Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)/Archive 1

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Thoughts on Inclusion of Professors

Include:

All tenured faculty at four year colleges and graduate schools.
All Professors at Ivy League, and other top 25 schools. (Being selected to teach at top 25 school is pretty notable, even if you don't get tenure.)
All professors who are fellows of their professional socities IEEE,ACS, ADSA etc.

Exclude:

Adjunct Professors
Non tenured faculity at 2 year schools.

Klonimus 06:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Do you realize how many stub articles a policy like this would invite? There are perhaps thousands of universities in the US alone, each of which has dozens or hundreds of tenured professors. The vast majority of these people are not notable. Many of them are, and we should judge them individually by their contributions to their respective fields, not assume notability merely because of a title. Wikipedia is not a directory of professors. Gamaliel 07:03, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

But let us not go in the other direction. the criteria now in place on the project page are much too high a standard, for there would be about 500 people in the US only meeting such a sstandard

There are more than 3000 colleges and universities in the U.S. alone. Even a small college can have 100 or so tenured facutly. The proportion of faculty with tenure runs very high (80%+) at many schools. Anyone care to guess at the total number of tenured faculty (or equiv.) worldwide? -- Mwanner 12:30, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, much too broad. There are 45,000 members in the (US) AAUP, and probabl at least an equal number not members; considering other english speaking countries alone, ithe count is probably 150,000, of which half will meet your criterion. It might more reaistic to reword it at least to:

Tenured full time full and associate professors in major (Carnegie Research Extensive) universities (and similar universities and ranks in the non-US&Canada) is presumptive evidence, and others depending on individual qualifications.DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Tenured professors frequently (usually?) have to have a published history of works. "Publish or perish" is the phrase I've heard bandied about. Most of these works are offline, as in not googleable. Give the new stubs the benefit of assuming good faith. Professors are obviously notable to their students. How notable is the only question.

Most universities have a level beyond that of tenure. Once a professor gets tenure, they may become lazy and stop producing anything worthwhile because they know they're set (i.e., have tenure). The majority (although not a high majority by any means) continue to work hard to achieve "Full Professorship", which is the next level beyond tenure - although not all achieve this status, despite their hard work. Perhaps we could limit inclusion to this higher tier. User:Mike barrie 20:35, November 19, 2006 (UTC)

Any teacher is notable to his or her students. primary school teachers also. We're talking about public notability. (& some primary school teachers who are leaders in the profession would be welcome also)DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

And the entire WP article database, in all languages, was under 4 gigabytes as of the end of April, 2005. Wake me when we've exceeded a few terabytes, then we might need to worry about "how many". Until then, I don't see any reason to destroy knowledge contributed in good faith based on opinions of notability. Categorize and index the data well, and we'll have no problems.--Unfocused 14:15, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

It's not a question of gigabytes and terabytes, it's a question of clutter and disambiguation-- at some point every other article will need a disambiguation page. And a lot of the articles published under publish or perish dictates are, predictably, awful. -- Mwanner 14:56, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

It's not a matter of disk space, but usability. And it's nice that professors are notable to their students, but that should be irrelevant. How notable they are to people not directly associated with them is how we should judge encyclopedic notability. Gamaliel 16:49, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Mwanner & Gamaliel, are we supposed to delete knowledge from the Wiki because you don't know how we're going to index, classify and present it? Perhaps it's just me, but I haven't seen the problems you allude to. --Unfocused 06:30, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that the term "tenure" is not generally applicable outside the USA, or at least North America. Ditto "Ivy League". In the UK we have three informal classes of university, the topmost of which, the so-called "Blue Brick" universities, would probably correspond to "Ivy League".

I would tend to say that an academic published in an international journal of record should probably have an entry because those reading his papers may want to look him up in an encyclopedia. This guy made Proc. ACM so he definitely counts by that score. There may be tens of thousands of people with the title "professor", but there are only so many international journals. Even so we're unlikely to be deluged with professor articles. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 14:41, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

there are lots and lots of international journals on all kinds of subjects. I think we should only have people who have won some important award or are otherwise gods. Not only for academics but also sports people and all other as well. -MarSch 15:12, 16 May 2005 (UTC) Oh, by the way, what is tenured? -MarSch 15:13, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Right, there are hundreds of thousands of published authors, most represented by a single paper. Thousands in ACM alone. And there are about 8,000 journals included in WoK. (But an award is a little too restrictive. ) DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Maybe a good test would be to consider whether this is someone graduate students (and faculty) in the field recognize by name. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.232.249 (talk • contribs)

Well yes there are lots of international academic journals (I'm not talking about the International Journal of Bricklaying), but they tend to carry significant academic output. Why are important awards necessary? How about the player who gets knocked out in Wimbledon singles quarter-finals by Serena Williams? How about the guy whose sole reward for five years research on the genetic structure of liliales is to have his work published and highly regarded by his peers? He may not have won any prize (so lay-people, who care about that kind of thing, may not have heard his name) but people are still going to read his articles and want to know more about him. That's precisely where encyclopedias come in useful. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 15:28, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

For a currently active non-notable person, the only source of info is usually his web page or himself. This will be found by Google, especially since the published papers list the name of the univ. There is therefore no need of it here, and for a non-currently active non-notable person, the person (or hisfamily) will be the only source. To have published 1 paper and are on the faculty somewhere, and are not known outside their own college. According to ISI counts, half of all published papers are never cited. DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, sure, if we could define a list of academic journals that were sufficiently rigorously peer reviewed, I could accept that, just as I could accept the idea of all tenured (or equiv) profs at "Ivy League, and other top 25 schools", if we could come up with such a list. But the idea of trying to come up with those list is enough to make me say, well, maybe we need to limit it to profs with scholarly books to their credit. Mwanner 16:05, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

The idea that books are better that a journal is a fallacy, books don't get peer reviewed, peer-review isn't the be all and end all, but it generally makes publishing erroneous results more difficult, some people sneak things into books that wouldn;t fly in a journal--nixie 08:05, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I see no need to draw up a list. We can just use our judgement. Personally I'd tend to ignore publication in journals with limited circulation. By the way not all academic publications are peer reviewed. And then there are monographs--I'd take more note of those on an international imprint such as Elsevier, OUP, and the like, and perhaps less with smaller outfits, though this should not be a hard rule. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 17:42, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Professors ain't professors

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Internal criteria (let Academia decide who is notable)

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)

The proposed standards at the top of this page set the bar way too low. We would be inviting tens of thousands of unverifiable sub-stubs. We would never accept such a low standard for business people. Tenure is a very poor way of judging anything except endurance. Being hired by an Ivy League school is also a poor indicator since it's more closely linked with luck, location, contacts and personal preference than ability. Fellowship in a professional society is not significant though a serious leadership role in the organization may be. I like MarSch's simple standard above. Examples like Tony Sidaway's guy whose been published and highly regarded by his peers but has not yet won any prize get discussed on a case-by-case basis and dealt with as exceptions. Citations are generally a good criteria if we have verifiable access to a citation database. Authorship is redundant with other criteria in the general criteria for inclusion of biographies and may not need to be an academic-specific criterion. Rossami (talk) 19:15, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand why you claim that having published profs and whatnot would end up with "unverifiable substubs". If you have a chap who teaches at a university and is published, he is inherently verifiable. He's got a faculty or school, a phone number, an address for mail, a bibliography can be compiled easily. At that rate you could even set the bar as low as published grad students and still not end up with substubs. It's possible to write an unverifiable substub even on a very famous person, even Charlie Chaplin, but that has nothing to do with whether we are setting the bar too high or too low for professors.

I don't mind if we let anyone published in any international academic journal into Wikipedia, what harm is done if we get a few people writing stubs that never expand? It's not like the developers are screaming "slow down, we're running out of Wiki!" --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:50, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

There's more to "running out of Wiki" than just having enough disk space. Is there anyone out there who is happy with Wikipedia's response time? Response time isn't just a factor of number of users; it's also driven by the size of the database that each user request has to deal with. But even if we had endless processing power, it would still be worth trying to keep a lid on adding every last prof whose students want to add an article: there are presently 157 entries under Category:Psychologists. Let's suppose there are 9000 colleges and universities worldwide; let's suppose we average only one article on Psych profs per institution. See the issue? -- Mwanner 21:55, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Sounds to me like an irrational phobia of a Great Wikipedia Paper Shortage Klonimus 18:33, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
- No, it's the problem of how you wade through a category that lists 9000 psychologists, most of whom have nothing new to add to the sum of human knowlege. It's like the problem you face doing a literature search-- the more garbage you have to wade through, the more difficult it is to find what you need. Why put useless stuff in to begin with? Because it's too much trouble to make the value judgements? That's just off-loading the problem onto the reader. -- Mwanner 21:09, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
  - Rather, it is "off-loading" the value judgment onto the authors of articles—as opposed to the autocratic administrators who, invariably, know less about the articles whose value they judge than those who write them. -Αναρχία 11:23, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
  - Why are you wading through the category anyway? I (and I assume most people) come to pages on Wikipedia two ways: by looking for a particular person, or by being linked to someone from an article. Category:Psychologists doesn't list all psychologists in Wikipedia; most of the psychologists are only listed by nationality. And most of those articles of no interest to me or most of the other non-psychologists looking for stuff. It is much more important to me that the important mathematicians and authors I'm looking for be listed, then some arbitary list of articles be kept short.--Prosfilaes 03:09, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

professorial publishing not inherently notable

Nearly all professors publish. They have to in order to get raises and promotion. There may be exceptions in the visual or performing arts for profs who produce or perform rather than writing. In general, most of the material profs publish is not notable. The usual test is whether their work is subsequently used as a reference for other publications by their peers. Most professorial publication concerns the minutae of a narrow area of current inquiry within a particular prof's already narrow subfield of specialization. While professors may be notable to their colleagues and students, in most cases they do not have a meaningful public life that would warrant an article here.

In general, biographies should be written only of public figures.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 19:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Ah now it's back to "notable". Let's just allow that academics do tend to publish interesting stuff that other academics, and even laypeople, like to read about. Isn't that notability enough? So Professors publish because that's their job? Yes, but they also don't get to publish a heap of crap. There is competition for publication.

You say Most professorial publication concerns the minutae of a narrow area of current inquiry within a particular prof's already narrow subfield of specialization. Yes, why is this is a problem? Do we say "sorry our systematics on Wikipedia can only go down to the leval of family. Genera are just too specialized?" Do we say that it's okay to have an article about a professor who publishes on the philosophy of science, but not a professor who publishes only on burial customs of Middle Kingdom Egypt?

In general, biographies should be written only of public figures

Well yes, but a piece on Professor X containing a bibliography would be very appropriate for Wikipedia. It would mean that it would be a useful resource for information on this chap. I'm not interested in who he's married to or whether he's been on Desert Island Discs, but I am keenly interested (as a layperson) in what he does. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:56, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Ah, but heaps of crap absolutely are published, up to and including hoax articles. So it's not just minutiae that's the problem, it's garbage, too. -- Mwanner 22:13, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

See, for example, the famous 1996 prank in which physicist Alan Sokal persuaded a Duke University journal called Social Text to publish a bogus article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Mwanner 22:53, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

The quality of the publications of professors can in some way be categorised, simply by how many times their paper is cited in other papers. Also note that if a physicist publishes ten papers that get 100 citations each, that is rather more notable than 200 papers with 5 citations each (particularly since this includes self-citations). The free and easy way for Wikipedians to check this is with Google Scholar ([1]), although it does tend to miss some papers and undervalue the total number of citations (and would be a little tricky to be sure you're correctly checking for a Prof. John Smith). So, for example, while I wouldn't be completely surprised if nobody here has heard of Prof. Bart J. van Wees, he has a pretty substantial publication record, including one paper with over 600 citations (average in physics is ten) to his name, which rather suggests influence in the field, even if nobody here could explain what a paper titled Quantized conductance of point contacts in a two-dimensional electron gas is talking about. I mean, seriously, what's more important, a Pokemon character or a research scientist? Shouldn't Wikipedia cover important things as well as popular things? Average Earthman 21:17, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Just out of interest I did a search for any publications including Ahn, Blum or Hopper at ISI Web of Knowledge. I only came up with five publications between them. Those five publications have been cited a grand total of four times by independent research publications. This is not notable. What other publications do they have that isiknowledge would have missed? As far as I am aware there are no significant journals missed by that source.

von Ahn L, Blum M, Hopper NJ, Langford J

CAPTCHA: Using hard AI problems for security

LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 2656: 294-311 2003

Times Cited: 2 (1 self cite)

Hopper NJ, Langford J, von Ahn L

Provably secure steganography - (Extended abstract)

LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 2442: 77-92 2002

Times Cited: 3 (2 self cite)

von Ahn L, Hopper NJ

Public-key steganography

LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 3027: 323-341 2004

Times Cited: 0

von Ahn L, Blum M, Langford J

Telling humans and computers apart automatically

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 47 (2): 57-60 FEB 2004

Times Cited: 0

TRAUB JF, BIRNBAUM JS, HARTMANIS J, REDDY DR, TAYLOR RW, VYSSOTSKY VA, HEARN A, YOVITS M, ZEIGER P, RICE J, HUSKEY H, STEWART R, FEIGENBAUM E, ARDEN B, CORBATO F, COX J, BLUM M, DODD G, CONTE S, HAMBLEN J

QUO-VADIMUS - COMPUTER-SCIENCE IN A DECADE

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 24 (6): 351-369 1981

Times Cited: 2

David D. 18:22, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

ISI Web of Knowledge misses many important publications in mathematics. I consider it a weak indicator of importance. Zaslav 21:23, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Regarding Pokemon, remember that Wikipedia policy is not consistent, and that Wikipedia tolerates things it does not condone. These things are nowhere more true than with regard to inclusion/deletion policy. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 21:10, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Proposal by Tony Sidaway

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)

Uh, that's too low a standard. By that level, I would qualify for an article since I've published in internationally recognised journals. Average Earthman 21:20, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
- That may be so. But why is it too low? Weren't the articles worth reading? If someone comes along and finds your work interesting enough they could well want to write an article. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:27, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
  - It's too low because what really counts is the longevity of the article and/or the number of citations each year. Many articles are published that never see the light of day. Most are not notable. I assume we don't want wikipedia to be like a phone book. David D. 21:42, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

