Prof test

I have been working on an article on Professor Matthew Watson which has been deleted for lack of notability - failing the Prof test. I have been trying unsuccesfully to get it restored and think I have lost the argument. Is it the intention of those working on the guidlines that such professors might be deemed to have failed the test? Comparing this Matthew Watson with the other Matthew Watsons it seems to me our standards with respect to academics are far more demanding than for US baseball players or US soccer players. Best wishes (Msrasnw (talk) 19:09, 21 November 2009 (UTC))

• Yes, that's true. However, the fact that the jocks can't get their act together is no reason for us to follow their bad example.... --Crusio (talk) 22:55, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

• • My worry is not that there are problems with other articles it is that wikipedia's coverage is good in sports and pop music and films especially US ones but for some reason the academic criteria is far harder than for other areas and indeed than it used to be. It used to be the case that writing a couple of textbooks with a good publisher and publishing lots of articles in peer reviewed journals used to be enough but not anymore. (Msrasnw (talk) 00:38, 22 November 2009 (UTC))

• As far as I can see, writing 1 single text book, as long as it is widely used, suffices to make an academic notable. Writing a bunch of papers doesn't: all academics publish. But if those papers are modestly cited (usually counts of a couple of hundred times in total, with top papers getting 70-80 cites, and/or an h-factor >15, -in the sciences, at least) then that is enough to satisfy notability criteria, too. And (again, in the sciences), anybody below that really isn't that notable. --Crusio (talk) 11:04, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

• I believe that the Professor test is so rigid and the bar set so high as to be dysfunctional. It is a common occurrence for me to notice an article or book or a reference to one by someone I don't know. Type them into google and their wikipedia page comes up. This is useful. Wikipedia has infinite space. I can see no reason why everyone in academia should not be included. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Broad Wall (talk • contribs) 16:39, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

h-index

I can see how h-index might be used for a delete argument, provided the article's only claim to notability is WP:ACADEMIC#1, but I'm unsure how it can be used for a keep argument. As far as I can tell, h-index is not weighted for depth of contribution to a journal article, and for all we know an academic may have contributed only marginally to a specific paper. I'm also unsure if h-index is calculated to account for self-citations. Currently, the project page discusses that the h-index can be used (with great caution) in evaluating whether #1 is satisfied, but I believe it should state that the h-index should only be used to help evaluate (again, with great caution) whether #1 has not been satisfied. Thoughts? Steamroller Assault (talk) 01:36, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, h-index has lots of drawbacks; you mentioned some of them and there are others. Still, a high h-index (e.g. 25+ for experimental sciences) is usually correlated with significant impact of an academic's work. I personally prefer not to base a keep !vote exclusively on a high h-index, but I think it is fine to use it as a contributing factor for a keep !vote. The one (utilitarian) advantage of h-index I see for the purposes of AfD discussions is that it can be quickly and easily computed using, say, GoogleScholar. Nsk92 (talk) 01:50, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

• I see the point, but as far as I am concerned, this discussion remains academic until someone shows me a researcher with an h of 25 who has never signed a paper as first or last author. While possible in theory, it is highly unlikely to occur in reality. Even if it would, someone inan AfD would be bound to notice that the hiugh h was obtained solely through minor authorships. --Crusio (talk) 04:30, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

• Professional lab techs often receive co-authorship on papers, and I'd have to imagine that there are plenty of lab techs with a high h-index. That being said, I bet there isn't a huge lineup to create lab tech articles on Wikipedia. As long as h-index is used as a guide rather than a standard (meaning, there is a convincing argument at AfD on top of the h-index value), I'm inclined to agree with these arguments. Steamroller Assault (talk) 08:09, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

• It'd come back to the same question, anyway—has the person been the subject of significant coverage in independent reliable sources? I'm not sure that all academics with a high h-index actually do meet this standard, and I could probably point out several who meet the "h-index" standard but do not pass the notability requirements. Given that, I'm not sure that the "high h-index" is necessarily good guidance as to when the notability standard is likely met. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 08:45, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
• True, I don't think I've seen an AfD where a "keep" decision was based on h only (but I haven't been following AfDs in this area closely, recently). --Crusio (talk) 09:21, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

• I think I've seen some "keep: h-index = 15" style !votes in the last few months. My impression is that h-indices are mentioned in AfDs as just one more component for the WP:PROF heuristic, in much the way that Steamroller is suggesting they ought to be. I've not noticed anyone claim to know what the threshold value of h-index ought to be (which would be a sure sign of badness). As for Seraphimblade's point, I think that is the age-old WP:GNG only vs WP:PROF argument. Either we delete academic bios for influential researchers, or we continue to try to describe existing rationale behind the emergent consensus for determining whether a researcher is influential and notable using the WP:PROF subguideline (of which one component correlates with h-index in a manner that WP:PROF regulars seem to be able to deal constructively most of the time). Pete.Hurd (talk) 21:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

RfC Using citation totals in articles on academics

Related to the above discussion is the RfC at Talk:Steve Shnider where citation totals have been quoted in the article lead. Your comments are welcome. Ash (talk) 09:11, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Academic society

Criterion 6 talks about holding a major highest-level post at a "major academic society", while Note 13 says this criterion can be satisfied by being "president of a notable national or international scholarly society, etc." Well, major is not the same as notable - which is it? I suggest we need to change one of these wordings to make it consistent. I found this conflict looking at the Society for Biblical Studies in India, which appears to be notable (since it has an article) but could hardly be considered "major". StAnselm (talk) 21:34, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Fundamentally flawed

Any notability guidelines that doesn't require any secondary sourcing at all is fundamentally flawed. An AfD I started is heading toward a Keep closure because of a high citation index for someone who has no secondary source coverage yet located. Surely that wasn't the intention of this guideline? We've pretty much turned the policy into "all well-published academics are inherently notable, regardless of secondary coverage" at this point. Gigs (talk) 13:56, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I would change that to "most well-cited academics are notable, regardless of secondary coverage". Tkuvho (talk) 14:03, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Fine with me. That still presents a serious verifiability problem and a conflict with the somewhat accepted idea that we no longer tolerate completely unsourced BLPs. Gigs (talk) 14:08, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I think you should distinguish between notability and verifiability. Somebody may well be notable, but if there are no reliable sources that can be used to base an article upon, article creation might still be impossible. However, note that "non-independent" sources (such as faculty pages) may be used to source non-controversial information. --Crusio (talk) 14:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

The purpose of notability standards on Wikipedia are to determine what is acceptable as a topic for an article. If, as you assert, there are subjects that pass the notability standard but are unsuitable for an article topic, then that notability standard is, by definition, flawed. Gigs (talk) 23:20, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

A citation from a refereed journal is an independent, reliable and verifiable source of notability and therefore almost ideal for assessing the notability of a publishing scholar. This is made clear in WP:Prof. Xxanthippe (talk) 06:41, 17 March 2010 (UTC).

INdeed, see Wikipedia:GNG#Notability requires verifiable evidence. If you're looking for notability criteria that don't require any sources at all, try Wikipedia:Notability (people)#Athletes. --Crusio (talk) 07:51, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I have much the same issue with WP:ATHLETE and WP:PORNBIO as well. I'm not quite as concerned about those because porn stars and athletes rarely create unsourced and unverifiable flattering articles about themselves, unlike academics. Gigs (talk) 15:12, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Gigs, your statement that anybody who's published will pass suggests you haven't spent much time watching deletion discussions on academics. Standards regarding the degree to which they're published and cited, while amorphous, are enforced. Ray^Talk 19:14, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

It seems from this discussion and from the AfD debate Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David S. Alberts that Gigs either does not understand WP:Prof or refuses to accept it as WP policy. In either case it might be advisable for a person in this situation to direct his AfD nominations elsewhere than to academic areas. Further, Gigs's arguments are not advanced by placing threats on my talk page. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:35, 17 March 2010 (UTC).

I already told you once to stop with the personal comments. Gigs (talk) 02:36, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Ray, I said "well published". The problem is not so much that too many are passing the standard, it's that the standard is divorced from the concept of independent coverage of the subject of the article that our primary notability guideline requires. Academic citations more indicate that the work of the professor is notable, not the professor himself. The assertion that using only self published (university bios might as well be self-published) sources is acceptable contradicts WP:SELFPUB #5. Gigs (talk) 02:50, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

This "notability for the work not for the person" is a bad argument that keeps coming up here, and you should feel bad for repeating it. Barack Obama is not notable outside of his work as a politician. Shakespeare is not notable outside of his work as a playwright. For the same reason we should not expect academics to be notable outside of their work. But some academics are notable for their work, others are not, and that distinction is what this standard is aimed at. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:30, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Plenty of independent sources have written about Barack Obama in a biographical capacity, same with Shakespeare. Being notable for your work and producing notable work are indeed two separate things, even if the two often do coincide. I suggest that if this argument keeps coming up it's because it's a logical one! Gigs (talk) 03:36, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It is often, if not usually, the case that the work of a professor is notable, not the professor himself. The concept is entrenched in WP:Prof. The professor is notable for his or her published research or scholarship just as a novelist is notable for his published novels or a musician is notable for his performed music. In all cases it is required to be proved that the creative output for which the person is deemed to be notable has actually been noted. This is particularly easy for researchers because of the citation system. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC).

