Talk:List of Indian scientists

Please, no more 'One of Most Famous Eminent Scientist in World'

A plea to the various contributors who have not learnt the idea of an encyclopedia - just state the basic facts, without going on about how wonderful and famous the relevant people might be. It looks like an advertising plug, and in fact tends to make one think that the person referred to is a cheap self-plugger with a sycophantic student, no matter what the truth might be, especially if the English is terrible. HE IS THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.201.105.122 (talk) 06:07, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Proposed changes

The article needs to follow the convention of List of Russian scientists with each entry mentioning with secondary reliable sources why the subject is notable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Solomon7968 (talk • contribs)

No, there is no requirement that that be the case. The requirement, as laid out in WP:V and, for living people, WP:BLP and WP:NLIST, is that the information be verified and (again for NLIST) be shown to be notable. First, the very fact that the person has a Wikipedia article by definition means that they are notable--if they are not, the article must be deleted, and you should deal with that matter on that article. Second, the only thing we need to verify is notability/importance (should the person not have an article, a reference may suffice, though personally I prefer that articles like this be reserved strictly for people with articles) and that the person fits the category--here, that means that they are Indian. I'm fairly certain that that is confirmed in every article previously linked. One question we may want to explore is whether or not this article is for people of Indian nationality or Indian heritage; personally, I think the latter conforms more to other Wikipedia rules, but I'm flexible. We may want to, for instance, remove all of the "ancient" people, because I'm not sure we can call them "Indian" since that concept didn't exist until the last several centuries.

Furthermore, the new layout is, frankly, awful. We absolutely do not want an image for every person, which is what your formatting implies. Also, given the very long length of this article (and whether we revert back or build from scratch, this article will eventually be of very long length), tables are far less convenient, especially for those reading on mobile devices, than a simple list. We could consider alternate organization schemes (e.g., by field or alphabetically) but definitely I prefer a list. Of course, should there be a clear and robust consensus in favor of tables, I will accept that, but I'm not going to just accept one new editor's preferred style.

So, I'm going to revert back to the previous version. As I said, there is no policy violation in the previous article, though if individual entries are unverified, please do remove them. Please do not revert back to your version per WP:BRD until you can establish a consensus for the change. If we cannot agree between ourselves, we can use dispute resolution. Qwyrxian (talk) 01:07, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

How it is awful? Please see the convention of List of Russian scientists. We do not need picture for everyone but we need to fix this scientist list into subcategories and associate comments with each entries. First of all 1) Scientist is poorly defined. 2) The term Indian is also poorly defined. In this particular list we can organise the articles by 1) Notable Awards 2) Fellowship and 3) University Affiliations. I agree that the table format may not be good but this is a formatting problem. The previous meaningless mess of alphabetical list is simply unacceptable. The Legend of Zorro 01:40, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

I've now gone through the entire list, and removed the very few who were either not verified (after quick glances at the linked articles) or who were not scientists. We can switch this into subcategories rather than alphabetical; if we do so, we need to do the work in a sandbox and complete it entirely before moving it here; we should not lose useful information during the process which will likely be quite time consuming. Also, you're going to have difficulty for scientists with more than one field of study...but that can probably be worked out.

On the formatting, again, I think this article should be, like almost all other lists, actually, you know, a list. Not a set of tables. I consider such tables to be a borderline problem under WP:ACCESSIBILITY. Plus, they are actually far harder to navigate, especially on mobile devices.

As for the definition of scientists...what? I'm pretty sure that anyone whose profession is any science related field, including mathematics and engineering, should be listed. I could accept the exclusion of mathematics, though, and engineering could conceivably be debated. What other definition are you thinking of? As for Indian, yes we need to make a decision. My feeling is that by looking over the articles, basically everyone included was born in India or its precursor states. None of the people listed seem to be Indian solely by ethnicity. So, perhaps the title List of scientists from India is better? Qwyrxian (talk) 02:35, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

A very much needed page.

I am very glad to see this page. Thanks. --Abhijeet Safai (talk) 04:09, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Running Wikidata query and adding missing names

I would suggest to run a Wikidata query and add the missing information in this article. I will try to do it myself as I will get time, but sharing this idea with interested editors so they can contribute in their time if they like this idea. Thank you. -- Abhijeet Safai (talk) 06:26, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

A not even slightly needed page

Or so it seems to me. I'm surprised by the comment of Abhijeet Safai above. By contrast, I find the page, as it is now, utterly pointless. It doesn't help me in any way that Category:Indian scientists does not. It's not sorted by specialty, by period, or in any other way. Sorting aside, it's uninformative. Abhijeet Safai (or anyone): How do you find this list more interesting/educational/useful/etc than Category:Indian scientists? Or, if you concede that it's currently pointless but could be improved so that it would have a point, how do you propose to improve it?

(I should confess that I find many Wikipedia lists of people, and perhaps most of them, pointless at best. [At worst, they're just an opportunity to increase the prominence of people who are barely noteworthy.] I did recently put a lot of time and energy into improving one: List of street photographers. However, I'm not entirely sure that even this was worthwhile.) -- Hoary (talk) 07:55, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Hoary I agree with you. This page does not add more information compared to the Category:Indian scientists and is pointless. Unless someone spends time to somehow sort it based on fields (which can also be achieved by Category), I think this page should be removed. Adamgerber80 (talk) 17:34, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Adamgerber80, I made the curmudgeonly comment above when sleepy (I hadn't even noticed that this thing had survived an AfD) and impatient. I now see that this article (or non-article) has quite a history. But anyway, here it was:

• immediately before an AfD template was slapped on it
• immediately after the AfD template was removed from it
• immediately before Abhijeet Safai praised its existence (above)

IMHO, these versions (which are very similar to each other) are pointless. The AfD failed because of what one might call a systemic other-crap-exists argument, which I might despairingly paraphrase as "We'd be discriminating against Indian scientists if we didn't have the pointless list of them that we have for scientists of other nations". (And indeed, I too wouldn't want Indian scientists to be treated any worse than German scientists -- with their equally pointless list -- or whomever.)

By mild contrast, List of French scientists does look (feebly) useful. Despite (or, arguably, in part because of) its red links, List of Armenian scientists and philosophers actually manages to be useful and interesting. (Though I'd say the red links are misplaced: they should constitute a second list on its talk page.)

This list of Indian scientists has had the occasional radical edit by IPs, but the logged-in users who've bothered to edit it radically have included User:Solomon7968, User:Qwyrxian, User:Wiae, User:IronGargoyle. I wonder if they think (anyone thinks) it has any value in its present form; or, if they (you) don't, then how it might acquire value. -- Hoary (talk) 00:20, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes. I spent my leisure time over couple of months and did it. Seven years later and here we are. The page is not only sorted according to the periods, but the roles of these scientists are also listed. Some extremely significant scientists' names are a bit more descriptive. Footy2000♡; 14:03, 1 April 2024 (UTC)