- Wikipedia articles aren't like phone book entries because, if nobody links to an article and you never enter the name yourself, you'll never see it. So it doesn't really matter if so-and-so writes an encyclopedia article about his favorite professor, it's not like it's competing for page space with somebody who matters. m:Wiki is not paper. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:54, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
  - Serious question: by this argument, why aren't vanity pages allowed? I could provide plenty of verifiable information about myself in an article, and if nobody links to it... android↔talk 22:23, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
    - Difficulties with verifiability. We *do* permit people to submit their own biographical entries, provided the information provided is verifiable and encyclopedic (eye color, pet's names, job, favorite hobbies, no, but "author of a bestselling novel" yes). There's a sliding scale, pretty much like the one I suggest for professors. My suggested gold standard for profs is international publication. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:09, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
      - Using myself as an example again, it is too low a standard as none of my papers have, as yet, been cited well beyond the average for physics papers (which is around nine), and I haven't published hundreds of papers either. Average Earthman 11:40, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
      - As a university professor myself, as much as I'd like to have a Wikipedia bio page, this hurdle seems too low to me as well. Significant academic journals are inherently "international" in both readership and availability. Just because I have a handful of well-regarded (by my research community) papers in well-regarded journals doesn't make me interesting to anybody outside my particular field. And those folks can get all the info they need about me from my university profile page (which most serious academics have anyway). Wikipedia isn't meant to replace Google; let's stick with a policy that if you have to add your own bio page, you don't deserve one. ;-) cmf 10:07, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
        There is a policy against autobiographical pages. A University profile page is more ephemeral than Wikipedia and doesn't permit for internal linking; if a professor is mentioned in an article, it's easier to link to a Wikipedia page rather than finding the webpage for every citation.--Prosfilaes 02:07, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
  - I'm interested in your citation criterion--it seems intriguing. I'm not sure that it would be particularly workable, though. What's wrong with an article about an average physics professor? If he happens to have written a paper I've read I may well want to look him up on Wikipedia. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:11, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
    - Well, this would have to be somewhat adjusted to match the various subject areas, but it is simply measuring the worth of academic works by the number of fellow academics who consider it to be worth referencing. In physics, the average is 9, so if you've published twenty papers and the most any have been cited is ten times, you're not sufficiently notable to warrant an article yet (as it will be quite likely to get out of date). If you've got 1000 papers, you might be notable by sheer volume, if you've ten first author papers with more than 50 cites, or 1 first author paper with more than 250 cites, then perhaps an article may be warranted - so for example Thomas Dietl is notable as his paper in Science in 2000 on ferromagnetism in zinc-blende magnetic semiconductors has over 500 citations (and basically sparked off million dollar research programmes in the US, Europe and Japan). But I would suggest that people write proper stubs - if you're justifying the article by their work, then you should know their work enough to provide links to key articles. This isn't the only requirement for an article of course, awards, significant patents, lucrative contracts with US universities and media work are also factors to consider. Average Earthman 14:27, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
      - Well it's interesting that you're using the word "notable" and "warrant". In practice I think Wikipedia has dodged the "does this subject warrant an article" question by letting editors create articles that they want to create, deleting obvious nonsense, and merging more trivial articles into appropriate articles on a wider subject. We can do this, because unlike a paper encyclopedia we're based on hypertext and we aren't limited by space or deadlines. I'm happy with this approach, and I'm not convinced that there is any reason to change it. Can you think of a reason why we should delete an article someone has written that is good but happens to be about a minor professor? --Tony Sidaway|Talk 14:57, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
        Sure. In a word, clutter. You wrote, "if nobody links to an article and you never enter the name yourself, you'll never see it". Not so. These folk will be entered into categories as Psychologists, Physicist, Sociologist, etc., etc.; these categories will grow from their present, reasonable size to, potentially, thousands of entries. Thus, for people browsing via the categories, a manageable situation will grow unmanageable. If clutter doesn't matter, why bother keeping anything out? It seems to me that an important part of the work of crafting an encyclopedia is making these (admittedly difficult) judgment calls to save the readers from having to wade through a load of useless fluff. -- Mwanner 23:12, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
    - What's wrong with an article about an average physics professor? The same thing that's wrong with an article about an average family doctor or an average barrista; verifiability. It would violate one of the fundamental policies of Wikipedia. How am I to verify information about an "average" person? Moreover, such pages are often made by the person themself, or a friend, and are extremely vulnerably to vanity-style information. -- Corvus 22:07, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
      - The average physics professor is trivial to verify the existance of; check the journals. If you email the universities they worked for, they will send you some information about the professor under question. You can call them non-notable -- and the notability of some Wikipedia articles that pass AfD recently has dropped quite low, to bring up the s****l debate -- but there is quite a bit of verifiable information. They aren't average people.--Prosfilaes 00:52, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
I think Tony Sidaway's proposal has a lot of problems. First of all, "internationally recognized" isn't even well-defined. What does an "internationally recognized" journal even mean? That it's carried in the library of at least one other university in one other country? Considering the vast size of the journal collections at the libraries of the premier universities, we're talking an extremely large number of journals. And since each journal is going to publish tens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of scholars over the years, that's a large number being multiplied to become even larger. The number of academics who have ever published in an "internationally recognized" journal is HUGE. Having articles for each one of them leads to a huge amount of clutter. It's not a disk space issue; it's a clutter issue. Besides categories, we would need far, far more disambiguation pages for common names. And probably, no one would ever care about any of these articles except that person and his or her immediate colleagues in the same department at the same university. Instead, academics should be held to the same standards of notability as other people would be for biographical entries. If an academic is near the top of his or her field, has hundreds of other scholars citing him or her, makes the news, or publishes a seminal book, then that would make the scholar encyclopedic. —Lowellian (talk) 08:43, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

Full professors and notability

I strongly feel that the "notability" requirements for academics should be set higher than merely being a professor with a publishing history. To be included, an academic should have to be an important researcher in his or her field. Remember, our main goal here should be making Wikipedia the best encyclopedia possible. Adding tens of thousands of articles that are of no use to anyone does not improve Wikipedia, and actively degrades it. There is a worse problem, though. The process that allows articles to improve over time depends critically on there being more than a couple of editors who are capable of contributing to any given article. An article about a typical university professor is unlikely to have more than one or two informed contributors. This leads to poor quality and possibly biased articles. Academics who are not at least world-renowned in their own field should not be included.--Srleffler 21:20, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

If we applied the same selectivity to sportspeople, we should start purging Wikipedia of thousands, or even tens of thousads, of articles on not particularly famous baseball, cricket and football players and others. How many of the players in any given American professional baseball team are "world-renowned"? I suppose Babe Ruth may qualify. And Joe DiMaggio, I guess. But that's probably it. I doubt any living baseball players are known outside the U.S., and many probably aren't known to any but the fans of their own team. Wikipedia is already extremely inclusive in some areas. At the moment we include any professional sportsperson and every fictional king from Tolkien's works. The notability criteria for academics should be camparable to the ones for sportspeople.

WP:BIO speaks of something it calls an "average college professor" as below the notability threshold. What I assume Americans may mean by this - we don't have colleges where I live and teachers at a comparable level are not called "professors" - is somebody teaching undergraduates at a small college with no doctoral programme, somebody who presumably has written an unpublished dissertation and published a few mostly uncited papers.

My personal view is that full professors at major research universities should at least always be given the benefit of the doubt. People who has advanced that far have already at several point in their career been deemed notable by their peers and will also influence future generations of academics as doctoral advisors. Other than that, there are other criteria which could be applied to include individuals who for some reason never get a professorship.

The thing about "one or two informed contributors" isn't something we can do anything about, I'm afraid. If the number of contributors should determine whether an article should be kept, that would just increase the systemic bias already in existence. Some of the best articles are written by only a few contributors and some of the worst have been produced by an unlimited supply of random bypassers who think they know something about the topic. Uppland 22:39, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Sportspeople, on the other hand, are public figures. Many more people know and care about the life of even a minor sports professional than about a typical full professor at a University. The issue about only a few informed contributors is a critical issue: verifiability. If too few people know about the biographical details of an individual, the processes that normally maintain accuracy and neutrality fail; the article becomes vulnerable to manipulation by an editor with a POV, or even by the subject of the article him/herself. Individuals who are not sufficiently well-known simply are not suitable subjects for encyclopedia articles.--Srleffler 05:35, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Isn't becoming a full professor exactly academic recognition of achievement? Sure there are other factors, such as teaching ability and ability to get grants that play into becoming a prof., but a professor (generally with tenure, if applicable to the academic system) is almost by definition notable. They must have been recognized by their peers for their academic achievement to become a prof.; that is what being a prof means. For myself, I have no trouble with lots of stub articles, because having stubs increases the chances more material will be added. Note, this is NOT to say unverifiable information should be included. That is a wholly separate issue. It seems to me that being a full professor is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for inclusion in Wikipedia. --Hansnesse 01:02, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think just being a full professor makes someone notable. It merely indicates a promotion to a certain level be one's employer. Each employer (e.g., university, college, institution) and department within that institution sets its own standards for promotion to full professor these vary wildly not only from institution to institution but within each institution among departments and from year to year as staffing levels, political situations (and tenure and promotions decisions are rife with politics) and economic issues change. I understand the value of having a stub with the hope that it will be filled in later, but if we have lots of stubs of semi-notable people, it lends itself to the inclusion of lots of other stubs for semi-notable people, which is not a good thing. Crunch 03:43, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I assume that you are referring to conditions at American universities. In educational systems with a higher degree of regulation, appointment to professorial chairs is not just an internal matter within a department and not as arbitrary as you describe (which is not to imply that less than happy decisions are never made). I agree that for the U.S., simple criteria as "full professor" can not be applied for all institutions, as American academia is simply too diverse and unregulated. Nevertheless, I would still trust whoever or whatever appoints professors at, say, Harvard or Yale or the University of Chicago to know what they are doing. Uppland 08:55, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, Crunch, I disagree here. For example, every professional sports player is one simply because their employer (the team for which they play) has decided to promote them to a high level, based on their merits. Although I agree with you that there is some variation in who gets chosen for full professor, it's not as variable as you make out. The standard at almost all research universities is that someone becomes a full professor if they have "an internationally-recognized academic reputation". When one is up for such a promotion, typically a large number of leaders in the field are contacted (upwards of 20) and their opinions solicited. In short, if someone is a full professor at a university with a reputation for research, then you can rest assured that they are considered notable by the community. (Now, of course, it is a different story at teaching colleges.) By "reputation for research", I'm including (of course) the Ivy League schools, but this would include most large state universities in the US as well. Actually, I think if we vetted a list of universities which we decided were of sufficient "research caliber", allowing every full professor, or even tenured faculty, at those institutions into Wikipedia would be quite reasonable.--Deville (Talk) 13:42, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Be inclusionist, they are more important than sports stars, etc. However, articles must be limited to verifiable information, and not be vanity pieces, which is a much simpler criterion. JeffBurdges 19:29, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Part of the problem I have with including full professors as "notable", is that if the arguments in favor of it are true, then the individual should already be notable, before being appointed a full professor. In other words, if being appointed a full professor indicates a sufficiently high degree of recognition or accomplishment, it should be possible to look at the person's body of work and see that he or she is notable under one or more of the first five criteria. I suspect, however, that this is not the case: that there are many full professors at research universities who do not otherwise meet Wikipedia's requirements for notability.--Srleffler 05:42, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

William Connolley

VFD debates first one at [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/William Connolley unresolved, the second one at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/William Connolley 2. Normally it'd be deleted striaght off, but what if you're a wikipedian and have friends to vote for you in vfd? Dunc|☺ 1 July 2005 09:38 (UTC)

Precedents

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)

Good stuff, I'll have a look around. - brenneman ^(t)^(c) 01:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Yet another proposal

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)

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)

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)

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)

I think this too narrowly defines notability. If we take non-academics as a guide, I don't think that anyone would argue against the inclusion of, for example, a Commissioner of Internal Revenue (of the United States). Yet there are only three articles for such a person (as I write this...), and two of the three are only linked to a couple of times (one is linked to heavily, due I think to a template used). I agree, however, that the balance is between (i)Comprehensivness and (ii)Time required needed to vet an article carefully. I think, however, that this proposal is too far in the direction of missing contributions. Nothing, of couse, should remove the requirement of verifiabilty, that is a seperate criteria. --Hansnesse 01:30, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

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)

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) Rereading... My mistake. --Hansnesse 01:57, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

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)

TerraFrost, I don't think anybody has claimed that the Berkeley professors you link to wouldn't be "worthy" to be mentioned. Your argument seems to be based on the misapprehension that Wikipedia is somewhere close to finished and that anything sufficiently important either has an article or is at least mentioned somewhere. I think that idea is entirely mistaken; as large as it is, Wikipedia is full of gaping holes in its coverage. Trying to fill such holes will inevitably lead to articles occasionally being created that not yet have any inbound links. Uppland 16:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

High bar

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)

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)

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)

[I like the emeritus list. It makes it evident that not even full professors at top-notch universities are necessarily famous. I would propose being famous among the grad students as the key selection criterion. Using the emeritus list, just walk into an EECS or CS department anywhere in the world and ask the first grad student who is Elwyn Berlekamp or Michael Stonebraker. The student will respond "coding theory" or "postgres". There are many people on the emeritus list who don't meet this test of, say, two-thirds of grad students having a clue.] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.232.249 (talk • contribs)

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)

Textbooks are very bad criterias for inclusion, as its often people who arn't very good at research who are writing the textbooks. Worse, multiple editions usually means the book is just designed to rip off students, and the person really isn't important. OTOH, a book translated into another langauge is a clear keeper. Why not just use the same criteria as scientists use, like quality of journals (impact factor). Note: impact factor is highly highly field specific, and is almost meaningless for some fields, like mathematics, but its used quite frequently by other sciences. JeffBurdges 19:37, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

A Pragmatic Suggestion

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)

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)

Rough Guidelines

I, for one, don't agree with the guidelines. For one, "producing or popularising a significant new concept, theory or idea" is impossibly subjective.

For another, a Festschrift or high award is the way the academic community shows notability and is entirely objective; there's no reason we should second-guess that. If someone has earned a Fields Medal, it's entirely against the spirit of WP:NOR for us to argue whether they are notable. Just as importantly, I doubt a blanket inclusion of those people will mean a huge number of articles.

(I've left the honorary doctorate out, as I don't think it's entirely on-point. I suspect the majority of honorary doctorates are to non-academics. I suspect that an honorary doctorate from a major (i.e. not Northwestern Oklahoma State University, although it is genuine) should also be a sign of notability, but I really don't know that much about who gets them.)

I added Friedrich Wilhelm Levi on the basis of a biography in a collection of symposium lectures. I should go back and add more about his actual mathematical accomplishments, but that takes more time to digest. He works as a concrete somewhat edge case, IMO, if someone wants to discuss why he shouldn't be included.--Prosfilaes 01:36, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

A Festschrift recognises notability. Just like a wikipedia page (cough), it is evidence of notability, but it doesn't bestow notability. I can imagine that someone who was not notable would very occasionally get one, academia being what it is, but I can't imagine that someone who has earned a festschrift would not show up heavily in a citation search. What defines a high award is subjective, significant new knowledge is subjective, even significant citations is subjective. We could pick an arbitrary number, but really, it differs from field to field. The problem is that notability itself is subjective. I've tried to keep the focus on the least subjective criteria that seem likely to include all notable accademics.

I agree that a significant percentage of honorary doctorates are to non-accas, and are all too often a return for favours granted. While they might help a case, I couldn't see someone having an honoury doc as being sufficient on its own to prove notability. Likewise, biographies get written for all sorts of reasons. They too suggest notability but don't prove notability.

I agree that the guidelines I've proposed are not exhaustive and are not always going to be easy to follow. But I think they're better than nothing. What changes would you suggest? Regards, Ben Aveling 02:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

These guidelines should provide some concrete simple rules to end the discussion quickly. WP:Music says "Has released two or more albums on a major label or one of the more important indie labels" and other rules, which just indicate notability, but those bright-line rule makes many decisions simple, and removes the need to discuss many pages. A Festschrift or a major award rule should mean that many articles that might have to be discussed don't have to be discussed. The size of AfD is a problem, and people get stressed constantly having to defend articles. Bright line rules are good.

What defines a high award is much simpler then what defines a notable individual, and once it's been agreed that a certain award is a high award, we don't need to argue it again, and if there's a lot of discussion of people under the high award rule, there will be a good body of precedent as to what is a high award.