Confusion sometimes arises from a misunderstanding of what our notability guideline WP:N says. Many topics qualify as notable under its first section, the GNG of substantial coverage in multiple reliable independent sources, but WP:N says that wikipedia notability can come from satisfying either the GNG or a specialized notability guideline. Of course sourcing for everything is eventually necessary. If one wants to think about it that way, one can consider the sources used to prove satisfaction of a specialized guideline to be these independent RS's for the GNG. The special biographical guidelines cover areas where consensus has arisen that their satisfaction proves notability, even when direct biographical coverage may be lacking; where consensus has been that production of so much notable work defines being (wikipedia-)notable for this work.John Z (talk) 07:21, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Shorter version of what John Z said: WP:PROF has nothing to do with WP:GNG. They're independent guidelines, and WP:PROF does not require extensive biographical content. If you have a problem with the existence of the guideline, Gigs, you can try to get a consensus to overturn it, but I would suggest there are more fruitful uses of your time. Ray^Talk 17:42, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It's only a matter of time until any notability standard that lets us keep unsourcable BLPs is amended to not allow such. I do have more pressing things to do in the short term, but if no one raises it I may get to it in a few months. Gigs (talk) 22:02, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I would agree with Gigs, as the changes to WP:ATHLETE have shown - there is no value in having an article about any person in the absence of significant coverage. A person is not really notable unless it has been "noted" in accordance with WP:GNG. If there is no sigficant coverage about an academic, then they are not notable, not matter how much they have published. Sure, there are many worthy accademics out there, but if there is not enough content to write a decent biography, then I don't see the rationale for an article.

Cited as an expert in main-stream press

If a professor is often cited for quotations or such in the mainstream press, would that make him notable? Usually we don't consider name drops to be notable, but if someone's opinion or studies are often cited in articles, I think it is of a different nature and makes it much more likely they are notable.--Crossmr (talk) 07:22, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

This is covered by criterion #7, explained in Notes and examples #14.John Z (talk) 09:39, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

What's the general threshold for this? a dozen quotations? an article on him talking about his work and the studies he's done?--Crossmr (talk) 07:35, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Google scholar

Does this [[2]] establish accademic notability. Or do we actauly have to have sources?Slatersteven (talk) 13:12, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

• Several papers with hundreds of citations and thousands of citations in total? Absolutely notable. --Crusio (talk) 13:36, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks I had assumed that you actualy had to see the context of the citation (for example some of the citations are him citing himslelf.Slatersteven (talk) 13:42, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

• With this high number of citations, it's sheer impossible that even a significant proportion would be himself citing himself... --Crusio (talk) 13:49, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

On a realted note does work have to be soley his, or can joint papers count?Slatersteven (talk) 13:51, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

• Joint papers certainly count. How to rate them differs a bit for different fields. In the life sciences, the most important author is the last one, followed by the first one. In some other fields, authorship is purely alphabetical. I'm not sure about computer sciences, but given the fact that he is sole author on several very highly cited papers, this is not an issue here. In any case, even if he was a minor author on all these papers, the sheer number of citations would make him notable anyway. In general, it is highly unlikely that a researcher can build up this kind of citation record simply by traveling on somebody else's coat slips. That might be the case for someone who has one or two highly cited papers, but not for someone who has a string of them like this guy. --Crusio (talk) 14:25, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

OK thanks, I was not sure about this as it seems a bit more flexible then other notability areas (such as politicans). I was appply those same kinds of criteria.Slatersteven (talk) 14:32, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

unclear

If some one meets the Notability by holding a Chair of depratment and with a reasonable amount of publication but no sources to write a "biography" (anything beyond things on a CV). do we still have an article on them? The Resident Anthropologist (talk) 02:28, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Neither being chair of a department nor having any amount of publication will pass this criterion. Being president of a university or having well-cited publications will. There have been instances where someone clearly passes and yet there is not much to say about them that can be sourced, but it's unusual. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:37, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Criterion 1 and H-index

In a current AfD discussion, a h-index of 14 is considered enough impact to satisfy criterion 1 of the WP:PROF criteria. This is rather amazing to me. Many many regular scholars who have just done their normal work easily have an h-index of 14. I just checked some of my previous supervisors and colleagues, and if we take that cutoff value serious, we probaly can add every scholar active in the field for about 15 years to wikipedia. I am not sure that is what we want. Ideas? -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 03:51, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

H-index varies wildly by field, and is also, of course, confounded by age. Publish two papers a year and have each of those papers cited twice per year, and in twenty years you have an H-index of 20. The inventor of the H-index, if I recally this correctly, considered that an H-index of 16 was more or less reasonable grounds for giving a tenure-track researcher in physics an associate professorship (assuming that he or she has the age when this promotion is typically considered). In pure mathematics, H-indices are very small. In physics they are huge. In mathematics we tend to think that researchers who don't publish two papers per year on average are not doing very well. In physics it has to be half a dozen per year. On the other hand, in mathematics those are mostly one author publications, in physics usually by half a dozen or more authors. In mathematics quite a few articles keep being cited for many many years, while in physics the huge majority of articles are not cited anymore after one or two years - almost all research publications are very provisional and rapidly made redundant by later publications. And then forgotten altogether when the subfield goes out of fashion. Richard Gill (talk) 16:50, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Helpful (?) reformatting of criteria

An angel told me in a dream it was my destiny to integrate the "Notes and Examples" with the Criteria themselves, thus making it all easier to use. The angel also said that I probably wouldn't remember enough markup to make the new layout look really attractive, and that someone else might have to use his or her higher level of skill to do that. Or maybe people wouldn't like it at all and revert. The angel said I shouldn't be bothered if that happens.

Also (my own idea, not the angel's): Since many, many archived discussions refer to "Criterion 1," "Criterion 2" etc., I hard-coded the existing numbering instead of relying on #, which implies the numbering might shift around in future, which I think would be a bad idea.

EEng (talk) 22:30, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

WP:AUTH

I have added WP:AUTH to the little list of other subject specific notability guidelines on the grounds that this seems particularly useful and relevant for many academics. (Msrasnw (talk) 11:13, 20 January 2011 (UTC))

About routine coverage

The last sentence of the last bullet point under General notes says: "For the routine uncontroversial details of a career, official institutional and professional sources are accepted." If I understand correctly, that sentence is merely referring to sourcing those routine uncontroversial details of a career. However, it's been pointed out (at the RfC at WT:N) that the sentence has been used to argue for the existence of notability based soley on such sources, which seems to me to be a bad idea. Should this be corrected, either by deleting or by rewriting the sentence? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:49, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

It would seem possible to me that clear evidence of meeting WP:prof notability might be provided by these sources. For example one of our indicators is holding a named chair. This might only be mentioned at the uni. involved - and this may be enough for notability. However notability is possibly not enough, the subject still may not be an appropriate topic for coverage in Wikipedia because of a lack of reliable, independent sources on the subject. I think therefor your last line is not so helpful. To be more precise - at the moment your addition is as follows:

For the routine uncontroversial details of a career, official institutional and professional sources are accepted as sourcing for those details, but they do not establish notability.

But I think they may well establish notability!

I think this might be more what you have in mind:

For the routine uncontroversial details of a career, official institutional and professional sources are accepted as sourcing for those details, but although they may establish notability, the subject still not be an appropriate topic for coverage in Wikipedia because of a lack of reliable, independent sources on the subject.

Anyway - any thoughts? Best wishes, (Msrasnw (talk) 22:08, 26 January 2011 (UTC))

Thanks for pointing that out! I just made an edit to try to address that, using slightly briefer wording. Does that work? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:17, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Someone just reverted the changes, asking for further explanation. In addition to the talk above, please see WT:Notability#Do subject-specific guidelines override the GNG, where the issue first came to my attention. Is there anything else I can clarify? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I shot from the hip with my previous edit to the article. The meaning needed is that these institutional sources, by themselves, may or may not be sufficient for notability. What about this? For the routine uncontroversial details of a career, official institutional and professional sources are accepted as sourcing for those details. These sources may or may not establish notability by themselves. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xxanthippe (talk • contribs) 22:36, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

I think the concern raised at WT:N has been that it's problematic to claim notability based solely on sources that are not independent of the subject. As such, these sources, by themselves, may not have consensus at WP:N to have notability. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:46, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

My impression/memory is that "For the routine uncontroversial details of a career, official institutional and professional sources are accepted." was intended to mean that "official institutional and professional sources" would provide adequate sourcing to facts (uncontroversial details of a career), in the sense that these career related biographical details (e.g. holding a named chair, or academic rank, or institutional affiliation) are the sorts of non-contentious material for which explicit WP:RS sources are not required. If those facts are enough to establish notability (the precise institution, academic rank, etc) then I would expect that they also would be the sort of non-contentious material exempted from the wikipedia-wise WP:RS requirement. WP:RS sources are required to support any/all potentially contentious statements. That X is employed at Y in the position of Z not uncontentious and sourcing by Y's webpages is adequate. The second half of that sentence as quoted by Msrasnw above (Tryptofish's addition) makes no sense to me. It directly contradicts the commonsense interpretation of the first half, and insists that all statements are contentious. Pete.Hurd (talk) 22:49, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

From WP:BLP " Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced..." Pete.Hurd (talk) 22:51, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I think that all information must be reliably sourced per WP:RS, whether contentious or not. The issue as I understand it is that sourcing that is independent of the subject is required to establish notability. I don't think academic institutional sources are unreliable, but rather, they can have a biased interest in promoting the importance of their faculty members. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:05, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

I've just put back, only, the part about "as sourcing for those details." Actually, I would be satisfied with that. It clarifies how the sources are used, in a way that I don't think is controversial, and we can leave the discussion of what satisfies WP:N for another day. But do, please, be aware that editors at WT:N are paying close attention to subject specific guidelines that might be seen as contradicting WP:N. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:54, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that institutional personal pages can be taken to be reliable sources. Although often written by the academic himself, they have to obtain the imprimatur of the institution before publication. A reputable institution would not allow unreliable information to appear on its web pages. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:20, 26 January 2011 (UTC).

