Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)/Archive 1

message: The idea of Professorship in the US is distinctly different from what it is in Australia and the UK. I know Australian academics with distinguished publication records  (30+ peer reviewed journal pubs and book chapters) that are not yet professors, whereas it's is very simple (albeit competitive) to get an assistant professorship in the US. This guys position and publication record simply do not warrant inclusion, just because he works in a field of interest to geeks does not make his achievements more worthy of inclusion. The proposal by Klonimus is ridiculous. --nixie 06:58, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In America, practically any academic is called professor.  In most of the rest of the world, only the most senior academics are professors.  Regards, Ben Aveling 10:33, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm... that's interesting. I don't know about most of the world; I've only lived in two places: Italy and the US. My exprience is that a professor in the US is, at least, an assistant professor with a Ph.D., whereas in Italy a professor ("professore") is anyone who teaches at any level (university, high-school or elementary!!). BTW, in Italy a Doctor is anyone who has received his "laurea" (equivalent to a Master's degree).--Lacatosias 18:48, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Without meaning offence, Italy is know for what might be called "title inflation," and almost all men are called doctore, which has come to mean sir. Pelegius 21:45, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

text: In Britain, each academic department has a limited number of professors. The other faculty are known as readers and lecturers. David D. (Talk) 15:26, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Although Warwick Uni is moving to calling every professor, reader and lecturer a 'professor' now, too, and that might spread to other universities too. fel64 12:08, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Professors ain't professors

message: Academia has plenty of ways of its own to define notability:
*Publication record and citations. This is weighed in at every appointment to a professorial chair, and when somebody applies for project money from various national bodies. As for books:
**It was pointed out above that books are not peer reviewed. They are, however, frequently reviewed in prestigious journals in their field. 
**Dissertations are usually scrutinized by people outside the author's own university. 
**Some books are published by particularly prestigious or picky publishers. 
**Popular books may not count for much in academia itself, but give the author a different type of notability.
**Has a book come out in several editions? Is it used as required reading in universities (outside the author's own institution)? Is it a standard reference for people in the field? 
*National or international prizes and awards;
*Honorary doctorates from other important universities;
*Membership in Royal and national academies of sciences and letters.
*Editorship of journals or other publications which include papers or articles by other significant auhors.
*Being a doctoral dissertation advisor, a "Doktorvater" as the Germans call it, certainly puts the person in another league than somebody who just teaches undergraduates.
*Has a Festschrift been dedicated to the person? Who were the editors and contributors?
At each point, one has to weigh the relative significance or prestige of the entities one takes into the calculation. Is a particular journal/academy/prize in itself significant enough to bolster the importance of the author/academy member/recipient? In practice, we already do this all the time, so this is nothing new, but we might agree on certain basic guidelines just to get some things out of the way. (For instance, perhaps it may be agreed upon that all fellows and foreign members of the Royal Society are notable enough for an article? Can anyone think of a FRS who would not deserve an article?)
Note that there is a certain risk of disciplinary bias, in that the world of natural sciences is more international than fields like history and literature. A brilliant Albanian physicist is more likely to be published in international journals than a prolific Albanian scholar of Albanian literature. Don't put all weight on the international character of somebody's production in disciplines like these.  Uppland 17:48, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Internal criteria (let Academia decide who is notable)

message: Keep it simple, stupid. If a reliable academic bibliography of works published in internationally recognized journals or major academic book imprints can be compiled, that compilation can be placed into Wikipedia under the author's name.  Verifiable biographical details may be appended. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal by [[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony Sidaway]]

message: I have started collecting links to previous VfD/AfD debates (and a few at this moment ongoing ones) at Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Academics/Precedents. Perhaps this could help get this discussion moving towards a consensus. I have mostly just added those I have myself participated in, as those are the easiest for me to find. Please add others you have seen. Uppland 20:16, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good stuff, I'll have a look around. - brenneman(t)(c) 01:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Precedents

message: If being a professor emiritus were truely notable, then shouldn't all professor emiritus be listed in their schools' list of notable faculty?  Consider the list of notable UB Berkely faculty and this list of Emeritus Faculty in EECS at UC Berkely.  Only one name - Lotfi A. Zadeh is common to both lists.  If the rest of the professor emeritus in EECS at UC Berkely aren't worthy of being included in a list of notable professors associated with UC Berkely, then are they even worthy of having a wikipedia article in the first place?  Likewise, if being a professor emeritus at UC Berkely isn't enough to warrant a wikipedia article, then why should being a professor emeritus at any university warrant a wikipedia article?
Instead, I propose that a wikipedia article only be created for an academic if (1) there are a large number of inbound links to that (non-existant) article, already, or if (2) it is linked to from another article with a lot of in-bound links.
Any other alternative would result in the creation of ultra-low traffic articles - something which the John Seigenthaler debacle has demonstrated not to be a good thing.  Due to the lack of scrutiny that they recieve, low-traffic articles are among the best candidates for containing factually inaccurate information, and maybe it's just me, but I think a non-existant article is better than a factually inaccurate article. TerraFrost 21:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The number of inbound links is a standard not connected to anything but Wikipedia. Even if professor emiritus is too low a standard, the standard needs to be set on the objective standard of how important they are. If they're notable enough, their name will bring in enough readers.--Prosfilaes 22:20, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm not sure I understand your inbound links comment, but if they're notable enough for people to read about them, then shouldn't they be notable enough to have other articles linking to theirs? TerraFrost 22:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So we couldn't have written a sudoku article until there were a suitable number of links from other pages? Standards for notability in Wikipedia should be independent of Wikipedia.--Prosfilaes 01:59, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

text:  I'd say the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (of the United States) is actually an okay article because of (2) - it is linked to from another article with a lot of in-bound links. If, however, it wasn't relevant enough to be linked to in the IRS article, I'm not so sure the articles existence would be warranted, either. TerraFrost 01:50, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I was not clear, I think.  I was refering to the lack of links to actual commissioners (the people in the list on that article), such as Fred T. Goldberg, Jr., who for instance, only has two inbound links (at present).  My apologies for the confusion.  --Hansnesse 01:55, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

text: What is your suggestion of what constitutes a lot?  Fred T. Goldberg, Jr., the aforementioned former commissioner of the IRS, has only two articles linking to it (other than this).  Moreover, of the two articles  which link to it, there are only 8 articles and 6 articles respectively (excluding redirects and this page) linking to them.  I say this, not really to press for a specific tell-all number, but to argue that important people can have few linked pages at any point in time.  The only way to develop an encyclopedia is to admit that it will at times be incomplete.  --Hansnesse 02:06, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree with the "obvious keep and work down" method, and I think your suggestion on textbook authorship is good too. But I still think it is important to look at criteria which indicate importance within academia, the "academics' academics", if you wish. What do you think about the criteria I suggested above? Can we agree, for instance, that all members of the Royal Society are notable enough? Uppland 08:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would certainly agree there, anyone in the Royal Society, or the American National Academy of Science, would certainly be worthy of inclusion.--Deville (Talk) 13:30, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I think that's simultaneously too vague and too restrictive.  Vague, because grad students aren't the same thing as the academic community for the field, and some disciplines are larger than others.  Too restrictive because an important emeritus that isn't "famous" still probably deserves an article.  Still, someone who easily passes your test will surely be notable: it's just that we shouldn't write policy that way.  Mangojuice 06:07, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yet another proposal 

message: Perhaps if we could start with obvious keep and work down?  How about writing a textbook that has had more than a single edition printed?  This could concievable fail the "audience" test for books, and if the gets pushed up than lots will fail.  I don't think any texts on Algebraic ring theory have sold more than 50,000 copies. - brenneman(t)(c) 04:49, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with the "obvious keep and work down" method, and I think your suggestion on textbook authorship is good too. But I still think it is important to look at criteria which indicate importance within academia, the "academics' academics", if you wish. What do you think about the criteria I suggested above? Can we agree, for instance, that all members of the Royal Society are notable enough? Uppland 08:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would certainly agree there, anyone in the Royal Society, or the American National Academy of Science, would certainly be worthy of inclusion.--Deville (Talk) 13:30, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I think that's simultaneously too vague and too restrictive.  Vague, because grad students aren't the same thing as the academic community for the field, and some disciplines are larger than others.  Too restrictive because an important emeritus that isn't "famous" still probably deserves an article.  Still, someone who easily passes your test will surely be notable: it's just that we shouldn't write policy that way.  Mangojuice 06:07, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  High bar 

