Talk:Timothy M. Chan

This article was nominated for deletion on 16 January 2009. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Governor General's Award[edit]

What Governor General's Award did Chan win? Surely not the Governor General's Literary Award. — Grstain | Talk 16:28, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually this article was not put up by professor Chan. He would be happy to see it deleted completely from Wikipedia for a number of reasons. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.255.146.80 (talk) 23:49, 16 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not to mention errors and omissions, this article appears to be outdated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.3.190 (talk) 12:45, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Based on the old version of previous year the following changes are made: 1. Country of birth added (for clarification) 2. IPAM(2009), and EuroCG'10 added (information already in public domain; just google them) 3. The sentence "His research focus on Computational Geometry" removed (his research extended beyond computational geometry, such as graph theory, data structure, complexity, streaming algorithms, to mention a few) 4. Program committee added (just google STOC 2010, FOSC 2007, for example) Remark: As no new information has been added to the old version other than what is already in the public domain, it seems it does not help in having additional citations for verification. Just like the old version, however, a lot of relevant information are still left out. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.133.141 (talk) 19:11, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I dispute the assertion that "it does not help in having additional citations". Per WP:BLP, everything in this article needs a source. Currently sources are badly lacking: we only have sources for his university chair and his doctoral dissertation award. It would be appropriate under BLP to remove everything else from the article, but as I don't know of any serious factual problems with it I'm not doing so right now. However, adding sources for all the other material should be a top priority. It's not good enough that one can Google them; they need to be in the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:16, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As I am in no position to supply additional citations for verification, please have all the changes removed, and let the article revert back to its former version. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.133.141 (talk) 23:04, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

May be people can help if they know which statements need citations for verification. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.133.141 (talk) 19:45, 29 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's not hard to identify what needs sources: they're all of the statements that do not currently have sources. In particular:

His birthdate of 1976
His childhood home of Hong Kong
His undergraduate education
His admission to colleges other than the one he went to and his choice among them
His Ph.D. date and age at completion
His program committee activity

—David Eppstein (talk) 19:49, 29 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Since there was no complaint with the previous version having only the 2 citations (see the previous versions with 2 citations), the additional 16 more citations in the current version should strengthen its reliabilty, and not diminish it. Perhaps what you want is not more citations, but rather documentrary proof such as brith certificate, diploma and transcripts, etc. Most of the personal information should have been filed in the CS department of UBC, including a copy of the formal offer letter from Professor E. L. Lawler of UC Berkeley. The main difference between the former acceptable version and the current one is that I took the liberty of adding a couple of sentences about Timothy's early life as a gifted child. On examining the revision, I don't find any statement that cannot be substantiated. As Timohty's mother, I have no objection to have the article deleted. - Ms.MYChan, Ph.D.(Physics) August 29, 2010. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.255.146.80 (talk) 22:46, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You should probably read Wikipedia:Verifiability as well as Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. I don't think there is much danger of the article as a whole being deleted, but some of the personal detail in it probably should be, if it cannot be attributed to published sources that any Wikipedia editor (with access to appropriate libraries etc) would be able to verify. Birth certificates, personal letters, and academic records don't generally count. A magazine article about Chan that mentioned the same information would be much better: despite the fact that such articles are not as reliable as official documents such as birth certificates, they're much more verifiable. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:00, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]