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Proposal to remove administrators from C6 criterion

No consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:55, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

In view of the above discussion, let me take on Tryptofish's suggestion and make a separate proposal:

Remove the administrators altogether from WP:PROF#C6 and reword WP:PROF#C6 to read:

  • The person has held a highest-level elected post at a major academic society.

Rationale

The C6 criterion of WP:PROF currently includes academic administrators such as university/college Presidents/Chancellors (in some cases Provosts), and, in the British system, Vice-Chancellors. The goal of WP:PROF#C6 is to serve as a shortcut, to cover people who are definitely, clearly and unquestionable academically notable. Then, once this criterion is satisfied, the person can be declared satisfying WP:PROF with no further questions asked. The problem is that, in my view, the current version of C6 scoops under its umbrella too many people who are not genuinely academically notable.

When it comes to academic administrators, in reality we cannot take it for granted that people holding the above posts are indeed academically notable, even for reasonably large and reasonably good colleges and universities. Often university Presidents/Chancellors are hired from outside of academia. Then they may not have any academic credentials and may not be academically notable per se, apart from their post. It does not make sense to suddenly declare them to be academically notable, if they are not even academics in any meaningful sense of the word. Their notability should be evaluated on WP:GNG or WP:BIO basis. There are many other situations (see the discussion above), where academic administrators rise to the positions of President/Chancellor following academic administrative ladder: Associate Dean, Dean, Associate Provost, Associate Chancellor, Provost, Chancellor, President, or something similar. In many situations such people leave a genuine academic career fairly early on, and switch to a purely administrative career track. By the time they become Presidents.Chancellors, they are no longer genuine academics. In my observations, it is often the case that as the level of their administrative post rises, the level of the institution to which their posted decreases. There have also been quite a few cases where the logic of the application of C6 has been inverted, and it was applied in AfDs for administrators of fairly small colleges/universities where relatively little information was available about the people in question. Examples include Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ronald E. Manahan, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Janet Dudley-Eshbach, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/De La Salle Brothers, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Joseph Fuwape, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/D.P. Singh (naturalist).

