Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD (second nomination)

Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD

AfDs for this article:

• Articles for deletion/Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD
• Articles for deletion/Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD (second nomination)

Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

This article is not about scientists but instead purports to be about a book. It is a little known book, originally published in 1999 by a small British publishing house [1] and now out of print in the UK at least, [2] though possibly still in print in India. The article offers no commentary whatever from third party sources: hardly surprising, as a Google search brings up a mere 32 unique hits [3]; and they are only Wikipedia mirrors, automated listings at a few online bookshops and a couple of passing references from people who are happy about their own inclusion. The article can never conform to WP:BK, because (i) it contains nothing which is not apparently sourced from the book itself, and (ii) as a minor work published nine years ago (and out of print in most of the world) it is most unlikely ever to attract further independent commentary or reviews.

An AfD eighteen months ago closed as no consensus. Three main arguments were made for keeping the article; all are erroneous or else no longer relevant.

The first argument for keeping the article was that it served as a useful list of scientists, many of whom were still in need of articles. But since then, the vast majority of the redlinks have turned blue. And the article was always a poor to-do list, for reasons I'll come on to.

Another argument made for keeping was based on the incorrect belief, which had found its way into the article, that the list was the result of an important, authoritative survey of many academics, rather than the view of a single author, and was important because of this. However, the book itself (of which I have acquired a copy) makes no such claim. It makes it clear that this is a personal selection; commenting "While relying heavily on [three scholarly biographical dictionaries], the author has has attempted to extract the top 1000 names in science that should be known to everyone with a serious interest in the role of science in society" (Preface, page vii, emphasis mine). While it does add that "In this task, the author was assisted enormously by a survey he conducted in eighty university departments around the world" (emphasis mine again), this is all it says about the survey. There is no information at all on who was surveyed, what the response rate was, how many votes each scientist received, or even how much weight the author attached to the results in making his selection. This is in spite of suggestions to the contrary on the talk page. I will provide scans of the relevant pages on request by Email to confirm the book's actual contents.

I will add that, as others have pointed out on the talk page, the book's selection is quite bizarre. To list just a few of the missing names, there is no mention of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Christiaan Huygens, Leonardo da Vinci or Werner Heisenberg. Perhaps most astonishingly, on pages 88 and 89 the (alphabetical) entries jump straight from Paul Ehrlich to Willem Einthoven, without pausing to mention the German fellow with the funny hair and the famous equation. It's inconceivable that any well conducted survey could have missed so many greats from the history of science; a more likely explanation is that the book was completed in a hurry to cash in on the millennium (release date: December 1999). The haphazard selection further reduces the book's value as a to-do list.

Finally, it was suggested that the list of scientists was endorsed by the President of the British Society for History of Science, and gained notability from this fact. While it is true that there is a short introduction written by Ludmilla Jordanova, it is just a bland essay about scientific biographies. It makes no specific mention of Barker or this book, certainly does not endorse the selection, and seems likely to have been commissioned by the publisher before the content was available. It is unlikely that Barker collaborated closely with Jordanova, because he thanks her "for his (sic) helpful comments", apparently having failed to notice that she is a woman.

The list of scientists (essentially a contents page for the book) is therefore inherently unencyclopaedic; by including this list we give massively undue weight to a single non-notable person's view of who the most important scientists throughout history have been; and this POV cannot be fixed since names cannot be added or removed without traducing the book. The remainder of the article can never be much more than publisher's blurb and should be deleted.