• (unindent) I have to side with Tryptofish here. My own institution, the CNRS is undoubtedly reputable. However, I have near-complete control over my part of our institute's website (actually currently not "live", as we just created a new institute and haven't gotten around making a new web site yet). It would not be that difficult to sneak some self-aggrandizing stuff in there. If this is true for me, it'll be true for others. There is currently an AfD going on for Arno Tausch and some of the more overblown claims are also on institutional websites. Generally, stuff like chairs or positions will be correct on these institutional sites and that is info that we can source from them without any problem. That's the "details" mentioned in the guideline. I wouldn't go further though and if that is all we have, I would not even think that notability would have been established. --Crusio (talk) 06:37, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

International Math Olympiad and Criterion 2

Guideline says:

Victories in academic student competitions at the high school and university level as well as other awards and honors for academic student achievements (at either high school, undergraduate or graduate level) do not qualify under Criterion 2 and do not count towards partially satisfying Criterion 1.

I'm looking to find out what this means in respect to exceptionally successful participants in the International Mathematical Olympiad (i.e., participants with three or more gold medals), or exceptionally young participants. Of course, some of them already gained notability beyond their IMO success (e.g., László Lovász, Terence Tao), but some did not (yet). Question is whether these people meet notability criteria for their exceptional IMO results alone? (Keep in mind we're talking about a small group of people here; List of International Mathematical Olympiad participants is complete.)

This has been the topic of a number of AfDs now, and no clear consensus has been established. Some resulted in delete (i.e., Tiankai Liu, Darij Grinberg [note: Grinberg wouldn't have meet the criteria I'm proposing here, anyway]), some in keep (i.e., Reid W. Barton). Recently, Iurie Boreico has been nominated for deletion. So can we please find consensus here? --bender235 (talk) 22:48, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Related are multiple-time winners of the Putnam competition, like Arthur Rubin (see especially Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Arthur Rubin (2nd nomination)). The sense here was that the four-time Putnam record was not quite sufficient to meet the WP:GNG, but that his highly cited paper was a pass under criterion 1. In the case of Reid Barton, there was substantial coverage of the subject in independent sources (Science Magazine in particular). One basic necessary criterion for notability in such cases, as I see it, is whether such victories have been noted by multiple independent sources. This is consistent both with WP:BIO and even WP:ATHLETE (if we actually apply that guideline as stated, instead of ignoring it as seems to be the case in many articles about athletes, ironically). Sławomir Biały (talk) 23:06, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

My sense is that, well, it's a competition between some very very smart and talented high school students. The basic idea for notability of a person is that people must care about their accomplishments, consider them noteworthy, where by "people" I don't mean "there exist people" but there exists careful consideration (as in, usually published or through some other formal process) either of them individually (in the case of WP:BIO) or in the case of their academic accomplishments (in the case of this guideline). Winning the IMO, even repeatedly, as difficult as it may be, is not usually the sort of thing that gets you a detailed writeup in a magazine (Reid Barton being the exception). This doesn't get into any judgment of whether it should be noteworthy, but the practical fact is that the world doesn't much care - indeed, the world cares far less than for, say, an Olympic contestant who comes in 25th place once. So far as I know (and my acquaintance includes at least 2 or 3 IMO/IPhO types), they get no endorsement deals from Nike or Wolfram, have to dodge no papparazi, do not have to take their phones off the hook. Insofar as Wiki-notability is supposed to take its cues from the world, and not from our preferences, I don't think we can justify extending this guideline to include repeat IMO winners. Ray^Talk 01:07, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I understand your "media test", but this, too, yields no consistent result. For example, there has been quite a lot of press coverage on German three-time gold medallist Lisa Sauermann. So is she notable, but East German Wolfgang Burmeister is not because we can't find any press articles from the 1960s anymore? And let's not forget Romanian Ciprian Manolescu or Moldavian Iurie Boreico hardly receive the media attention they would've drawn if they were American (or German, for the matter). This leads me to the conclussion that press coverage shouldn't be the (only) benchmark here.

Further, one may ask whether the press coverage of a current exceptional participant (e.g., Reid Barton, Lisa Sauermann) justifies the inclusion of every exceptional participant, because it simply establishes notablity for that "exceptional participant" status. --bender235 (talk) 11:00, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Ciprian Monalescu gets loads of Google News hits, more than Lisa Sauermann. "Reid Barton" gets about twice as many, but also many of those are not relevant. So this seems to contradict the point you're trying to make. Anyway, Ciprian is probably already notable under WP:PROF#C1 (he's authored some highly cited papers with Pete Oszvath).

As I see it, multiple independent sources are important, not just for establishing notability, but also for WP:V, and for having something encyclopedia-worthy to say about a subject. If someone is only notable for having won a student contest several times, we can mention that person in the main article about the contest, but it seems redundant to have a separate article about the individual if that's the only thing we have to say about them. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:46, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

"Ciprian Monalescu gets loads of Google News hits, more than Lisa Sauermann." Huh? I'm counting 16 results for "Ciprian Manolescu", and 5 for "Iurie Boreico", whereas Google News yields 38 results for "Lisa Sauermann". Are we talking about the same Google News here?

"'Reid Barton' gets about twice as many, but also many of those are not relevant. So this seems to contradict the point you're trying to make." Again, I'm counting 30 for "Reid Barton" (there's more than one Barton, therefore you have to add "Math"), that is also less than Sauermann. --bender235 (talk) 13:47, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... I did an archives search and got 74 for Ciprian, 38 for Lisa, and 149 for Reid Barton. But, ok, let's accept your search results. My point is that, even though the relative proportions are a little different in your search, these are all roughly in the same order of magnitude: it's not as stark a difference as your post suggested. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

My point was, that Lisa Sauermann received plenty of coverage for her IMO achievements (in notable newspapers like Süddeutsche Zeitung), whereas Boreico received basically no attention at all (I'm counting three articles in little known media, a Romanian, a Croatian, and a Chinese; the others are Harvard Crimson articles regarding his Putnam results). But still they're both three-time gold medalists, meaing both equally notable. That was my point, and Google News results actually support it more than enough. --bender235 (talk) 14:45, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

You're leaving out the fact that Lisa is a woman. Exceptional women in mathematics generally get a big boost in recognition because of this. Also, notability isn't determined by this kind of metric, that so and so, having achieved such and such is therefore as notable as someone else with comparable accomplishments. Notability requires that someone has noticed. It's not a fair measure, but it is what it is. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:56, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Let me add that I knew Ciprian as an undergraduate. At that time, he seemed to be more well-known as a Putnam than IMO winner. This is born out in sources as well, since the majority of coverage consists of Harvard Crimson reports about his prowess in this competition. My general sense is that IMO results are not really regarded as important. They should certainly be taken very lightly in assessing the notability of a subject apropos of this guideline. Substantial press coverage can make the subject notable more generally under WP:BIO, but that should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Sławomir Biały (talk) 15:22, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

My intention was to not make this case-by-case decisions. The guideline should say "exceptional achievements at IMO merit notability", just like winning the Fields Medal merits notability. There isn't a case-by-case decision, like one Fields medallist may be included because he received enough press coverage, and others don't. No, if win a Fields medal, you're notable per WP:ACADEMIC, regardless of press coverage (just out of curiosity, you might compare Perelman's and Tao's press coverage with Werner's or Lindenstrauss'). It should be just like that with outstanding IMO participants. --bender235 (talk) 20:13, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

This guideline is about professors and other persons who hold academic ranks, not about students. There are undoubtedly students who satisfy WP:GNG, but one should not look here for the standards by which their bio pages would be judged for notability. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:57, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, after all this notability guideline is for science & academia biographies, and in my opinion this includes students. --bender235 (talk) 20:05, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

No, absolutely not. WP:PROF is a guideline for people notable for their academic achievements in terms of scholarly contributions to a particular academic disciplines. That is why it expressly excludes, in several different places, student level awards from conferring academic notability. It has always been consistently interpreted to exclude students. Winners of various scholastic academic competitions must go through WP:GNG/WP:BIO provisions to demonstrate notability. Nsk92 (talk) 21:16, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

In case this isn't obvious, winning one those competitions 1000 times doesn't add anything to the "sum of all human knowledge" understood in this guideline as academic knowledge. While it is mental (athletic) performance, this guideline is not concerned with that issue, just like it's not concerned with chess players. Tijfo098 (talk) 03:01, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so I move this discussion to WP:BIO. --bender235 (talk) 10:39, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Clarification of criterion #6

I believe it is of much need that we define what is a "major academic institution" as the word "major" can be very subjective. Do we base it on student population? Endowment? International recognition/awards? I ask this in relevance to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/De La Salle Brothers. Moray An Par (talk) 06:10, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

In the absence of further guidance and precedent, it seems wise to interpret the word in context. In this instance, I can't tell you if that institution is "major" because my expertise is in U.S. higher education and I have no knowledge of the Filipino context. Some of the measures proposed in the discussion seem like reasonable places to start - enrollment, endowment, age, etc. ElKevbo (talk) 15:36, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok. I understand that we cannot define a universal definite criteria for what is a major university. I'll forward this to the Philippine WikiProject. Moray An Par (talk) 03:49, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Amos Megged