My opinion about academic administrators is that a large number of them are not true academics and that it is too hard to devise a part of C6 criterion to separate those who are from those who are not. It is far better to remove administrators from C6 altogether. With those academic administrators who are genuinely notable, there will be no trouble making such a case under WP:BIO or under other WP:PROF criteria. But for the others we should just say: ``Holding a high academic administrative post, such as university/colleges President/Chancellor or Institute Director, or a similar post, is not, in and of itself, a sufficient proof of academic notability. However, an individual holding such a post may be notable if he/she satisfies WP:PROF on other grounds or satisfies one of the other notability guidelines such as WP:GNG or WP:BIO". Nsk92 (talk) 00:15, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Oppose change from current. Just by having the executive leadership role in a major (and it has to be major) academic institution makes a person notable, whether they are academics or not. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:01, 26 September 2016 (UTC).
    • There are several problems with this. First, it is not necessarily the case that all people holding such positions at reasonably major universities are in fact notable in the sense that Wikipedia understands this term. That is, one can find quite a few examples of such people where they would not pass WP:PROF on other grounds and they would not pass other notability guidelines either; that is they are not the subject of substantial and detailed coverage of independent reliable sources. The only reason they are considered notable is that WP:PROF#C6 currently declares them so. But why should it? Second, the bar of what is a ``major" academic institution is pretty variable and subjective and often gets pushed pretty far down. Look for example what happened in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Namgi Park and in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Joseph Fuwape. Third, I still don't see why WP:PROF should declare academically notable a large group of people who are fundamentally not academics. With administrators it is too hard to separate wheat from chaff and I don't think that a rough tool like C6 is the way to go. Nsk92 (talk) 02:10, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Weak support. I think this change will make very little difference for the people it actually covers — they almost always pass WP:GNG. But I often see this misapplied to heads of community colleges, small seminaries, department chairs or deans, or (more confusingly because of the language barrier) people in third world countries who have declared themselves to be the head of a new university but without any real infrastructure, personnel, or actual academic depth. So I tend to think that removing this will simpljfy discussions while keeping the people we want to keep and making it a little less easy to keep the people we don't want to keep. But my support should not be misinterpreted as meaning that I don't think these people are notable; they are, but we don't have to say so here. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:29, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Strong support per the discussion in the above section. University leadership no longer indicates academic notability. GNG and BIO are more than enough to cover leaders of truly major institutions. Regards, James (talk/contribs) 06:32, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose deleting, support revising. Although I suspect that it is true that GNG could cover this adequately, I think that it is a misunderstanding of the purpose of WP:PROF to consider it as a guideline about persons of great scholarly distinction, to the exclusion of persons of great academic institutional distinction. I agree that a lot of university presidents get there through non-scholarly backgrounds. And I agree that quite a few of the AfDs cited above would fail GNG. But the problem is that the criterion, as written, is too broad. If one looks at the Note for C6, it is framed in terms of leaders of accredited universities. So that basically excludes only blatant diploma mills. That's too inclusive. The note should be revised to change "accredited" to something like "highly ranked". --Tryptofish (talk) 21:55, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Support. The rationale for having an SNG for academics (according to the lead), is that academics might not be the subject of enough biographical coverage to satisfy the GNG but are nevertheless are notable due to the impact of their work. The rest of the criteria are good indicators that an academic's work is impactful, but I don't think C6 is. As discussed above, positions in the administrative hierarchy are appointed on the basis of managerial or "leadership" skills rather than academic impact. These people may well be notable academics, but if they are they should be able to pass either one of the other WP:PROF criteria or the GNG. And quite frankly, we could do without yet another crack through which corporate self-aggrandizers can slip into the encyclopaedia.
My only qualm is losing the criterion for directors of "independent research institutes". In archaeology (and I believe the humanities more generally), we have a tradition of independent overseas research institutes (the British School at Athens, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, American Center of Oriental Research, etc.) Directing one is not only a prestigious position but implies scholarly impact in precisely the not-very-visible-in-RSes way this guideline is supposed to accommodate, namely by running or supporting substantial amounts of fieldwork in the host country. I'm sure it only affects a tiny number of articles, but I wonder if it could be incorporated into one of the other criteria (C5?). Joe Roe (talk) 00:25, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment I want to expand a bit on a point alluded to by David Eppstein. In some countries (and not just third-world) high-level academic administrators are appointed by the government from the ranks of bureaucrats/regime loyalists/apparatchiks and have little or no academic credentials. That's often the case in Russia and some other countries of the former Soviet Union, even for what one might consider well reputable academic institutions. In third-world countries the situation can be even worse, depending on the particulars. Adding various qualifiers such as ``highly ranked" or whatever, as Tryptofish suggests, in front of an academic institution in this situation is problematic. It opens the door for gamesmanship, endless debates ("highly ranked" by whom? How highly ranked does it have to be? Etc), accusations of cultural and regional bias, and so on. It is far simpler and cleaner to eliminate the academic administrators from this criterion altogether. By the way, we could add a note to WP:PROF that holding a high-level academic leadership position at a major institution of education or research could be used as a contributing factor towards satisfying WP:PROF#C1. For administrators who can't pass WP:PROF anyway that won't help them much. But it would help genuine academics who are directors of independent institutes (like the ones Joe Roe discusses above), or to those academics who do end up being college Presidents/Chancellors/Provosts/whatever. Nsk92 (talk) 01:17, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