In short the book fails Wikipedia's inclusion criteria on many levels; WP:N, WP:BK, WP:V and WP:NPOV to name just four. As an article about a book it is irredeemable due to the book's lack of notability, as a list of scientists it is something we have no need of. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 20:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Wow, I don't think you really needed to write a book of your own, but your point got across. This book definitely does not have any individual notability, outside references, or a need to clutter our site. Reywas92^Talk 21:02, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete We have plenty better lists of scientists that our readers would benefit from examining. As a book article, it fails the threshold by quite a margin. As a list of important scientists, it is only notable in its incompetence. Sorry to those who have spent time fixing wikilinks or dates of birth and death, but I believe your time will be better spent elsewhere. Colin°^Talk 21:21, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep, if for no other reason than that it was extremely useful in creating cross-links between various forms of the names of these scientists. In addition, it serves the very same purposes as most other lists on Wikipedia. Actually, I thought this was long-gone ancient history. Was it deleted and re-created again? In fact, it must have been. It looks like I created the article; mine is listed after the first entry. But in fact, that was one of my last edits there; I only edited it one other day since then, but I probably had a hundred edits before the first one listed in the history. It was originally put here by someone else, not by me. If I did re-create it, it was inadvertent. Prehaps I was editing it at the time someone else deleted it, and my edit then started it all over again; that's the only thing I can think of. Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:24, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Who is going to benefit from the "cross-links between various forms of the names of these scientists"? If some science wikiproject want to keep the list as a tool for naming/linking, then it can go into project space. We write articles in WP namespace for the benefit of our readers, not the editors. I'm sorry you've spent time on this but I rather think we were mislead on the importance or worth of this list and book. Now that a copy has been found, its shortcomings as anything useful to WP are apparent. To have editors waste more time on this would be a crime. BTW: the article was deleted due to copyright concerns and the history incompletely restored when those concerns were addressed. Colin°^Talk 21:31, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

It must have been your copyvio deletion and the subsequent restoration that lost all the prior history and mistakenly made it look like I created the article. See the logs for the page, and User talk:Gene Nygaard/2005Jul-2006Jan#Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD. Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The IP-address you mentioned there on my talk page was probably the original creator, though I don't see anything about it on User talk:202.138.112.252 before your copyvio notice. It had been discussed somewhere, most likely on the article's talk page, in more stuff that has vanished into the ether.

Curiously, if you go to the history of the talk page for the article, it shows 17 talk page entries which predate my supposed creation of the article on 31 December 2005. What is going on here, anyway? Can you figure it out? Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:48, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore, even that first entry on the talk page is a pretty clear indication that the article had been in existence for some time before then (and it is likely before then that most of the editing I did too place). THat first talk page entry says:

This page was made into a redirect to List of scientists but I reverted it because this article references one particular book and so the content of the redirect and the content of the article would not be the same. Qaz (talk) 02:58, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:59, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The log shows that the article was deleted by User:Quadell on 20 Feb 2006 as a copyvio, then restored two days later by User:David.Monniaux when the author apparently released the list under the GFDL. However, for some reason David only restored the most recent revision (yours) rather than all the revisions, making it look like you created the page. Admins do have the option of selectively restoring revisions; it allows them to remove libel and whatnot from page histories without the need for oversight. Why David did it in this case I don't know - it might have been to do with the permission, or it might have been a simple mistake. You'd have to ask him.