This article was created recently. Although it is stated that Megged is "Chairperson" of a "Chair", it is also said that he's a "senior lecturer". His website says he's an "associate professor". I am curious as to whether people here think this makes him qualify under criterion #5. --Crusio (talk) 08:29, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

It might be best to ask the article's author(s) or leave a note on the article's Talk page. I, too, don't understand the first sentence in that article. The English translation of this webpage says that he is an Associate Professor and doesn't say anything about being a senior lecturer. If he worked at a U.S. institution I could make some (well-informed) educated guesses about his status but he works at an Israeli institution. ElKevbo (talk) 15:41, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

From looking at his website and reading the details, my impression is that the word "Chair" in the "Latin American Chair" there is used in a somewhat non-standard meaning and basically means a program within the department rather than a named Chair appointment. E.g. it looks like beain the head of the "Latin American Chair" is not a permanet appointment, such as a named Chair designation usually is. So, IMO, beaing the head of that Chair, in and of itself, does not qualify under WP:PROF#5. Nsk92 (talk) 17:14, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

"Never use self-published sources" vs praise by established experts in blogs

In more than one case, we have an article about a relatively junior academic researcher ("Dr. X"), whose notability is supported in part because some very well established researcher in the same field ("Prof. Y") has posted in a personal blog that Dr. X's research results are of great importance. A couple of examples are Ryan Williams (computer scientist) and Larry Guth. I am inclined to give a lot of credence to Prof. Y's statements, much more than to the more frequently-used basis of establishing academic notability by looking at numeric citation counts. However, while our policy on self-published sources does allow expert postings on blogs to be used as sources in general, both it and WP:BLP specifically disallow using these postings as sources on biographies of living people. The possible choices here seem to be

1. We could agree that Prof. Y's blog postings cannot be used in article space, remove all such sources from our articles, also remove any statements that can only be supported by sources of this type, delete (or at least not oppose the deletion of) any articles for which there is no other basis for showing notability, and accept that this will cause us not to have coverage of young researchers who have made important breakthroughs that are too recent to be reflected in the citation record.
2. We could remove statements and sources of this type from article space but continue to use Prof. Y's blog posts to justify a pass of WP:PROF#C1 if and when the article gets taken to a prod or AfD. The drawback here is that it gives us articles whose notability is not obvious from the content of the article and leads to more unnecessary AfDs.
3. We could lobby to get the policy changed. Likelihood of success seems small, because a lot of the people who care about such things have little interest in seeing WP:BLP weakened.
4. We could try to find some creative reading of the policy that allows us to interpret it as not applying in these cases. It's written pretty clearly though, so this also seems difficult.

Are there any other possibilities I've missed? Any thoughts on the right course of action here? By the way, in both the Williams and Guth cases, some of the authors of the blog posts in question (Richard Lipton and Terence Tao, respectively) have already published books of older blog posts, and by so doing have magically made their writings usable as sources here. But the posts about Williams and Guth are too recent to have been included in these books. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:48, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

My understanding of "self-published" is published by Dr X. A source published by Prof Y would be "other published" with respect to Dr X (but "self-published" with respect to Prof Y). Nonetheless, such sources should be used with care and only if the blogger themself is is of proven notablity. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:00, 4 June 2011 (UTC).

Unfortunately WP:BLPREMOVE conflicts with that interpretation: it seems to imply that sources published by Dr. X might be ok, but the sources published by Prof. Y (if they say anything contentious) should be immediately removed. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:11, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Only if they are contentious. They are not contentious here, are they? Xxanthippe (talk) 23:20, 4 June 2011 (UTC).

Sort of they are. Today we've had an anon tagging the Williams article for notability and as a more long-going issue on the Guth page an editor there is arguing that on the basis of these policies we should remove all the blog sources. So they're contentious because of policy because of content. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:04, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

I think that you have raised a very interesting question here. I looked at the two bios that you linked, and they both strike me as borderline calls. First of all, what Xxanthippe meant about "contentious" wasn't whether Wikipedia editors are disagreeing about the pages. Rather, the point is that BLPREMOVE only applies if the blogging Professor Y is saying something defamatory about Dr. X. That's not the case here, so BLPREMOVE really is not an issue. Instead, the guideline here indicates that, in general, a beginning Assistant Professor (or someone who is only going to start as an Assistant Professor in the near future!) does not inherently meet the requirements for notability. Thus, either the pages should be deleted, or notability needs to be satisfied, instead, by WP:GNG.

So that brings us to the bottom-line question: does a blog by Prof. Y satisfy GNG? On the whole, I'd much rather see some sort of peer-reviewed source from Prof. Y, or an op-ed or other commentary in a published source. And it's made worse when Prof. Y is predicting that Dr. X's work will be important in the future, as opposed to saying that it is important today. And GNG generally requires multiple sources, so Prof. Y is only one. I think that editors would have to look at these factors, including making a judgment as to just how much of an authority Prof. Y is (such that a self-published blog by Prof. Y would be a reliable source), in order to judge these pages on a case-by-case basis. But the question to be asked would be: does this biography pass WP:GNG? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:31, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Tryptofish clarifies my meaning. There should be no objection to the blog quotes being included as they are not defamatory, but I do not think that they confer notability by themselves. This, as with all researchers and scholars, has to be done by the criteria of WP:Prof. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:17, 5 June 2011 (UTC).

I think this is one of those situations where the straightforward application of policy is pretty clearly wrong. The policy is intended to prevent harm to living people, not to stop us from reporting factual, direct commentary by experts on their work. It will be hard to codify something like that in the guidelines/policies, but certain blogs are definitely more reliable and useful than any number of pop-science magazines. Ray^Talk 14:55, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I think we all agree here that this is not an issue of defamation, and BLPREMOVE does not apply here. As for how blogs stack up for WP:RS, that's complicated, but there are good reasons not to make it too easy to rely on blogs. When the hypothetical Prof. Y really is someone of great stature, it should be possible to find other sources reporting what she has said, even if she also has a blog. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:46, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Another question on Criterion 5

The above discussion doesn't quite get at my question...I found a new article on Jody Armour, and tagged it with a notability template. In response to my talk page comment, another editor said that because Armour is holds a "named chair" position, that he automatically meets criterion 5. Is that really what that criterion means? I starts scanning through the faculty pages at USC (where Armour teaches), and my scan through the first third seemed to indicate that the majority of full professorships at that school are named (or the people hold a higher position like Dean or Vice-Dean). Is this test really supposed to imply that being a full professor at USC Law necessarily makes one notable? I question this, especially since this guideline says that people meeting any one of these criteria are notable, unlike most of the other field specific guidelines that have the much softer "are presumed notable". Am I misunderstanding the guidelines, or are the criteria for academics just that odd? Plus, if I'm not misreading, isn't this actually providing notability to the professor, in part, by the type of school they're teaching at? That is, private, wealthy institutions are (as far as I know), far more likely to have named chair positions; does this mean that someone is simply more likely to be "notable" because that's the type of institution the become a full professor in? Qwyrxian (talk) 12:38, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• I agree and actually think that we could do away with this whole criterion. If a certain named chair really amounts to something, then the person occupying it will have many well-cited articles/influential books/conference contributions which will serve as a pass on #1. #5 is just superfluous, IMHO. --Crusio (talk) 13:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• Agree. Let's delete Criterion 5, or at least removed the "named chair" bit and leave only "distinguished professor". Named chairs are unusual and (usually?) prestigious in the UK, but for US universities they're more common and often just a device to help with fundraising ("give us enough money and we'll name a chair after you"). Qwfp (talk) 14:05, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Since Qwfp says that they're still prestigious in the UK, we could split the criterion...but would it be getting into WP:BEANS territory to make the rule for UK professorships only? Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Crusio--essentially, that the "named chair" is just a red herring. That is, that at some universities, being a named chair really does mean something, in which case only those professors who meet other criteria will get it, while at other universities it means nothing other than "someone has to fill this chair we named after a wealthy benefactor, and you're the best we have here, so...." In an attempt to further dialogue, here's a question: do universities with named chairs actually go out and recruit a professor to specifically fill a certain chair position? Or is it a matter of internal promotion? Or something else? Answering this helps imply whether or not it is actually a measurement of notability in a Wikipedia sense. Qwyrxian (talk) 23:26, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Certainly some named chairs are specifically recruited externally and unavailable to internal promotion. The ones we have in my department happen to be that way, for instance. I doubt that there's a consistent rule about that at any university, though. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:50, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I want to correct what may be a misconception here. At US universities, it is indeed typical for named chairs to be named for donors, but it's not like the donor gets to pick someone to fill the chair, or that the chairs are filled with second-raters just because it keeps the dollars flowing. At least at significant research universities, there are full professors, and full professors who have been given named chairs, and the latter are just about always chosen as the most distinguished, on academic principles. Commonly, appointments to named chairs are made through external recruitment instead of internal promotion, but that is typically done in order to be able to recruit someone who is more distinguished (notable) than the full professors already in the department. Personally, I think a case could be made that we should consider anyone with tenure notable, but if we want to be more selective than that, then full professors are usually more notable than associate professors, and full professors with named chairs are usually more notable than full professors without named chairs. Admittedly, there are cases where a position is filled with "the best person we could get", and that's true at any academic level. Anyway, subject-specific notability guidelines like this one should (ideally) be regarded as ways to quickly identify who would pass GNG, rather than as ways to get around GNG. In theory, a named chair professor who doesn't pass GNG and who wouldn't pass GNG even with very thorough editorial research probably shouldn't have a bio page (and probably shouldn't have gotten the academic appointment). --Tryptofish (talk) 20:57, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

