Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sarah Ballard
I have to regrettably observe that this article is another case in which boosters (in this case for articles on women) are misdirecting the discussion. For those who do not know or who are willfully looking past the way in which the dynamics of "big science projects" work...this case is entirely typical: a post-doc is lead author on a paper that represents a team effort of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of people, all of whose names are on the paper, and an excited but not terribly informed media contact the first author for talking points. The philosophical error of some of the above arguments, which basically amount to "there are sources, so GNG!", is that PROF was developed because a very large fraction of academics would otherwise qualify exactly in this way. (One might view this from the perspective of statistics in that academics, as a cohort, are not a random sampling of the population. Rather, they are highly biased ''toward'' notability....hence the need for PROF.) So, we judge academics (which Ballard is) against a different standard. However, in Ballard's case there's more because of the "big science" aspect ... the media could have contacted anyone else, for example the senior author, or her supervisor David Charbonneau (the 2nd author). The internal decision-making process on author order is a major issue within academia (why was Charbonneau not the first author?), but usually a good supervisor will put a grad student or postdoc first because they know how the dynamics of publicity work. Consequently, it's extremely disingenuous to make the claim (as some panelists do above), that these are ''Ballard's'' discoveries and ''that'' is why there are sources and ''these sources'' are why she is notable. '''It comes down to something that has been observed numerous times before: it is close to impossible to separate out a grad student or post-doc's contributions from her advisor's/lab's/research team's because mere appearances from author list (and it's accumulated benefits) can be deceiving''' &ndash; that is why  (in the absence of ''conclusive'' demonstration of notability) is the judicious interpretation of ''all'' such cases
— User:Agricola44, 17:19, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:TOOSOON (Wikipedia:Too soon)