    • I like the idea about a note to C1. I'm not strongly opposed to just relying on GNG, but when I suggested "highly ranked", I actually said "something like" that, not those exact words. I take the point about "highly ranked by whom?", but there's a solution to that: use more specific wording that indicates the meaning. For example, see how C3 refers to IEEE as "a highly selective honor". I can easily see (and in fact have seen) users try to game "highly selective" just as they might "highly ranked", but it's not insoluble. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:06, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose No rationale has been created for treating "major academic societ[ies]" different from colleges and universities. If we believe that college and university presidents or vice chancellors who are not "legitimate" academics will qualify for inclusion through the broader notability guidelines and practices then surely we cane make the same argument for leaders of scholarly organizations. Please note that I would support deleting the statement altogether as I see no reason for carving out a notability exception solely for people whose only distinction is leading one of these organizations; it seems like such an exceedingly narrow exception that it's unnecessary. ElKevbo (talk) 23:55, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
ElKevbo is correct about what the current proposal is. Personally, I would not be opposed to deleting C6 altogether, to simplify things, and I am OK with modifying the proposal accordingly. However, there is a substantial difference between academic administrators in charge of colleges/universities/institutes and between elected presidents of major academic societies. The former are often substantively not academics at all but either administrators/bureaucrats or non-academics brought in to fill these posts from outside of academia for various reasons. With presidents of academic societies things are completely different: They are elected by their fellow scholars for their academic achievements, and for any academic society of sufficiently good standing those achievements have to be great indeed to merit elect as President of such as society. Personally, I am not aware of any instances where a reputable academic society has elected as its President a person who was not real a bona fide notable scholar but instead just an administrator/bureaucrat/whatever. At least the likelihood of that happening is much much smaller than with presidents/chancellors of colleges and universities where this sort of thing happens all the time, as a matter of course. The two categories, academic administrators in charge of colleges/universities/institutes and elected leaders of academic societies had been clumped in C6 by a bit of a historical accident. But substantively these two groups of people have very little in common. Nsk92 (talk) 00:53, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose the proposal as written (i.e. cutting it down to apply only to societies) for the reasons given by Tfish and ElKevbo. (Glad to see you're still around, ElKevbo.) EEng 00:42, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
Did you read my response and an explanation to ElKevbo's comment given above? Presidents of universities/colleges and Presidents of academic societies are two very different groups of people who ended up in the same C6 criterion of WP:PROF by a bit of a historical accident. The rationale for removing academic administrators from C6 does not apply to Presidents of academic societies. The former are routinely recruited from the ranks of professional administrators or from outside of academia by boards of trustees of colleges/universities; that's often a management or a political/bureaucratic decision, and holders of these posts are often not true academics. By contrasts, Presidents of academic societies are elected by their peers from their own ranks on the basis of outstanding academic achievements; they are almost always not simply notable but famous academics of high national and international stature. Nsk92 (talk) 00:57, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
It not the case that Presidents of academic societies are elected by their peers from their own ranks on the basis of outstanding academic achievements. The American Chemical Society does not always use this criterion. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Elizabeth Ann Nalley, and its current President does not have a high citation impact. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:58, 1 October 2016 (UTC).
Thanks, that's a very interesting case, I was not aware of it. She appears to be a bona fide academic but indeed her academic achievements as such do not seem to be spectacular, and it appears that she was elected President of ACS primarily on her record of outstanding service to the profession rather than of research accomplishment. So far this appears to be an isolated case, but if turns out not to be, I would probably be in favor of deleting C6 from WP:PROF altogether. Nsk92 (talk) 12:11, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Yeah, I read it. Your concern seems to be that, since this is the Notability (academics) page, if it perchance covers someone who's not (by some standards) an "academic" i.e. a person of scholarly accomplishment, but is rather a person notable in (shall be call it) "the academics industry" e.g. a not-so-hot-scholar university president, then the universe will explode. (Sorry for that complicated sentence.) It won't. EEng 03:01, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