I would like to keep criteria 5 - it's a great heuristic. Bearian (talk) 20:58, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Please don't use "criteria" as a singular noun. Nails on chalkboard.... --Trovatore (talk) 21:01, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

There are some named chairs which are ex officio (e.g. held by the current department chair) or reserved for more junior faculty. I don't think those should count for notability. But for the ones that really are reserved for the more distinguished of the full professors, #C5 is a good way to shortcut AfDs and avoid relying on beancounting. And also unlike most of the other criteria it fulfills the spirit of notability: by giving the named chair the university has noted the recipient, so ipso facto they are notable. I also would like to see this criterion remain, but possibly it could be more tightly circumscribed. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:03, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Allow me to revive this if I may. The problem I have with David Eppstein's point is that it requires us to somehow "know" which named chairs confer notability and which don't. That is, how can I, as someone who doesn't work at University X, look at a person's profile page, see that it says that they are the George Gerogian the Third Chair of Ethnographic Legal Psychology tell me, a Wikipedia editor, whether or not that position actually has anything to do with what we mean by notability? I don't like the idea that this exists solely to provide a shortcut in AfDs--if we have strong reason to believe that having a chair makes one notable in a Wikipedia sense, then I haven't seen it yet; seeing it would possibly help explain my and others objections to the criterion. Note, also, that you say that having a named chair means that the person was noted by the university--however, I would argue that being noted by only one's employer is not sufficient to meet Wikipedia's much higher Notability standards. I mean, getting an Employee of the Year Award from Joe Random employer certainly wouldn't qualify one for a Wikipedia page. I don't mean to say that these are so low, but just to say that I feel that a shortcut is only useful when we can be fairly certain that the shortcut reliably signifies the underlying goal; in the case of named chairs, I'm beginning to doubt that they do. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:52, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

You certainly have a point here, but the estimation of notability of #5 is not nearly so fraught as in the case of citations. I am inclined to keep #5, as per Bearian, because it can shortcut much tendentious discussion. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:19, 14 July 2011 (UTC).

I suppose a case could be made that any academic appointment, at any level, is simply a case of being noted by one's employer. However, academic appointments are (generally) made based on criteria other than things that would apply to employment in other job sectors. High level professorial appointments are (generally) based upon research reputation, the evaluations by academic experts at other institutions of the candidate's publications and so forth. In other words, universities evaluate candidates for named chairs by pretty much the same criteria that Wikipedia uses for biographical notability. In that sense, then, the analogy to Joe Random employer is incorrect. I suppose an alternative approach would be to scrap all of this guideline, not just the one criterion, and have GNG govern, but I think there's consensus that having a heuristic is (generally) helpful. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:19, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I note that Criterion 5 is one of the few criteria that do not have a detailed note following it. Perhaps a solution to this concern would be to write such a note, pointing out the ways in which caution should be used in applying the criterion. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:24, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

After going through some academic BLP articles, looking for poorly sourced BLPs, and articles on people who were generally not noteworthy, I found this "has a named chair" criterion rather curious. I agree with many of the above comments that if the academic of the "named/distinguished" is actually worth something, at least one of the other criteria will be met. I suggest that #5 be removed. aprock (talk) 07:29, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

• The criterion should be kept because it a useful shortcut--every single article on someone who meets this criterion has been kept, as far as i can tell, and would always be kept. Having it saves considerable useless discussion at AfD , where we need the time to concentrate on the actually questionable articles. It's like the criteria for major awards. People who win one would also be kept on the basis of publications also, because that's the basis on which they got the awards. But having the criterion leds us make simple decisions on easily citable information. Academic appointments to senior ranks at universities are always made on the judgment by numerous outside referees--one university I've been connected with requires 12 such references for even an ordinary full professor! I'm not prepared to outguess the judgment about notability made by those qualified to make it and prefer our own opinions. DGG ( talk ) 03:46, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

• I find DGG's argument concerning named chairs rather compelling. By analogy, I'm sure that it is stated somewhere (didn't take the time to look it up) that getting an Oscar or a Nobel will make someone notable, although getting such an award guarantees, of course, an abundance of sources. Named chairs are rather rare and indeed prestigious appointments, universities won't recruit just anybody for that. An explanatory note as proposed by Tryptofish could perhaps be helpful. --Crusio (talk) 08:38, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Alright then, let's look seriously at creating such an explanatory note. What specifically should it include? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:12, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

• Well, I think one point that should be addressed is whether named chairs at any institution are covered by this item. There are some very small colleges/minor universities out there and if they have named chairs, we perhaps don't want to include those. Formulating that unambiguously and clearly will be tough though... --Crusio (talk) 20:21, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

I'd be happy to draft the note, and I'm kind of thinking out loud here. I think we need to be careful about basing this on smallness, as that could be a matter of dispute. I do think, though, that the research status of the institution is relevant. Each explanatory note starts with the criterion in bold, so this one starts with: The person holds or has held a named chair appointment or "Distinguished Professor" appointment at a major institution of higher education and research. The talk in this thread has focused on ex officio and on fundraising-driven appointments as possibly not qualifying for notability, as well as named positions for faculty at positions lower than full professor. I certainly think that an explanatory sentence saying that this criterion only applies to persons who are tenured at the full professor or equivalent level, and not to junior faculty, would be appropriate. I think it also might be useful to add a sentence about how named positions at some minor non-research universities may not be notable – that it really has to be "a major institution of higher education and research" – but I'm not sure how to frame the ex officio and financial aspects, especially since we cannot expect editors to engage in original research on those points. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:44, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Why does the size of the institution matter? I see the assertion above that it might matter but I'd like some examples or other empirical evidence, please. ElKevbo (talk) 21:19, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

It wasn't my assertion, of course, but I agree that size doesn't matter. (Wait a minute, that sounds like something else...) Of course there are major institutions that have smaller numbers of students. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:30, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

The point behind the rule of thumb that an Oscar or Nobel prize makes a person notable is specifically the fact that those awards practically guarantee that we will have an abundance of reliable sources about the winner. And, importantly, if that abundance of sources does not materialize, then the person is not notable.

There are practical and ethical reasons for this:

1. No person should be subjected to a Wikipedia biography written on the basis of just one or two incomplete and possibly wildly biased sources.
2. Wikipedia should not be subjected to any biography written on the basis of just one or two sources written or controlled by the subject (e.g., the official bio at the university).

I believe this is a good rule of thumb, because 99% of the time, a person holding a prestigious chair in modern times is a person for whom many WP:Independent sources can be found. However, it's just a rule of thumb, and in the 1% of chairs without sources—including many appointees to such chairs in previous centuries—we should not have an article about the person. Notability is not an automagical quality of being employed in a certain fashion: Notability always requires independent sources, even if your title is the Queen of England or the President of the United States. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree with that, but is there any reason to think that the issue of independent sources applies in some special way to named chairs? I would think that it applies to all of the criteria in this guideline. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:42, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

• My use of the word "small" was indeed not correct, Tryptofish corrected that well. As for the comment by WhatamIdoing, notability is independent of verifiability. Somebody can be notable, but an article can still not be written unless there are verifiable sources to base the article on. That's alsready covered in this guideline and WP:GNG. --Crusio (talk) 08:15, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

No, that's not true. Notability requires verifiable evidence. Nobody and nothing qualifies for its own article on Wikipedia ("is notable", to use the wikijargon) unless there are verifiable sources to base the article on. (Those sources need not be mentioned in the article, but they must actually have been published in the real world.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:24, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree with removing Criterion 5 altogether:

1. Its elements are incapable of adequate delimitation.
2. This is partly because it refers to an institutional judgement which, necessarily, is largely opaque to WP editors and therefore should not be counted as sufficient.
3. BTW, I would not have thought that being Dean, Vice-Dean or whatever of such ilks would meet Criterion 5 anyway. If it does, then I think Criterion 5 must go since it is increasingly common for people to become Dean or the like merely through a willingness to spend their days counting beans.
4. Yes, Notability requires verifiable evidence - the problem here seems to be that fulfilment of any of the academic criteria seems to constitute "verifiable evidence". Or, if it does not, then the sufficiency of fulfilling Criterion 5 creates a conflict with Notability requires verifiable evidence both in general and because it can be far easier to fulfil Criterion 5 than to fulfil some (and perhaps any) of the other academic criteria.
5. As long as Criterion 5 is counted as sufficient, articles will survive that are deficient in every other respect in terms of the academic criteria - that is, deficient in WP editors' direct judgement regarding the person who is the subject of the article. The article Jody Armour is, to my mind too, a startlingly plain example - but there are others and some of them are evidently self-promotion.
6. If alternatively Criterion 5 were to be counted only as supplementary, for the foregoing reasons it would not actually do that job.
7. Criterion 5 is hugely biased toward the USA, where to my knowledge named chairs of any kind - and especially those named for a donor - are far more common than in any other part of the world. --Wikiain (talk) 01:07, 12 December 2011 (UTC) On further thought: that point is not intended to be anti-American; there is something to be commended about the US cultural tradition, reflected in supportive tax laws, of donating to educational institutions and in particular to one's alma mater. --Wikiain (talk) 11:54, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

• The whole point of these criteria is that they are a kind of "shortcuts": if a person meets one of them, there are bound to be reliable sources covering them. Concerning your "startlingly plain example", this is indeed an excellent example! Did you try a Google search, for example? Or a GScholar search? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:31, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Above, I raised the possibility of adding a note to #5, but the discussion subsequently meandered. Any interest in that, still? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:22, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I think your suggestion would be helpful. "Major" being taken as referring to reputation rather than size. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:21, 12 December 2011 (UTC).

