Talk:Hilary Wilson

Sourcing issues

Some of the sources have major issues with reliability. I'm going to go over them and give a bit of explanation as to why:

• Retail sites: These should be avoided for the most part. Sometimes, in very, very specific situations a retail site can be used to back up basic details, but that's typically in situations where the site is extremely widely known for being accurate. For example, iTunes can be used to back up basic details in situations where no other possible sources exist. Given that this was created as a way to solve notability issues with another article, it's very important to use the strongest possible sources here. This source can't show notability and if it's just to establish that she wrote these books, there are better options, such as WorldCat.

To be honest, I always recommend avoiding retail sites because they make pages look very, very promotional and rarely offer up information that is absolutely vital to a page or can't be replaced with a more neutral source.

1. It doesn't look like Biblio.com would be seen as that strong. There's also the issue that this is backing up the claims of certain books being her most noteworthy - this doesn't hold water, since the site is listing the books they have for sale, which isn't the same thing as saying that they're what she's most known for.
2. Amazon and Waterstones should also generally be avoided for the reasons stated above.

• Primary sources: These can back up basic details, but they can't be used to establish notability. This is pretty much the main reason I'm bringing them up, as it's important to establish notability.

1. Michael O'Mara books, her publisher
2. Press release from university she attended.
3. South Hampton Ancient Egypt Society.
4. Articles she wrote

• Goodreads. Goodreads should pretty much never be used as source. The reason for this is that the site's info is user driven. Yes, publishers and authors can, have, and do submit info, but the info is overseen by a group of volunteers much like Wikipedia. They're dubbed librarians and to become one, you pretty much have to have a handful of books in a bookshelf and have an account that's about a month old. This means that it's not impossible for a description to have mistakes or have been written by a user rather than the publisher or author. As such, it's not something that should be used as a source to even back up book blurbs. It would be far better to use primary sources like an author or publisher's site or a database like WorldCat or even a university library.

• AllReaders is more than a bit dodgy looking. There's no information about how they get their info, their editorial oversight, or other info needed to tell if a source is reliable or not. There's really no info about them other than a picture of a very adorable dog as their "chief librarian". Definitely not reliable and I wouldn't consider them to be a notability giving RS as far as their reviews go.

• The fact that the book was included in a university's recommended reading is typically not going to be of major interest as far as Wikipedia goes. I'm not saying that this info should be removed from an article, just that it's not really a notability giving source.

All in all... there's really not much here that's reliable and pretty much none of it really helps with notability. The existence of this article helps with what to do with the other page, but it poses a new one of notability here. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 17:52, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

• I just don't want this to get nominated in turn, is all. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 18:01, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Right, right. These are good points, given in cogent detail, and thanks. So, I'll answer in detail. The executive summary is that in my opinion 1) you're correct, Hilary Wilson herself isn't notable, 2) however, the corpus of her work taken altogether is notable (the article could be retitled "List of works by Hilary Wilson" if people want), and 3) assuming that notability is given, which sources can be used on basis of being reliable is a different matter -- and a complicated one -- but a number of mutually self-supporting refs support a structure of high reliability, I think.

The rest turned out to to be really long, but that's the nutshell.

Lot of detail follows

OK. So, I want to state the obvious, establishing right off that a notability-establishing source and a reliable source are two completely different things. Obvious, but just so we're on the same page.

So yes, Hilary Wilson herself isn't very notable. She doesn't achieve WP:GNG with what's in there now, and I doubt she can. We need a good meaty article or interview in an actual real newspaper or something. Or maybe two. Probably nothing like that exists.

So, before going on to reliability of references, let's think about the notability of her corpus. For now, I'll assume the all the material about this books is reliable and can be used (we'll discuss this later).

So, taking one of her books, Understanding Hieroglyphs, say. Well, it's been translated into two languages, which mean 1) somebody thinks it's worthy enough for that work, and 2) it's read in at least three languages. That's two more languages than almost all of our other book articles I think. Secondly, it's cited in 18 different books and articles that JSTOR has. JSTOR only has serious works I guess, so that indicates the book is in the intellectual mindsphere of the subject (an important and well-known subject too). If it was a textbook it'd probably be in per WP:TEXTBOOK (at least by the rules). It's kind of like a textbook, but since it's not required reading at university (far as I know), it isn't one. But I mean, somebody here made an article about it, which it's going to be deleted but it wasn't fodder for WP:CSD or WP:PROD. It wasn't an unreasonable article to have.

And that's just the one book. Wilson has three others.

Egyptian Food and Drink isn't a textbook either, but Brown has it on a supplemental reading list for their department. That means they basically recommend it. I don't think they'd do that if they didn't respect it some. Brown University is a big deal. It's an Ivy League school, and QS Global World Rankings 2021 (whoever they are) ranks it #60 worldwide. Elite.

I'm not a believer in "that means zero, and if Harvard and Oxford and Tokyo U also recommended it, 0+0+0=0". Maybe the Brown thing is worth .1 notability, and we need to get to 1.0 to pass the threshold. Or whatever. It's a data point, it's not nothing. I don't know of other top schools have it on their radar, but I'd be surprised if Brown was an outlier. Why would it be? There's no way to easily know since mostly this wouldn't be online, though, and we can't assume. But still.

And there's People Of The Pharaohs. It's been translated into Dutch. Egyptian Woman is historical fiction. A legit field, Category:Historical novels has hundreds and hundreds of entries, and most of those haven't been translated into Czech and German (and a lot of these articles are of lesser notability and no better quality than this one section, being just a listing of vital stats and a plot summary).