message: One goal of such a policy should be (IMO) making sure that the quality of articles is high by keeping a balance between the number of people contributing and the number of articles. The number of articles in an area should be some fraction of the number of people who are likely to read and edit the articles. This will ensure that enough work goes into each article to make it meaningful.
There are, I think, about 1200 fully acredited four year colleges in the US. Williams College has 291 voting faculty, with 59% being tenured. Amherst College has 177 faculty. These are small colleges, so using them as a basis will lead to an underestimate of the number of tenured professors. Doing the arithmetic: 291 * 59% * 1200 = 206,028 is likely an underestimate of the number of tenured US faculty. It seems unlikely to me that this number of articles would be well maintained by the wiki process. However, I would like to know how many articles there are, and how many people actively work on them in a year. I'm sure this information is easy to find, but I don't know how.
A pragmatic approach is to set a target, say 10,000 articles about US professors. I don't know if that is a "reasonable" number but it is less than 10 per college. An estimate can be made of the number of professors selected by any policy, and this estimate can be compared with the number thought to be a reasonable total.
Another approach is more empirical, but might require some extensions of the wiki mechanism. I don't know how to query for statistics in the wiki, but there might be a way to determine the percentage of articles of some kind that are stubs. If the current policy results in many stub articles, then the inclusion criterion should be made more restrictive; alternatively a very low percentage of stubs would suggest enlarging the database.
Cre 19:33, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what the requirements are for tenure in a four-year college in the U.S., but rather than looking at all "professors" at American four-year colleges, you should (to get a more reasonable figure to begin with) limit yourself to people at the uppermost steps of the career ladder at actual research universities. In either case there is no reason to introduce an arbitrary limit at some particular figure. Uppland 11:29, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Pragmatic Suggestion 

message: Please check out my revision to the criteria Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Academics.  I tried to take the current version an flesh it out, particularly paying attention to (1) the need to write it as a firm guideline (but not a policy), (2) being informative about the norms of achievement in academia, (3) stating the policies briefly, and explaining them separately, and (4) softening the policy a bit, so that notable professors would be included, not just people who are generally notable that happen to be professors.  I think it's an improvement; I'd like to see some discussion on it.  Mangojuice 21:35, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I just put bullets in the list above. Uppland 07:02, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree: those all count as prestigious awards/honors, per criteria 8. Mangojuice 14:06, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

text: WP:PROF should redirect to this page; the only reason it doesn't is that this page did not exist at the time the redirect was made. But perhaps this page should also be moved to either Wikipedia:Notability (people)/Academics or Wikipedia:Notability (academics) to be consistent with the previous move of Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies to Wikipedia:Notability (people). Uppland 07:02, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New version 

message: I think the key criteria is that the professor is "an expert in their area by independent sources".  And depending on what that "area" is, they may not be affiliated with an Ivy League or "top 25 school".  Ivy League schools aren't necessarily strong in my areas of expertise (geography, criminology), with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania.  Instead of a rigid criteria as that, I would be happy if someone let me know if they found an geography professor article.  I could help judge its merits, notability, come up with the independent sources, and clean-up the article.  For other topics, (e.g. Physics), I am unqualified to make the determination.  
Maybe a solution... While I've personally been staying away from userboxes, it might be helpful if we had userboxes or user-categories for "Geographers", "Criminologists" or something to denote my areas of expertise, and maybe that could work here too.  With such a system, it would be easier to find people to assist in making such determinations as to a professor's notability and find sources.  I realize the number of userboxes or categories would increase significantly, but these would not be the same as the problematic (political, ...) ones but would be useful towards furthering the Wikipedia goal of creating a free encyclopedia. -Aude (talk | contribs) 20:22, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, I see we have :Category:Wikipedians by interest, :Category:Wikipedians by profession, and :Category:Wikipedians by education, which may be useful.  I'm not sure I like how :Category:Wikipedians interested in criminology is worded, though.  If someone is a professor or graduate student in this area, they are more than "interested" and doesn't really get at their expertise.  -Aude (talk | contribs) 20:30, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And there's also :Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest C-D. -Aude (talk | contribs) 20:32, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

text: If I came across say a Physics professor, I think it would be worthwhile consulting Wikipedians knowledgable in the subject area first before putting up for AFD.  However, you're right that most people wouldn't bother.  Aside from user categories, we also have Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science and Portal_talk:Physics as possible places to seek expertise.  Though, also not ideal.  Recognizing expertise is certainly one of the weak points of Wikipedia — a broader issue than this proposed policy. -Aude (talk | contribs) 22:03, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Or if AFDs could be organized somewhat by subject area in addition to dates?  I regularly try and scan the list of AFDs for each day to see if something pops out at me.  But, if they were organized in someway by topic, then maybe I could watchlist it? -Aude (talk | contribs) 22:06, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Here is an interesting thought:  Could we make it a criteria for deletion that the most relevant project page has been notified of the proposed deletion (with some reasonable margin of time for the relevant people to notice it)?  That is, when I recently discovered that some idiot thought Paul Boghossian should be deleted, I immediately went to Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy and let all the philosophers know that somebody who knows nothing about philosophy was trying to delete a notable and potentially informative article.  Similarly, perhaps every time a geography professor comes up for deletion, the Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography (if there is one) be notified, and if there isn't one, just a note on Geography.  It seems that this might be a useful way to get the appropriate people deciding on the merits of the article, rather than just random AfD voters. KSchutte 02:01, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I don't think we could.  That would be a policy change, not just a guideline, and I think folks would strongly resist something so bureucratic.  Mangojuice 12:55, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recognize areas of expertise 

message: It's quite rare for Wikipedians to delete a porn star's biography.  One sees enthusiastic comments such as, "Great performer!"  on their AfD nominations even though the person in question did little more for humanity than have sex in front of a camera.  So when I see a proposal to delete a university professor's biography, I ask whether this person is as significant as the average porn star.  This may not be a fair analogy: just about anyone who earns a Ph.D. is far more notable than all but the greatest of porn stars, in my view of the world.  So I supplement this with a quote from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf: "You can't afford good liquor on an associate professor's salary!"  The average porn star probably does enjoy good liquor and doesn't even need to pay for it.
By this measure, a tenured full professor at an accredited university is as notable as a porn star because:
# A full professor can afford good cognac.
# Maudlin notions about adding to human knowledge.
# Let's not try to count any more reasons.
Respectfully submitted, Durova 00:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hear!  Hear!  Furthermore, has anyone tried to delete an American Footballer?  What have they done for the world other than provide a temporary bit of excitement for a few football fans and yet work of teachers/professors etc affect millions into the future.  Every footballer has a bio and yet we ignore academics.  Madness Maustrauser 13:00, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I really don't like this kind of argument, and it comes up with maddening frequency in AfD debates about academics.  Let me point out: (1) different types of topics are different, and can have different standards for notability.  The bar for academics should be low, not because the bar for other topics is similarly low, but because academics are public figures and generators of ideas, and that makes many of them notable people.  (2) WP has systemic bias.  We all know that.  The fact that WP contains too many porn stars and too many fictional characters is unfortunate, it's not a justification for making more mistakes.  Two wrongs DON'T make a right.  That said, yes, most full professors at accredited universities probably are notable, but it has nothing to do with how they compare with porn stars, and especially not with how much money they make; it has to do with their academic accomplishments.  Mangojuice 14:41, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Easy there, this is only semi-serious.  I happen to subscribe to those maudlin views about the importance of adding to human knowledge. Durova 18:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

text: All university professors do is play games with knowledge; the really important people are the ones who get food to the tables and keep us from starving. Does that mean that farmers, truck drivers, and grocery cashiers are all deserving of an article?--Prosfilaes 17:24, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What is your point? You could say the same thing for most groups of people considered notable around here. Uppland 17:34, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  The point is, "maudlin notions about adding to human knowledge" aren't the right standard; there are people who have way more important jobs that just aren't notable.--Prosfilaes 17:40, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The whole issue depends on your definition of notability. Uppland 17:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The porn star standard 