OK, I wrote something. I'm very sure that it can be improved upon. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:07, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Tryptofish - this comment will interrupt your train, so please feel free to rearrange so that the prospect of a note to Criterion 5 can be pursued for its own interest. I'm pessimistic, but will be interested to see if anything can be done.

Guillaume - By "startlingly plain example" I meant, similarly to Qwyrxian who introduced it, that the article Jody Armour itself contains no indication of notability other than that the subject holds a chair that bears a name, which for that institution turns out not to be a mark of special distinction - all of the "named" chairs in the department seem to bear donor names. That the name is a donor name does not, of course, mean that the occupant is not distinguished - Armour's colleague Andrei Marmor is well known in legal philosophy and perhaps should have his own article. But it's surely not enough for notability.

These criteria don't seem to serve as "shortcuts" if each of them can be sufficient by itself. If only one criterion is fulfilled, the information that fulfils the criterion will not cut to anything else. And, if that information does not actually support notability - as, I am contending, can be the case with Criterion 5 - the article will not be based on notability and should not be kept. If fulfilment of one criterion points the article author to fulfilment of others, then fine. The other fulfilments will show notability and fulfilment of the first criterion can just be included information. And, in that case, it need not have related to a criterion in the first place.

Since what looks like a donor name on a chair doesn't do anything for me, I didn't Google for Armour. However, I have now done so: here is his homepage. The homepage shows one book, which is in the article, and a handful of journal articles. Some of those articles are in good law journals - although one might be careful about US university law journals, since they are run by students - but there are only two articles after 1999 and the book is 1997. Where I work, Armour would not come close to being classified as "research active". When I then go from his homepage to his curriculum vitae, I can see evidence that he is a fine activist on civil rights. That information, if verifiable from independent sources (because we do need such evidence), might make him notable for WP, but I don't think there should be a WP article unless the article contains it. One might say that the WP article should be kept but tagged as a stub. But then just about every professor - in the broad US definition of "professor" - could have one. But - at the risk of sounding ex cathedra - this is an encyclopedia and not just a directory. Or, at least, we might merely be back in the place where this discussion began: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper. (And I don't have a problem with omitting most professors but including Pokemon characters - this encyclopedia is not only for professors, however nifty some of us might be with a Confuse Ray.) --Wikiain (talk) 02:14, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand your point. Essentially all named chairs bear donor names; that fact has little or nothing to do with whether their occupants are notable. As for your second paragraph: they are "shortcuts" in that they allow us to avoid wasting time carefully researching our responses to stupid deletion nominations when there are so many worthier targets for the deletionists; I don't see what that has to do with allowing each criterion to be sufficient. As for your third paragraph: we aren't trying to compile a list of "currently active" researchers, nor even of researchers who were active at any other time, but rather of researchers who have made an impact at some time in the past. So looking at publication counts, without trying to measure the impact of those publications (e.g. by citation counts) is pointless. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:21, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikiain, I'm OK with the train being interrupted, no problem. And, actually, I'm pretty sympathetic to your argument that a subject who has an endowed chair, but who (I'm basing this on what you said, haven't checked it independently myself) has a single book and an absence of recent publications might not really be notable. On the other hand, what was the impact of the book and articles in the time when they were published? Perhaps the academic promotion was based upon a very high impact of that work in its time, and it's not unusual for highly notable academics to eventually reach an age where they would no longer be considered research active. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:00, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Apparently I didn't scroll down far enough; apologies for the redundancy. I. William Zartman might be a case in point for an article that depends solely on criterion 5 and doesn't appear to have much encyclopedic value. I think other criteria are much better indicators of actual notability, and I support the idea of removing criterion 5 altogether for the reasons stated above by User:Wikiain. JFHJr (㊟) 05:58, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Citation numbers in regards to notability

What minimum number of citations should I be looking for in Scopus, Web of Knowledge, or Google Scholar to show notability? Is there a rough threshold that is agreed on? (It would be helpful to hear individual opinions if there is no general agreement.) And if an individual meets any such threshold, should it somehow be indicated in the article? Or are citation metrics just a tool for Afd discussions?? Cloveapple (talk) 20:26, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

• That's not an easy question. Citation rates vary heavily by field. What would make a mathematician highly notable would be laughable for a neuroscientist. So no clear figures can be given and, on top of that, even within fields people differ. For neuroscience, with which I'm most familiar, some people think that an h-index around 15 is enough for notability, whereas I feel that 25 is a better cut-off. Same for citation rates: some feel that a researcher is notable if he has two or three papers that have been cited 50 or 60 times (still referring to neuroscience here), whereas I feel that several with around at least a 100 is required. As for inclusion in bios, these statistics are often used in job evaluations and such, so I presonally don't see anything wrong with including a ball-park figure ("John Doe' articles have been cited over 2500 times, giving him an h-index of 30"), but, again, other people feel that we should leave this out. On a more technical matter: Scopus should only be used for people that started publishing after 1996, because that's when its coverage started. GScholar is very unreliable (see the story of [[Ike Antkare])). It has some coverage where Web of Science is a bit deficient, though (such as computer science, for example). I don't think all this helps much, but I hope I didn't obfuscate too much... -) --Crusio (talk) 20:38, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

• I tend to create and edit science based articles (including scientific journal articles). I suppose this includes scientific researcher's biographies. When I do a biography I don't concern myself with citation rates. To me it appears there are much stronger indicators of notability presented in WP:PROF (the notability of academics). If I can meet any one of the criteria I it is a good bet that this person will have accomplished, and contributed a remarkable amount of research to his or her respective field. I believe the citation rates will take care of themselves in these instances. Persoally, citation rate is not the first thing I that I concern myself with when writing a biography article. Hope this helps. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 02:43, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

• For me, I guess I'm unlikely to create a new article based only on citations; I'll look for a named chair, a major award, a separately notable topic named after them, a festschrift, something like that to anchor the article. But if I see an article that someone's already created, and that is undergoing some sort of deletion process, then I'll look at citations as a way to test whether it's worth saving. In that case what I usually look for is several papers with 100+ citations. As Crusio says, though, how many are good enough depends on the field. In some cases fewer citations will be sufficient, if the search results show that the subject really is the top expert in some significant but low-citation subject. And in some cases having very high citation counts isn't good enough, for instance if it's for a small number of papers that all have the same more famous coauthor, or if the only sourceable facts about the subject are the publications. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:49, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

• Thank you for all the responses. I had thought citation metrics might be of use in article creation when looking at somebody who "work[s] outside academia (e.g. in industry, financial sector, government, as a clinical physician, as a practicing lawyer, etc" but I see it's not as simple as I'd hoped. Cloveapple (talk) 15:03, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

• The citations issue most often comes up in AfDs of academics who have created articles about themselves or have had articles created by partisans. The criterion from WP:Prof for notability of academics is that they should be "above average". It is difficult to determine what the "average" is and standards have arisen in an ad hoc manner. Looking back at past decisions on these academic AfD pages I find that to clearly satisfy WP:Prof#C1 500-1000 citations in the scientific literature have usually been needed with an h index of greater than 15. Those with an h index of less than 10 rarely pass. There is no formal policy on this; it is just the way that decisions of editors have evolved over the past few years. In the past year attention has been directed to the differences between academic fields, as Crusio notes above. Bio-med is highly cited, physics and chemistry in the middle, maths low and theology even lower. My impression is that the boundary mark (h index) for bio-med is currently taken to be 20, physics and chemistry 15, maths 12 and theology 10. Cases which are around those values tend to get much discussion, the further away in either direction the clearer the case becomes. These numbers provide a rough guide and may well be overruled by detailed circumstances. As always, local knowledge helps. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:40, 27 July 2011 (UTC).

I do not think we normally accept "above average" in AfDs and if that's in the rule, it's misleading. The problem with above average is: with respect to whom? All people who have ever published a paper or received a PhD? All people with any university position? All people who are full professors? All people who have novel prizes. The average person in the sciences who receives a PhD publishes a paper based on it. The average number of citation a published paper gets from anyone except the original author is between one or two. The rule as applied literally would mean that anyone who published a paper which got three citations is above average for academics, and that's broader than has every been suggested here. Actual numbers are misleading. I disagree with Xxanthippe that raw citation counts mean anything exact--the two of us have argued it back and forth a probably dozens of AfDs by now. . We customarily use the h index, but a person with 4 published papers with 4 citations each has an index of 4; and so does a person with 4 published papers with 4 citations each and 3 papers with 100 citations each. Applying it as is suggested in the above paragraph to fields like theology where people normally publish books, not papers, is particularly absurd and I do not think is accepted in any field of the humanities. The only people who have ever applied it are bureaucrats in granting agencies, who want a number, without the least concern over whether it is meaningful--and I think even this is no longer the practice is the few countries that tried to use it as a formal criterion. The actual criterion that normally matters in WP:PROF, is being an authority in one's subject and high citations, properly interpreted, are one way of helping to showing. DGG ( talk ) 02:05, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to Delete Criterion 5

Given the large variability in the value of titles such as "Distinguished Professor", and what appears to be general consent among the editors (see here and here), I think we should remove Criterion 5. If the academic is truly notable, the other criteria should be more then enough to establish them as such. I would go ahead and change it now, but I think it would be good to give the opportunity for debate if it is needed. --Djohns21 (talk) 07:13, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia! You will find that there is a discussion of this matter in the sections above. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:40, 27 July 2011 (UTC).