I pointed you to my comments above since your original oppose was "per ElKevbo", and ElKevbo's oppose was based on the argument that the same reasoning for removing academic adimistrators from C6 would apply to removing presidents of scholarly societies from C6. I tried to explain above that this is not the case. Regarding the "universe exploding" thing, no I don't think that would happen if we keep C6 in the current form. But I do think that there is a problem with C6 that needs fixing, and that its extent is bigger than you realize. In addition to the kinds of examples discussed in the proposal itself, I see quite a new few articles about university/college heads from Asia and Africa that are being created now, who have minimal, if any academic accomplishments, and are often in effect political/bureaucratic/government functionaries. For now these articles are typically quietly BLP-prodded or PRODded or even tagged CSD G11 and deleted before making it to AfD by people doing NPP because the creators of these articles are newbies who don't quite know what they are doing. However, eventually they will learn, and this issue will become a problem for the AfD stage. I don't want to have nasty debates at the AfD then about what the meaning of "major" or "highly ranked" or whatever is in relation to these kind of colleges/universities. It will be very difficult or maybe impossible to apply any sort of a reasonable standard in such situations without an apparent bias. It is far better to exclude this category of people from C6 altogether and judge them on general WP:BIO/WP:GNG grounds, or, if they qualify, on general WP:PROF, grounds. Nsk92 (talk) 14:22, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
As a case in point here is a new AfD, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Antonino Castrone, just nominated for AfD on September 30. The subject is the "University Director" at Aalborg University. The position does not seem to have an exact counterpart in the U.S./U.K. systems, but he seems to be in charge of all the administrative apparatus of the university. The description of his background in the article shows that he has essentially no academic background/accomplishments at all, and yet it is quite plausible that somebody could invoke WP:PROF#C6 in this AfD. Nsk92 (talk) 19:17, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out. It's a very good example. I just commented there in favor of deleting, and seeing that example gave me a better feel for the issues that are involved here. And something occurred to me as I was making my comment there. I commented that the person appears to have had no impact on academia outside of his own institution. And I think that could be a very good criterion that we might add, in order to distinguish the genuinely notable from those who have been passing on a technicality. We could limit notability to "The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society, and has had a significant impact on academia or scholarly study beyond their own institution." – with my suggested addition shown in green. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:39, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Actually, the subject of this particular AfD has held significant administrative posts at two different universities (so more than one institution): as an Economy Director at Copenhagen University and then as a University Director at Aalborg University. Nsk92 (talk) 12:39, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes, that's a good catch! But I think it can easily be fixed. Just change "institution" to "institutions" (plural). --Tryptofish (talk) 19:27, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Wouldn't the "significant impact" criterion just be restating C1? Again, this seems to be pointing to the fact that C6 is superfluous. Thanks to the points made above, it seems to me that C6 is just unfixable. We should be rid of it entirely. James (talk/contribs) 21:56, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
To some extent, it does reiterate C1 as well as GNG. But it seems to me that, with such a revision, C6 would no longer be so easily misused, and it would serve the function that SNGs typically serve: make it clearer how GNG applies within a specialized area. And spelling it out via C6 also serves to provide an efficient way to point to reasons why a particular page should be deleted. The problem that led to this discussion is that the criterion was being understood to mean something that it should not mean. Making the criterion clearer is better than leaving it unsaid. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:02, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose Those who run academic institutions create and further academic policies in a wide variety of ways. They clearly impact academia. Beyond this, they impact things more generally. They are clearly notable, so whether we say it is academic per se, or something else, the fact is they are notable and should have articles.John Pack Lambert (talk) 01:55, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
The notability standard exists to ensure that we have enough appropriate, third-party sourcing to write good articles; "impact" without coverage or "furthering academic policy" is not notability. James (talk/contribs) 17:45, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
She looks notable to me. You should add something about her work. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:26, 12 December 2016 (UTC).
  • Further It seems this change (and others discussed above) is rather radical in altering practice - CENT notification and notice to academic discipline projects therefore seems the way to go. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:07, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
The discussion started a couple of months ago, and petered out, and then a few new comments appeared in the last few days. Instead of pulling out the heavy ammo, maybe it would be better to just close the discussion as no consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose as per the reasons above, plus the fact that the criteria for Academics in general are already unreasonably more stringent than for -- to pick an example at random -- Australian Rules Football, for which you are notable if you have played in one (1) match.ch (talk) 02:39, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
What are you so strongly opposed to, closing the discussion? Xxanthippe (talk) 04:26, 12 December 2016 (UTC).
Oppose the proposal to remove language and leave the section as quoted above. I don't see a proposal to close the discussion.ch (talk) 05:26, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
Then I will repeat what I said just above: it's past time to close this discussion as "no consensus". I'll probably do that myself tomorrow, unless somebody objects before then, or beats me too it (feel free). --Tryptofish (talk) 23:01, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Use the same language?