message: Really, peer review is an international standard. Wikipedians themselves submit to it. At least in the physical sciences, notoriety is measured by citations in peer-reviewed journals, and especially the heavy-hitters like Nature and Science. Anyone with a Ph.D. can get articles published, and occasionally lots and lots of them, without contributing anything to their field (e.g. read Betrayers of Truth, by William Broad and Nicholas Wade).
Only the active academics in any given field are truly qualified to determine whether someone's contribution(s) is noteworthy. And IMO, the only reliable measure from the outside are citations. One or two papers in the major, field-specific publication, with 50-100 citations is a solid academic career, at least in those areas with which I'm familiar. Someone with several papers in that range is well-known by his or her peers. A Science or Nature paper cited hundreds of times is seminal.
Also, I believe it is dangerous to try and place a value on any one discipline. Just because no one's heard of the world's leading parasitologist doesn't mean he or she doesn't merit a Wikipedia entry -- in fact, I would argue that is precisely the role of an online encyclopedia. Google will provide me all I need to know about John Curtis Estes. These days, academic search engines, e.g. Thompson's Web of Science, have citation databases that can be queried by author, providing a quick sense of how prominent an academic is in their field.
I'm a new Wikipedian, so I apologize in advance if I've either broken protocol or am out of sync with this discussion. If nothing else, however, I'd like to point out how vital this discussion is. We live in a time when the most basic tenets of science are yet again being tested. The World Wide Web is increasingly a vehicle used to smuggle pseudo-science passed the rigors of peer review to support an agenda or ideology. And again IMO, that is why any metric of an academic's contribution to their discipline must come from others within that discipline. Todd Johnston 15:23, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peer Review 

message: This policy sets the bar too high. We should include articles on any person as long as the information is verifiable from a reliable source. It requires a certain (albeit low) degree of notability to have information published in a reliable source, and I feel meeting the criteria of verifiablility is enough to meet the criteria of natability. Lower the standards, no reason to deprive the poor professors of their rightful place in the world's largest encyclopaedia. Loom91 15:04, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On any person? We already have disambiguation pages for many names (see John Williams (disambiguation), William Morgan and James Brown (disambiguation), for example, or Johnson, with its many links to further disambiguation pages (for Ben, Bill, Bob, David, Jack, Joe, John, Joseph, Mark, Paul, Robert and William)). Start multiplying the number of biographical articles we have, and the dab pages will multiply and become longer, possibly to the point where you can't find what you are looking for. Yes, notability criteria should be as fair and even-handed as possible across Wikipedia as we can make it, and there are categories where fancruft has gotten obsessive, but I don't think the answer is to drop all criteria for notability. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 16:45, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Ultimately WP:V is the final determiner of whether an article should be included, as Loom91 says.  However, I don't think this sets the bar too high: it's trying to say when someone is OBVIOUSLY notable, and it doesn't say that people who don't meet that criterion aren't notable.  Is that clear enough in the proposal?  It needs to be clear.  Mangojuice 17:09, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too tough 

message: For an only quasi-notable child, or even PhD student, of a notable academic, is it acceptable to create a redirect to the notable academic?  I've seen redlinks for children of academics who might one day be notable, but arn't yet.  It seems best to create a redirect, instead of changing the redlink to point to the parents page, if they might be notable in the future.  JeffBurdges 16:09, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Children of academics who might one day be notabe [etc] is neither a criton nor a redirect, except for the few trul famous people--and their children in general are quite notable in their own right. This is exactly what is wrong with the low standards--first all faculty, then their children, and their students, and so on unto the nth generation?  But again , there are some very famous scientists and other scholars whose phd students do generally in fact become notable--and this is a method of study in the history of science. It might be relevant to , maybe 100 or so people worldwide, and still would be best left to the history of science academic books and journalsDGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirects for quasi-notable children and students of notable academics 

message: If an academic fails to meet any of the criteria established in this guideline, then someone who wants to keep the article needs to present an argument on how the subject is notable. I think is appropriate to add something to that effect, instead of simply saying that failing to meet the criteria does not establish non-notability. Ultimately, of course, notability is established by consensus of editors, and guidelines can be ignored by a consensus. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 19:39, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  failure to meet any of the criteria 

message: I don't really like the "Common Arguments" section of this guideline.  A guideline shouldn't tell people how to debate about something.  It should set a standard and explain how that standard ought to be used.  This section seems totally out of place. KSchutte 21:41, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Common arguments 

message: There are already plenty of tools to deal with absurd examples. For great justice. 16:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: This is confusing, unecessary and a bad case of instruction creep

message: In India and some other developing countries, the stress is not so much on research, but more on teaching. Some of these professors may not have any academic publications to their name, but are highly notable by virtue of their presence on several policy-making bodies of the government(s) or on the board of directors of well-established companies. I believe that such profs merit articles on Wikipedia. --Gurubrahma 05:03, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Teachers fundamentally aren't notable. If they're notable as politicans or directors of companies, then this page is moot on their notability; this page is only for articles which claim notability through academia. I don't think being on the board of directors of even the largest companies in the world is notable, however; it's too private and too ill-documented.--Prosfilaes 05:23, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: eh? and I believe pornstars are fundamentally notable? Being on the board of directors of the largest companies in the world is definitely notable, especially if one serves on boards of two or three companies. Annual reports of all these companies are available on their websites in pdf format, it is well-documented. --Gurubrahma 05:43, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Pornstars are more notable because they're public figures, known across a large area. Teachers are generally known only to their students, and there's nothing keeping their notability alive after their deaths. It is documented that they are on the board of directors, but that's all; their lives aren't recorded, and what they do isn't recorded. You'll note that most of the people listed on List of people on multiple governing boards are notable for other reasons like being politians or at least CEOs. Most of them are also increadibly boring. People should have articles because people want to look them up.--Prosfilaes 06:16, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Most pornstars are not (IMHO) notable.  But we have different - lower - standards for them and pokemons, and for the same reason.  AFDs on them attract people who are generally less critical than the type of person capable of thinking academics are interesting.  If an academic is notable because of their 'service' then they are notable because of that, regardless of being academics.  Notability (academics) aims to set sufficient grounds, not minimum grounds.  Regards, Ben Aveling 10:44, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm horrified that you think whether you find them boring is a good criteria. That's exactly why these kinds of proposals are bad for Wikipedia. We should make objective decisions about whether facts are verifiable, and report them without bias about what we think is interesting. For great justice. 16:21, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  No, Wikipedia shouldn't be a wastebasket for every piece of verifiable information, and WP:NOT makes it clear it's not. Furthermore, it's actively dangerous to have information that no one is looking up, since it makes an good place for libel to stick around. Wikipedia should not be an idealistic tool that contains information just because it's out there; it should be an encyclopedia recording facts that are interesting to readers, so (a) people will want to look something up on Wikipedia and (b) we aren't wasting our time writing stuff that no one will read.--Prosfilaes 18:24, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

text: If an academic has little research but has other important and verifiable contributions (like, say, having made controversial comments covered in the news, or having an important post), they are probably notable under the general requirements of WP:BIO, and we don't need to cover that kind of issue here.   Mangojuice 14:27, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  India and other developing countries 

message: As this discussion has been relatively stable for a while now, I think it's time we took a poll to confirm the support of the community.  Please sign under "responses" with either * Support ~~~~ or * Oppose ~~~~, with an optional sentence or two explaining why.  More substantial discussion should not go in this section; please create a new section for it.  Mangojuice 12:43, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Withdrawn, per Francis Schonken, below.  Mangojuice 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