On the main point though I agree with Colin; with the article's many inadequacies which I've outlined, I don't see that "useful cross-links" is a good enough reason to overcome WP:V, WP:N, WP:BK and WP:UNDUE. I'm sorry that the good work you put into cleaning up this page was in vain, but there really is nothing here to merit an article. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 22:06, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. —Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 22:25, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete very simply as a non-notable book. Someguy1221 (talk) 22:42, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Per the nominator, the book's not notable. I see the argument for keeping as a reference list of top-scientists, but no Gauss?! Heisenberg?! Einstein?!? It's a bit too controversial to be useful, bearing in mind that it's ultimately just one man's informed opinion. The Zig (talk) 22:43, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep/merge There are still some redlinks. I'm not seeing a good list to merge these into and don't think the list should be deleted until we've got them all. Colonel Warden (talk) 23:10, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
  • A quick flick through some of the redlinks suggests that many or most are already redlinked from other lists; for example Thomas Lewis (cardiologist) is redlinked from these articles, Saul Winstein is redlinked from here; others only seem to be redlinks only because they point to uncommon variants of the person's name which nobody's bothered to redirect yet; for example I've just redirected Gerald Mayer Rubin to Gerald M. Rubin. Others might just not be very notable - after all, the author's selection is idiosyncratic at best, and a hundred word biographical sketch in an obscure book does not in itself confer notability, however grand the book's title. However, if anyone thinks the redlinks retain value as a to do list, it would be better to keep them on a Wikiproject's subpage than in article space, as the list has no inherent value as an article. In fact, the redlinks are already preserved at User:Lambiam/RedlinkedScientists, so the information would not be lost by removing this from article space. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 23:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
    • I'm pretty sure it started out with over 900 redlinks. A good number of them were just red because appropriate redirects hadn't been made; Wikipedia already had the articles, but the names were originally just blindly linked as they appeared in the book. OTOH, there were also blue links to inappropriate articles. But even with that, much fewer than half of them on the list had articles (whether they had been found or not) when this article started. This article ws one impetus for athe initial creation of a good number of articles, and for cleaning up a lot of the existing ones. Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:58, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. The multiple reasons for deletion have been amply explained. I note that Gene Nygaard says the article was extremely useful in creating cross-links between various forms of the names of these scientists. Pardon the personal note, but my room is full of things that at one time or other were extremely useful; plenty of them are now worn out, boring, mouldy or otherwise of no more than curiosity value, and the entire room is an unsightly mess. I'm surprised to hear that this article was useful, but if it was then let's be grateful for this as we put it out of its misery. ¶ Immediately above, the Colonel points out that there are still some redlinks, and is not seeing a good list to merge these into. A few seconds ago (and before reading Iain99's comment) I plonked a list of all these redlinks on the talk page of this AfD, so they'll survive the richly deserved deletion of this sixty-two kilobyte "article"; anyone is free thereafter to do anything with them. -- Hoary (talk) 00:04, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete as per nominator and my own arguments on the article's talk page. One bias-revealing stat I once worked out is the mean number of wikipedia articles in different languages, a decent indicator of someone's international fame, for different groups of scientists on the list. In November, for British scientists this was 3.5, for the rest of the world this was 13... There is no need for a list like this to artificially boost the UK's superiority complex with respect to science, though it is fun to compare the greater merits of listed people like Herbert Brereton Baker and the delightfully named Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland with notable absentees like Avicenna and Heinrich Hertz. Afasmit (talk) 00:39, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • To claim your original research here as evidence of bias is more just evidence of your own bias than anything else. Have you actually looked at the scope of most of the Wikipedias? Over 70% of them don't even have 1,000 articles. That "3.5" is about the total number who make any kind of a stab a comprehensiveness, isn't it?
  • Or are you just complaining because Chemical Ali didn't make the list, when he has links to articles in 19 other Wikipedias? Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:45, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Gene, don't get upset about this. I've probably put at least as much time in cleaning up this list as you. I'll just save a copy for myself now. Other much, much larger projects have been deleted in the past, like the index of people by last name.

It's sad how "original research" has become a dirty word; the wikipedia rule likely should not be interpreted as "don't check on your facts before writing." If I were to make a wikipedia article entitled "Bias in Philip Barker's Top 1000 Scientists list" you'd have a good point.

Your claim that "since the other language wikipedias are not comprehensive, the numbers have no meaning" doesn't make sense; in fact, if each were indeed comprehensive all listed 1037 scientists would occur in all languages. As it is now (and always will be), all wikipedias contain samples of articles someone somewhere thought was noteworthy enough to include, and this sampling did the statistics for me. Undoubtedly, there is a bias there too (some systematic, like mathematicians around the world seem to have really jumped on wikipedia, countries with multiple languages like Switzerland have a small head start, British historical figures have a wider exposure through the dominance of English-language text books, because of the size of the English wikipedia, lesser known foreign scientists get the English entry "for free", etc.), but it's not my bias and it will never explain why half the British listees had 3 or fewer wikipedia entries, and half of the international had 13 or more. Afasmit (talk) 03:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Mostly, I'm just saying your methodology if flawed. For one thing, having articles in many Wikipedias is anot a reliable indicator that someone is a "top scientist", which is why I mentioned Chemical Ali. Then there is the question of the significance of numbers like "3.5" and "13" when they range from zero to 90, and when they are not by any mans independent, with articles from one often being translated into another; and the more closely related the languages are, the more likely this is to happen. Like from one Norwegian Wikipedia to the other Norwegian Wikipedia. And the wide discrepancies in the numbers of speakers of each of the various languages. The very limited pool of active editors on some wikipedias will skew the results greatly. The methods you use to determine nationality can skew the results too.

