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Include:
Exclude:
Klonimus 06:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
Academia has plenty of ways of its own to define notability:
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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, 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)
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):
Anil Kumar,24th Feb.2006 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.138.112.252 ( talk • contribs)
It seems to me that the criteria for inclusion may differ for different disciplines.
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)
I'd also like to remind you, "There is no official policy on notability." (from WP:N). From Wikipedia in eight words:
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 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)
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)
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)
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:
Respectfully submitted, Durova 00:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Yes, point taken. JeffBurdges 02:33, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
There are already plenty of tools to deal with absurd examples. For great justice. 16:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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'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.
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.
Reflux 21:14, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
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)
Would an academic who holds a position of significant academic leadership be considered notable? - Fsotrain09 03:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
[Anil Kumar] made essentially the same proposal, above, back in 24th Feb.2006 DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
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.
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.
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
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:
Not so much, folks. Here's a better article:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Espresso Addict 08:42, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
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 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)
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
---
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
First draft notes for assessing notability of academic, scholarly and scientific journals and periodicals:
Okay -- that's the stuff I came up with as a first pass. -- lquilter 04:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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:
Modified for broader categories & reordered
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
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)
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)
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 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. Wal ton Vivat Regina! 14:14, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
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)
The IncGuide template still lists this as a proposal rather than a guideline. This should be changed. -- Metropolitan90 14:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
Include:
Exclude:
Klonimus 06:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
Academia has plenty of ways of its own to define notability:
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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, 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)
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):
Anil Kumar,24th Feb.2006 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.138.112.252 ( talk • contribs)
It seems to me that the criteria for inclusion may differ for different disciplines.
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)
I'd also like to remind you, "There is no official policy on notability." (from WP:N). From Wikipedia in eight words:
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 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)
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)
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)
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:
Respectfully submitted, Durova 00:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Yes, point taken. JeffBurdges 02:33, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
There are already plenty of tools to deal with absurd examples. For great justice. 16:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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'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.
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.
Reflux 21:14, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
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)
Would an academic who holds a position of significant academic leadership be considered notable? - Fsotrain09 03:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
[Anil Kumar] made essentially the same proposal, above, back in 24th Feb.2006 DGG 22:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
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.
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.
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
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:
Not so much, folks. Here's a better article:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Espresso Addict 08:42, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
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 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)
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
---
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
First draft notes for assessing notability of academic, scholarly and scientific journals and periodicals:
Okay -- that's the stuff I came up with as a first pass. -- lquilter 04:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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:
Modified for broader categories & reordered
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
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)
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)
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 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. Wal ton Vivat Regina! 14:14, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
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)
The IncGuide template still lists this as a proposal rather than a guideline. This should be changed. -- Metropolitan90 14:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)