I would suggest that a Festschrift or a major award be sufficent to include the biography of an academic.--Prosfilaes 02:53, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

How would we measure a festschrift? Would this count? What defines a major award? We can probably agree on a short list of awards, but these things are still subjective. And can you imagine an individual who would have earned either without a recognised publication record? Regards, Ben Aveling 03:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

We measure a festschrift wisely. It's subjective, but less. I want a guideline I can cite and end the debate, instead having to argue every time about what recognized publication record is.--Prosfilaes 06:28, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, we can try it and see. If it doesn't work, we change it. So long as we're agreed that we are accepting the festchrift as evidence of notability, not claiming that it bestows notability? Regards, Ben Aveling 06:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

New version

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)

As no discussion has taken place, I've just made my edits to the main page. See above paragraph for the motivations. One more note: I didn't include the comment about "Festschrifts" as there's no need to be so specific: anyone who gets one ought to be notable for other reasons (especially my criteria 2: known as an especially important figure to others in the same field. Mangojuice 14:17, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Notability for Academics

I think there is no objective criteria for notability but would like to suggest that the following achievements merit automatic notability(as they are result of extensive peer review process):

Nobel Awards,
Pulitzer Awards,
Templeton Awards,
Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Fellowship of National Academies,
Fellowship of American Philosophical Association,
Fellowship of American Academy of Arts and Letters,
Fellowship of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
Fellowship of Royal Swedish Academy of Letters,
Fellowship of Pontificial Academy of Sciences,
Fellowship of British Academy,
Fellowship of Royal Society of London,
Field Awards,
Lasker awards,

Anil Kumar,24th Feb.2006 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.138.112.252 (talk • contribs)

I just put bullets in the list above. Uppland 07:02, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree: those all count as prestigious awards/honors, per criteria 8. Mangojuice 14:06, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I just found this guideline; I think it is in an excellent state already and would be useful for initial exposure on AfD or Proposed Deletion. How about a shortlink, e.g. ~~WP:PROF~~ WP:SCHOLAR? Sandstein 05:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

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)

A few points

It seems to me that the criteria for inclusion may differ for different disciplines.

In my discipline (philosophy), fame is often a matter of association, so the best philosophers all collect at the top of a small number of major universities (i.e., university of employment is a good criteria for judging notability). I suspect that the same doesn't hold true for disciplines like physics. I suspect that it would be far too expensive for universities to do that (physicists cost more than philosophers), so the talent is more evenly distributed in physics than in philosophy (i.e., university of employment may not be a good criteria for judging notability).
A significant portion of value is determined by usefulness. Couldn't we decide our policy by determining if the articles would be useful? That is, we can refuse to allow someone to make a stub on every academic, but we can allow one to create a significant and informative article on even a somewhat minor figure. In my field, information about instructors of any Ph.D.-granting institution (and some very few of the highest regarded Masters-granting institutions) is valuable information, and would be useful to someone who is applying to graduate schools, or looking for a place to do a postdoc, or figuring out whose books to read. (Without information on these people, these decisions we make are less than well-informed.)
Different subjects have different standards of value. There are a bunch of different psychological experiments that all show pretty much the same kinds of things, so the value of their research is best recorded in the articles on attention, change blindness or cognitive bias or the like, rather than in articles on the academics themselves. On the other hand, some disciplines are largely book-driven or involve holistic theories (such as the humanities), and the information in these disciplines is probably better conveyed by comprehensive information about that academic's work being in an article on the academic himself/herself, rather than on the individual topic (e.g., Truth, Good, Beauty, History, Public policy).

My conclusion from these points is that perhaps different criteria are needed for different fields. KSchutte 21:49, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with your conclusion. (1) I don't really understand. (2) is an interesting point, but the value of the information isn't what's being judged. WP is not paper, but WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information: we draw the line somewhere in between, that we call "notability." The information in my local phone book is indisputably useful information, but most of it isn't notable. (3) is your most interesting point, but I think the guidelines are already attempting to treat academics in different fields appropriately. Different criteria aren't needed: rather, we need criteria that are general and reasonable to apply to various disciplines, respecting the differences among academic fields. Mangojuice 19:19, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Isn't the fact that a large number of people would be interested in information about these subjects sufficient to make them notable? If they're not already notable, the only reason this is so is because the information that would make them well-known is not available. (Your phone book objection isn't appropriate; that's clearly not the kind of information I'm talking about.) KSchutte 06:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I did some calculation in my head, and I think the fact that someone is a prof at a PhD-granting school would gain them at most about 100 hits a year. This is not enough: we clearly can't include all topics that would interest a mere 100 people a year, or we'd be duplicating nearly the entire internet. So, no. Mangojuice 14:08, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

That is a ridiculous standard. Have you ever clicked on the "Random article" link in the margin there? Let me do it ten times and see what comes up: List of largest empires, Gerhard Louis De Geer, The Mark Steel Revolution, Landon Pearson, Handicraft-subsistence production, Embarrassment, Richard Lenski, Sweden general election, 1970, LED printer, Nerve plexus. Okay, now given this survey, should we conclude that these articles belong or don't belong in an encyclopedia? Well, most of them are quite stubbish and contain only the very most general content about their subject. Is this what we want from an encyclopedia? Clearly not. (Wikipedia is not Wiktionary.) Encyclopedias are supposed to be "vessels of information". My point: It's better to have extensive, verifiable, useful information on minor subjects than it is to have a bunch of stubs about notable subjects. How much information is in an article about an academic will determine how many hits it gets, not how notable its subject is. If somebody writes a particularly good article on, for example, Jerry Fodor, that content is what will determine how many people read it. This is going to be just as true for less important subjects like, for example, Brian Kierland. If we want to attract experts to the 'pedia (and I hope that this is one of our aims), we probably need to have information in the 'pedia that is useful to those experts. KSchutte 16:48, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd also like to remind you, "There is no official policy on notability." (from WP:N). From Wikipedia in eight words:

"Notable: A view is generally considered notable if it is potentially information of value or interest in some way to a significant number of people, or to some perspective, or its omission would leave a significant gap in historical human knowledge of a subject. Even minority, controversial and discredited views are often notable. Often it is valuable to see how people thought, or competing views of the time. By contrast many fringe views are not notable by this definition, because they are not sufficiently significant or had little or minor impact in their field as a whole."

You choose to emphasize the phrase "significant number of people" and I think that this is an inappropriate emphasis. The emphasis should be placed on "potentially information of value or interest". By merely being academics at Ph.D.-granting institutions, information about academics is valuable. You act like just anyone could acquire such positions in academia. This is incredibly dubious. There are high standards for these jobs and not just anyone can get them. If Georgie Porgie has a job at a Ph.D.-granting institution and he has written a book and a couple of articles, then I want to know what is in that book and those articles without having to read them myself. This information is valuable, and it is the only kind of information that will encourage experts to join the wikipedia community. For some reason, you think the wikipedia community should include only experts on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Paris Hilton, and J. K. Rowling. I think this is supposed to be an encyclopedia and ought to encourage scholarly information rather than delete it. I'm sorry if I'm ranting, but you are just making me angry. Try to give me some argument for your position instead of just asserting it. I won't be convinced by you just saying "nuh-uh, that's not how it works". How it works is what's at issue. Don't beg the question. KSchutte 18:07, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm very sorry if I made you angry, that wasn't my intention. It's one thing to debate the notability of academics, and it's another to debate the guideline about notability for academics. I concede you have good points about the notability of academics: I would encourage you to use them in AfD debates as much as you want. However, I don't think they're good for a guideline. I want to respond, mainly, by talking about what a good guideline here should be: that's why I am interested in this topic.

First of all, a good guideline would be a useful guideline. To me, this means that it should (1) be understandable and useful to ordinary editors, (2) it should be backed by a strong consensus, and (3) be obviously reasonable. Point 3 I include because the point of guidelines is to help debates about deletion: if the guideline is not obviously reasonable, then every time it is cited, new debate may break out about the guideline, which makes the guideline not that helpful. (Point 1 is why I think we should avoid, at all cost, field-specific guidelines. They could be more accurate, but usefulness is more important.)

Second, a good guideline should give positive, not negative criteria. This is important because if an article is improperly deleted for being non-notable, this causes more harm to WP than if a non-notable article is improperly kept. Therefore, it's important that arguments on AfD have good traction, especially when arguing that an article meets the guideline. Naturally, it's very difficult for a guideline to have both positive and negative criteria, or you'll get weird cases that meet both critera, and then what? A corollary to this is that the guidelines should always work: there should be no exceptions that meet the guidelines and yet might not be notable. Therefore, third, the guideline should be conservative in implying notability. Of course, the guideline should also explicitly state that it is a conservative guideline, so that its use in AfD debates is proper.

Now, to respond to your points. First of all, you espouse the position that all profs at PhD-granting programs should be considered notable. I disagree, but my disagreement isn't really that important. I do think there's a definite lack of strong consensus on that -- look at the rest of the discussion on this page: people repeatedly object to criteria that would lead to all or most academics being considered notable. But the guideline doesn't exclude those people being notable either. In fact, many of them probably are notable... and if the guideline explicitly says that exceptions exist, this would leave you space to make your argument in an AfD debate.

That all said, maybe the guidelines do set too high a bar. Perhaps we could remove the word "particularly" in guidelines 3 and 4, the word "especially" in guideline 2, and rewrite guideline 8 to replace "prestigious" with something milder like "significant" or "notable". We could also note that certain normal career milestones for academics are a kind of honor: tenure (possibly, at least at a top school), full professorship, named professorship. I'm reluctant to say that being hired can be considered an honor, but maybe being hired at a top school? Or maybe, we could add a conservative blanket guideline like "tenured professor at a school highly ranked in the prof's field". Also, it could be worded better to make it clear that it's a conservative guideline. Mangojuice 21:15, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate your comments and my anger has settled down a little. I'm so used to arguing with children over on the talk page of Philosophy that I must have temporarily forgotten that there are sane people in the world. You may be right that different criteria for different disciplines may not work the best for a guideline. (Though, it does seem that in practice the value of articles on academics can be determined by largely different criteria in the case of a priori and theoretical disciplines, empirical disciplines, and "creative" disciplines.) I'd like to change my recommendation, then. It seems to me that we ought to have a disjunctive guideline. That is, our criteria ought to be either special notability (like the kind in the current guideline) or beyond-stub amount of information of at least decent quality (I suppose we could just pick some arbitrary amount). I just think 'pedians are way too delete-happy for articles on this topic, and that might be a way to curb it (and maybe encourage people to write longer, informative articles!). Let me know what you think. KSchutte 03:53, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Quite reasonable. The thing is, with academics, a CV is already a beyond-stub amount of information, but I personally feel that if all we can write about someone is their CV, what's the point? Especially considering that most of the CV is filled up with publications that, while possibly of real value academically, are of no interest to most readers. Also, as a practical concern, I think a lot of people want to keep out vanity articles, and allowing an article that's no more than a CV would open the floodgates in a way people would find distasteful. I'm going to take a stab at rewriting the guidelines a bit: it's worth explicitly mentioning inclusionist arguments, with some reasonable discussion about them. Also, as a final point: wikipedians may be too delete-happy here... but it wouldn't do any good to combat that with an inclusive guideline unless that guideline can become an official one! Mangojuice 12:46, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Maybe we might find a way to describe "beyond-stub amount of information of at least decent quality" that would get around this objection. One way in which this could be done for most scientists and humanities scholars (though maybe not for "creative" disciplines like drama, art, music, etc.) is to require that the information presented be more than just a list (i.e., we could insist that they actually describe the content of their books and papers or the nature of the experiments).

I, personally, don't think vanity pages on academics are much of a threat. Most of the academics who meet the Ph.D.-granting institution requirement know how to write with an objective POV (of course, there are exceptions), and they know their research better than anyone so they can describe it best. I know that this wouldn't fall under the wikipedia definition of "vanity", but I suspect you have something like this in mind. For an example of a page written by its subject that contains extremely useful information about his work, see Nathan Salmon.

Are people really so obsessed with their professors that a large number of articles fitting under the official "vanity" definition are created? Indeed, that would be delightful news. I thought we academics were quite a bit less popular than whatever local band is down the street. KSchutte 15:38, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Two responses. First of all, about "beyond-stub information of decent quality"... this is really about debates on AfD, and any article that has beyond-stub information (verifiable information, at least) of decent quality already rarely gets deleted, so I don't think we need to include it in a guideline. Heck, this is already the philosophy of a lot of people on WP: if a subject is at least potentially notable, and there is more than stub-level verifiable information about it, it passes the basic test of deserving a place on WP. So, I don't think we need to bother explicitly with that; it's already part of the general WP philosophy, and very sound. Rather, let's make sure that the guidelines are such that any academic we can write something non-trivial about is probably notable for one of the reasons we list.

Second, I'm talking, specifically about autobiographies. Just because academics, largely, are able to write NPOV articles on themselves does not solve the problems these articles can create. Nathan Salmon is not a problematic example because it wasn't created by him... but I do wonder if all of the personal biographical content is externally verifiable. But in any case, it's not as important whether *I* think this is a problem: it's clear the community thinks this is a problem. Mangojuice 17:46, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I would also like to see more focus on the actual work/research of academics, but I disagree that the condition that KSchutte suggests above (that the article describes "the content of their books and papers or the nature of the experiments") should be a sine qua non, as an article can establish notability in other ways. An example: I wrote the article on Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a Swedish mathematician, and so far, long after creation (on Jan. 27, 005), it still has not one word on his contributions to mathematics, other than on an institutional level. I'm simply not capable of writing that, and I prefer not to make a fool out of myself by trying (although adding some pseudo-mathematical gibberish might actually be a useful way to provoke somebody to correct/rewrite it...). But I think the article establishes notability in other ways. Sometimes an article is needed just to give some idea about the biography of a person who is linked from other articles. I also think it is quite clear that an article like this one would never be deleted on AfD (but you can try to delete it if you wish). Hence, this is not a useful criterion. Uppland 07:36, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Recognize areas of expertise

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)

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)

And there's also Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest C-D. -Aude (talk | contribs) 20:32, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

That sounds great in principle. In practice, does anyone ever actually try to consult experts in AfD debates? If not, this is.. kinda moot. Unfortunately. :( Mangojuice 20:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

It would be disappointing, to say the least, if every professor wasn't an expert in their field. Vizjim 13:56, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

The porn star standard

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

The whole issue depends on your definition of notability. Uppland 17:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Peer Review

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)

Too tough

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)

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)

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)

About Dalbury's concern, surely we can't limit the breadth of our work just because it won't be easy to find anymore? That's the job of the search engine (our own or 3rd party). Any person is notable to a sufficiently small group of people, and we shouldn't deprive that group. What mangojuice says, I don't think the non-exclusionist nature of the policy is sufficiently clear. Loom91 18:47, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
- You bring up a good point. We should not avoid including an article on a notable topic just because it starts to get hard to find the right articles. However, when we make the argument that WP is not paper, this is an important counterargument that we should be selective. I disagree that every person is notable to a sufficiently small group of people.. or rather, I don't think that means that every person is actually notable. I'll try to make the guideline more clear about its non-exclusivity, but feel free to edit it yourself if you want. Mangojuice 17:31, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
  - I think this (the "everybody is notable to somebody" thing) is a too general issue to discuss on this particular page. Either way, I think we need to have a threshold of obvious notability, just to be able to avoid some AFD debates over academics altogether, just as there is a policy to keep all members of national legislatures or all professional sportspeople (many of whom are really less notable than most professors - but it is a convenient place to draw a line, and we would have an annoying amount of AFD debates over obscure baseball and cricket players if it did not exist). Recipients of a certain set of awards, members of national academies etc. In addition, full professors at major research universities are (in my experience) never deleted, at least not if the article is even a half-decent stub with no suspicion of a copyvio. I think that could actually be pointed out in the guideline, but with the caveat that it may be debatable exactly what qualifies as a "major research university". Lower level academic teachers are more frequently deleted (associate professors/lecturers etc, depending on the system) unless some particular notability is demonstrated. Uppland 17:51, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Redirects for quasi-notable children and students of notable academics

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)

I think redirecting one bio to another is confusing. It's fine if it's something like (say) a maiden name redirecting to a married name, but a child redirecting to a parent? It's bad to do that unless there's actually a section to direct it to. BTW, just because there's a redlink doesn't mean the article should actually exist. Many people just automatically link lots of words everywhere, without thinking whether or not an article should exist. Mangojuice 17:24, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh redirecting to a family subsection would obviously be preferable. And you would never redirect unless the person is actually discussed briefly in a family/students subsection. But can you even redirect to a subsection? Also, I just noticed "what links here" works for deleted pages. I wonder if you could redirect to its own "what links here" page? Might be a nice way to say "We arn't going to address this person's notability yet, but here is all the other notable stuff around them." JeffBurdges 17:52, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

You can't redirect to a "what links here" page because it's not an article; you can only redirect to articles. Pages like the "what links here" page, prior versions of articles, et cetera, can only be linked via an external link, and luckily, redirects to external links don't count. Mangojuice 15:43, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, point taken. JeffBurdges 02:33, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

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)

failure to meet any of the criteria

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)

Common arguments

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)

Alternate proposal for notability

A lot of the debate above is getting pretty numerical, i.e. trying to figure out how many publications, or how many citations, a professor needs to have to become notable. But how about an (admittedly somewhat vague) notion as follows: if there is an article on an academic, and an author of this article can describe why the professor's research is notable, then we keep the article? In other words, any article on a person which can only say "Professor X is a full professor at Y U." is not worthy of inclusion, but any article which says something like "Professor X has worked on mitochondrial micro-obfuscation for years and was one of the developers of the notion of transient aggressive bipolarity, which is now a commonly diagnosed medical disease" is? It seems to me that if a researcher's contribution to the big picture can be summarized by an outside observer, this is notable enough. --Deville (Talk) 05:26, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Good idea, but I think we capture that with criteria 4 and 5 in the current draft; such a prof would have a notable new idea or concept attributed to them, or a highly-regarded piece of research. Mangojuice 06:01, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this; in some sense my proposal is really a proposal of how we make an objective assessment of whether or not Criteria 4 and/or 5 apply to a given academic. It's nearly impossible for a layman to really judge what is "important" in a given scholarly field, and I think most Wikipedia editors would fall into that trap. However, the notion that "a given professor has made a contribution which can be described and contextualized by a layman" is much easier to determine, because either the article does it or not.