And nowhere is the methodology more flawed than in your talking about a "mean" above, and then talking as if it were a median in your last sentence. We don't even know what you were trying to measure, let alone how accurate the implementation of that determination was. Gene Nygaard (talk) 06:42, 13 February 2008 (UTC) originally posted not logged in, 69.57.91.185 06:32, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, my bad. I meant to type median of course. Darn the nitwits that came up with those easily mixed up names. You could have just said "by the way, you meant to say 'median' " of course.

With respect to Chemical Ali, and I trust you're not implying that most foreign scientists are terrorists, I'm only comparing people on the list, all presumably there because they were noteworthy for their scientific work and not their notoriety.

It seems you think the English language is some four-fold disadvantageous for scientists to be included in foreign language wikipedias. I suspect it is rather advantage instead (e.g. the texbook issue I mentioned above, most foreigners will look in the English wikipedia to translate biographies from, as this tends to be the second language people know, etc.). Also, for scientists from the US, Australia, South Africa, Canada, etc. the median number of foreign wikipedia articles was 11, not that much different from the 14 for non-English speaking countries. I think Barker just had access to a British biographical dictionary. You seem very interested in this. I can send you the excel file if you like. Afasmit (talk) 09:48, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep Though the content draws from one book expressing one man's opinion, it is a cite to a published source, and it's superior to an original research list of a thousand scientists. It's also the basis for adding other information. Though the author packaged it in a form that would make it more marketable, this isn't a countdown (although Casey Kasem could have sent out a dedication right before introducing #181, Sir Isaac Newton). It's a published list of persons, not all of them well-known, who made notable contributions to science. If someone else has published a similar list of 1,000 persons, merge the articles. It appears that 38 of these names are red-links, which means either that the entry has been misspelled or that there's not an article about that person. If Wikipedia has articles about the other 962, then that's pretty good. Perhaps it's not as popular an encylopedia topic as, say, List of SpongeBob SquarePants episodes, season three but there's room for all the disciplines in Wikipedia. Mandsford (talk) 02:49, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • It's also the basis for adding other information. Could you elaborate? ¶ If someone else has published a similar list of 1,000 persons, merge the articles. It's highly unlikely that any such book (or web list or whatever) would have precisely the same title. Let's suppose that its title were slightly different but its purpose indisputably identical. We can also assume, I think, that this second person's top thousand would not be the same as the "thousand" (1037) here. Indeed, the union of the two sets would almost certainly exceed 1037. How might one title the resulting article? I can't think of anything neater than "Union of lists of top thousand scientists", but to me that sounds a distinctly strange article. (Actually the very notion of there being a "top [insert number here] scientists" sounds odd to me, but that's another matter.) ¶ It appears that 38 of these names are red-links, which means either that the entry has been misspelled or that there's not an article about that person. If you're looking at my derivative on this AfD's talk page, I didn't count them, and I can't guarantee that I didn't sleepily overlook something. (Simple to check: before the article is deleted, get its HTML source -- I don't mean the editable preprocessor source -- and grep this for the string "action=edit".) But however accurate or inaccurate the list, as it's on this AfD's talk page it will outlive the article and can be used in any way you wish. Indeed, any interested user or project could put it into a "to do" list elsewhere. -- Hoary (talk) 03:28, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • It is not a cite to a published source, it is an article about a published source, and there are different criteria as a result. If someone wants to use this crappy list to prop up the notability of another article as a reference, well, I don't think they'll need to for any of these scientists, but they can give it a go. That doesn't mean that the published source deserves its own article, though. There are no cites for this book to any other published sources at all. --Ig8887 (talk) 03:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Please note: we are discussing the deletion of a book article, not a WP list that happens to cite a book. The creation of such a WP list would either be POV or necessarily involve sythnesis of sources, and fail on that account. Colin°^Talk 08:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. No one is debating that the people ON the list are notable or not; what is in question is whether the list and book THEMSELVES are notable. Therefore, we need third-party reliable sources discussing the list or the book and assigning notability to this specific list of 1000 scientists. Was this list debated in any scientific journals? Was it reviewed by the New York Times? Did anyone even notice that the book was published? You would think that if the book itself was notable, the exclusion of key scientists like Einstein would have been the subject of uproar, controversy, or at least simple observation by third-party media. The fact that it was not implies that this work is merely another insignificant book written by one man who happened to be lucky enough to con a publisher into printing it for him. The "useful" redlinks have already been preserved, leaving no reason for this regurgitation of a non-notable book's table of contents to remain in Wikipedia. --Ig8887 (talk) 03:16, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Comment: I decided to do a little research into what sort of company WOULD be conned into publishing this. It turns out that "The Book Guild Ltd." offers "partnership publishing"[4] which is a fancy word for vanity press. A Google serch revealed at least one writer's website that indicated that The Book Guild sometimes asked for "contributions" from prospective authors looking to have their book published. So it's likely that this author didn't even have the editorial oversight of a single editor, he simply ponied up some money and put his opinions into print. --Ig8887 (talk) 03:25, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete as before, ZERO external sources. This book fails the fundamental criterion of notability - that external sources of information exist. Even if it passes that criterion, there's no reason in the world for us to have an article that is merely some random person's list of scientists. --B (talk) 03:45, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete unless and until an independent review of the book, published in a notable journal or similar, is cited. dab (𒁳) 08:57, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. Said keep last time, but that was a year and a half ago and there has been no improvement whatsoever since then. Batmanand | Talk 09:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. I am not sure where the worry about a vanity publisher emerges.The book has been published by Orient Lingman ,one of teh biggest and most respected publishing houses in Asia[5] The publication house has publishes many bestsellers including Wings of Fire by Abdul Kalam.And thsi is not a random list-it has been authored by a noted UK archaelogist.