text: *This is totally not a , it's a recent and active discussion.  As for instruction creep, we have a section on that in the discussion above, if you want to see the counterarguments.  Briefly, articles on Academics are on the border between where we ought to rely mainly on WP:V vs. WP:N, and the "prof test" is vague and causes lots of confusion on AfD debates.  Mangojuice 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oppose as above. This is harmful instruction creep. Stop it! 67.109.101.226 22:45, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Someone did mention this earlier.  It's my hope that we can create a general cross-field guideline, to avoid too much detail.  I don't know which of a Kinkeldey, a Siemens, or a Pirrotta award would be the most significant, but presumably they have articles, and that would be my first step; my guess (without looking into it) would be that they'd all establish notability.  Ok, now I'm looking them up... it seems none of them have articles, so I would say that's a good place to add some content to WP!  But on WP both the Kinkeldey and Siemens prizes have been worth mentioning in articles, while I find no mention of a Pirrotta prize.  If you want to generalize any of the language, go ahead, and if you want to add some more information about fields you feel aren't covered well, try to do so, especially in the "examples" or "caveats" section.  If you find that you're unable to clarify things that way, I'm interested in hearing why, but perhaps there's a new criteria we need.  As for soliciting experts, I would love if more people would do that, but I feel that guidelines should urge this very gently.  We should not be trying to dictate behavior to people, but rather making a natural guideline that's informative and applicable.  Mangojuice 02:23, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: * Support, guideline seems stable and reasonable, and is needed. Mangojuice 12:43, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *This is totally not a , it's a recent and active discussion.  As for instruction creep, we have a section on that in the discussion above, if you want to see the counterarguments.  Briefly, articles on Academics are on the border between where we ought to rely mainly on WP:V vs. WP:N, and the "prof test" is vague and causes lots of confusion on AfD debates.  Mangojuice 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oppose as above. This is harmful instruction creep. Stop it! 67.109.101.226 22:45, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Responses

message: Something that hasn't been mentioned much (at all?) above is the potential importance of soliciting views from at least one (better, more) people in the field of the professor for all but the most plainly nn AfD debates.  At this point, I would not encourage others (and am not willing myself) to put in the effort to make pages for even the highest respected academic music scholars because there seem to be too many delete decisions being made by voters who don't have a sense for how different fields work.  For instance, citation indices do not exist for most humanities fields (and most humanists do not publish on the web or even maintain bio web pages).  Before voting to delete a musicologist (or any academic), I would hope that Wikipedians would have some idea about the relative weight of awards (which of these would not establish notability: a Kinkeldey, a Siemens, a Pirrotta?).  It may be that, at the least, the criteria need to be split among scientists, social scientists, and humanists before any headway can be made.   --Myke Cuthbert 01:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone did mention this earlier.  It's my hope that we can create a general cross-field guideline, to avoid too much detail.  I don't know which of a Kinkeldey, a Siemens, or a Pirrotta award would be the most significant, but presumably they have articles, and that would be my first step; my guess (without looking into it) would be that they'd all establish notability.  Ok, now I'm looking them up... it seems none of them have articles, so I would say that's a good place to add some content to WP!  But on WP both the Kinkeldey and Siemens prizes have been worth mentioning in articles, while I find no mention of a Pirrotta prize.  If you want to generalize any of the language, go ahead, and if you want to add some more information about fields you feel aren't covered well, try to do so, especially in the "examples" or "caveats" section.  If you find that you're unable to clarify things that way, I'm interested in hearing why, but perhaps there's a new criteria we need.  As for soliciting experts, I would love if more people would do that, but I feel that guidelines should urge this very gently.  We should not be trying to dictate behavior to people, but rather making a natural guideline that's informative and applicable.  Mangojuice 02:23, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Knowledge of Field in Voting

message: I strongly support notability guidelines in the general case.  One problem with non-notable people having their own articles is that there simply aren't enough editors to watch over them all for vandalism. Sure, you may have that nice assistant professor with the great teaching style on your watch-list now, but who'll be watching over them in 2050 or 2100?  You may say, "don't worry, they'll be dead by then so they can't sue us", but someone could easily add libelous information about a living person into that article.  Think of the 2100 equivalent of Bill Gates or John Seigenthaler, Sr..  Why libel them in their own article, when you can libel them in the article of some 2006 non-notable academic where no one is wathcing out for the vandalism?  Johntex\talk 00:54, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I guess one thing I would say is that there will presumably be more people monitoring recent changes at that point, so there's still a good chance they would catch it.  But more fundamentally, this sounds like an argument for limiting the number of pages generally, which seems inconsistent with the idea that Wikipedia is not paper.  --Cheapestcostavoider 02:42, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: John, no offense, but this sounds like no reason whatsoever to influence anything we do, it's so out there.  Can you point out even one instance of this kind of thing happening and persisting for more than a week?  Mangojuicetalk 03:09, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, this is what verified, reliable sources are for. You might just as well say "we should not have much detail on chemistry, because if someone read a page on chemistry that was wrong, and poisoned themselves, they might sue, and it's hard to keep up with all the pages we have on chemistry, so we should delete most of them." For great justice. 16:37, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: One problem with non-notable people

message: I've changed the criterium "has published a well-known or high quality academic work" to "has published a well-known academic work", as "high quality" is inherently POV. Who are we to judge whether Prof. Dr. Fritz F. Finkenheimer's An Epistemology of Trends in Jungian Psychoanalysis on Lemurs is of "high quality" or not? And by whose standards? To put it another way - if it is of high quality in the view of the scientific public, the author will inevitably (soon) fulfill one of the other criteria. Disagreements? Sandstein 15:36, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd like to change it to say "highly regarded," rather than "high quality".  The difference as I see it is that high quality asks for a judgement in the mind of the editor, while highly regarded is a matter of the opinion of experts, which is something else entirely.  Your point is good, though.  Alternatively, how about "influential?"  Interpreting "influential" or "highly regarded" (or even "well-known") relies on some judgement, but it's not wholesale opinion the way "high quality" is.  Mangojuicetalk 17:48, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Influential" seems the most appropriate to me but how will/can that be verified?  What is an appropriate standard?  Rossami (talk) 18:17, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think "influential" is not bad. I considered "notable", too - i.e. would the work be worth an article of its own? Then again, we might as well replicate what WP:BIO says: "Published authors ... who received multiple independent reviews of or awards for their work". I.e., in the terms of this list of criteria: "has published an academic work that has received multiple independent reviews or awards." There appears to be consensus for this standard already. Sandstein 18:27, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that's going too far.  I don't imagine that only award-laden books and papers, or works worthy of an article on their own, should be good enough for this; rather, if they've written something that's been highly cited, that should be enough. Mangoju icetalk 18:59, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the term "highly regarded" is better than "high quality", because most quality that exists is recognized by the experts. If it's not recognized, then it hasn't become important enough. Moorens 19:34, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

text: As For Great Justice points out above, any form of notability is really a matter of opinion anyway.  We might as well embrace it.  Truth is, there are some papers/books that are clearly notable/important, some that are clearly not, and a great many in between where it's non-obvious.  Since we have to form a judgement regardless of how the criterion is written, it might as well be a judgement on the core issue.  To me, the core issue is whether the person has a work that is noteworthy, but I hesitate to use any word too similar to "notable" since "notable" is so loaded on WP.  As I said, I don't want to imply that the work needs to be article-worthy on its own.  "Well-known" sort of misses the mark.  How about "significant?"  Mangojuicetalk 15:45, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

text: OK, I can live with "...has published a significant academic work", but what other meaning than "notable" can "significant" have in this context? Sandstein 16:00, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think "significant" means what "notable" means as a word, but to me, "notable" on Wikipedia means "significant enough to have an article", a connotation I think we should avoid.  Mangojuicetalk 19:07, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "High quality academic work" 