I admit that this would be more inclusionist than some people would like for this. However, I think as long as someone has written an article with the motivation of describing research contributions, this is fine. My guess is what people are really trying to avoid is "I took Calculus from this guy and he is awesome so I will write a WP page about him", no?--Deville (Talk) 13:25, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I like your interpretation -- care to add it into the examples section? I think what people are really trying to avoid is autobiographies, particularly the verifiability problem of WP:AUTO. Think about the example you gave in your first comment. If the summary of Professor X's research could be sourced, it's fine. But what if only Professor X himself could make that summary? It may be true, but if it's not verifiable it doesn't belong on WP. Mangojuice 14:53, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I definitely agree with what you're saying. In fact, I happen to think WP:AUTO is actually more lax than I would make it; I've seen several instances of autobiographical edits, and I don't think I have seen one, in namespace, which makes Wikipedia better. And this goes double for the academic bios. And any statements from a professor about his own research will usually violate WP:V as well. And in any case, if the only one able to summarize a person's research is that person, then it's almost definitely not notable by our standards.--Deville (Talk) 22:02, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, they sometimes make it better. For example, Robert M. Solovay showed up to correct his thesis title, which had an error in it that I had faithfully copied from the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Granted, he could have asked someone else to correct it, but I don't know that that would have happened, since he doesn't edit WP on a regular basis. So I'd be against a blanket prohibition. I don't know where the line should be, exactly. --Trovatore 22:12, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. I wouldn't be for a blanket prohibition precisely because of examples like that. Moreover, this would be impossible to enforce. But I think I would, in general, be against anyone writing a summary of their own work, or, even worse, a summary of how their work has impacted the academic community as a whole. I would be very sceptical of the POVness in such a case.--Deville (Talk) 22:34, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Academics working on their own articles definitely can make them better, especially for those academics working in the humanities, or in broad general theory. I'll bring my own friend and faculty member, Nathan Salmon, back into this conversation. He succinctly and clearly described the four arguments for which he is most notable. (He also gave some fairly interesting verifiable personal information.) No one else would have been able to do this who hadn't read all his books and articles...Sure, he may have overestimated his esteem, but that is extremely easy to fix. The benefits outweigh the negatives by far. Now, whether it would be valuable to have non-notables doing this, that's a different question. See: Celia Green for a potential (though not definite) example. KSchutte 16:03, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

What precisely does "highly regarded piece of research" mean? Does that compute to a certain number of citations? If so, then this so-called "alternate" reverts to the original metric. If "highly regarded" can be strictly defined as: the article overtly cites verifiable widely-published overtly-worded lauding of Professor X or Professor X's work as ground-breaking, beyond mere implicit mentioning by citation. In other words, zero citations and zero works published in widely-respected peer-reviewed academic journals would be significant disqualification as academic notability, but the presence of any number of citations to journal articles would not be enough to automatically judge the professor as academically notable, as is current practice. As shown by Randall Beer's article, which generally says "I have moved. I find these topics interesting. (With the implied: Please grant-fund my research over at the new institution.)", the bar for academic notability needs to be raised beyond 1) full professor who published journal articles that 2) have been cited and who might have published yet another garden-variety commodity textbook. Those weak criteria are met by nearly all professors worldwide at some point during their career, which is far too many tens of thousands of academes to have (rather short stubby) abbreviated-CV articles like Randall Beer. —optikos 13:53, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

WP:PROFTEST

I've boldly created a shortcut as WP:PROFTEST, seeing that WP:PROF is taken already. Flamewars please ensue below... It seems superfluous to add that any quoting of WP:PROFTEST should still be qualified with "proposed standard" or the like. Sandstein 20:25, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Good idea; WP:PROF can probably be reused when this proposal becomes a guideline, as it's not used that much. I've removed the shortcut notice from Wikipedia:Notability (people) to discourage use of it for now. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-03-22 20:48Z

Naming consistency

I've renamed the page to from Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Academics to Wikipedia:Notability (academics) for consistency. Also I've advertised this page on WP:CENT and Template:Notability. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-03-22 20:51Z

Instruction creep

This page strikes me as a serious case of instruction creep. Rather than try to set inclusion standards for every profession, I would much rather we spent our time and energy trying to improve the general standards at WP:BIO. I strongly urge that this guideline be merged back to the main page to prevent the further balkanization of our standards. Rossami (talk) 21:47, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Some comments:

Well, as it stands, WP:BIO is explicitly balkanized with respect to profession. While the standards are all morally the same (notable and verifiable), the standards are explicitly different in terms of practical application. For example, the stated standards for actors is different from those for sportpeople which is different from those for artists, etc. Now, of course, this begs the question as to whether this should be so.
I happen to think that it should. The different communities have different sizes and different effects on the world's populace. For example, the set of all professional athletes is much smaller than the set of all professors. Thus it may make sense to include, say, "all athletes in a professional league" and at the same time not make sense to include "all faculty at all universities". Since the academic community is larger than the sports community, it's at least arguable that we should retain a smaller percentage of academics than athletes, and thus have more rigorous standards for inclusion for academics. In any case, the two communities are so different that it certainly makes sense to me that the practical application of "notable and verifiable" could differ wildly between the two professions.
All of the philosophy aside, from a pragmatic point of view, it seems that this sort of thing is extremely necessary. WP:AfD is simply chock-full of debates about notability of academics. You see the same arguments every day, it's almost always contentious, and this suggests strongly to me that the WP community is very much not in a state of consensus about what makes an academic notable.
I think that the eventual fate of these discussions will (and should) be integrated into WP:BIO. Right now this is just a hashing out of guidelines.--Deville (Talk) 22:28, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm strongly against merging back to WP:BIO. It comes down to this: what's the point of a guideline? It's not a law, it's not a rule, what it is, basically, is an attempt to explain community consensus, because that will be useful. This is natural, in light of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules; if the guideline isn't useful or doesn't reflect consensus, then by default, it'll just be ignored. There is a lot of disagreement and uneven arguing in AFD debates about academics (look through some of the precedents if you want to see evidence). The best outcome here is to find consensus, whatever it is, and let people know about it. And I do think academics articles make a quirky little corner of the wikipedia topics, because there tends to be lots of verifiable information about academics, even everyday ones, which by WP:V we should include... but on the other hand, most academics probably aren't notable... so where do we strike the balance? So I definitely think that it's worth finding consensus about when articles on academics should be included or not. And yes, ultimately, WP:BIO should be changed to reflect this as well. Mangojuice 23:54, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Just a note to everyone; I've just now updated the precedents page to add in debates currently open. I found seven. This is not a huge number compared to other subtopics like WP:MUSIC and WP:WEB, but the debates are quite back and forth. What bothers me in them are mainly two points: people being uninformed about consensus (they often have some vague idea of the "professor test") and people worrying too much about notability vs. verifiability. Anyone who's interested in this topic, check out the curent debates: Wikipedia:Notability (academics)/Precedents#Not yet closed Mangojuice 21:06, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

At the risk of repeating what's been said so many times, I think this shows pretty strongly why we need to be having this discussion right here. One hears the same old arguments at every professor's AfD.--Deville (Talk) 05:39, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Ditto everybody. This (proposed, at present) guideline deserves to be separate from WP:BIO. There are plenty of precedents which indicate its merit. KSchutte 16:06, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

This is SO wrong! 67.109.101.226 22:46, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Could you clarify why you think this is so?--Deville (Talk) 23:07, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

This is confusing, unecessary and a bad case of instruction creep

There are already plenty of tools to deal with absurd examples. For great justice. 16:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

India and other developing countries

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Survey

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)

Withdrawn, per Francis Schonken, below. Mangojuice 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Responses

Support, guideline seems stable and reasonable, and is needed. Mangojuice 12:43, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Oppose, per Guidelines for creating policies and guidelines, No. 10: "Do not call a vote". Further, re. the content of the proposal: do we need this? Seem like unnecessary rulecruft/instruction creep to me. If "[...] more well known and more published than an average college professor (based on the U.S. practice of calling all full-time academics professors)" (as included in Wikipedia:Notability (people)) does not refer to an intuitive concept, I have no reason to believe the present content of wikipedia:Notability (academics) is going to remedy that... it rather adds intransparancy to the concept, by its detailed instruction creep; also it kind of tries to impose the "professor test" criterion above other criteria/tests mentioned at wikipedia:Notability (people). I'd recommend to go for {{historical}} or {{essay}} for this proposal. --Francis Schonken 13:04, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

This is totally not a {{historical}}, 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)

Oppose as above. This is harmful instruction creep. Stop it! 67.109.101.226 22:45, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Knowledge of Field in Voting

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)

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)

Please! No More RuleCruft!

Enough already. There are plenty of guidelines, about guidelines about guidelines. There is virtually nothing that is verifiable that needs rules like this. Please stop. For great justice. 00:40, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

From the position that any verifiable has a place in Wikipedia, that's reasonable. However, if we do continue to delete hard-to-verify articles that are just places for libel to hide (like any biography is prone to), we need rules for that.--Prosfilaes 03:01, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

I find this request by For great justice upsetting, to say the least. We're trying to help! This guideline has been used, and I think it's been helpful in AfD, helping people make more intelligent decisions. And let me point out for anyone who isn't already aware, that For great justice seems to make it a practice to vote keep in just about every AfD debate he comes across; I've never seen a delete vote from him. WP:AGF, but it's like he wants people not to be able to have rules that can argue for deletion, because he doesn't want things deleted. Mangojuice 03:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

My personal voting history has no relevance to this guideline, it's just an ad hominem attack. I don't want true, verifiable things deleted, and I don't want endless rulecruft that allows anything someone doesn't like to get deleted just because they don't like it. For great justice. 05:30, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

This is not the page to argue against deleting verifiable things. That's standard practice on Wikipedia, and it is no more relevant here than arguing WP:NPOV would be at Talk:Albert Einstein.--Prosfilaes 07:26, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Just because you don't like that a guideline makes something get deleted doesn't make that guideline rulecruft. JoshuaZ 05:33, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

And just because you don't like an article doesn't make it collegecruft. Notability is a disruptive, unhelpful and inherently POV. It has not place in building an encyclopedia. For great justice. 05:42, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Besides the standard answers, these rules are about living human beings. Bad articles about living human beings can create bad press and potential legal risks for Wikipedia, as history has shown. Removing those potentially libelous articles that aren't read frequently and aren't easily verifiable is very important for Wikipedia's continued existance.--Prosfilaes 07:26, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Articles which are bad should be edited to make them good. Information that is libelous and impossible to verify should be removed. That has nothing at all to do with 'notability' and is already covered by other policies. 67.109.101.226 22:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

The only way to find out whether an article is impossible to verify is if you spend the hours to look up the material. The problem is many articles that no one looks at to check whether they are bad, libelous or impossible to verify.--Prosfilaes 03:11, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

'Spending hours looking up material' is the process of writing an encyclopedia! Sorry, but if you're not interested in doing research and writing, you're in the wrong place. Deletion of things that you're not interested in researching is not the answer. For great justice. 15:56, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

This guideline is really not deletionist. Look at it: it gives many reasons why an academic may be notable, and tries explicitly to prevent people from arguing for non-notability. I agree with you that deleting an article that's imperfect because you're too lazy to improve it is a terrible thing, and it does happen a lot. But if you want to see the kind of thing this guideline is REALLY trying to prevent, take a look at Isotope's comments on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Christopher Winship. Mango juice^talk 16:42, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree - Isotope is voting without reference to existing policy. Making more policy will not fix this, since he's not interested in what there is. Less is more in this case, since a few well understood and clear policies is better than masses of ill written, poorly understood and only marginally supported policy. For great justice. 18:00, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Great! If we ever have a question on an article, we'll just ask you to go look it up for us. In fact, since the problem is articles no one has questions on, each day we'll just randomly pull a couple of the biographies of living people and have you verify that they aren't libelous. Okay?--Prosfilaes 17:41, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

The concept is bogus. It's your POV vs someone elses. Is 'Christopher Winship' verifiable in the sense of the Wikipedia policy (and in compliance with sources, WP:NOT etc)? If yes, he should stay, if not, he goes. Easy. For great justice. 16:55, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

This is ridiculous. It's not about libel. It's about 'what I like'. AFD is not normally a forum for people who believe they have been libelled. Thank God. That's why we should stick to verifiability. That way, if someone complains, it's either verifiable from a source, or it's not. There's no arguing about whether or not a group of people once came up with a guideline about what they like being used as a criteria. For great justice. 17:56, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

No, AfD is not a forum for people who have been libelled. Court is. Which is why we want to reduce the number of articles where people can add "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." and nobody ever notice. Go get people to delete the guidelines about notability, and then come back to us.--Prosfilaes 03:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Duh. That's why it's important to verify facts that go in. It has nothing to do with notability. For great justice. 17:15, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Why didn't you stop the Seigenthaler incident? Could it be perhaps that verifying all the facts that go into the Wikipedia is an impossible job, and it will be all the more difficult the more articles we have, and the more obscure the subjects those articles cover? --Prosfilaes 18:15, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't see how that's relevant. A non-verifiable fact was added to an article. It was spotted, and removed. The system worked. Notability, as usual, had nothing to do with it. For great justice. 18:36, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

So the system is working perfectly fine when libel stays in an article for years and gets legal threats directed at Wikipedia? The fact is, the people who run the site and have to pay the lawyers disagree.--Prosfilaes 19:30, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, I don't see any input here from 'the people who run the site and have to pay the lawyers'. I think it would certainly be safer from a legal standpoint to delete everything, but that's not a great option. It seems to me that heavily edited articles are just as much of a liability as seldomly edited ones, and that you have not made any case for the validity of notability as criteria. For great justice. 07:03, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a phone book. It's not about deleting things from some 'dislike' of the person or whatever. It's about deleting things that don't belong in an encyclopedia. Regards, Ben Aveling 10:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Existing policies cover entering telephone books (WP:NOT, 6.Genealogical entries, or phonebook entries.) There is no need for more rulecruft. Please read and understand existing policy before making more bad policy! In any event, nobody is arguing for entering telephone books. That's rubbish. There are no cases that can't be dealt with with existing policy. I agree that we don't need more instruction creep. Especially not crap instruction creep. 67.109.101.226 22:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