Under "criteria", presumably to refer to the same thing, we use the following different language. Perhaps, whatever we use, we should use consistent language? Or are there really three different things? 

   3. The person is or has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society) or a fellow of a major scholarly society which reserves fellow status as a highly selective honor (e.g., Fellow of the IEEE).

   6. The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a ... major academic society.

We have similar but different words also in these two sentences. Should they also be made to be identical, or are they meant to cover two different things?: 

   5. The person holds or has held a named chair appointment or distinguished professor appointment at a major institution of higher education and research (or an equivalent position in countries where named chairs are uncommon).

   6. The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society.

2604:2000:E016:A700:E56C:77CF:14C1:19A3 (talk) 08:10, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

WP:NOTDIRECTORY, WP:PROMO

There have been ongoing discussions in Wikipedia about: a) raising the N bar to deal with promotional editing; and b) some N guidelines/essays have been written and used in ways that lead to articles that are essentially directory entires, and not WP articles about a person or organization.

Some recent discussions include:

This fairly old and much-cited guideline (with its nicely recorded precedents linked at the top of this page) is located near the root of some of these problems. I have read the precedents and understand the reasoning that lead to these criteria.

What is problematic, is the way these criteria are discussed in the guideline, and how they are used in deletion discussions.

The guideline explicitly says "....if an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her failure to meet either the General Notability Guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant"; the criteria here are used as an automatic "pass/fail" to get "in" to Wikipedia, regardless of whether we can actually write a Wikipedia article about a person, based on independent, secondary, reliable sources. As an example of the influence of this guideline, see for example WP:NJOURNAL which was directly adopted from this guideline, and until recently also contained "automatic pass" language and that N essay was used that way (see this discussion at its Talk page).

In my experience of dealing with advocacy editing, including paid editing, some of the most persistent and blatant advocacy/conflicted editing in WP is done on behalf of academics and universities (which makes sense, as these institutions and people live and die by their reputations, so of course getting and managing a WP entry would be a high PR priority in some quarters). Other N guidelines will of course need to be addressed to deal with the issues discussed in the first sentence above, but this one does too.

It seems to me, that we should either amend WP:NOT to permit directory entries on academics, or we should change this guideline and the way it used (both!) to comply with the general WP:N guideline and the WP:NOTDIRECTORY policy. (In other words, the sentence quoted above should be deleted, and content in the body of the guideline that it summarizes should be changed to comply with N and NOTDIRECTORY)

Thoughts? Jytdog (talk) 00:13, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