message: I've been thinking about this a good bit as I have seen many professors who have done work that does not get splashed into the public's eye as much as other research but is still important to their respected communities. I'd consider it along the lines of a small local celebrity, small band, or a minor sports player. Their influence may not be seen as much as the work of others but that does not mean it isn't notable or important. I say this only because some researcher working with processes to be used in industrial production lines for chemicals is going to have a much smaller audience than someone writting about penguins. I think one great thing about wikipedia is we're not confined to the bindings of a book so we can be a little less selective and still NOT let wikipedia become an, "indiscriminate collection of information." We can include more Professor's with published work in their area as their works is used to make changes in certain areas and is used by other Professors conducting research.
I think the current Criteria are good for deciding notability but I think we need to consider opening it up a little more to let more research professors easier allowance into wikipedia, especially ones who concentrated on a smaller or less popular area of research. I was thinking of a points system along the lines of how the federal government judges foreign firearms to be allowed into the country. Different features on the firearm have different point values. If the added score comes up to a certain points value, then they are allowed to be imported into the country. This may not be the best solution but I think it definately considers some discussion and could possibly reach a solution everyone agrees on. 
I've come up with the following list of some positions or achievements college Professors attain. We can assign points values to each one and if the total score comes up to a certain level it'll give us some clue to their notability in their area of research. Some you may consider "weak" or "not as notable" but they will simply recieve lower scores than other "hard to obtain" categories. Feel free to suggest more and give your thoughts on this proposal. 
* Conducts Federally funded research
* Held/Holds an Endowed Chair
* Received Tenure
* Professor Emeritus
* Held Chair position or headed up their Department. 
* Holds a Patent
* Published in Journals related to their area of study (some point value for each article maybe?)
* Authored/co-authored/edited a Textbook
* Authored a book in area of study
* Edited a book in area of study
* Lectured at events related to area of study
* Received award from College they are a Professor at
* Received a "non-major" award from other organization or company for research ("non-major" as a "major" award would already give them notability)
* Holds multiple advanced degrees
* Part of Nationally Ranked Department/School (i.e. A Univeristy's School of Business is ranked high by U.S. News & World Report)
* Dissertational Advsior 
I think this could possibly satisfy everyone without lowering the bar too much. A professor who achieves multiple or a lot of those points has definately produced more than a normal professor and influenced students, their area of study, industry, and other professors.
Reflux21:14, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I really don't like it.  The purpose of this guideline is to level the playing field in terms of which articles on academics end up deleted vs. not deleted.  It sounds like it would be really hard to evaluate someone on a point scale unless you knew absolutely everything about them.  And people should not be using this guideline as a license to create autobiographies; we have a policy specifically against autobiographies for a good reason, and that should apply even to notable people.  Mangojuicetalk 04:33, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

text: I look around WP and see too litle information on academic output, not too much.  What's the point of "objective" inclusion guidelines based on the academic's characteristics?  Let the standard be on the value of the article, not the personality ... if the article is useful and contributes to knowledge, keep it.  The focus here should be on the substantive content, not quasi-objective measures of an academic's notability.  If the article provides information a resaonable person may find useful or interesting, it's a good article.  A well-written article on the contributions of an academic who might not meet some of these arbitrary standards of notability, whether inclusive or exclusive (top 25 schools only?  Puh-lease!), is much more valuable to the WP-reading community than a stub on even a really really good pornstar! SvenC 20:34, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  '''New Point System Proposal''' 

message: Would an academic who holds a position of significant academic leadership be considered notable? -Fsotrain09 03:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's hard to say without some concrete examples. One question I would ask is, Is it something that has been mentioned in a general interest publication? I would want to consider the size and scope of the organization, and the specific position. But I can't be more specific, because these things always require some exercise of editorial judgment. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 03:53, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Academic leadership?

message: Is there a difference between text books and Exam-oriented-books (Like the Self Assessment and Board Review) as far as notability is concerned and is there any criteria that says that only authors of text books are notable and authors of Exam-Oriented-Books are non-notable.Doctor Bruno 03:00, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Exam Books

message: There were some other criticisms of a more inclusive policy.
1) crowding out disambiguation pages -- like I said, obscure 1930s baseball players.  Maybe if we write decent articles on academics, people will be more interested in us.
2) someone said that Harvard professors get their jobs because of connections.  "There is no cabal."  Not all cynical statements are true.  While there are abuses, I'm sure the majority of profs at Harvard are brilliant people.  That's ridiculous.
 
3) Verifyibility.  Every single professor in the advanced world has a copy of his CV on his website.  Professors are not going to lie on their CV.  Come on.
:a/you'd be suprised how many don;t. Often the older notable ones.  b/Again, you'd be suprised.  DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is the English WP. DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Odds and Ends

message: I've been participating in AfD debates over academics primarily in the science/medicine fields for some months now, and I get the impression that the guidelines aren't always very useful in deciding notability. In particular, non-specialist editors frequently list academics whose notability seems fairly readily apparent, but who don't readily fit into the current guidelines. 
I'd like to suggest clarifying the guidelines by adding to the examples:
*Editor of major journal in field or consultant to major body (qualifies under 1) 
*Published multiple papers in high-impact, prestigious journals, such as Nature or Science (qualifies under 3)
*Fellow of prestigious society (eg the Royal Society or United States National Academy of Sciences) (qualifies under 7)
Espresso Addict 08:42, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extra examples 

message: Radiant has invited people to comment on the current version through the Village pump. I'm not convinced that the overall approach makes sense. On one hand the objective is to give a precise idea of "notability" as applied to academics and that's not a bad idea since "notability" is too often a vague concept. But it's not going to help if this is done using even more fuzzy notions like "significant, expert, well-known, important, especially notable" and even "their area". This is likely to lead to AfDs with more bickering, not less. Being an academic myself, I know a lot of people in my area which are notable within my small community but should not get a Wikipedia entry because they have not had any recognition beyond this main area of expertise. Publications mean nothing since it's our job to publish research papers and books. All in all, I think I agree that the whole proposal should be transformed into a note in the WP:BIO guideline which should indeed be our focus given its sad, confused state. Pascal.Tesson 17:48, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see what you're saying, but such places where there is room for interpretation exist in plenty of established guidelines.  For instance, WP:BIO includes "The person made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in their specific field" and "Major local political figures who receive (or received) significant press coverage".  "Widely recognized", "major", "significant," same kind of stuff.  And I agree with you that merely HAVING publications means nothing.. but wouldn't you agree that having an especially large number of publications means something?  I would love to put a note in WP:BIO that sums up the ideas here, but I'm not sure what such a note would say: there's too much detail -- how would you sum this up? Mangojuicetalk 17:55, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The recurring problem is non-academically knowledgeable people who think that being a professor at an ivy league is by itself notability enough, or who think that anyone who has had a paper published in a major journal such as PLoS is notable.  That's why there should be some precise statement to indicate that this is not notability for WP purposes, and giving examples of what is. DGG 18:06, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: To answer Mangojuice's question let me use my non-notable self as an example. If you look at this  and this  you might think you're looking at two people in the same field that are publishing at roughly the same rate. But I assure you Alexander Razborov is a superstar and unquestionably deserves an article. I don't want to name names but there are academics who choose to publish an unusual amount of papers. Yes, it takes some talent to do that but it won't make you notable unless your productivity is waaaaay above average. I still think that the only way to measure the notability of an academic is through either peer recognition (like winning major awards in a field, i.e. criterion 7) or recognition from outside the strict field of the academic's competence (or pretty much what criterion 1 suggests). I'm not a big fan of the other criteria. Number 3, as I said above, just moves the debate to "what's a significant academic work" and would be covered by 2 anyways. Similarly, number 4 and 5 are meaningless unless the academic is notable in the sense of 1,2 or 7. As for 6, well that one is simply ridiculous. Pascal.Tesson 20:26, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

text: The problem is not sources. There is not the least problem finding sources forthe work of any professor who has published papers. In some cases hee may be no further bio details without serious original research, but the papers may give basis enough. DGG 07:38, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Interesting comment. I would argue however that the correct fix is to make the notability of musician/weathercasters/minor actors tighter since many such articles are currently based on unreliable sources and are unlikely to ever be more than that. A somewhat related issue is that, whether we feel this is fair or not, academics are unlikely to be written about unless they truly make outstanding contributions to their field (or are quirky enough to generate media interest). This is always a delicate thing to point out because people tend to view the inclusion/exclusion of bio articles as some sort of statement on the value of a person's contributions to humanity. Pascal.Tesson 03:00, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd agree that the notability of musicians/weathercasters/minor actors &c should be tightened, but I don't believe that there's a community feeling to do so -- they tend to sweep through AfD with significant consensus to retain. With regard to your second point, I'd consider specialist review articles/books are usually sufficient to identify the key contributions in a field, though as I mention below, in multi-author papers there's then the problem of assessing who are the primary contributors. Espresso Addict 18:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmm... I'm skeptical about the possibility of doing this based on review articles or books. Any decent book or survey will have an extensive list of references and will try to reflect the breadth of research rather than the most significant contributions. Moreover the key contributions to a field tend to be recognized only with sufficient hindsight and even then there's the problem you mention about giving credit to the right people (especially in thinks like biology, medicine, psychology, etc.). I find it more coherent to rely on third-party independent sources (which surveys usually aren't). Pascal.Tesson 20:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Thoughts