And I do not know why the refernce to omision of Einstein is made-he is very much there!I know the earlier edition was recalled in the UK but the current edition does have all that.[6] and has a forward by a top UK historian of science[7]. Should that not be a reason enough? (Delhite (talk) 11:52, 13 February 2008 (UTC))

Book Guild obviously dropped the book when the realised what a turd it was. Universities Press (India) Pvt. Ltd (an associate of Orient Longman) were somehow persuaded to publish a paperback, which may well have had Einstein inserted as its such an obvious gaff. Philip Barker (the archaeologist) is most definitely not the author of this book. See his obituary from 2001. The forward (available from Iain by email) is damning in its lack of praise for the book. I would think that Jordanova is rather embarrassed by it. Publication alone is not enough to get an article on WP. There are millions of non-notable books published by excellent publishers. Colin°^Talk 12:31, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Einstein is absolutely not in the original edition, which I have sitting in front of me. If you doubt this, Email me and I'll send you a scan of the page he should be on. The Indian publisher might well have corrected this gaffe, after all, it's a glaring omission, even to a layman; but if the list was changed between editions this is yet more proof that it's an arbitrary, mutable selection and not the result of a comprehensive survey, which could hardly be changed after the fact.

The book was not authored by Philip Barker, the archaeologist. I found a single university press release which suggests it was [8], but I assume this is a simple mistake on behalf of the university's press officer. The minimal biography on the dust jacket describes the author as a scholar who lectures in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka and received a PhD in 1994. If he were a world renowned archaeologist, the biography would have found room to mention this. Furthermore, according to the OTRS ticket on the talk page, the author was apparently on hand in 2006 to release the list under the GFDL. Barker the archaeologist died in 2001. Ans as Colin's obituary shows, he was in a nursing home by 1999, and in no state to write a book.