First of all, remember there's a big difference between policy and guidelines. I don't think this page aspires to be policy at all, just a guideline. Heck, WP:N isn't even policy. Second, this guideline is more about protecting articles on good subjects than about removing articles on bad subjects. Check them out: they have a lot of reasons why academics' articles should be notable, and very little about when an article on an academic is not notable. In fact, it specifically says that just because something doesn't meet these criteria doesn't mean it's not notable. Third, you're being really rude. Obviously you know a lot about Wikipedia policy and such, but you have almost no edits apart from this kind of criticism. You're calling our work crap, but you're hiding behind an anonymous IP number even though you're obviously an established user. Mango juice^talk 16:39, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Of course WP:N is not policy. A lot of people think it is bogus. It doesn't matter whether the intention is deletionist or whatever, it is still bogus. Academics are notable to people who are interested in them, and not notable to people who aren't interested in them. Some of them have enough verifiable information about them to write an article that is more than a stub. It's that simple. For great justice. 16:55, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Obviously, you're a relativist about this. So to you, no guideline will ever be useful. However, most of us on Wikipedia find guidelines useful. You say "a lot of people think (WP:N) is bogus." Who, besides you? I know an awful lot of people cite notability concerns constantly on AfD debates, and I've seen many people pick WP:V over WP:N (as should be done). But people who think WP:N is a bad idea? Show me. Mango juice^talk 18:14, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Re who finds it bogus - it's been voted on numerous occasions, check the archives on those votes for individuals. In fact, just read any talk page on anything to do with notabiliyt. They are full of people who don't agree with it as a concept. I find the core policies of verifiability, sources and npov to be very useful, it's just fatuous guidelines that I find useless and counterproductive. Good, well written and useful guidelines are, of course, useful. But we have them already. For great justice. 18:23, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I was surprised to discover that WP:N is not, and effectively never has been, an official guideline. However, WP:BIO is. I have to say, I'm with you that Verifiability and WP:NOT are all we really need. However, WP:BIO and related guidelines (like this one is trying to be) are there for a good reason: to help ensure fairness and consistency. Take a look, if you will, at Simon Strelcheck. I believe the page redirects somewhere, but if you go to it and see what links there you can find some hotly contested AfD debates and two DRV ones as well. To sum it up, Simon Strelcheck was a municipal election candidate (not even elected) and so definitely falls below the politician threshold on WP:BIO. It was nominated for deletion at least once by pm_shef, who is the son of Strelcheck's opponent, and supporters of the article brought this up. Things got pretty ugly between pm_shef and those editors (many of whom turned out to be sockpuppets). The situation, obviously, was regrettable and ugly. However, the guidelines were the one thing keeping the debates useful. Because of them, no one could argue the WP community was being unfair to this candidate, and in the end, the article's desinty will probably end up being decided in a way consistent with how we've handled similar articles in the past. To put it another way, you're allowed to disagree with a guideline and vote your conscience as you see fit. I don't think the existence of those guidelines is holding you back, except perhaps that if you don't explain why you disagree with the guideline you'll have a hard time influencing anyone else. So you may be right that the existence of guidelines may have a negative effect on you. But I think guidelines have a very positive effect on the community, which is really more important. Mango juice^talk 18:18, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

I can't look up Simon Strelcheck, because it has been deleted. This sort of thing cuts to the heart of what I'm talking about. There is verifiable information about this person out there. He stood for public office. I have litterally no idea why anyone would oppose me being able to look him up if I want to (of course, as you point out, his political opponents would not want me to look him up). Under the current system, it appears that his opponents POV carried the day - instead of the principle that verifiability governs what goes in, there was a battle about whos POV should prevail. I find that very damaging. If we had held fast and said that anyone for whom there is enough verifiable information to write an article stays in, the battle would never have taken place, and we would be consistant. For great justice. 18:41, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

You can still go to [2] even though the page has been deleted. For simplicity, here: 1st afd 2nd afd 2nd DRV. I agree with you, if we ignored notability and included all verifiable information, there would be consistency. However, there are two compelling reasons not to do this. The first is WP:NOT, specifically, "WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information." Some things aren't encyclopedia-worthy, period, and shouldn't be included. Admittedly, this doesn't say why there shouldn't be an article on any academic, although in the worst cases, articles on very unimportant academics may be effectively phone book or directory-type entries with no other importance. The second is based on a community consensus that we should try to stick to articles for which we can keep them verifiable and NPOV. This is a major problem for obscure subject. Simon Strelcheck, for instance, was a municipal election candidate in some city I'd never heard of before in Canada. I was able to fact-check some of the claims in the article, and revise things that were incorrect or not neutral, but it was a lot of work, on a topic that not only do I have no interest in, but the vast majority of people have absolutely no interest in. The WP community seems huge, sure, but that doesn't mean we can spend that kind of effort on every obscure article. Basically, the alternatives we have are to allow this kind of article to exist, which will probably not be neutral or verifiable, effectively indefinitely, or we delete them. Articles that aren't neutral or verifiable, and exist for a long time, are harmful to Wikipedia. This reason can be related to the policy that "WP is not a free webhost", too: perpetual articles that get no attention effectivey turn WP into a free webhost; if a contributor is makes an article in bad faith (or to promote its subject), not deleting it effectively means the content remains HERE forever, which is much like allowing them their own home page on Wikipedia. Mango juice^talk 20:09, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

OK. We agree that WP is not an indescriminate collection of information, but the problem comes when we try to define that. A collection of people who have run for public office is not indescriminate. It is a deliberate cataloguing of information. You say that 'Some things aren't encyclopedia-worthy' well, that's fine, but the devil is, again, in the detail. What you are really saying is that 'My POV is that X is not encyclopedia-worthy'.

I agree with you that, in the case of bios with no more information than that the candidate existed, no reasonable article can be written, and it should redirect to a list, which is a suitable way to deal with that. A list of candidates that ran in X election is an easily verifiable, and not 'indiscriminate' collection of potentially useful information. I don't think we disagree on the idea that articles should be NPOV and verifiable, I just don't see why we need more pseudo policy to enforce that.

Your argument seems to come down to whether or not there is an active community to maintain the article and prevent vandalism or POVmongering on the subject. I agree that that is a concern, but I don't think deletion is the solution. There are other ways to ensure that an article is factual than to delete it. There are plenty of articles that have active communities maintaining them that get attempts to delete them (or actually get deleted) because people think they are 'nn'. For great justice. 20:35, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for coming into this late, but Justice, I have one question for you: are you claiming that every academic who has a postion anywhere should be included in Wikipedia? You're saying that notability is POV, and thus we should include every verifiable fact in the Wikipedia? I admit I'm having a bit of trouble of figuring out what it is you're arguing for. Thanks! --Deville (Talk) 14:58, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi there! I am saying that the standard set of verifiability set out in WP:V is high enough that every academic who has enough verifiable information from credible sources could easily have an article without any problems. There might even be fewer than there are now. I am saying that the concept of notability is inherently POV, while verfiability is much more objective. (There are issues of exactly what is a credible source, but these are, in practice, much easier to agree on). Have a re-read of WP:V, it is much more rigorous than most people think. For great justice. 17:02, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

You talk about POV as if it's always bad. It's not bad at all for editors to have different points of view about the project. WP:NPOV is about articles, not policies, guidelines, or debates. Notability, I suppose, does encourage each of us to decide for ourselves what we think is notable and what isn't, and it leads to certain problematic behavior from over-the-top deletionists. On the other hand, WP:NOT isn't that clear about the scope of Wikipedia, and "WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information" needs interpretation from people. Notability guidelines came into existence via personal interpretations about WP:NOT and related issues (like the issue of perma-stubs, or concerns over the possibility of making an article conform to WP:V or WP:NPOV. They're there to summarize community consensus about what we do and don't include. Now, maybe we shouldn't act this way as a community. But we do, and we did before the guidelines, it's just that we did so with less uniformity and fairness. Furthermore, this isn't going to change so easily. But let's bring this back on topic. Is there a reason specific to this proposal for why you don't like it? Mango juice^talk 16:25, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to be late in getting back to you - personal points of view have no part in writing articles or deciding what information should go into the 'pedia. It's as simple as that. For great justice. 02:00, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

That's your point of view. I guess it should have no part in deciding what information should remain? It's preposterous to imagine that we can function as a community without using our opinions. From WP:NPOV: "All Wikipedia articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly and without bias." (emphasis mine), and no mention of the idea of NPOV is put forward that refers to guidelines and policies, nor is there any such mention in WP:RULES. Mango juice^talk 12:01, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, I see the confusion. I am applying the concept of NPOV to editorial decisions about content. All article content should be written from the NPOV. Furthermore, editorial decisions about which content should be included are subject to NPOV. For example, the articles on democrats and republicans should be written from a NPOV. Furthermore, whether or not to have an article on Democrats is also subject to POV rules. You could not, for example, exclude the democrats simply because you didn't like them or were not interested in them. So, a policy or guideline that has implications for what information gets in or not must be in compliance with NPOV. For great justice. 19:32, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Of course applying your POV to what is included is bad. My POV is that we have much too much mathcruft, and that's not notable to me at all. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for wikipedia, it's verifiable, so I guess we're stuck with it. 165.254.38.126 15:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Please don't mess with other people's comments. You obviously think that Wikipedia should have the mathematical articles, or you wouldn't say "fortunately for wikipedia", so your whole comment is being disingenious.--Prosfilaes 17:43, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

May I ask how much is "enough" verifiable information? The reason I ask is because, at least in the US, pretty much every academic has a webpage, on which they have all of their publications and CV etc. In short, for pretty much any faculty member at every American university (and most European ones) there is enough information online to write a short bio for this person. I think the community concensus, so far, is that we should not include all of these people.--Deville (Talk) 18:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Third-party (i.e., independent), reliable sources are needed. Note that personal websites are considered to be among the most unreliable of sources. You need third-party sources for most of the facts in the article. An academic's web page may only be used as a source to fill in minor, non-controversial, non-extraordinary details. -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 23:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, read that, and WP:V too. This issue has been discussed to death. Simply a self written web page is not a reliable source. A third party article would probably be. 165.254.38.126 15:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

JSTOR test?

This wouldn't work for the sciences, I don't think, but in the humanities virtually every journal in JSTOR is a major, well-regarded journal. By and large, major journals publish notable scholars and notable scholars publish in major journals. Anyone with more than a couple articles in JSTOR can probably be assumed to be a significant figure in her field. I'm not proposing this as a hard-and-fast rule or even close (objections: while every journal in JSTOR is a major journal, not every major journal is in JSTOR; most people don't have access, etc.), but as a way to get information about borderline cases. As I say, it wouldn't work in the sciences because of co-authorship, which could allow a grad student or lab assistant to be all over the database, but in the humanities co-authorship is rare. Chick Bowen 02:23, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Other databases include Ebsco Host, Elsevier (sciences), and Hein (law). For sciences, maybe we need a higher bar - more than "a couple articles". And of course, if an academic has published in Nature (journal) or Science (journal), then they would be considered notable. -Aude (talk | contribs) 02:33, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

And I've used Web of Science and Social Sciences Citation Index to see how much an author or article has been cited. -Aude (talk | contribs) 02:37, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

All true. But the nice thing about JSTOR is that there's a principle of selection in the journals included (Ebsco, for example, is huge and includes lots of tiny journals). Chick Bowen 04:05, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

JSTOR is useful for including older journals as well, but although there are a few journals in German, French and other languages, it is still dominated by English language publications. One has to keep that in mind. Uppland 05:51, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

This is true, but there's a reason for this: in the sciences at least, almost all of the best journals are published in English (I can't speak for the humanities, although I think the same is true there). Many good journals are published in the US, and of the rest published overseas, most of these are in English as well. As just one example, look at the titles of articles in the most recent version of Zeitschrift für Physik: every one is in English, and this is typical. For good or for ill, English truly is the lingua franca of scholarship today. --Deville (Talk) 15:07, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I am speaking of the Humanities. The current situation is not quite as you depict it, but it was even less so a few decades ago. In the humanities research doesn't age as quickly as I assume it does in the sciences. Not everything old is entirely dated, even when it has to be read with the awareness that the context has changed. In addition there are large fields where hardly anybody publishes anything in English. Hardly anybody would write in English about Swedish literature or Swedish history; the audience for qualified academic articles in such fields can be expected to know Swedish anyway (how else would you use the sources?). Articles in English are for the most part either popular or have an obvious international topic. How large a percentage of studies on German, French or Italian history or literature do you think are written in English, as opposed to German, French or Italian? I personally have no idea, but I would expect it to be a much smaller part. Uppland 15:37, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I certainly stand corrected on the humanities part. Of course, one should note that here, on the English Wikipedia, there will always be a systemic bias towards those scholars who publish in English, simply because that's who the editors here will know. --Deville (Talk) 19:28, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

In music history, much of the best scholarship is still published in languages other than English. While a number of German language music journals participate in JSTOR, most Italian and French do not. Deville's statement must be qualified as for the sciences only. Many of the top researchers I work with barely read English and certainly do not write in it. Presence in JSTOR would establish notability to my mind, but absence would not be NN. --Myke Cuthbert 03:11, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

You made a valid point about this, Mscuthbert. It is not imperative to view the absence in JSTOR as non-notable because of the strong reasons you gave. --S iva1979^{Talk to me} 14:29, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

I disagree, I have one first-author publication in the JSTOR journal PNAS, but I'm certainly not a notable scientist. TimVickers 18:47, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

":It's more problematic. JStor is merely a collection of back files of SOME academic journals. They include many leading humanities journals, and JStor concentrated here because publishers themselves were already doing the science journals. But JStor is not the criterion: articles in it are important because the journal and article was published in is important & Jstor is a convenient way to find some of them. Equally good journals are in in the group, but these have to be found through indexes which in many cases are still print-only. So it a positive factor but can never be a negative one.

Tim, this may disturb your self-image a little, but your scientific work is notable. Sorry, but the person is not always the best judge of her/his work, in both directions. Thats the pt of the rule on autobio. DGG 07:27, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

One problem with non-notable people

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)

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)

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? Mango juice^talk 03:09, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

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)

"High quality academic work"

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 17:48, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

"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)

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)

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. Mango ju ice^talk 18:59, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

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)

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?" Mango juice^talk 15:45, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 19:07, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

New Point System Proposal

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 04:33, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

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)

Journals

I reverted a change that changed "(of at least reasonable quality)" to "in reputable journals." IMO, the change was a bad idea, as in different fields, people publish in different ways. Some fields, people publish books. Some, conferences are the main venue. Obviously, people should be judged based on the field they're in, and "reasonable quality" is there to imply that the publications must be good ones. Mango juice^talk 04:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

There's more to life than journals. At the same time, I can sympathise with the desire to restrict to Academic forums. What about "in academic books and journals" ? This is a minimum standard, so we don't need to be exhaustive. Regards, Ben Aveling

An academic's notability may be based on popularizations. I think it would be best to leave the wording as is, and let editorial judgment prevail. -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 10:35, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

True. I changed it to "significant and well known", same as on the next line. That says what we're looking for. Regards, Ben Aveling 02:16, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Academic leadership?

Would an academic who holds a position of significant academic leadership be considered notable? -Fsotrain09 03:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

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)

Exam Books

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)

Citations

ISI has an open access database of highly cited researchers, and many of these have associated bios. I'd suggest that this is a good starting place for verified notability in a field, and a source of non-controversial bio information. I'm very much in favour of raising the bar on notability for academic bios and for establishing concise, clear paths for verifiability of information. I'm not suggesting that the only criterion should be inclusion on the ISI list, but that it should be generally regarded as sufficient evidence of notability and that an exceptional case would need to be made for someone not in this database. See http://isihighlycited.com Gleng 10:58, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

The ones in highly cited are a checklist, as are the ones in the National Academy of sciences, the N.A. Engineering, the Royal Society, etc. They get in, presumptively, and these list should be checked to ensure it. (and even if you put in only a stub in order to get the work at least started, you mention where you found the name as justification)

If people do this, they should leave a note somewhere (eg in the talk for the articles on the Checklist used) so it isn't duplicated. volunteers? let's start with the ones we know are important.' (btw, I am doing this on one of the lists in my subject.)