message: So, since comment was requested on this at the Villiage Pump, I thought I'd ask what people think about this article.  Keeping in mind that this isn't AFD, if we were to apply these proposed guidelines to him, what sort of result do people think would be achieved there?  How would these guidelines work in practice? ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 14:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, first of all, they've been used a lot already in AfDs.  In this case, I would say that notability isn't the primary issue, the primary issue is the neutrality of that article.  But if it comes to notability, the article seems to base the notability of the subject on the importance of a particular contribution: it also lists a lot of directorships and other positions, but those don't have any place in the guideline.  I'm having a hard time digging up how many citations his papers have: Google Scholar says 173 for his best paper (which had 3 other authors); PubMed has more, but "related articles" may not be exactly papers that cite the one in question.  I think his notability is a good test case: he doesn't have so many articles, or such well-known articles that it's absolutely clear we'd have to accept him.  I would, myself, say he's notable.. but I bet if it came down to notability, an AfD would end up with no consensus.  (We should probably try it, though, because the article is such clear vanity, without sources.)  Mangojuicetalk 14:58, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This guy is not notable in my book. A fine researcher for sure and one with a nice career but where are the independent sources on which we can rely to find out and explain his impact and career? When writing about him we have two choices: rely on his own or his friends' evaluation of his work which leads to POV problems or some editor tries to evaluate this on their own and we are left with original research. I've always felt that this was the point of notability guidelines: help us nip in the bud articles which are doomed to recurring neutrality and OR problems. Of course I think that it would be hard to make a case that he is not notable with respect to the current proposed criteria (and that's why I think they're ill conceived). The main mistake that is being made in the proposed guideline is that it is intended to first evaluate an academic's worth and then decide whether he's worthy enough to be notable. But there are pretty crappy academics which are notable and on whom reliable sources exist and pretty brilliant academics who spend their life doing valuable work that is not recognized beyond their very very small community. Pascal.Tesson 16:59, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I totally and completely agree with you.  But the same issue is true with all the notability guidelines.  That's why I was careful to say "if it came down to notability" -- that is, if all the info could be written neutrally based on reliable sources.  Mangojuicetalk 17:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

text: I think this case brings up another problem: the body of work on protein folding in which he's been involved is widely known (and his co-author TE Creighton I would consider certainly notable), but I don't recall hearing his name associated with it before. It's possible that he's a member of a research group that jointly produced notable work under the leadership of others. We've had some acrimonious discussions on this topic before on AfD – it's difficult for non-specialists to determine to whom the work should be primarily attributed. Espresso Addict 17:50, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a point you've beren missing. He is to my mind unquestionably notable, not only because of his papers in protein chemistry, which as a biochemist I find quite sufficient to the status, but because of his information projects which as an information worker I find quite sufficient. (the inventor of BLAST is notable just as the inventor of Index Medicus is notable). Together, this implies notability besides his small community. 
A paper has been cited 173 times is enough--thats a very small number; --the related articles just meana papers on the same subject, and are irrelevant altogether. Outside biomedicine, this is much  harder. Outside science & social science, its harder yet there's nothing to use as a citation index. 
*The proper way to do this would be to analyze the output and the citations 
of those already in--they represent quite a range. But dozens of people have been working on this sort of problem for decades: the work is quite contentious, and the best source for it is the SIGMETRICS list--so this will not help us.  
*Perhaps the qy is: will anyone besides his students and family look for him here? In this case, yes. There will be quite a lot of AfD cases if we look for all the nos. This is a operational determination, although subjective.
*An AfD vote is not the way to judge the quality of work in a subject. It's to judge the evidence put forward. DGG 07:38, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Test case

message: I suggest the following, which I think could reduce the size of this page dramatically, and has the merit of removing the arguments elsewhere:  
If an academic has been mentioned by name in a WP article in the subject field, that person is sufficiently notable. Not including them would leave red links, which seem to bother some people. Conversely, if one wishes to have a page for an academic without notability in his subject according to WP,then either the subject page needs improvement by someone who knows the subject, or the academic may be notable for other reasons than his scholarship: For example, the presidents of major universities are almost invariably public figures even outside the place where the university is, and relevant information should be easily found. DGG 04:45, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Um no.  Being mentioned in the context of something notable does not automatically make one notable.  Otherwise, we'd all be notable.  (Surely you know someone who knows someone who's notable?)  Regards, Ben Aveling 22:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: simple criterion

message: ::::Popularity is only one possible measure of notability, however. There is an inherent bias in encyclopedias towards academic topics, because encyclopedias are themselves academic projects. This does not seem to me inappropriate. Thus continents have no notability guidelines, academics ought have lax ones, and Wal-Mart managers ought have very strict ones. Phil Sandifer 14:13, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: But Wikipedia is not an academic project, and simply positing that academics ought to have lax notability guidelines is not the way to convince people to keep those articles.--Prosfilaes 14:41, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, it really is. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are academic projects. If Wikipedia is to be a serious encyclopedia, it needs to be laxer on academics than on, say, sports stars. A notable academic will be far less known than a non-notable baseball player. But because of what an encyclopedia is, the academic still gets an article. Phil Sandifer 22:19, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, maybe you're right.  After all, I have no interest in chemistry, feminism, or ballet, so why don't I just AfD a whole pile of them.  After all, not every that some people are interested in are interesting to other people. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:16, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You may not have an interest in Chemistry, but it has an interest in you.  Some things are important, even if they aren't interesting to you.  Something things aren't important, even if they are intresting to you.  Some things are intresting to enough people that they are important.  Cruft happens when something is extremely important to a small number of people who are prepared to be sufficently unreasonable about it that we put up with them, rather than waste time arguing.  For national leaders, more important than average would be too strong.  For academics and sportsmen it seems about right.  For walmart managers, the bar should probably be 'significantly more important than most'.  Regards, Ben Aveling 22:23, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: We should bias towards academic topics

message: The standards proposed on the project page assume a single discrete published work or body of work. For most scientists,who make the contributions not in books but in many papers, there will be no single distinguishable work in that sense. A top person is, say, mouse genetics, may have published 100s of papers, no single one of which is notable or distinguishable from the general progress in mouse genetics, yet he may be the most important (=notable) person in that very large field.DGG 05:39, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Subject difference in standards

message: A test case of interest for people working on the proposal is Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Harold_Aspden, which focuses on notability criteria for scientists working on fringe theories. Sdedeo (tips) 18:48, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: test case for the prof test

message: the guidelines on the project page have a tag: inactive. But they are used in deletion disputes every day. Until we agree on a better, i thin they are de fact active, and we should instead of inactive, say "being actively discussed for  revision", which is certainly true. DGG 23:33, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not even really sure that's true.  To be honest, people seem to pretty much accept WP:PROF as a sensible test for notability.  We should probably mark it as .  Mangojuicetalk 00:32, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well it is being discussed, right here in fact. and there's no reason not to inform people of the discussion. But first step is to remove the box, and I did. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DGG (talk • contribs) 05:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

