Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Adrianne Wadewitz
First, let me say that this article was created at perhaps the most inopportune time. I, like probably many of you, have the feeling that we're "scavengers fighting over the corpse" &ndash; distasteful in the extreme &ndash; but we're all here, so evidently fight we must. (Footnote: Perhaps a policy on a "waiting period" is needed, so articles can be considered with cooler heads...we're not a news source and it's clear that the  of this event is creating enormous problems.) The reasons for "keep" are obvious and unavoidable: that which has been noted is notable (here by NYT obit, among others). However, let me play devil's advocate. There's very little independent information in the NYT source (besides vital stats) on which to base an article. Most of it talks about her activities as a WP editor &ndash; information that necessarily comes from WP itself. In a very real sense, this is Circular reference|referentially circular. Quite a large fraction of the article is devoted to her dissertation, an aspect that is ''never'' found in other articles, so far as I know, because dissertations are minor works (with a few exceptions, like Koiter's). There's a lot discussion here about Adrianne's scholarly accomplishments in general, but the truth is that she was a post-doc, basically "just starting out". I see one established article in The Lion and the Unicorn (journal)|Lion and the Unicorn, an editorial, from 2009, a new article from a few months ago in Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature|Bookbird, and her dissertation, which is held by http://www.worldcat.org/title/spare-the-sympathy-spoil-the-child-sensibility-selfhood-and-the-maturing-reader-1775-1815/oclc/819572657&referer=brief_results 1 institution, as you'd expect. These figures are very average for a junior scholar. Adrianne's WP "activism" (as I've seen it called above) is also not notable ''per se''. We should also be very careful here to distinguish Wikipedia's situation, which is simple participation bias (a problem fixable by outreach), with actual Sexism|gender discrimination (for example, being passed over for employment because of one's gender, as I have). A number of commenters above have confused these phenomena and therefore attribute more significance to this aspect of her work than it warrants. If the subject had been some other person that we could have considered in a disinterested manner, this discussion would be vastly more simple. As it currently stands, the article is still a  and my guess is that it will stay this way, at least for a while. It is certain to be kept, but as time passes and cooler discussion prevails, it will very likely be pruned to a stub that observes simply that Adrianne was a scholar noted for her WP activities and who was killed in an accident. RIP
— User:Agricola44, 19:25, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:RECENTISM||WP:MEMORIAL (Wikipedia:Recentism)