  • Years ago, I had troubles with this guideline. It tends towards creating directory-like coverage of senior academics, it superficially appears to encourage BLP articles for academics, based on notability evidence for their research as distinct to their person. I found my challenges well answered, mostly by David Eppstein and DGG. My developed view is that some subjects are more generously judged than others. The two extremes are WP:PROF and WP:CORP, which interestingly are the only two SNGs that were accepted prior to acceptance of WP:N. It's about "scholarship is good", and "commercial promotion is bad". I think WP:PROF is acceptable as an exception on the inclusive side of WP:N, and WP:CORP is a very important exception to WP:N on the excluding side.
    However, the situation has become muddied by the commercialisation of academic institutions, a many-years old trend, and one that is not plateauing. I think the answer is this:
    • WP:PROF should tighten it's focus on publishing researchers, and move to exclude academics whose notability claims relate to teaching, or anything commercial including patent publishing.
--SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:27, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I like SmokeyJoe's idea of focusing on academics who are notable for their scholarly publications rather than for teaching or for commercialization (although some teachers or commercializers could still pass via GNG). But I've always thought of this guideline as being more strict than GNG, rather than letting persons who fail GNG pass on the basis of PROF, so I'm surprised to hear the opposite. I agree with Jytdog that there is a problem with bio pages about non-notable academics being created out of self-promotion, having seen it multiple times myself. But I've always found that the result at AfD has been to delete on the basis of being too junior according to PROF. Am I wrong about that always being the case? I'd be very interested in seeing AfDs that have kept pages about marginal academics in that way. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:58, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
This is interesting but misses the mark a couple of ways. First, the issue with academics and universities is not just commercialization; academics compete like hell for grant money and getting published in high quality journals (which is not about commercialization), and we have all seen press releases hyping How Very Important some basic research finding is, put out by universities trying to drive donations and burnish their reputations. Reputation management/PR.
Second SmokeyJoe just skipped right over the "directory-like" nature of WP pages that arise when some criteria is met and articles are kept, even when GNG is not met and we cannot write an actual WP article about a person.
Many good things happen when we strive to raise content quality, and many bad things start to happen when we lower standards. This "automatic green light" criteria in this guideline and its application leads to articles that violate WP:NOTDIRECTORY, which is policy and allows promotional directory listings to come into WP (promotional in their very existence here in WP). This guideline, or the NOTDIRECTORY policy, needs to change. It seems to me. Jytdog (talk) 02:06, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
OK, I actually would be fine with simply deleting Conversely, if an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her failure to meet either the General Notability Guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant. It should really go only one way: setting a bar higher than GNG. I agree, we should not say that it's acceptable to keep a page that fails GNG. Do other editors see a problem with deleting the sentence? --Tryptofish (talk) 02:12, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
And it occurs to me that deleting the sentence might be a better way of getting at the issues behind the no-consensus discussion just above, at #Proposal to remove administrators from C6 criterion. --Tryptofish (talk) 02:15, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Trypto, the body would have to be updated as well. It says, for example, "Academics/professors meeting any one of the following conditions, as substantiated through reliable sources, are notable." Editors do things like count publications or citations and claim that is "reliable" to meet these criteria. Jytdog (talk) 02:43, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I oppose deleting the sentence because that would be contrary to the reason for existence of WP:Prof; that scholars/researchers are notable for their achievements in research, not for their persons. I certainly see many BLPs of early career academics who are WP:Too soon, and deal with them appropriately. Promotionalism can be deal with as always-by excision. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:40, 22 February 2017 (UTC).
If there are multiple independent sources describing someone's research, then there is no problem. For instance if somebody wins a major prize, like a Lasker or a Nobel, there will be such sources. Jytdog (talk) 02:45, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
There are invariably multiple independent sources that can be found in the citation databases. For example a paper with 50 cites has been referred to by 50 different authors. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:24, 22 February 2017 (UTC).
Do you see the stretch, of using 50 citations to a fact in paper as evidence of notability of a person? The citations are not coverage of the person. WP:PROF blurs the distinction between the researcher and the researcher's research. The way I look at this is that WP:PROF-passing, WP:GNG-failing articles are not personal biographies. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:38, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
The same reasoning would tell us that we couldn't use any articles about his political accomplishments to source an article about (or notability of) Barack Obama, because they are about his works rather than about him. We would have to base our coverage only on the things he has done other than being a politician. Which is a stupid way of deciding what to cover, but it's the only conclusion I can draw from your reasoning. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:02, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