text: *Actually, WP:PROF used to redirect to WP:BIO but was recast to this proposal, so it does not  follow that people who use it are aware of that change. This page has had exactly one comment between December 4th and yesterday, so it was definitely not in active discussion yesterday. >Radiant< 08:34, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: However, it is in active *use*.  Discussion has mainly died down because no important changes have been suggested for over 6 months, apart from a few well-meaning but radical suggestions that didn't go anywhere.  The redirect was changed to here 8 months ago, so it's pretty clear people are aware of the guideline now.  Let me point out a few cases in which this guideline was used and obviously well-accepted: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kate Robson-Brown, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/K. G. Karthikeyan, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stephen Heppell, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/George L. Kelm, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rafael Sorkin, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eduardo Reck Miranda (2nd nomination), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rami Grossberg, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Chiara Nappi, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cynthia Neville, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Linda Trimble, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anirvan Ghosh, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Selam Ahderom (second nomination), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paul Jorion, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Randall James Bayer, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Arnav Tripathy, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sylvia Ceyer, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anurag kumar, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James K.A. Smith, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jessica Zucker, Ph.D., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jatin Thakkar, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mayer Zald, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Susanne Holmström, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Douglas J. Den Uyl, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James Anderson (mathematician), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hilal Khashan, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Salwa Khoddam, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Igor Pak, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ralph Juergens.  None of these examples were especially close to the redirect changing targets.  Okay, I went a little nuts on examples from July/August, after that I started skipping forward in time to show that examples continue to come up right up through this month.  There are plenty more.  Most of these examples show most of the following points: (1) WP:PROF is recognized to be different from WP:BIO.  (2) Arguments about keeping/deleting refer to the actual criteria in this guideline: that is, WP:PROF is being used appropriately.  Note: not always in the same comment that links to WP:PROF.  (3) Earlier on, a few users are the ones who keep referring to the criterion -- none of them are me (but I know I've referred to it lots of times, I just don't use the WP:PROF shortcut) -- but they are well-respected members of the community, including User:TruthbringerToronto, User:Trialsanderrors, User:Jzg, User:MER-C, et cetera, and the names get more diverse later in time.  (4) A lot of those links are contentious debates, which shows that the guideline is an important one.  Beyond the examples, the "professor test" of "more notable than the average professor" ends up being a call for WP:ILIKEIT votes.  And, looking through as many of the debates as I could, I saw only a few examples where the community decided to ignore WP:PROF, usually when it was being stretched to apply to people like executives-turned-academics, surgeons, or artists.  However, one thing I did see quite often was use of the "proposed" status of this guideline to elevate personal preference votes above reasoned arguments.  One such argument called the guideline overly inclusive, but that debate ended as a clear keep consensus.  What's more, I'd like to see any debates that ignore, in a two-sided debate, the actual criteria in this guideline.  It seems to me that if the guideline is used, de facto, even when not specifically referred to, then it is an official guideline.  Mangojuicetalk 17:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * Given that that period of time encompassed a major holiday period for many people I think the inactivity may be explained on other grounds. In general I wouldn't really want to categorize something as "inactive" until it's been dead for, say, at least 3 months.  I know, I know -- my own arbitrary criteria.  But still -- people get busy. And Mangojuice's point is right on, btw -- just because discussion has died down & there are still some open issues, doesn't mean that there's not general use / interest in the guideline itself; just not so much in the discussion. Distinguishing between those two is probably useful. --lquilter 17:21, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I endorse marking as guideline. Note that it's status as a proposal has been used as grounds for disregarding, e.g.  Pete.Hurd 19:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good. It's a bad piece of policy, as I've said before. Academic subjects are something we should be more inclusive of, not less. (Which has always been the problem with the professor test as well - professors should have an easier time of inclusion than other things, because an encyclopedia is, on a kind of fundamental level, an academic project with academic biases.) Phil Sandifer 19:57, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmm, I note that WP:SCIENCE (which is a guideline) says that "Scientists are considered notable if they meet the "Prof test" as academics, or are considered the creators of scientific topics which pass their respective tests." which makes it odd that the "professor test" is not a guideline. Pete.Hurd 20:48, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:SCIENCE was made a guideline only a day or so ago, and very prematurely, as it's barely ever been used or referred to.  Phil -- the guideline is really quite inclusive; among the examples I scanned where people felt like ignoring the proposal, every one of them was a delete vote -- in other words, people have to ignore the proposal to vote for deletion in those cases.  The only exceptions were the writers of a few vanity articles that tried to defend them, as usual, with very weak arguments like WP:ILIKEIT, or based on their personal knowledge.  Mangojuicetalk 03:26, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: inactive?

message: Hi all!  I was wondering if someone with experience in cultivating this guideline or simply someone with a good handle on it would mind creating a few  "dummy articles", so to speak in his or her userspace (which could be linked to the body of the guideline for reference).  A few fictitious articles that both meet and fail this guideline would be a great resource in helping people to understand how it can and should be applied.  The problem with mentioning AfD's is that non-adminstrators cannot view the deleted content if/when the AfD results in the article being deleted.  If this has already been proposed, my apologies, but might someone provide a link to this venture if it has, in fact, already been initiated?  Cheers Gaillimh 01:22, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example articles 

message: You know, I think we could get this from "proposed" to accepted.
In reviewing the discussions on this talk page, there has been little discussion for a long time of the basic criteria on the first page. Instead, the discussion has focused largely on (a) should this be even broader? and (b) a recent flurry I'm not sure how to characterize, but seems to suggest the guideline isn't needed at all. I'm setting aside the latter comments, because I think they're not well-supported: It's already been documented that this guideline is being used even in its proposed state, and most people contributing to the talk pages seem to think it's needed. 
On the "should this be broader" strain of arguments, could we state at the top that this guideline indicates sufficiency, but not necessity; and that academics may have notability shown in other ways.  We could then revisit the question of whether to make the guideline broader after 6 months or a year of watching it work in practice as a full guideline.  
--lquilter 15:14, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed, I came here to suggest the same thing. The 'prof test' is used in AfD for many months now, I was suprised to see it is still just a 'proposed policy'. Time to recognize the reality and slap official policy stamp on this one.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  23:42, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What is the process by which we make such a move?   semper fictilis 16:05, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Based on my experience: annouce that we are close to making such a move on talk of WP:N and relevant WP:VP pages (and on all pages you thing are relevant, the more the merrier). Barring any objections, after a week, anybody can simply change the tags on the page and edit the releant pages to make sure they reflect the change. And it's done...-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  05:32, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Barring any objections"? Does that ever happen? —David Eppstein 05:48, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

text: * We have agreed to compromise with a disputed tag below the policy tag while further discussion can be evaluated. --Kevin Murray 22:40, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. As much as I would like to see this become a policy, we have to reach a consensus first. Good policies are discussed often for months. Bad ones are created with little time for community to respond.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  14:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  proposed => accepted 