So, but none of these books really rates a stand alone article. One way to look at it is, again, 0+0+0=0, the section is worthless. Another way to look at it is "Well, People Of The Pharaohs isn't notable enough for an article, you need (lets say) 1.0 notability for a stand-alone article and it's only a .4. But then the others are too, so it's .4+.4+.4+.4=1.6, so taken together the corpus is notable enough for an article." What if she had 20 books at this level of notability? 50? What is the cutoff? Again, rename it to "Books by Hilary Wilson" and consider the bio stuff just lead-in background if that helps.

The article is fine. All this is complicated, there are many rules here, they are usually vague can be interpreted in various ways, they are guidelines (=suggestions), and are mostly hemmed around with admonitions of the nature "use common sense" and "exceptions may apply". Article is OK, for my part I'll use the WP:1Q supplement to WP:IAR, don't erase OK articles.

Diversion re reviews (opinions) which we don't have here

OK, so... all this is assuming that the sources are accurate? Are they? Well, sources are always 100 accurate for their own contents. For opinions (reviews) we say "Goodreads says such-and-so", we can 100% stone prove it by pointing to the Goodreads page. I didn't start off with "Goodreads said...", but I did end with "-- Goodreads". Same thing, can be reformatted if desired.

The question is "do we care what Goodreads says? Is it worth reporting to the reader?" A good question! I don't know the answer! We're not talking about notability of the entire article (that's established, or not, above, and Goodreads can't help there). So... I get that if The Atlantic reviews the book, that's worth telling the reader. If a blog with a readership of 12 people does,that's (usually) not worth telling the reader. Where does Goodreads fit in? Well, Goodreads has an article -- a long one with 72 refs. And Goodreads Choice Awards has its own article. It's not some squeegee guy's blog. It has 1,678 incoming links (mostly people reffing stuff to it I suppose, and surely there're more uses that aren't linked) -- not a lot, but not nothing. Alexa gives it #342 worldwide in traffic, and that doesn't seem all that low considering we're talking abut every website in the world. To my mind this is plenty. Someone who is of the mind "We can use New York magazine, The New York Review of Books, the Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and maybe 20 others for book reviews and descriptions" might disagree. It's a matter of opinion.

So then for AllReaders... that's different. They're 100% reliable (since their material is opinion) but... looking into them more (I'll spare the details), no, we can't use them. Removed.

So... what about Goodreads for statements of fact -- mere descriptions. So, for Egyptian Food and Drink they say "A short introduction to the importance of food and drink in ancient Egypt with particular emphasis on bread, beer, cereals, meat, fish and fowl. Wilson also discusses the Egyptian kitchen and the production, preparation, storing and preservation of foodstuffs."

Can we take that to the bank? Nope. (Goodreads doesn't have the Wiki problem anyone can go in and mess with the text once its posted. But it does have the problems that it's surely not fact checked, and their business model may not require pinpoint accuracy.)

But if you want to seriously vet refs and have the time, you have to have forensic analysis in your toolbox. Goodreads says the book is "A short introduction to the importance of food and drink in ancient Egypt with particular emphasis on bread, beer, cereals, meat, fish and fowl (etc.)". Waterstones says pretty much the same. Amazon says pretty much the same. And there are numerous other sites (mostly booksellers) saying much the same. And they're not copying each other (this is key) -- the wordings're different, their entire short descriptions are different. And there's nothing to indicate that they don't have the source material in front of them and a business model that would militate against being egregiously sloppy or lying on purpose (about this).

So then the question is "Is this book indeed a short introduction to the importance of food and drink in ancient Egypt with particular emphasis on bread, beer, cereals, meat, fish and fowl, such that we're confident enough to say that? Or is it something else?" Well you've got three or five or seven sources saying that it is. Well I mean what more do you want? If that's not enough proof, what would be? Sure, one of the sources or two could completely slip up, get confused or want to troll or whatever and write "This book is a short description of current Egyptian culinary habits, the fast food industry, how grocery stores are organized, etc." Or get careless and write "beets" instead of "beer". But all of them? No.

So the same applies to the bookseller descriptions. Goodreads supports Barnes & Noble supports Amazon etc. and it's an ecosystem. I don't care if they're commercial. I don't care if they're selling their own sisters. I only care if we (and the reader) can trust them to be accurate. (I get what you're saying about it being a bad look, but I mean if you want book descriptions you have to go to sites that have a business model of describing books. I don't care if Wilson ever sells another book and editors are welcome to engage me on that. It's a bad look, I don't like it either. But it's just a look. There's nothing wrong with the material.)

I took out Biblio. You're right it doesn't prove anything, and infobox stuff is usually ref'd in the article, these are here only four books so sky-is-blue that they're her four most notable. I used it because it shows them all together in one place, but can do without I guess.

Yeah I don't want it to get nominated either. If it is, it's in trouble, because the heathens at AfD are mostly of the mind "I'm giving this 30 seconds, person doesn't meet the GNG, we've got too many damn articles anyway, end of consideration: destroy." Little that I wrote above could they understand even if they had the time and interest. But you never know. It's pretty much random which articles get selected for the bit bucket. Most get left alone. Elaine Viets is a sort of similar article, I wrote it 15 years ago and nobody's complained yet. Herostratus (talk) 22:12, 14 May 2021 (UTC)