As I wrote in the nomination, Jordanova's forward is a short (a page and a half), bland essay on the general topic of scientific biographies, which says nothing about the book itself. Notability is not contagious, and merely being loosely associated with a notable scholar does not make the book itself notable. If it were a genuinely important book, there would be a wealth of independent reviews commenting on it, praising or criticising its selection and contents, which would allow the article to grow beyond a simple text dump of its contents page. There aren't; it's never even had a customer review on Amazon. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 14:09, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete - Non-notable book. No reliable sourcing. -FrankTobia (talk) 14:23, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete This article about a non-notable book by a non-notable author gives vastly undue weight to the opinions of that author. The title of the article gives the impression that this is Wikipedia's list of the 1000 greatest, rather than an article about one random guy's favorite 1000. The book author did not include the fathers of scientific psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Fechner and William James, along with the proponent of operant conditioning B.F. Skinner. He left out physicist Gustav Kirchhoff who pioneered the concept of black body radiation as well as his current and voltage laws which allow analysis of electric circuits. He left out Joseph Henry who was the co-discoverer of electrical induction. He left out Heinrich Hertz who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves. He included many lesser lights. He included industrialist/inventors George Westinghouse , Thomas Edison , and Joseph Swan , whose actual scientific contributions were minor. Fails WP:N. Edison (talk) 15:27, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete not a notable book, -- worldCat shows only 55 libraries, which is very low for a book intended as a popular-level reference book. The uselessness of the list for WP purposes seems to have been dealt with above. Would anyone be interested in a List of Scientists included in Dictionary of Scientific biography, however? It's several thousand, but I could do it gradually. it would be a good check list for WP bios. .DGG (talk) 21:09, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete per many comments above. It is not notable and has done its job as a list of redlinks. --Bduke (talk) 23:01, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Oy vey! WP does not need this article on a not notable and deeply flawed "book". Pinkville (talk) 04:08, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
• Rant OK, I spent a bit of time last night doing my own bit to kill off the redlinks, and I'm left wondering if I'm going slightly mad. While writing articles for James Walker (chemist) and Thomas Edward Thorpe, I noticed that Adolf von Baeyer, Rainer Ludwig Claisen and best of all, August Kekulé are missing from Barker's book. Now, smashing chaps as I'm sure Walker and Thorpe were, I confess that I'd never heard of them until last night, and having read their ODNB entries (and Barker's book, for that matter) I'm still in the dark as to what they did which makes them anywhere near as important, let alone more important, than those three German gentlemen, so can anyone, anywhere enlighten me? As for Thomas Melvill, he seems to be so obscure that I was a bit worried that an overzealous new page patroller would slap a CSD tag on the article, and had to think carefully about how to assert notability. His ODNB entry is three paragraphs long, and even Barker's book says he "had no impact on the scientific community" and ascribes his "lack of influence" to his early death. Even to a Brit like me with a superiority complex about science ;-), this is ridiculous. I now find it hard to believe that Barker did much more than paraphrase entries at random from an anglocentric biographical dictionary. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 08:43, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep

I think it is important not be to swayed by knee-jerk reactions.I am alluding in particular to Iain's comments:

1.Archaelogist Barker did not author the book.University of Rochester science portal suggests otherwise. [9]

2.Jordanova is "embarassed" by her forward;is there any evidence to back it up apart from one'sown hunch!If so,I shouldlike to see that.

3.I amas an Indian and a Tamil tempeted totakie very strong exception to teh suggestion that Orient Longman,one of teh top and most respected publishing houses in Asia published t---d once it was rejected!The use of that word I am not sure conforms to the standards required by the Wiki.And is there any evidence.Orient Longman has long been teh premier publishing house in this region.[10] I am not sure many readers and users of Wiki owuld find the comment in good taste.

3.The book was originally published by Book Guild!I have been though the book in the refrence section of Chennai Mathematical Society-going through it I notice tha this volume is a reprint and it syas that teh book was originally published by Orient Longman,later as a hardback by Book Guild which was recalled because of errors almost immediately.

4.Einstein is very much there in the original volume [11]

Please note that his photo appears on the cover page!Clearly Iain has the recalledvolume in his hand!

To his credit he did leave a note on my talk page when he nominated this article for deletion.But I am afraid I cannot go along with unsubstantiated hunches.