[Anil Kumar] made essentially the same proposal, above, back in 24th Feb.2006 DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Public Figures

Hi. So I've read through the whole discussion, and I want to make some comments. I figured it'd be best to make my own section instead of sprinkling comments across a debate that mainly took place last year.

**Academics are public figures, insofar as their published works are concerned.**

Their whole career, from the defense onwards, is about getting up in public, telling the world how they designed their experiment, what their assumptions were, and make a full accounting of their data and results, and then subject all of that to endless criticism and praise from all competent to judge it.

Knowledge does not happen in a vaccuum, and indeed knowledge kept private has no academic value (DaVinci is remembered primarily as an artist, not a scientist, for this reason). Academics are derelict in their duties if they do not publish (or submit) their ideas once they've passed sufficient refinement. Academics are inherently public figures.
I believe academics are public figures even if the general public takes less interest in their work than baseball/etc. By way of facetious example, none of the members of the [Annales] school is as well known as pop-history superstar [Doris Kearns Goodwin], but I assure you their work is held in much higher regard.
Reiterating statements others made above, the inclusion on Wikipedia of the hundreds of no-name baseball players and New Jersey state comprollers in the 1930s on the grounds that they are "public figures," while excluding academics who spend their whole lives airing the fruits of their labor in public, is unjustifiable.
- Frankly, celebrities and politicians are able to retire or temorarily remove themselves from public life; a chemistry professor who falsifies data will never be able to live that down.
- And even more frankly, if they get to have their 1930s baseball players clogging up the disambiguation pages, then we get to have out Russian Lit scholars doing the same thing.
(Implicit in the argument that academics are public figures w/r/t their work is that facts not relating to their role as a public figure should not be included, e.g., the affair the dude had with the music prof's wife. That's what conferences are for. Falsified data, on the other hand, is fair game, if it's verifiable.)

Establishing Notability

Getting published within academia is such an arduous process as to render Wikipedia's "just because someone's published a book doesn't make him/her notable"-policy moot (though not implying that everyone who's been published is notable).
Quick notes: often book chapters and even monographs are depricated in favor of articles in peer-reviewed journals, even by tenure committees. This I do not believe is fair, in light of academic publishing houses' also stringent publishing standards. To quote someone whose name I don't remember, "the true peer review starts after the article is published." Leading to...
Citations. SEE DIRECTLY ABOVE MY POST. On the other hand, using citations as a measure also has its drawbacks, e.g., different typical numbers of citations in different fields; a work in an obscure field could receive many citations simply because it is the only work on that topic; and the simple fact that any cut-off number would be at least to some degree arbitrarily determined.

My Proposal

So where does this leave us? Obviously I am in favor of relaxing the criteria for the inclusion of an academic on Wikipedia. On the other hand, including every tenured professor (or full professor, or adjunct...) is also not appropriate, lest my parents, who have made the same joke for the past 10 years about buying the domain name "lazytenuredprofessor.com", but never have (because they're lazy tenured professors), get their own pages

are you quite sure that they do not deserve it?DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

So here it is: make it interesting. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, but it is also supposed to be fun. So, make it fun and interesting. Don't put up boring data and statistics, put up main areas of study for that professor, what his or her main findings have been, and implicitly show why that work is important. The article should, of course, be open to the main criticisms leveled against the professor's arguments.

Here's a bad article:

Joe Bob, Ph.D. (Notre Dame, 1977), Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University.

Marching band champion, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, 1959.

This article is a stub. You can expand it...

Categories: 1948 Births Living People

Not so much, folks. Here's a better article:

Carles Boix, Ph.D. (Harvard University, 1995), Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago. His main subfield is comparative politics.

In 1999, Professor Boix published an important article in APSR in the small but growing literature on the adoption of electoral systems. Using a statistical analysis of "effective electoral thresholds", or the minimum proportion of votes a party must receive according to the institutional structure of that electoral system, he showed that the "threat of socialism" was the key variable in determining whether a country adopted proportional representation or maintained plurality voting (present in virtually all countries at the time) when it transitioned to universal suffrage. "Threat of socialism" is actually a composite variable, composed of 1) the strength of the challenging socialist party; and 2) the coherence of the non-socialist parties at that time. Plurality voting implies winner-takes-all government, and promotes convergence onto a two-party system, according to Duverger's law, as it has a high effective electoral threshold. In a country, such as the UK where the socialist challenge was small, or where the non-socialist parties were able to rally behind one party or candidate, elites would have no incentive to change the electoral system. On the other hand, in countries such as Austria where the socialist party presented a formidable challenge, or where the non-socialist parties were weak and fragmented, the possibility of a socialist majority government was high. Therefore, PR was introduced to enable these smaller parties to enter parliament, in the hopes that they would be able to form a coalition together and exclude the socialists from government, thereby preserving private property and the status quo, or at least to be able to temper socialist demands. Boix also demonstrates the robustness of his variable relative to other variables that have been proposed, such as trade openness, as suggested by Peter Katzenstein (I think).

Criticism: Simply put, a causal statement does not imply its converse. Boix provides no answer as to why a country would adopt FPTP when currently in possession of a PR system, even though such events appear within his data set (and even seems to intimate that the converse might be true). One example is Italy, which had Western Europe's largest Communist party and a purely PR system. The PCI collapsed in 1990, and in 1993, a [mixed member proportional]] system, wherein 75% of the seats were elected within single member districts, was introduced. Although it appears that the collapse of Italian Communism precipitated a return to plurality-based voting (and indeed it did play a role), the historical record is more complex; the reform of the electoral system took place in a period during the entire Italian party system was collapsing. However, despite its shortcomings as a universal model, Boix has made an important contibution to the theory of electoral systems, within the framework of rational choice institutionalism. -- then the citation Categories: Political scientists (comparative politics), ...etc... There you go. Of course, I could't put the criticism in because it is MY criticism, and I can't put in original research. At least, not until I get this paper published.

Your example is not realistic. If he is full professor at Chicago, he will have published considerably more than one paper. And the paper(s) will have been widely cited, and this is easy enough to determine. (And if his work is truly notable, it will be in the article for his subject; this isn't the place to summarize it--after all, it is published. DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Odds and Ends

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)

4) Bias towards English. Well, in poli sci at least, English is overwhelmingly the dominant language. At any rate, opposing expansion for academics seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If professors are good, they will filter in.

This is the English WP. DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

6) The solution to the problem of 77 psychologists becoming 4000 psychologists is to create categories for subdisciplies: Psychologists (learning), Psychologists (cognition), Political Scientists (comparative politics), Political scientists (international relations), and so on.

Zweifel 13:37, 26 August 2006 (UTC) = an overworked graduate student who stayed home alone on Friday night yet again, couldn't work any more, and ended up writing a big long thing on a Wikipedia talk page....and who definitely doesn't deserve his own wikipedia article.

Extra examples

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)

Thoughts

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)

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? Mango juice^talk 17:55, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

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)

To answer Mangojuice's question let me use my non-notable self as an example. If you look at this [3] and this [4] 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)

I think the criteria should put right up front that substantiation of meeting a criterion must be achieved through reliable sources. Suggested change to Criteria section text: "If an academic/professor meets any one of the following conditions, as substantiated on the basis of reliable sources, they are definitely notable...."--Fuhghettaboutit 22:29, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

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)

After following AfD discussions on sci/med academics over the past few months, I've come to the view that the way these guidelines are currently being interpreted tends to be (1) confused, and (2) rather harsh comparative to other fields of endeavour. The latter may be intentional given the large number of academics, but it does tend to generate the feeling that xyz borderline notable academic is clearly more notable than abc pop musician/weathercaster/minor actor/&c, which can inflame feelings in AfD debates. I don't think the current guidelines are much help either in distinguishing notable from run-of-the-mill academics or in aiding editors to identify leading academics in fields outside their own specialism. I wrote a few suggestions above, but didn't receive any comments. Espresso Addict 23:31, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

Test case

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)

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.) Mango juice^talk 14:58, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 17:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

Changed Criteria to discuss

I am not sure that changing changing the criteria of a guideline in order to facillitate an AFD that an editor is involved in is sufficiently objective, without discussion and consensus, so I am reverting those changes and posting them here for discussion (see [5] later changes [6] in italic --Zeraeph 21:13, 28 October 2006 (UTC)):

--- Criteria

If an academic/professor meets any one of the following conditions, as substantiated through reliable sources, they are definitely notable. If an academic/professor meets none of these conditions, they may still be notable, and the merits of an article on the academic/professor will depend largely on verifiability.

The person is regarded as a significant expert in his or her area by independent sources.
The person is regarded as an important figure by independent academics in the same field.
The person has published a significant and well-known academic work. To be significant or well-known, the work must meet one of the following criteria:
1. The work must be the subject^[1] of multiple, independent, non-trivial^[2] reviews or studies in works meeting our standards for reliable sources.
2. The work must be prescribed as a textbook, a reference work, or required reading in an undergraduate- or graduate- level course; which is not taught, designed, or otherwise overseen by the author; at several independent accredited universities.
3. The work must be widely cited (excluding self-citations) in the academic literature.^[3]
4. The work or the original ideas described therein must form the basis^[4] of another work which is itself notable for other reasons.
The person's collective body of work is significant and well-known. To be significant or well-known, the collective body of work must meet one of the following criteria:
1. The collective body of work, or a large subset thereof, must be the subject^[1] of multiple, independent, non-trivial^[2] studies or summaries in works meeting our standards for reliable sources.
2. The collective body of work, or a large subset thereof, must be the subject^[1] of an undergraduate- or graduate- level course; which is not taught, designed, or otherwise overseen by the author; at several independent accredited universities.
The person is known for originating an important new concept, theory or idea which is the subject^[1] of multiple, independent, non-trivial^[2] reviews or studies in works meeting our standards for reliable sources.
The person is known for being the advisor of an especially notable student, and that student has acknowledged the importance and influence of the advisor's ideas on him or her.
The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them.

---

I respectfully request that these suggested changes are not made until at least the conclusion of the relevant AFD ([7]) to avoid any controversy. --Zeraeph 19:23, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Though the editor in question has now chosen to post a disclaimer on the relevant AFD ([8]) I would still prefer the changes be removed from the article for discussion until at least after the conclusion of the AFD. I would also like to ask Psychonaut not to delete my comments from this discussion again. --Zeraeph 20:10, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

And I would respectfully request that you do not post and call for discussion on outdated diffs that do not accurately reflect the totality of my changes to this article. It's dishonest and potentially wastes other editors' time, since they will be reading and commenting on text which has already been revised. If you want to illustrate my changes, either reproduce them accurately and in full, or simply provide a link to the diffs, like so: [9] —Psychonaut 20:36, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

My comments should remain exactly as they were at the time of posting see WP:TPG, if you feel there have been further relevant changes since then, feel free to post them yourself in addition. Also, please try to stay within WP:CIVIL.

Now that you've read WP:TPG, please read again the part that says "Don't misrepresent other people". Posting material that a user has since corrected is a misrepresentation. But thank you for finally posting the corrected version. —Psychonaut 21:27, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Please try to be more reasonable, the changes I posted were accurate at the time of posting, I do not believe there is any policy stating that comments must accurately predict another editors next move. You reverted my reversion of your changes (as is your right) and then deleted part of my request for discussion (as is not your right in accord with WP:TPG). I just reverted your inappropriate deletion. If you had made further additions that you felt were part of the same discussion then it was for you to say so, not to once again tamper with my comments. --Zeraeph 23:11, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

May I also point out that the diff I posted is an accurate account of the changes you made in between my drawing you attention to the existance of this guideline [10] and my initial request for discussion here [11]. I acknowledge that you have since added the following [12] and have added it to the above in italic. --Zeraeph 21:06, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

These latest additions by Psychonaut just create instruction creep. I recommend reverting them. The page was pretty OK as it were. You can be as specific as you wish, but you won't be able to cover everything. It is better to keep it simple and focus on the important points. At some stage people just won't bother reading the page. Uppland 21:48, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps my additions are too specific, but the guidelines as they were were certainly too vague. For example, it was claimed that an academic was automatically considered notable if he "is known for originating an important new concept". That opens the doors to too many cranks who claim that their pet theory is "important". There needs to be some objective criteria for determining when a concept is important. As another example, academics were automatically notable if they had a notable student. Well, practically every graduate student is assigned an advisor at the outset, and many of these students switch advisors because their interests are not compatible, or even because the student thinks the advisor is terrible. Some students work independently and have little to no contact with their advisors except when it comes to asking administrative advice or defending their thesis. In such cases, it's ridiculous to say that the advisor is important just because one of their students turned out to be important.

If we can work together to find some alternative set of criteria which is more concise but which also excludes undesirable cases, then that would be great. Do you have any suggestions? —Psychonaut 22:00, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

I really DO feel that Psychonaut needs to take a step back, and accept that his strong feelings about the AFD that he initiated today may be unduly influencing his judgement and priorities in terms of this project and it would be best to revert his changes until after a the AFD when they can be discussed and decided objectively with a far cooler head.

I actually wholeheartedly agree with his wish to exclude the "advisor to a notable student" criteria. Lord knows most remarkably notable people have suffered from advisors in the "deeply dippy" range betimes! But as for the rest I am inclined to agree that the simpler the better. --Zeraeph 23:11, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you mean. On retrospect, my tone in the AfD nomination could well be hot-headed and full of strong feelings. Obviously I was not thinking at all rationally and was letting my opinions and emotions get in the way of the facts. I admit I may have been acting out of ignorance of the articles' subject matter (and dare I say long-simmering jealousy of Dr. Benis's discoveries?) instead of out of genuine concern for the betterment of Wikipedia. I probably put my arguments forth too strongly and didn't leave any room for compromise or to think that I may have been wrong. Whenever someone voted to keep the article, I resorted to ad hominem attacks or logical fallacies instead of politely presenting him with contrary evidence or sincere requests for evidence supporting his side. Furthermore I tried to rig the vote by concealing a potential conflict of interest. Sadly, I also have a long history of suppressing legitimate groundbreaking scientific discoveries from being covered on Wikipedia, including those of noted mathematician James Harris and distinguished computer scientist Arthur T. Murray. This activity has earned me the near-universal scorn of my fellow Wikipedians, but I just never seem to learn. You're right; I had better take a wikibreak to cool down a bit and reassess my priorities. —Psychonaut 00:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

The whole question about advisor to notable student is really besides the point, and the criterion "notable students" can safely be removed. It's caused some confusion, and it is inconceivable that any academic could meet this criterion without also have met one of the others. Does anyone have a counterexample of one with a notable student but was not otherwise notable?DGG 00:08, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

George W Bush's little league coach perhaps? ;o) I treated myself to the very great pleasure of removing that particular folly. --Zeraeph 03:22, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest removing the "notable student" criterion altogether. In most cases the teacher is likely to be be notable for other reasons, and we don't really need to cover every conceivable exception in this guideline.

As for the "crank with a new concept" thing, I would suppose that this issue is already covered by our general verifiability guidelines. If the cranky idea is notable and verifiable (as in having been covered in news sources or featured in some bestselling work), it may be notable. But that is probably not what this particular set of guidelines should be about. Uppland 07:08, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I am with Uppland here: these changes are instruction creep and not necessary, and may in fact confuse people about the guideline. Ultimately, what we really want with "significant and well-known" is something people will always have to debate on a case-by-case basis, so we might as well just let them. That's how the best WP policies work: they're principles, not rules. Mango juice^talk 11:55, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

simple criterion

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)

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)

Idiotic proposal

This is one of the worst proposals I've ever seen. It makes a fine proposal for whether a given academic's work should be mentioned in an article on the subject of his work. However, it precludes what would be one of the most straightforwardly useful things Wikipedia could do and become, which is a place where the work of published academics is succinctly and accurately summarized. It is important, in our quest to police and define the boundaries of notability, not to take an area where enyclopedic coverage is exceptionally valuable, and where fan encyclopedias are unlikely to pick up the slack, and curtail the coverage pointlessly. The reason we have notability guidelines for, say, webcomics is because they allegedly make us look unserious. That is not a factor for academics, and we ought not be worried about academics in the same way.