Existence of sources

Xxanthippe reverted this addition of two links a while ago. I assume that Xxanthippe had some actual objection, rather than a trivial, bureaucratic procedural goal of obtaining written permission in advance (something Xxanthippe doubtless knows is directly disclaimed by policy ("It is not necessary for editors to seek written permission in advance to make such changes, and the absence of a prior discussion does not prove that the change is not supported by consensus").

The text says, "Every topic on Wikipedia must be one for which sources exist".

Technically, it is not enough for the source to exist; the source must actually have been WP:Published. If you find a letter written to your great-grandmother in her attic, then that letter is "a source" and it "exists", but it is utterly worthless for Wikipedia's purposes.

Additionally, it is not any old source that demonstrates notability, but specifically an WP:Independent source. For example: a university professor normally has a web page at his or her employer's website. That webpage is useful for verifying information, but useless for showing notability. What shows notability is third-party or independent sources, not any source at all.

If there are no substantive objections forthcoming, then I will eventually restore these links for the sake of providing greater clarity. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

I think this is not the place to be including redundant descriptions of what is and what is not a source. The problem with incorporating statements like that, in every other guideline than WP:RS that mentions sources, is that then whenever WP:RS changes somebody will have to track down and change all those other copies of what it says. Or worse, they won't get changed and then we'll have incompatible guidelines. Better just to keep it simple ("sources", rather than "sources published in independent newspapers, magazines with national circulation levels, peer-reviewed scientific journals, or non-print-on-demand traditional-author-payment-model books") and refer elsewhere for the details. And even more, your proposed text is already inconsistent with WP:RS, which unlike what you wrote here allows some self-published sources in certain circumstances. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:27, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

It's best to keep things simple. Also, I don't agree that university web pages are always unreliable sources. Any institution of repute will bear down hard on an academic who puts false material up on one so these sites are subject to implicit independent editorial control. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:18, 9 September 2011 (UTC).

Actually, I can say from first hand experience that (at least some) universities allow tons of stuff on their web pages that would totally fail Wikipedia's standards for sourcing that is independent of the subject. For that reason, I agree with WhatamIdoing's concern in making the edit. At the same time, I agree with David Eppstein's point about avoiding incompatibility. So let me make a suggestion, of an alternative edit that gets at the same issue: keep the current wording, but link the word "independent" (in the phrase "reliable, independent sources on the subject") to WP:PSTS. Would that be acceptable? --Tryptofish (talk) 17:17, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

David, did you look at the diff? Here are the changes:

• Every topic on Wikipedia must be one for which sources exist
• Every topic on Wikipedia must be one for which independent, third-party sources have already been published

Does that look like "redundant description of what is and is not a source" to you? The change (1) adds five words, (2) changes one word, and (3) adds two links. There is zero possibility of this resulting in discrepancy between this notability guideline and the sourcing policies.

Xxanthippe, as I said above, university websites are perfectly reliable for verifying information. "Verifying information" and "deciding whether we should have an article about this person" are completely different things. The fact that a university puts up a bio on every single faculty member does not demonstrate that Wikipedia should have an article about any of them.

Tryptofish, WP:Secondary does not mean independent. A requirement for third-party or independent sources should point to WP:Third-party sources (the current choice at WP:V) or WP:Independent sources (the likely target of the proposed merger of those two pages), not to PSTS. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:03, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

As for the point of what you said to me, you are right, and those would be fine with me as alternative links. As for what you said to the other editors, I'll wait to hear what they say, but I'm receptive to some kind of edit to address the issue. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:17, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

There is no such rule as the second rule cited. For a great many types of articles, including articles about living people, we accept primary non-independent sources if there is reason to consider them reliable. For businesspeople, academics, public servants, we accept their official web pages at an institution. Yes, they are not by themselves a proof of notability--though the events reported in them may be. But they are presumed reliable unless contested for routine facts, and can be cited as references for such. This has been discussed dozens of times on the RS noticeboard, It is a rare and newsworthy event for a official CV on a university website to be false in what it says . Yes, they contain fluff, Yes, they may omit details. But the actual facts reported are as reliable or more so than biographic facts in any secondary source (which are almost always simply copied from there in any case.) Cases of gross inaccuracy in such CVs are very rare: they are usually newsworthy , tho sometimes the university involved manages to deal with them quietly, and almost always they lead very quickly to the loss of the position. They're treated as academic fraud: it happens, but not all that often. In the US they almost always make the Chronicle of Higher Education, though I know about a few unpublished ones also. At Wikipedia in the 4 years I've been working on this subject, I've encountered one such: there were reasons to be suspicious, I found after a project that the doctorate could not actually be verified--that it fact it was almost certain it had not existed. We deleted the article, of course. This is different from exaggeration--the most common case is degrees specified correctly, but which turn out to be from a diploma mill. That's not very uncommon, especially among non-academics who think the credentials will be helpful and don't expect them to be investigated. If it's a public figure, they make the general newspapers. DGG ( talk ) 01:53, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

You seem to have conflated "can be used" with "can be used exclusively". WP:V demands that all articles be based on third-party sources. If zero third-party sources exist, then you may not have an article about the subject. Assuming some third-party sources have been published, you may certainly also use non-independent sources, but you may not write an article exclusively from non-independent sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:27, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Please see

Please see a discussion at Talk:Jennifer McCreight#WP:NOTRESUME. Thank you. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:45, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Too strict criteria

These criteria strike me as far too strict. An academic who has written several books is an expert with some influence. When you evaluate sources, articles about academics often give relevant information, and we are impoverished by the exclusion of many deserving names. WP treats authors of fiction less strictly. Swedish WP includes all professors, as well as docents, among the criteria for notability. German WP talks about academics who have made a significant contribution to their area of expertise, but add that this usually applies to full professors. --Jonund (talk) 13:28, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

If you were a professor, would you want to have an article about you or your colleagues on Wikipedia based on gossip, rumors, and hearsay? Or would you want it to be based on properly WP:Published reliable, WP:Independent sources?

If such sources exist, then the article can be written under the normal rules for any subject. And if no such proper sources have ever been published about you, wouldn't you prefer to not have any article at all to one based on hearsay? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:06, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

WP:GNG has always been grounds for inclusion of academics. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:39, 11 January 2012 (UTC).

But it doesn't have to. When judging notability, we can use GNG, or a more specific criteria, or both. We can use the more strict one or the the less strict one. There's no set rule either way. In fact, I'm fairly certain people have tried, on numerous occasions, to clarify the exact relationship between GNG and more specific notability criteria, and each time, no consensus has been reached (in part because some subject specific criteria are less strict while others are more strict than GNG). Qwyrxian (talk) 00:35, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't question the need for reliable, independent sources. What I object to is the idea that academics who don't meet these criteria should not be deemed notable.

If WP:GNG is grounds for inclusion of academics, why do we have specific criteria for academics? They bring confusion and may discourage editors from writing. --Jonund (talk) 12:39, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

It's the other way around. WP:PROF is a shorthand to show that an academic is likely to be notable, even if this person would not completely satisfy WP:GNG at first sight. For instance, there are likely to exist reliable sources about someone who is president of an international learned society or occupies a named chair at some major university. If someone does not meet WP:PROF, but there are reliable sources, that person may get included through GNG. So PROF should actually encourage editors to write about academics. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:12, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Charles V. Hamilton

I'm not that familiar with the criteria on this page. Could someone better versed in them please take a look at the article in the section title? I'm trying to decide whether or not an AFD is warranted. There are a number of claims on the page, but I'm not really sure how they stack up against the WP:PROF criteria. If WP:PROF notability is met, then an AFD would be a waste of time. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:06, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, it appears that he was a tenured professor who held a named, endowed chair so he meets our criteria. The article is quite scant, though, so your suspicion is justified. ElKevbo (talk) 20:20, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

TYVM - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:05, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Plank high

Why do I have an impression that professors, who arguably have a higher impact on the humankind than, say, high school athletes, have to jump through the hoops hung high to get into wikipedia? The guideline is littered with the superlatives: "highest", "highly prestigious", etc. How about toning it down? At least I would suggest to eliminate an absurd double whammy: "...a major highest-level elected or appointed academic post...". Otherwise let's be systematic and thorough, and write "...a major highest-level highly prestigious elected or appointed substantial academic post...". Logofat de Chichirez (talk) 02:16, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, your question hits on a point that is a sore one with quite a few of us, and has been discussed extensively. Part of the reason that the threshold is set high for academics is the tendency for self-promotion otherwise. And the reason given for lower standards for athletes is that, for the totality of our readership, more people want to look up athletes than to look up scholars. If it makes you feel any better, high school athletes actually do not qualify for articles, unless they are otherwise notable. The intention of all of these guidelines is to predict who would, actually, pass WP:GNG. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:33, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

• One could also see it this way: WP:GNG is valid for everybody, athlete or prof, making the bar the same for all. However, newspapers and such will routinely write about even minor athletes, but rarely about academics. WP:PROF allows academics to pass, even if they would have difficulties to pass GNG, so PROF actually lowers the bar. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:14, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Would you even want to have such a low bar? If you were a professor, would you really want to have a biography written about you that could be edited by the student you just flunked, or that emphasized some transient, trivial event merely because that's the only thing that the WP:Independent sources thought exciting enough that it would sell newspapers?