(Venkat Radhakrishnan (talk) 10:33, 14 February 2008 (UTC))

You raise various points. ¶ You say 1.Archaelogist Barker did not author the book.University of Rochester science portal suggests otherwise. [12] Iain99 has already pointed this out (see above). He followed this with various observations, among them that it seems that the author of this book contacted Wikipedia five years after the archaeologist had died. This raises various possibilities: (i) the archaeologist didn't die, (ii) the archaeologist's ghost contacted Wikipedia, (iii) the non-archaeologist author contacted Wikipedia, (iv) an impostor contacted Wikipedia. Let's take these one by one. (1) would imply an elaborate fraud behind such materials as this. (ii) is the kind of explanation that I for one generally tend to avoid; (iii) seems least problematic to me; (iv) would imply that the list within the article should be deleted as a copyright violation. Have I overlooked something here? ¶ You seem to appeal to this URL for the authority to claim both that (i) Orient Longman has long been teh premier publishing house in this region and that (ii) Einstein is very much there in the original volume. It's an article from The Hindu, titled Orient Longman, Trinity College tie-up on English language exam. How does it back up either claim? -- Hoary (talk) 10:57, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep.Being an author myself who has published several books,I can say that anyone with any knowledge of book publication woudl vouch for the very high standards espoused by Orient Longman as its published volumes woudl testify.Having grown up in Goa,I know I read sevral volumes published by them.

But I shall concentrate on two points:

a.firstly,if a book has been recalled for any reason,and then republished ,the judgement shoudl be based on the latest version and not the recalled version.I know how I had to force one of my publishers to recall a book of mine.I think we are judging the book on the basis of statements from a volume that has been recalled.I can see the photograph of Einstein in the Orient Longman volume cover.

b.I looked through the Royal Society Library Archives: [13] Somehow I do not believe the Royal Society would keep "turd' in its reference section.

Regards.Dinesh (Dineshdsouza (talk) 11:58, 14 February 2008 (UTC))

libraries keep a remarkable number of things in the reference section, including all obtainable biographic dictionaries, good or bad, because they might possibly be useful. that not our criterion.DGG (talk) 19:35, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Strong keep

I was fascinated to note a few names who I had never heard of-Zohary,Donders etc.Keep for the reasons stated by Gene(Banarsibabu (talk) 12:41, 14 February 2008 (UTC))

• Oversimplification! User:Barnasibabu's list of contributions may be short but it is most interesting; it includes the editing of Dineshdsouza's user page -- Hoary 14:35, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Some points raised by recent posts
  • (1) The Book Guild edition is surely the original. The Indian publisher lists its edition's publication date as 2002. [14] Furthermore, the Book Guild volume makes no mention of any previous editions, as would be customary were it a reprint. And "...From the Dawn of Time to 2000AD" would be a pretty silly title for a book published significantly before December 1999!
  • (2) As I already pointed out, the University of Rochester has made a simple mistake about the identity of the author. Barker the archaeologist was living in a nursing home in England by the late 1990s,[15] not lecturing in India as the dust jacket and Indian publisher claim the actual author was. [16]
  • (3) There is indeed a copy in the Royal Society library. [17] Vr/Venkat has previously claimed to have consulted this copy, and said that it was the first edition [18] Yet the library lists its copy as having been published by Book Guild in 1999 - in other words, the same one I'm looking at now. Why has Vr failed to notice until now that it was actually a reprint, and if it was indeed withdrawn by the publisher (as opposed to merely sold out or pulped), why does the library still stock it? For that matter, if it was recalled, how did I manage to get a new copy from Amazon (I clearly have too much money) a week or so ago?
  • (4) None of this addresses the primary reason for the deletion, which is that the book itself is utterly non-notable, and that the copy of its contents page is unencyclopaedic, and of no use to Wikipedia.
  • (5) Why have so many accounts with even worse spelling than mine suddenly turned up claiming to know the detailed publishing history of this obscure book? Does someone know the author, perhaps? Is there a conflict of interest here? Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 13:15, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