At least in the humanities, I would propose that there is unambiguously useful content to be found at the level of "has had a publication in a peer-reviewed journal." The sciences are obviously harder because of the multiplicity of authors. Phil Sandifer 20:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Too low

In many fields, a typical academic would be getting at least one publication in peer reviewed journals per year. Just getting published isn't notable. It's like saying a baseball player is notable because they got to first base, once. Regards, Ben Aveling 22:31, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

...and? --badlydrawnjeff talk 23:05, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Are we in the habit of deleting professional baseball players? Phil Sandifer 05:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, Phil, but I don't understand. Are you saying we shouldn't limit articles on academics in terms of notability at all? I would counter that, de facto, the community does feel that is necessary: many, many articles on academics without clear importance have been deleted, and the "more notable than the average professor" guideline in WP:BIO that stood for a long time has already been an accepted policy. I think this draws the line much more appropriately and accurately than that.. wouldn't that be a good thing? Mango juice^talk 03:26, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I think this is a classic case of notability being misapplied. The "average college professor" can have two kinds of articles written about her. The first is an article that lists her publications and gives a nice, short, NPOV summary of all of them. The second is a vanity piece that reads like an ad. The first is indisputably a good, useful article - more useful than any number of popular culture articles we routinely keep. The second is a bad article that should be deleted - not because its subject is non-notable, but because it's vanity. It could almost certainly be rewritten into a good article, but because of the amount of research required for the average Wikipedian to do so, it's more useful to nuke the article, and wait for someone to come along and write a good, NPOV, non-vanity piece. Phil Sandifer 05:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Phil, not necessarily in defense of my proposal, but you've got the number of publication criterion backwards. in the humanities, an academic is evaluate by their ability to write publishable academic books, and traditionally scholarly articles don't count much. (I say traditionally because the books have now gotten so expensive they need subsidy, and some of the lesser universities now count 3 articles=1 book.). In most of the sciences it is not multi-authorship but the revers, just as Ben says. Any decent student is expected to have at least one paper to his ame before getting his doctorate, and 1 peer-reviewed paper a year is about the minimum. (There are a few fields, such as high energy physics where multiple authorship is a problem, and many papers are now written by a "collective" typically named after the experiment they have combined forces to do. The high amount of multi-authorship in clinical trials is real: they typically require patients from many medical centers--but it has become the custom not to call them authors if all they did was contribute patients.)

Phil, about my idiotic proposal. This was intended as a category which required an article. Otherwise it would be a red link, and there are people going around removing them. I meant mentioned in the article, not simple cited as a reference. In most of the articles in academic fields relatively few people do get mentioned by name in most articles--if they are merely friends of the last editor , the next editor will take care of it. Whatever bad practices may be in other subjects is not our topic. This being a talk page, expect a little OR on thisDGG 06:20, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Are we in the habit of deleting professional baseball players? Phil Sandifer 05:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

If it was up to me, we would have that habit. For baseball players, and schools, and porn stars, and weapons systems, and roads, and movie directors, and episodes of kiddies cartoons, and for far too many other things, the bar for notability is lower. But for academics, the rule is "more notable than average". I figure it has something to do with the mental age of people who are interested in various topics. Some people understand that not everything they are interested in is interesting to other people. Can you tell I've been on the wrong end of too many AFDs? Regards, Ben Aveling 07:10, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

"More notable than average" is not a useful guideline over every occupation. Walmart managers who get written up in Walmart World are surely more notable than average, but that doesn't mean that they're important enough to have an article. On the other hand, baseball players are known to millions, as are porn stars and weapons systems and roads and movie directors. (While we're on geographic features, how about a continent only gets an article if it's more notable than average?) The fact is that every major league baseball player and weapons system and major road and major movie directory is of interest to a wide number of people, whereas most academics aren't. Like or hate it, more people probably know of Bridget the Midget than Évariste Galois.--Prosfilaes 11:00, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

We should bias towards academic topics

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Lit reviews would be useful

User:Phil_Sandifer's 11/1 point ("I think this is a classic case of notability being misapplied. The "average college professor" can have two kinds of articles written about her. The first is an article that lists her publications and gives a nice, short, NPOV summary of all of them. The second is a vanity piece that reads like an ad. The first is indisputably a good, useful article - more useful than any number of popular culture articles we routinely keep. The second is a bad article that should be deleted...") is helpful. Wikipedia is needed as a reference tool for people who want to do what one does with encyclopedias: Go to them for information about a topic that is not readily and clearly explicable elsewhere. For that reason, articles about academic research are particularly valuable. Anybody can go to google & pull up lots of information about Freddie Mercury or the X-Files. But pulling up a good article that explains the value of Mary-Claire King's work is considerably harder & more time-consuming for the sort of person who has a question & turns to an encyclopedia to answer it. ... And this is why other criteria that feed into notability (how many edits, how many links) need to be viewed carefully: Because not enough people know enough to add appropriate links. --LQ 20:27, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

How nice to find someone else who knows M-C K. (who is not yet the subjec of a WP article)

But essentially all professors & professional researchers in the US have home pages, on which they list their c.v. (curriculum vitae)=resume, which contain a very complete list of their publication, professional talks, meetings attended, etc. --and in many cases links to a freely available version of at least some of them. Many such pages also contain personal information, depending on individual preference. And some do contain non-technical summaries of their research program. Replicating the home page data is both trivial and unnecessary: Google does it just as well. As you say, talking about the significance of their work is much more difficult, and it would be unreasonable to attempt it for all but the truly important. DGG 03:41, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Untrue, at least in my experience. One might find a recent CV (Last 5-10 years), but one will rarely find something thorough, and, as you point out, only some contain good summaries of work, and frankly few (Especially those with books or articles in good journals) have full-text versions of articles. There is a lot to be done in the way of making a good resource for this, and Wikipedia genuinely is the perfect place to do it. Phil Sandifer 22:06, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I think Phil made a point above that needs to be emphasized--that the only problem with articles on obscure academics is vanity. Since most academics are indeed published, it's not hard to satisfy WP:V, so we just have to make sure that we satisfy WP:NPOV, and look out for articles by academics or their students touting their work. The lack of articles on academics is a much bigger problem. The Sterling Professorship at Yale is one of the hardest positions to get in the U.S. university system, and is a pretty good indication that someone is a Big Cheese. If you look at the list, though, you'll see how few of these we have articles for. That's a significant hole in our coverage. Chick Bowen 18:50, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

You use the word "obscure," but obscure is a good synonym for un-notable.

On the other hand every holder of an endowed professorship at a university probably would qualify as notable, and this is very easy to check. This includes such titles as "Sterling Professor of ...", "Smith Family Foundation Professor of...", Squibb professor of ...", "Microsoft Professor of ..." These positions usually carry a higher than normal salary, and are used for faculty prestigious enough for the university to actively recruit. It does not necessarily include "University Professor of ", which is a title some schools give to all retired professors, but some use to mean "Distinguished."DGG 23:58, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Untrue. Notability is not a popularity contest. Encyclopedias are expected to make value judgments beyond popularity - hence Encyclopedia Britannica having an article on Jacques Derrida, but no article on the far more popular Pokemon. Those judgments tend to, in other respected encyclopedias, be deferential to academic topics. I am merely suggesting we follow the same model. If we are more permissive than Britannica on popular culture (and dear god we are), we ought be proportionally more permissive on academics (and right now we are not). Phil Sandifer 00:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

A good lit review is a lot of work. If someone is prepared to review all of an academics work, then better that their effort is channeled into a notable academic. That said, a good lit review will show what the academic contribution is, so the current requirements shouldn't discourage anyone from reviewing anyone who has made any substantial contribution to their field. If the lit review itself is worth keeping, that will demonstrate that an article on the academic in question is worth keeping. But anyway, most lit reviews are on the range of different contributions to a single topic, not on one academics contributions to a range of topics. Regards, Ben Aveling 01:09, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

What about administrators?

How about professors who are Deans, Provosts, etc of their respective schools? Does that have some bearing on notability? It may or may not be "easy" to get a junior faculty post in the states, but it is never easy to become Dean of something.--Dmz5 05:25, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it was mentioned somewhere in the extensive discussion above that this can be relevant. It would depend on the individual case. At a university the top positions usually are Chancellor, President, Provost, Dean of Faculty, and Deans of the various schools or colleges--these would be sufficient. There are other positions, such as Dean of Student Affairs, which do not have the same notability off campus. Vice-Presidents vary--it is often a significant, and sometimes merely the person in charge of non-academic affairs. sometimes significant. At a small college, perhaps only the President. The significant ones will meet other notability criteria--there will be be newspaper and magazine articles about them, as well as their usually very extensive academic credentials.

A project! college and university presidents--at least the current ones forward. :) DGG 06:19, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Subject difference in standards

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)

test case for the prof test

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)

inactive?

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)

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 {{guideline}}. Mango juice^talk 00:32, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

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).

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 17:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

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)

I endorse marking as guideline. Note that it's status as a proposal has been used as grounds for disregarding, e.g. [13] Pete.Hurd 19:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

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)

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 03:26, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I removed the merge tag. There is clearly no impetus to merge this into WP:BIO, and it WP:PROF continues to be actively used in deletion discussions, and I couldn't find any active discussion on the merger. If someone wants to change the status quo, the onus is on them to create the forum and drive the discussion. WP:SCIENCE is still a pNG though, and most likely will be for some time. The number of science-related discussions is pretty small. ~ trialsanderrors 00:59, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Example articles

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)

academic journals?

Hi. Someone has recently just PRODded an academic journal (the New York Review of Science Fiction) with the rationale that a google test didn't turn up any third-party articles about the journal. I think that's a ridiculous measure, and completely illustrates why we'll have a million articles about miscellaneous fan & celebrity culture magazines, and no articles pointing out significant scholarly & academic journals. Is there a related proposal, not for biographical, but for other academic works? Textbooks isn't quite it. --lquilter 05:01, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

This has turned up in other other case as well, Chemical physics letters, a title which could not possibly be misinterpreted as non-academic. The article was supported by adding content beyond the basics. (Finding worthwhile content beyond the basics is a problem with most academic journals). It was then supported by references from Journal Citation index and, I think , Ulrichs. Unfortunately JCR does not cover humanities journals. I can think of links that would help, such as a link from the official website of the editor. OCLC would also show the number of schools that say they subscribe--it is not an accurate number, but it would help. There's another thing--indexing. I do NOT want to suggest we include full indexing information for all journals the way a library catalog or Ulrich's does it, including every service that has ever indexed an article. But listing the key ones in the field will help when needed. I'll put in my 2cents for this one .

More generally, we will need criteria. The working one now is all peer-reviewed journals, and particularly those cited in WP articles. The important professional magazines that are not peer-reviewed in a literal sense will be a problem. I would suggest deferring this a while, because of the problems with N academics and N science, which are still in flux.

For any others, I suggest posting them here for community help, or on Deletion sorting--science and technology. Several editors are best for establishing consensus. Anyone needs JCR data, ask me.-- the best way of expressing it is 5th out of 50 in the category. Of course this wont help the ones at the bottom:)DGG 04:03, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm still trying to figure my way around deletion sorting! In the meantime I did basically what you suggested (I was a librarian in a former lifetime) -- I pulled out OCLC Worldcat collection data, pulled out Ulrich's info on indexing. It is a humanities so there's no good citation index. I'm going to draft some basic criteria for assessing notability of an academic journal; if consensus is achieved, it could be moved into relevant guidelines, and I'll post here initially. (I can't believe someone tried to delete Chemical Physcs Letters. Jeez.) ... By "the problems with Notability academics and Notability science", do you mean the lack of participation? --lquilter 04:13, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

First draft notes for assessing notability of academic, scholarly and scientific journals and periodicals:

Google tests and searching for articles about academic, scholarly, and scientific journals are not a useful test with most academic journals, since they are rarely "newsworthy" in the traditional sense. Rather, journals are notable because they are the source of notable scholarship.

The following criteria are indicia of notability for academic journals:

Citation index and citation impact factor. These are metrics which attempt to measure how frequently a journal is cited by other scholarship in the field. Unfortunately, these statistics are only available for the sciences, and are not readily available for humanities and social sciences.
Citation to the journal within professional dialogs on the topic. These would include citations of the journal in research databases (even if no pre-calculated citation index number or impact factor is available, searching databases to see if the journal is cited would be helpful); discussions of articles published in the journal in the discussion fora of the field (blogs, listserves, published conference proceedings, and so on).
Discussion of the journal itself within the field or within general media. This is likely to be rare, but it can happen for the very highest-profile journals (e.g., Science or Nature), or when scandals happen -- a paper is retracted, an editor is accused of bias, and so forth. While the publicity may give a sense that the journal is notable, absence of publicity should not be construed as lack of notability. Moreover, because journals are rarely newsworthy, news coverage is likely to be disproportionate, and not give a clear picture of the general quality or reputation of the journal; the substance of such news coverage, therefore, should not be given undue weight in an article on the journal.
Reputation within the field as evidenced by frequent, regular publication or submission by leaders within the field.
Reputation within the field as evidenced by submission to acceptance ratio. Ratio of submission to acceptance may give some idea of selectivity and popularity of the journal. However, the ratio must also be considered against the breadth of subject matter of the journal. A very broad-subject journal (such as Nature) could expect many more submissions than a more narrow-subject journal. Alone, submission/acceptance ratio is of only limited value in assessing notability of a journal; however, when considered with other factors, it may be helpful.
Publication of significant numbers of leading, influential, or high-impact articles in a field. In the sciences, "Lists of notable publications" offer one source to review. However, it should be noted that these will generally be weighted toward general field journals and away from more subject-specific articles. Exclusion from such a list is not a per se sign of non-notability.
Indexing by standard literature indexes and databases. Notable academic journals will be indexed in the primary databases for their fields. Super-notable journals (such as Science and Nature) will be indexed in broad, general databases. A journal that is not indexed or included in relevant databases will need to have other extraordinary signs of notability. (Note: This criterion is applicable to contemporarily-published journals. Indexes may not cover historical or older journals, or have changed coverage; exclusion of older journals from applicable databases may not have the same significance as exclusion of a contemporary journal. This criterion is also not necessarily applicable to a very new journal, since it may take some time for indexing and abstracting services to add a journal to the index. However, a very new journal would likely need some other indicia of notability in any case, such as a notable editorial board.)
Notable editorial board. Academic journals are generally run and edited by other academics, and the association of notable scholars in the field with a journal is an indicia of notability.
Collection by libraries and archives. Searches of OCLC WorldCat or other union catalogs can give a sense of how widespread a journal is academic and public libraries. Certain kinds of journals -- niche, very expensive, or trade-oriented -- may be notable even if they are not included in many research collections.

Okay -- that's the stuff I came up with as a first pass. --lquilter 04:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Quick vote

Of the above, the subsection entitled Public Figures makes the most sense to me (although it is far too long.)

Academics shouldn't be exceptional compared to politicians, athletes or other public figures. It seems to me what is needed here is a more general Wikipedia standard, such as how many people edit & watch the article over a year and how many articles link to it. Lack of work probably indicates lack of interest probably indicates lack of notability. That may seem like a lot of "probably"s, but this sort of evolutionary selection system tends to work pretty well.