My point is that, at the lower end, the GNG doesn't work for academic researchers, interpreting the GNG rigidly; that WP:PROF needs to be an exception. It is appropriate to cover academic researchers on the basis of the impact of their research. The Barack Obama analogy breaks down pretty quickly, shall we just ignore that? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:22, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Everybody has their pet projects and demands exceptions to N so they can create and keep pages in WP that are not WP articles in any meaningful sense but rather are violations of NOTDIRECTORY. They don't do the work to actually get community buy-in by trying to amend NOTDIRECTORY to allow their pages to exist in harmony with that policy. The people here do it, the journals people do it, the radio people do it, the music people do it, etc etc. So NOTDIRECTORY becomes meaningless and WP is left wide open to various essentially promotional directory entries. This is not a good thing. Jytdog (talk) 05:47, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I don't think the PROF-passing GNG-failing articles tend to violate NOTDIRECTORY. DIRECTORY information is characterised as lacking secondary source content. WP:PROF articles tend to have no problem there, their problem is passing the test of independent sources.
  • Many pet projects may have demanded exceptions, and in due course they fail. WP:PROF has never demanded exceptions, it is a very old guideline and is well reflected in results at AfD.
  • Walled gardens, you wrote in the edit summary? A lack of incoming links to the garden is what characterises a walled garden. Do you have examples of walled gardens of academics? I don't think there is this problem.
  • Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals), the pseudo essay of a failed guideline, now there is an actual problem. Journals are commercial organisations in a commercially competitive world, there is a lot of promotion there. Similarly with your other examples. I think it is useful to chase down the promotion angle. Notable academic researchers, I think that is a field of many missing articles. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:14, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. Briefly - 1) This is exactly what every project is going to say about it and its exceptions. 2) As I already noted, academics are some of the worse abusers with regard to COI/PROMO editing. RW academia is not the elysian fields; it is brutally competitive with regard to grants and publications and people abuse WP to boost their reputations to help with both, and just for the sake of their ego. This is not a field that is free of promotionalism. Far from it. I worked in academia for 15 years and dealt with it in RL as well as here in WP. Jytdog (talk) 08:12, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I have to oppose as well. There are academics who work in fields that, while their work (or discovery) is significantly notable, it may not be independently newsworthy. Part of the reason for Prof is the fact that academic work often goes unnoticed except within academic circles, or within a particular area of research, and oftentimes bleeds over into commercial interests. I'm concerned that BLPs like Theodore Rappaport may fall victim. Atsme📞📧 03:21, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
That's just silly. There are independent sources about Rappaport like this. That said that article is full of garbage like the Reagan quote. But there is no way that person fails GNG. Jytdog (talk) 04:14, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
I was referring more to the COI/promotional/commercialization aspects that tend to be under the microscope by new page patrol and at AfD. Atsme📞📧 11:19, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
  • WP:PROF does not rate one scholarly field over another. In all scholarly fields, influence is primarily shown by citations. and citation analysis is the basic method of showing it. (The other criteria in WP:PROF are mostly additional which help speed up the decision in many cases--eg. being of fellow of the APS, but they are basically reflections of the academic influence. The numerical citations that show it vary widely in different fields, and have to be evaluated differently in the fields dependent on books,--there's no magic number. Secondary statements about influence can generally be disregarded--they tend to either duplicate the analysis if they are valid, or --very much in the other direction, are puffery or polite acknowledgments. The sort of statement that counts is citation. Since we've established over the years that the level we expect is basically that of full professor in a major research university, I would favor making that the criterion--we've essentially never held such a person non notable except in cases or prejudice about the field or the sociopolitical environment, such as our disgraceful rejection of those in fields traditionally dominated by women, such as education or nursing). But to calibrate the relevant level of citations, its appropriate to look at those unambiguously notable on the basis of awards or named professorships in the same field at the same period.
The argument we should use the GNG is nonsense. It can be use in cases where the notability ifs other than academic--eg a professor who becomes a politician. But it is irrelevant in judging the academics. I thought I put it to rest 8 years ago when I showed that with enough work I could show that anyone at the assistant professor level could meet the gng, if one selected quotations appropriately using the comments about them in the citing papers. DGG ( talk ) 04:48, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Here is what you are saying: It takes a lot of work to write a decent Wikipedia article about most academics But it is often possible, at least for people who have professor level positions.. Therefore, instead of requiring that editors actually do the work to create decent WP articles, we set up criteria that allow people to create and keep directory entries without actually doing the work of creating a WP article, and people can just show up at an AfD, glance at a few stats, vote !keep, and move on. So Wikipedia gets steadily filled with garbage. That is terrible. Jytdog (talk) 05:38, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
The amount of work, however meritorious, that went into creating an article, has never been considered to be a factor in deciding if the article is appropriate for Wikipedia. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:09, 22 February 2017 (UTC).