At least I do not know the publication history of the book!But the question remains unanswered-was there a mistake committed by the University of Rochester?If so where is the evidence?And whatever I know about the book comes through the net!And I do not see any evidence of a "mistake" by the press officer!Should we operate on presumptions?Being in a remote village in India,I can hardly be expected to know the author!Moreso if he is dead!!But I do believe the contents of a recalled book should not form the basis of this debate-only the existing edition!Only Vr can answer the quetion you raise.But I do find your disparaging outlook towards a respected publishing house unusual to say the least.Hence I would go along with Gene Nygaard and vote

• Keep

(Cbhatia (talk) 14:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC))

Cbhatia, you ask But the question remains unanswered-was there a mistake committed by the University of Rochester?If so where is the evidence? as if this were a new and unanswered question. The University of Rochester has done nothing. Either (a) some careless writer(s) working at or for the department -- a writer who for example also wrote Contains a forward [sic] by former President of the The British Society for the History of Science Ludmilla Jordanova -- made some dumb mistake. Alternatively, (b) that writer didn't make a mistake, and the book was indeed written by somebody who was in a nursing home in Britain while he was roaming the Indian subcontinent. Other possibilities involve a ghost and an impostor. All of this is explained above, for those who care to read it. -- Hoary (talk) 14:49, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

more calmly, all Rochester did was take advantage of an opportunity to give a professor there some publicity--that's what PR people at universities do, which is why we don't trust hem very far at WP about notability. DGG (talk) 19:41, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete per nom. No meaningful evidence of notability and either way, the list itself doesn't belong in the article (it's a wanton WP:COPYVIO for starters). Gwen Gale (talk) 16:26, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • It would be a copyvio, but according to the OTRS template at the top of the talk page, someone (presumably the author) contacted OTRS to give permission for it to be used. However, I note the book's fanclub thinks that it was written by someone who died five years before OTRS was contacted. If I believed this, I'd ask somebody from OTRS to re-examine the ticket, as I don't think that ghosts retain the rights to the work they did while they were alive. ;-) Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 17:20, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

NO, the list is not a copyvio, its not a reproduction of the book, but just the contents of it. The book talks about the material, which is fair comment. The list of subjects covered in a book is not copyrightable except for arrangementDGG (talk) 19:35, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the list is long enough that it does represent a copyright violation as to content and arrangement, note also, someone else thought enough about it to get a copyright waiver (however uncertain) through OTRS. However, my comment on copyright was only an aside, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of notability. Gwen Gale (talk) 20:02, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

The article was originally deleted as a copyvio, so there seems to be some uncertainty on this point. [19] I'm not a lawyer, but I would have thought that in the UK at least, a list like this would be covered by copyright under the same principle which protects sporting fixture lists (see here for want of a better link in a hurry). I understand that US law is less restrictive, so I'll defer on this point. Regardless, it's a minor point - as you say, the book is very non-notable, and that's reason enough. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 20:24, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete - the subject of the article is the book. and that book does not meet our notability requirement. That it serves as a useful source for expanding our coverage of scientists is not relevant to its notability. -- Whpq (talk) 17:14, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. Non-notable book. --Itub (talk) 17:43, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
• Comment Please note Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Vr. Colin°^Talk 18:25, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• final comment from me we are not asked to decide about the quality of the book--we are asked to decide on whether it is notable, and the answer is that it is not, because there are almost no libraries that have bothered buying it, or major sources reviewing it. End of story. Those who want to work on notable scientists, should join us on the History of Science Wikiproject. DGG (talk) 19:41, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
• delete per DGG's variey of comments above. JoshuaZ (talk) 20:29, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

KeepI think it is a matter of opinion who should be there.I note the talk page whre on eperson wanted the infamous Abdul Qadeer Khan to be included!I concede that if Einstein is not there the list would have no credibility but it appears that he is there in the valid edition.I woudl like someone to look at the valid edition and see if Einstein is actually there-he appears on the cover though!I would change my vote to delete if he is not.And I do not agree with DCG's comment-the book appears to be in the Royal Society Library-and it appears in the IIM,Ahmedabad library as well.(Shonali2000 (talk) 06:26, 15 February 2008 (UTC))