A fact from Carl Kaestle appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 November 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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Article was created with the mention in the edit summary that this person meets WP:PROF#5. However, as far as I can see, he does not hold a named chair, but is an ordinary professor at Brown. Nothing to spit at, but not exactly notable according to WP:ACADEMIC either. --Randykitty (talk) 19:07, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that. Meanwhile, I searched for more info on "William F. Vilas Research Professor", and got quite a lot of different names and fields. When I searched for "William F. Vilas Research Professorship", I found this. Looks like there are quite a lot of Vilas professors concurrently, so perhaps this is less significant than it looks like at first sight. I'm pinging @DGG:, who is an expert in this kind of things. --Randykitty (talk) 20:27, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"University professor" is an ambiguous title -- it doers not really count as a named professorship--it's often given by a few universities to retiring faculty as more distinguished than Emeritus.
The reference for"William F. Vilas Research Professor" is here.There are 10 of them in the university of Wisconsin. (as a parallel there are multiple Regius professors at UK universities -- Glasgow has 13. They are all distinguished. We have articles on about half of them as individual titles, e.g. Regius Professor of Divinity -- we have articles on most of the individual holders of each of them. I would be surprised if these were considered equally famous to those world-famous professorships in the UK, but the Univ. of Wisconsin is a very major research university, & so they do meet WP:PROF #5.
But he also meets other WP:PROF criteria. In particular, as President of the National Academy of Education, he meets #6, the highest elected post at a major society. (This might also meet E3, of just membership in the society brings notability. Goven the traditional low regarad at WP for faculty in Education, it might be harder than it ought to be to establish this. )
But the easy factor is that he is notable as an author, under WP:CREATIVE: WorldCat shows that he is the author or coauthor of at least seven books published by major academic presses. some of which have almost 1000 library holdings--there are sure to be reviews, and in fact some are mentioned in the article. He also appears to have been the senior author of at least one and possibly more major government education surveys. Almost none of this is mentioned in the article. Any academic whose major work is in a field dependent upon books as publications, will invariably be notable also under WP:AUTHOR, which is a much weaker standard. After all, if one attains high rank in a first rate educational institution, there's a basis for it. DGG ( talk ) 16:00, 21 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