Let me give you an example: we have a scholar in the UK who has had articles written about him pretty much only in relation to a minor case of plagiarism. He's also an expert on Muslim–British relations, so he's quoted in multiple sources talking about that subject, but none of that tells you anything about him (unless you think a long string of "was quoted once in a newspaper saying..." is biographical material). Our sources are unbalanced: "Hey, there's this guy who's an expert on a subject" doesn't sell newspapers and therefore doesn't get written about. "Hey, they're making this huge stink at the university about someone failing to copyedit a couple of sentences" does. If that was you, would you really appreciate a Wikipedia biography that reflected exactly what the independent sources said about you, i.e., an entire article about a trivial, one-time plagiarism dispute? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:14, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Lots of people in any field would prefer not to have an article about themselves. I'm sure any OTRS volunteer could tell you that.

As for newspapers being the basis for articles about academics, that just suggests badly written articles. Surely a notable academic would have reviews of his or her work in academic journals? Wouldn't those reviews be used as sources? Wouldn't those reviews show something about his or her expertise? What am I missing here? Cloveapple (talk) 17:32, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

• Sounds good in theory. In practice, however, people write reviews about a certain subject, not a person. So, yes, a scholar would get cited in such reviews, but each single review would not tell you much about any given single academic or her/his work. If you would put the notability at "should have had at least one review written about her/his work", then my bet is that even many Nobel winners would fail... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:55, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

I think I was unclear above. When I said "reviews" I was thinking of book reviews in academic journals. I can see why you would have thought I meant "review articles" of the sort that summarize the state of research on a particular topic. Cloveapple (talk) 18:00, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

• Ah, I see. That still doesn't solve things, though, because publishing books is not all that common in the life sciences, for example. I know several highly-influential and notable scientists who have never written a single book... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:23, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

I can think of Nobel Prizewinners in the sciences who have never written a book. What makes them notable (apart from the Prize) is the recognition of their work by others. This is ascertained rather easily from the citation databases.Xxanthippe (talk) 21:53, 11 March 2012 (UTC).

And even if you're written a book and that book was reviewed in any detail (most books aren't), the review might not say more than a short paragraph about the author. Fairly often, we only have a couple of WP:Independent sources about a professor, and what we have is mostly problematic (e.g., about a single incident) or inadequate (e.g., a passing mention). That's why we don't even attempt to write articles for most professors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

All this good and well and I understood what you wrote. I see the controversy here. At the same time I also see that you all were happy to rehash whatever was disputed, so that you forgot to actually answer my question. Let me trim it a bit, so that you will not get excited again:

The guideline is littered with the superlatives: "highest", "highly prestigious", etc. How about toning it down? At least I would suggest to eliminate an absurd double whammy: "...a major highest-level elected or appointed academic post...".

I fail to see why simply "prestigious" is not enough and I am curious what "minor higest-level academic posts" are excluded by this policy and why. Sorry for being obtuse. Logofat de Chichirez (talk) 20:59, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess it was really the rest of us who were obtuse! I went back and looked again at those superlatives now. The double whammy you cite is in number 6. I'd be open to deleting the word "major" in that case. What do other editors think about that? More broadly, I'm not as bothered by the superlatives as you are. That's because of the way that AfD discussions go. One person's "prestige" will be another person's puffery. Someone will write a bio of an academic who really falls short of the guideline, but they will defend it because the subject won some award that no one heard of, etc. In order to reply to those arguments, it's helpful to point out that not all honors are equal. The more that one can point to requirements for high standards, the less people will argue about what the requirements are. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:33, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I'd be open to deleting the first "major". But the second "major" serves an important role in distinguishing the head of an Ivy league university from the head of a local community college. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:39, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with that, just the first "major" in that sentence (and I enjoyed your edit summary). --Tryptofish (talk) 22:18, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Hah, so major CS professors keep track of internet memes. Cool. Logofat de Chichirez (talk) 22:36, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

A reference to a novel that was published before I was born counts as an internet meme? —David Eppstein (talk) 23:28, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Silly me: in my brain it immedialety rhymed with "badger badger badger badger". The next thing was buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo... Now I know all about majors, too :-) Logofat de Chichirez (talk) 23:45, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

P.S. to whoever is fond of Catch-22: In a bizzarre chain of events, a minor chat in this page seems to have triggered a major rewrite of Major Major Major Major :-) Logofat de Chichirez (talk) 19:50, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

notability question

Does this seem notable enough to merit and article: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=author:%22R+Marmulla%22&hl=en&as_sdt=1,33 many papers published, but I'm unable to find much biographical content. Nonetheless, seems like a notable academic. --KarlB (talk) 18:15, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Looks kind of borderline to me. When I search GS for tomogram accuracy (related to his most cited paper) I see some other papers with citation counts 1294, 767, 520, 441, 373, 313, 295, 290, 286, 285, etc compared to Marmulla's top-cited 118. So this looks like a fairly highly cited area, and the numbers don't convince me he's one of the top experts in it. It's at the level where I probably wouldn't object to someone else creating an article but it's below the level at which I'd be willing to create it myself. In any case we need more than just citation numbers to have some content with which to write an article — what is there in this case? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:12, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

for now just this: [3]. he's actually a user here, i came across him when doing a AfD on an article about one of the softwares he has created, which doesn't seem to be notable, but looking at his work, I figured he actually might be. In any case, any content about him is likely to be in German I suppose. --KarlB (talk) 19:33, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

published

David, WP:V says (in the WP:SOURCES section)"Source material must have been published (made available to the public in some form); unpublished materials are not considered reliable."

There are zero exceptions to this, not even for self-published sources. And if an experienced editor like you believes that unpublished sources are useful for demonstrating notability, then we really do need to mention that "redundant" fact here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:13, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Self-published sources are made available to the public in some form. But they haven't been independently verified so they should be used with great caution unless they become cited or reviewed by reviewed sources. However, a public lecture which does not make it into print can sometimes be considered in notability -- for instance, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, would be notable even before it appeared in print. Similar things happen in other fields, especially those slower fields (humanities for instnace) where an important discovery can take years to get into print but which already inspire other research based public lectures. But the existence of the lecture and its claims should usually be able to be found in print somewhere. -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 22:45, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Actually, self-published sources are verified (for purposes of WP:V), but they aren't peer-reviewed. Anyway, I'm having trouble understanding what the issue is, for the disagreement to which WhatamIdoing refers. It seems to me that, if the required sources "exist", then they are not "upublished". The act of publishing them makes them exist, although they need not always be published in the traditional paper way. I guess I'm missing something: what am I missing? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:33, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

See discussion above, Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)#Existence of sources, and in particular DGG's long comment there. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:03, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks: giving myself a dope-slap, since I participated in that discussion. But then I still have largely the same question with respect to the edits/reverts discussed here. It seems to me that WhatamIdoing is making the reasonable point that self-published material should not be used to establish notability of a page, whereas other editors are replying that self-published material can be used to source certain kinds of routine information on a page – which is also reasonable, but a different question. The sentence being edited ("Every topic on Wikipedia must be one for which sources have been publishedexist; see Wikipedia:Verifiability.") sounds to me like it's mostly about page notability, whereas the sentence that comes immediately after it ("For the routine uncontroversial details of a career, official institutional and professional sources are accepted as sourcing for those details.") is clearly about, instead, routine information. Perhaps this is where the confusion lies? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:54, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Actually, my goal is to update this to more accurately reflect the policy at WP:V.

Unpublished sources do "exist": if you find Grandma's old love letters tied up in a ribbon, those letters exist. They are not published, but they exist: you can see them, read them, touch them, burn them, or use them to wallpaper the kitchen. But they are not published, that is, they are not made available to the public in any form.

This really has nothing to do with self-published sources, except that David reverted the change—the change that made this page match the wording in the policy—with the rather strange claim that self-published sources were somehow not published, despite being, by their very definition, sources that were actually published. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:40, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

I restored WhatamIdoing's edit when it was reverted. I was reading "unpublished" as meaning "not curated and releases by an independent publisher." (Given that meaning, I felt adding "published" was appropriate because self-published sources, while sometimes useful for verification, say nothing about notability, the topic of this guideline.) However, she means the more obvious understanding of the word, made available to the public - not sitting among a bunch of letters in a drawer, or an email from the subject, etc. I endorse the inclusion of "published" as a simple and worthwhile clarification of WP:V. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 02:29, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

How many citations are needed to pass WP:Prof#C1?

Newcomers to the academic BLP AfD pages sometimes ask how many citations and/or size of h-index are needed to satisfy WP:Prof#C1. There is no clear answer to this and there is no Wikipedia policy on the matter. One can judge only on the basis of past practice. Looking back at decisions on the academic BLP AfD pages over the past few years, I find overall that to clearly satisfy WP:Prof#C1 500-1000 citations in the scientific literature have usually been needed with an h index of greater than 15. Those with an h-index of less than 10 rarely pass. There is no formal policy on this; it is just the way that decisions of editors have evolved historically. The acceptable number of citations varies by subject. Some indications of this are given in the report "Citation statistics: A report from the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS)". Statistical Science 24 (1): 1–14. doi:10.1214/09-STS285. MR2561120. Project Euclid. The average paper in mathematics gets cited about once, in life sciences about six times, with several subjects in between those limits. Bio-med/life-sciences is highly cited, physics and chemistry in the middle, maths low and humanities lower. My impression is that the boundary mark (h index) for bio-med is currently taken to be 20 with typically 1000 citations, physics and chemistry 15, maths 12. These numbers are not finishing posts, which to reach gives an automatic pass of WP:Prof#C1. They are boundary markers: cases around these values tend to get much discussion, the further away in either direction the clearer the situation becomes. It is also the case that notability is diluted by a large number of co-authors. It is hardly necessary to say that these comments represent my views alone and do not constitute Wikipedia policy. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:21, 7 May 2012 (UTC).