I would not like to see Wikipedia turn into some one of those lame family tree exercises where every child (or grad student) of every person mentioned gets a page & so on.--Jaibe 20:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

How many people edit, watch, and link to an article from other articles is not external criteria at all, and will lead wikipedia down the path of becoming an entertainment encyclopedia. In other words, the passions of the member communities of wikipedia -- a largely white, male group, with deep interests in TV & computer culture -- will dominate what wikipedia is even more than they do already. It would be impossible to delete those articles because they are self-referencing. It would be difficult to support inclusion of notable figures that don't fall into those categories because the wikipedia culture, however dysfunctional, nonrepresentative, and non-encyclopedic, doesn't support them. --lquilter 20:41, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

It would be impossible to delete articles that people actually read? That would be so terrible. I mean, of course we should have articles on 17th century poets that a thousand people in the world have read and not on TV shows that a million people watch.--Prosfilaes 13:23, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Sarcasm isn't helpful, and you're misinterpreting or misstating what I said. Regardless -- we all know that there are articles on wikipedia that are, without question, collections of trivia; current notability guidelines let us delete them. An "internal-links as notability" test would not permit us to get rid of them, and wouldn't help us keep the articles that a thousand people in the world have read. And yeah, the 17th century poets are just as important as the 20th century actors and computer programmers, so we need a guideline that helps us build a good encyclopedia. --lquilter 16:04, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Current notability guidelines do nothing for collections of trivia; that's WP:NOT, primarily. An "internal-links as notability" would let us get rid of them, since nobody really links to just a collection of trivia. There's no point in writing pages that no one reads; on the other hand, there is point in writing pages on subjects that people are interested in. If no one reads the articles on the 17th century poets, then those articles aren't nearly as important as the one's people read.--Prosfilaes 21:28, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

They are less important only in the sense that we have not attracted enough editors interested in working on those articles. The actual contents is biased by that, and we should not let it affect the principles. There is an incredible bias against academics in the humanities--as compared to the sciences, let alone some other categories of people. Let the authors/editors decide what to write articles about--the attitude should not be ITDOESNOTINTERESTME. I could well maintain that the world would be much better off with the television shows removed altogether, but I do not push that view on others. This must not become a popularity contest, or we will have only a specialized encyclopedia. For people who want to write specialized wikis, they exist in abundance. DGG 02:10, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I hardly think that the set of things people are interested in looking up in Wikipedia is a specialized set, any more than the set of things that people are interested in writing in Wikipedia.--Prosfilaes 13:54, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Prosfilaes, you are being way over-general. "People" use wikipedia for arcane academic topics as well as for pop culture and sports research. Wikipedia is intended to be both a general purpose encyclopedia as well as subject-specific encyclopedia. Since there are numerous general purpose and subject-specific encyclopedias that treat significant contributions to the humanities -- including 17th century poets -- then that is the standard. Notability, as determined by third-party publication and assessment. Please review the Five Pillars (Wikipedia is an encyclopedia) and Wikipedia:Notability (primary notability criterion). --lquilter 14:42, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

If people use Wikipedia for arcane academic topics, then that would be included in the set of things people are interested in looking up in Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia will be an encyclopedia with or without arcane academic topics that no general purpose encyclopedia has ever touched upon. There is no reason to bias ourselves towards one topic out of some snobbish POV view that it's superior to what other people want to look up.--Prosfilaes 14:57, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I am honestly not sure I'm getting what you're saying. Are you suggesting the entire enterprise of Notability (academics) is snobbish? Or are you suggesting that I'm being snobbish? (If the latter, I think you don't know my interests well enough to comment.) Feel free to take it to my talk page to explain. --lquilter 15:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Jaibe's general proposal is not helpful, and misunderstands the purpose of this project. We already have general criteria of Notability. The question is how best to apply the general criteria in specific situations. The accomplishments of sportspeople are regularly written about in newspapers, and newspapers are easy for laypeople to find and verify. The accomplishments of academics are regularly written about in journals and other forums that are not as easy for laypeople to find and verify, and are written about in specialized language that may be more difficult for laypeople to understand. We develop guidelines, therefore, to help people who are not as familiar with a particular field or subject to critically evaluate notability within it. "Internal links" and "numbers of people working on an article" measures only popularity and popular understanding of the topic; it doesn't measure notability or help to elucidate notability for people trying to assess the value of an article. --lquilter 14:49, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Yay, Lquilter. Jaibe's proposal forgets that (a) there is no space limitation (unlike a printed encyclopedia) so we don't have to rule out articles that aren't popular, (b) being a general encyclopedia means you cover every subject, not ruling out those that tend to be inactive, so no matter how infrequently it's needed, the information will be there for the user. (The obscure information is what people are most likely to need in Wikipedia. The obvious is available elsewhere.) The question is what's worth having in an encyclopedia. The best judges of that are the people who are interested in a subject and have some experience with it. People who aren't interested aren't likely to be good judges.

As for notability, the same applies. No simple formal rule, like "professors at 'top' schools", is a good criterion. People who know the field are most likely to be able to say what and who is notable. I don't see why being hired by Harvard makes a person notable; it tends to be the other way round (usually, Harvard will only hire someone who already is notable—this excludes temporary junior faculty), but the criterion should be scholarly accomplishments, not what job you got. Zaslav 21:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

proposed => accepted

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)

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)

What is the process by which we make such a move? semper fictilis 16:05, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

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)

"Barring any objections"? Does that ever happen? —David Eppstein 05:48, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I object to this becoming a guideline. There has not been sufficient notice given to assume there is no objection. Should remain as proposal until thoroughly discussed. --Kevin Murray 19:32, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
- I'm reverting you. The discussion has been going on for a very long time already, the guideline is in place and has been used repeatedly, and it was promoted as a guideline by someone who was an independent observer, not someone developing the guideline. See my post above, the guideline has broad acceptance and has been stable for a long time now. There has been ample time for discussion already; the discussion had been listed at WP:CENT since around May of last year. If you actually object to the proposal, you should say so and why, so we can start discussing. Mangojuice^talk 20:24, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
  - No, please do not follow this course. Piotr proposes a reasonable approach to inviting more discussion, and I have followed his suggestion. There has not been sufficient discussion to warrant an adoption of the further instruction creep. --Kevin Murray 20:41, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

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)

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)

Why this is not instruction creep and should be a guideline

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. Mango juice^talk 23:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

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)

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). Mango juice^talk 04:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 18:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

This problem might be solved by merging this page with WP:BIO. Perhaps this is worth considering. >Radiant< 13:03, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Radiant's proposal makes sense. --Kevin Murray 15:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

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 {{mergeto}} 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. Mango juice^talk 18:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Okay, okay, I propose that we merge this page into WP:BIO since it largely overlaps with that page, and I propose that this is done by finding the parts that do not overlap, adding them to a new section on that page, converting this page to a redirect there, and fix the double redirects, and I propose that this can be discussed. Happy now? >Radiant< 08:55, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
- Sorry about that, I was having a bad day. :) Kevin beat you to the punch, though. My point, partly, was that there's a major difference between including these criteria on WP:BIO and massively simplifying them and including THAT on WP:BIO. Without knowing the particulars of how to combine the two pages, it's hard to comment on whether it's a good idea or not. I think Kevin's ideas on the merge are fine, since they don't really alter the conditions here. Mango juice^talk 14:00, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Disagree. This is very useful as a separable policy. Having several smaller guidelines for specific groups is preferrable to having an overblown WP:BIO with many subsections/subpoints or even worse, not mentioning relevant points at all. I find it useful to be able to refer to WP:PROF during prods or afds, and wouldn't be as happy with having to refer to WP:BIO secton 12 or having to reinterpret WP:BIO every time. What we are doing here is cofifying law based on precedents: WP:PROF is recognized precedent for notability of academics. If you disagree, please suggest a merger of WP:BIO to WP:N - why do we need more than one policy for notability?--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk} 14:47, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

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)

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)

Merging logistics

For the most part the following 6 cases are pretty good. But I think that these could apply equally to a broader category including artists, designers, writers and other creative professions. I think that there is a fine line between those who create and those who teach.

As is:

1. The person is regarded as a significant expert in his or her area by independent sources.

2. The person is regarded as an important figure by independent academics in the same field.

3. The person has published a significant and well-known academic work. An academic work may be significant or well known if, for example, it is the basis for a textbook or course, if it is itself the subject of multiple, independent works, if it is widely cited by other authors in the academic literature[1].

4. The person's collective body of work is significant and well-known.

5. The person is known for originating an important new concept, theory or idea which is the subject of multiple, independent, non-trivial reviews or studies in works meeting our standards for reliable sources.

6. The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them.

Modified for broader categories & reordered

6. The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them.

1/2. The person is regarded as an important figure or significant expert by peers.

5. The person is known for originating an important new concept, theory or idea.

3. The person has created a significant and well-known work, which has been subject of multiple independent works or reviews, has been widely cited by other authors, or is the basis for respected curriculum.

4. The person's collective body of work is significant and well-known.

A. The person's work is likely to become a part of the enduring historical record of that field.

note: the numbers were not changed for easier reference to the existing scheme. A is brought in from the existing People guidelines. Added words are in bold.

--Kevin Murray 18:47, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

comment, in order of the above numbers 6. We will them be discussing just which honors. 1/2. This is indecisive enough to include almost everybody, or almost nobody 5. This includes very few people., and anyone who meets it will certainly be included in category 3 and category 1/2 3. "subject of multiple independent works" is applicable to only a few fields. & ditto for widely cited--perhaps between them they encompass everyone/ note: many AdF decisions now use this part. 4. This is indecisive enough to include almost everybody, or almost nobody A. All scientific work is part of the enduring historical record. I do not think this is an improvement over the present--it will depend wholly on interpretation of vague terms. DGG 19:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)I

DGG, I generally agree with what you are saying. But the weaknesses apply equally to the existing text. I did not want to go too far from the existing in the first phase of discussion. How can we specifically tighten up the ambiguities? --Kevin Murray 19:35, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

- Back later today on that one. This is not a trivial question, for the exact wording will affect decisions. May I first ask--is the intent to include the typical full professor at a major university, but exclude the typical new asst. professor with a few small papers? That's what I think recent AfD decisions have been saying (& I agree with them). It easier to find a wording when we know where we are going. I wouldn't want to actually use the cats I've mentioned, for it has to be flexible to include non-typical careers, like an occasional full professor at Univ X who's a dummy, and an occasional asst professor who's just done a world-shaking thesis. I've known some of both :).

I also don't like the addition A: it seems like this is strictly more restrictive than criterion 4, so we should just have #4. Otherwise, this does sum up this guideline pretty well. Mango juice^talk 19:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not real happy with (A) either; it is from BIO so I included it so we would be merging the two concepts, then look at trimming. --Kevin Murray 20:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
I would rather see the assistant professor issue handled through a precedents page such as the Common outcomes. --Kevin Murray 20:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Too restrictive? Too permissive?

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)

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)

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 14:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Mango, well said! --Kevin Murray 19:14, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Merge vs. don't

I think it's probably a good idea that the criteria discussed here be reflected on WP:BIO, but I do think this page contains some more useful guidance about academia. Thoughts? Mango juice^talk 15:07, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I would like to see the "useful guidance" in an essay. I think essays can help editors understamd the why and the how, without creating more actionable "code". --Kevin Murray 15:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Nobody cares about essays. This is a useful guideline as it is.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk} 01:49, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

"Useful guidance" is, by definition, a guideline. Discussions such as this one are generally the result of people attaching far greater importance to the term "guideline" than it actually means. THe usage on Wikipedia should be identical to its dictionary definition; guidelines aren't strict rules. >Radiant< 09:44, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Radiant and I agree about what a guideline should be; however that is not the state of practice at WP, so per the customary nomenclature of WP, guidelines are applied like rules. --Kevin Murray 16:41, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

If the guidelines here are incorporated at WP:BIO pretty much in full, we could just use {{superseded}}. That way it's not an essay and it doesn't lose its status as a guideline, et cetera. Mango juice^talk 05:35, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

It seems that the discussion at WP:BIO about the inclusion of the section Creative Professionals has fully incorporated these guidelines and has stabilized such that this is now redundant to WP:BIO. It seems appropriate to consider the merger successful and redirect. --Kevin Murray 00:03, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I am still against the idea of merging. For one, this page still contains important caveats about how to apply the biography rules. In particular, the caveat that it is difficult to judge notability for fields you are not personally involved in is extremely important. And, I believe the discussion page here is useful for discussing particular cases which may or may not conflict with the notability rules.--Myke Cuthbert 01:12, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't like the idea of merging as an academic is different in terms of notability. I feel that any academic should be considered notable as any academic with a PhD will have done original research and pushed their field forward in some manner. It seems silly saying, such and such is notable or not. As a chemist I consider very few psychologists as notable, but have a lot of respect for people within my field who I see as being notable. I even see this within my field, I am an organic chemist so do not know much about the more mosern notable figures in physical chemistry (obviously I know a few - Lipinsky being one). So give them all a space and let them be added if they are, its not like a book where every tiny bit of space must be rationed. Finally I find some of the sports people mentioned on wikipedia less than notable, but there they are, lets celebrate academics and academia in the same way the obsessive sport loving people celebrate their heroes.

So hooray for Greg Fu. Alex Jones - Synthesis for all 16:03, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the standard of notability is often far overemphasized over verifiability. The words and even ideas of academics are generally so easy to verify (if not necessarily on the web in all fields) that we need worry less on this account. However, their biographies are often as difficult to verify as any other figure on WP. --Myke Cuthbert 02:18, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

From the edit log

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)

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)
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)

I see Kevin's point, but I think that all the notability guidelines that currently exist are both necessary and relevant. It is essential that Wikipedia should have fixed standards for notability, in order to exclude articles that are non-encyclopedic, without relying on editors' subjective judgements. It is equally necessary that specific types of articles should have their own notability standards. Walton ^{Vivat Regina!} 14:14, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Definition of terms?

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)

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. Mango juice^talk 21:27, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Need to change the IncGuide template

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

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d The "subject" of a work means non-trivial treatment and excludes mere mention of the idea, its author, or its publication, price listings and other nonsubstantive detail treatment. It also excludes mere citation.
^ ^a ^b ^c "Non-trivial" excludes personal websites, blogs, bulletin boards, Usenet posts, student essays, wikis and other media that are not themselves notable. Be careful to check that the author, publisher, agent, vendor, etc. of a particular source are in no way share an interest with the academic or concept in question.
^ There is no objective criterion for establishing that a publication is "widely" cited. Wikipedia editors should consider not only the absolute number of citations (as provided by a citation index) but also the number relative to other publications in the same field which are generally acknowledged to be important.
^ One work forms the basis of another if the author of the latter publically acknowledges this, or if the bulk of the latter is widely regarded as a derivate work of the former. The critical issues are that the author of the derived work must have been aware of and familiar with the original work, and that a significant portion of the derived work must draw from the original work. This excludes mere citation or passing reference.

[subject-1] The "subject" of a work means non-trivial treatment and excludes mere mention of the idea, its author, or its publication, price listings and other nonsubstantive detail treatment. It also excludes mere citation.

[nontrivial-2] "Non-trivial" excludes personal websites, blogs, bulletin boards, Usenet posts, student essays, wikis and other media that are not themselves notable. Be careful to check that the author, publisher, agent, vendor, etc. of a particular source are in no way share an interest with the academic or concept in question.

[citations-3] There is no objective criterion for establishing that a publication is "widely" cited. Wikipedia editors should consider not only the absolute number of citations (as provided by a citation index) but also the number relative to other publications in the same field which are generally acknowledged to be important.

[basis-4] One work forms the basis of another if the author of the latter publically acknowledges this, or if the bulk of the latter is widely regarded as a derivate work of the former. The critical issues are that the author of the derived work must have been aware of and familiar with the original work, and that a significant portion of the derived work must draw from the original work. This excludes mere citation or passing reference.

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