message: From Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines, in the section "How are policies started," there are three types of policy: descriptions of common practice, accepted proposals to change Wikipedia practice, and dictated policy from Jimbo/Wikimedia.  This guideline came into being as a policy of the second type.  Guidelines of that type that are accepted should not be considered "instruction creep," because that means that the instructions are not needed: when the instructions actually change the way things are done, the level of detail must be required (or else, the effor was not necessary in the first place).  In this case, the discussion was important and has changed the way inclusion of academics works on Wikipedia.
See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nicholas J. Hopper for the particular deletion discussion that originally launched this general one.  Some of the early discussion can be seen on this page, in the first few sections.  It can be clearly seen in that discussion that people were generally going with the "more notable than the average professor" approach from WP:BIO, but had wildly diverging opinions as to what that meant.  People seemed to be unclear on a number of issues: (1) Hopper is called both an associate professor and an assistant professor.  (2) His publication record was called long when it in fact consisted of about 8 papers, and there was confusion between accepted work and merely submitted work.  (3) His work on a couple of interesting results led some to believe he was encyclopedia-worthy, while others pointed out that all professors are expected to publish papers.  The discussion led to this more general one, because of these issues not being particularly well understood.  Fundamentally, this is because typical Wikipedians are not usually in a good position to understand what the "average professor" is (heck, I am in a good position, and I'm not even really sure).  An average professor could be a truly median-quality professor considered over all college-level instructors worldwide.  Or, it could mean to exclude professors that don't engage in research.  Or, it could only refer to full professors.  This guideline exists to answer those questions enough so that the Wikipedia community can make arguments about notability of academics without being badly uninformed about certain issues in academia.  
As to whether the page should be a guideline or not, the main question is whether it has community support.  As I argued at #inactive?, the guideline is used extensively, and there is lots of evidence to suggest that people understand this guideline and largely agree with it.  There are some cases of disagreement, but the guideline does seem to fit the center of community opinion, because there isn't much disagreement, and in most cases those disagreements did not affect the outcome of the debate.  I did not include all examples of the use of WP:PROF in my list, partly because there are too many, but also because many instances don't show much, just a mention of "fails" or "passes" WP:PROF without much further discussion of it.  Many more examples can be found by following "What links here" from the guideline page.  
The final issue is the question of whether or not it is appropriate for the page to be marked as a guideline at this time.  From WP:HCP, on the question of whether or not a proposal should become policy, the advice is "Don't call a vote", because the question is not whether or not a page passes an arbitrarily timed and advertised poll, but whether or not it enjoys community support and whether it should be a policy.  Mangojuicetalk 23:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have to say, it seems very odd for Wikipedia to regularly include every minor character in every soap opera and every reality show contestant, yet place high hurdles to the inclusion of articles on academics. Why not simply include if the academic has published multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals and has had a review article indicating something the person did is notable, and be done with it? The result would be to include almost everybody, certainly at major universities. And what would really be the problem with that? Why have a long, complicated guideline that seems far more exclusionary than most of the rest of the encyclopedia? Best, --Shirahadasha 02:49, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're misinterpreting the guideline.  People only have to meet ONE condition to be notable, not all of them.  And also, the guideline specifically says that anyone not meeting any of the specific criteria may still be notable, just that those who do meet them definitely are.  But as for your criteria specifically, what do you mean by a "review article"?  I can't tell what you would count and what you wouldn't.  Would an ordinary citation count, if it summarized a person's work?  If so, a lot of graduate students would deserve articles.  Would you want to see an article written outside of academia on an academic's work?  If so, that would be very restrictive (and not necessary, as academia has plenty of reliable sources to work with).  Mangojuicetalk 04:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why all the emphasis on significant and well-known etc., appearing to exclude the average academic? By mention in a review article I simply meant inclusion in some survey of the literature, a book review, etc. so that somebody else has written about the work the person did. I had meant some statement about the person's work that would be more than a simple cite, but perhaps multiple cites would be adequate. It seems to me that requiring that the person be "widely" cited etc. may be too much. Again, I'm suggesting we take a look at what's acceptable for popular culture articles and ask why we have to be particularly stringent as long as the basic criteria of multiple publications and peer review are met. Why not have a very simple, short guideline? Best, --Shirahadasha 04:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you want Wikipedia to be more inclusionist than it is.   The community seems to feel that a merely average academic, with a few publications but having contributed nothing significant, should not get an article on Wikipedia.  I view the goal of this proposal as to inform users about academic standards for success so that the community feeling that only notable academics should have articles can be implemented well and consistently, not to fundamentally change the Wikipedia community's opinion on academics.  I've experienced this in many debates.  If you think the community could be convinced differently, by all means, try, but I definitely don't think that average academics being included is the community feeling at this point.  Mangojuicetalk 18:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

text: *This problem might be solved by merging this page with WP:BIO. Perhaps this is worth considering. >Radiant< 13:03, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

text: * Radiant's proposal makes sense. --Kevin Murray 15:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * Radiant didn't give a proposal: there is no guidance there on what would be merged, or how that could provide guidance just as useful as the current proposal.  Radiant had previously slapped a  tag on this page but, similarly, did nothing to try to actually merge the two pages, and the discussion never got started.  It seems to me the issue of whether there is or is not too much detail here is orthogonal to whether it should have its own page.  If the guideline here can be simplified in an acceptable way, it may make sense to include those guidelines on WP:BIO, but without a simplification, this is just moving a "feature creep" concern from one page to another.  Mangojuicetalk 18:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

text: * You are "codifying law based on precedents."  Wow, that's way off base from the WP definition of a guideline.  Before you start "codifying" WP, you should become intimately familiar with the difference between policies and guidelines and other subtleties. --Kevin Murray 15:04, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Huh? Per Mangojuice in his opening post in this thread - this is how this guideline was started. If it doesn't fit the definition of a guideline (quote, plz) it only means our definition is to limited.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  17:06, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why this is not instruction creep and should be a guideline 

message: Either the supposed guideline or these suggestions would drastically lower the standard of notability for academics, and I'm not sure why that is.  It seems to me that since academics, almost by definition, publish new work, that a higher standard is needed to weed-out the ordinary academic from the notable.  The west overproduces academics, and the receipt (let alone nomination!) of one of its countless academic awards is beneath meaningless because few of the awards are notable among themselves.  Moreover, every Eng. Lit PhD candidate in the last twenty years has proposed an "new concept, theory, or idea" that someone (usually themselves) thought was "Earth shaking."  
Every professor in the English-speaking world would meet the very low standard of this supposed guideline.
I propose the following guideline:  An academic is notable on the basis of their work as an academic only if that work has not just been mentioned, but been the central subject, of multiple, non-trivial, independent studies in works that either (a) Are generally recognized peer-reviewed journals; or (b) Otherwise meet wikipedia's standards as sources contributing to notability. (unsigned by user:208.226.153.24)
::* Prior to (a) this statement is a paraphrase of the primary criterion adding nothing new; (a) is a higher standard than WP:NOTE which creates a conflict(b) refers to WP:NOTE etc. There is nothing here to justify a separate criterion. --Kevin Murray 22:11, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Question. Given that Wikipedia believes that every minor soap opera character, reality show contestant, and person named Charity is notable, why should notability for academics continue to be so drastically out of line with its general notability criterion. If all academics publish, and appearing in publications is the general definition of notability, it would seem to follow that all academics are notable. Why should academics be less notable than Family Guy episodes, every single one of which has it's own Wikipedia article? What exactly is the basis for believing that academics are so much less important to general knowledge than Star Trek characters or chewing gum brands, contribute so much less to the enduring historical record than baseball players and Sopranos episodes, that unlike these other, more important contributers to civilization, each of which merits its own article, academics don't? --Shirahadasha 02:23, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * I agree with you.  These are supposed to be ways to grant greater inclusion for special cases, but these end up being interpreted as exclusionary.  My objective is to get these all together in one place and consistent, as being the lesser evil. --Kevin Murray 02:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * Shira: If you're complaining about the systemic bias on Wikipedia, then yeah, you have a point.  But just because other areas are overly inclusive doesn't mean that we should always be overly inclusive; see WP:INN.  The problem with allowing articles on typical, not especially successful academics, is the WP:VANITY articles that come up; academics like to engage in self-promotion.  But notability is a silly concept anyway, the real point is to what degree we can write about a subject while sticking to the main Wikipedia policies: WP:V and WP:NPOV.  For minor academics, it's hard, if you can't rely on their personal webpage and CV.  Mangojuicetalk 14:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * Mango, well said! --Kevin Murray 19:14, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Too restrictive?  Too permissive?

message: User:TravB said, "why are all of the notability pages being pushed as guidelines, when there is widespread objection seeWP:N". In response to this, I should point out that most of our more succesful notability-related guidelines (e.g. FICT, BIO and MUSIC) actually predate WP:N. So if there is a problem with the latter, it does not follow that there must also be a problem with the more specific guidelines. >Radiant< 09:42, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * I'm not sure that predating precludes subordination.  Regardless the dissatisfaction expressed at WP:N ranges from concerns with that specific guideline to the entire concept of notability. --Kevin Murray 17:09, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * I don't specifically oppose the existence of WP:N, WP:BIO, or WP:ORG.  But I do oppose the further inclusion of complete pages of restatement and/or contradiction for the purpose of interjecting a sentence or two of new thought, which could be appended to core pages. --Kevin Murray 17:09, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  From the edit log 

message: Hi.
Should we give a definition for exactly what the terms "significant" and "well-known" used on this page really mean? mike4ty4 00:28, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I argue no.  First of all, I think it's kind of up to the community to settle individual cases, rather than up to us to determine a perfect set of rules (also that leads to instruction creep problems).  But more importantly, it's very hard to actually define those terms, because it'll vary based on the field and type of work.  Mangojuicetalk 21:27, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of terms? 

message: The IncGuide template still lists this as a proposal rather than a guideline. This should be changed. --Metropolitan90 14:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need to change the IncGuide template