Of course not, but it matters if we can actually write an article, or just generate a directory entry. Jytdog (talk) 08:13, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Virtually every article covered by WP:PROF is also covered by WP:BLP, which is (a) policy and (b) much more conservative. I would say that the bare minimum should be one non-trivial independent source primarily about the subject. I really can't see why academics should be the only living individuals for whom we do not apply this basic minimum standard. Guy (Help!) 10:13, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • This guideline seems to be widely misunderstood, even though I've always thought that it is very well summarised in the hatnote box:
  • Subjects of biographical articles on Wikipedia are required to be notable; that is significant, interesting, or unusual enough to be worthy of notice, as evidenced by being the subject of significant coverage in independent reliable secondary sources.
  • Many scientists, researchers, philosophers and other scholars (collectively referred to as "academics" for convenience) are notably influential in the world of ideas without their biographies being the subject of secondary sources.
  • Having published does not, in itself, make an academic notable, no matter how many publications there are. Notability depends on the impact the work has had on the field of study. This notability guideline specifies criteria for judging the notability of an academic through reliable sources for the impact of their work.
In other words, because there tends to be a paucity of biographical sources about academics (in English at least – other countries, e.g. the ex-Soviet Union, seem to be much better at producing biographical sources on academics) but there are usually a very large number of sources about their work, we assess the impact of their work to gauge notability rather than biographical coverage. That's it. There's no "automatic passes" or assumptions of inherent notability. The guideline still asks the question "do we have enough sources?", just in a slightly different way to WP:GNG/WP:ANYBIO.
If anything it sets the "bar" higher than it ordinarily would be. WP:NAUTHOR, which also substitutes sources about a person's work for sources about a person, advises us that authors with multiple reviews of their books are notable. In contrast, multiple reviews of an academic work are nowhere near enough to pass WP:PROF (and indeed occasionally people cite WP:NAUTHOR in academic AfDs to try and get around this). It's frequently pointed out that, in practice, the other additional criteria in WP:NBIO lead to essentially anybody who is verifiably in that profession (e.g. actors who have been in films, sportspeople who have played in a tournament, pornographers that have won any of the hundreds of awards they give themselves) being kept at AfD, while academics are explicitly expected to be (significantly) more accomplished than the "average professor" to merit inclusion.
Perhaps it's the complexity of this guideline contributes to the impression that it's a pass/fail checklist or otherwise subverts WP:N. If so, I'd be in favour of simplifying it as DGG suggests above, although I'd prefer to loosen and generalise the criteria to be more in line with other professional SNGs at the same time. A very simple and easily-applied criteria would be that anyone who a) verifiably holds a permanent research position at a notable university or b) has published multiple peer-reviewed papers that have been cited by others is presumed to be notable. – Joe (talk) 10:59, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
This rule would be much broader than even i have ever proposed; permanent amounts to associate professor in the US, research university is also very broad, and "researcher" applies to anyone who gets a research degree such as a PHD. What I would advocate is associate professor at a major research university in the US, at least R1 according to Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education), on the basis that people are appointed to such positions only after very careful scrutiny from those better qualified than we are to judge. There has however in the past been no support DGG ( talk ) 05:01, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Well, my general impression is that for these people it's their work that makes them significant (notable), and thus that's the sensible focus of the page, which supplements the GNG passing academics. Other bio details are then filled in, often with very fine sources, even if one is very intent on calling a billion dollar organization (university) publication "not independent", or a highly respected learned society "not independent". Or there is good SPS, etc. Conversely, take for example Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, who seemingly passes GNG, and NACADEMIC (not that any of that has ever been tested in deletion), but even still, we don't have her birth date, so are fuzzy on even how old she is (so, are we suppose to now say, 'my god, how can he write her biography?'). How much detail is enough? But "notability" is not really about all the details. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:43, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I was pinged above, and I've posted several times recommending rising notability criteria as a mechanism for dealing with paid editing on behalf of borderline-notable subjects. I've also written quite a few biographies of scientists and academics. Given that, this strikes me as an extremely strange place to start the notability-raising campaign. Academic biographies, even somewhat fluffy ones, are not breaking the encyclopedia. They may often be subject to "COI" edits - in the sense of being edited by their subjects, students, etc. - but as far as I'm aware, are very rarely bought and paid for. So this is rather off-target in relation to the comment I made that was linked at the top of this thread, and does not seem like the most practical approach to deal with that problem. (In fact, this is a bit off-topic, but I think academics editing their own biographies, citing their own articles, and so forth represent a major missed recruitment opportunity, driven in part by over-focus on "managing COI" rather than new-editor acculturation. Newbies write what they know, as we know.)
    By comparison with many other SNGs, this one is a rather high bar, and some of the commentary above seems to miss the point of why one might want to read a biography of an academic. I have trouble parsing the distinction about being notable for things one has done rather than "as a person". Socialites are famously famous for being famous; everybody else is notable for things they've done. In the case of academics, the things they've done include influential academic work, for which we've written down some useful heuristics for determining who's influential. Opabinia regalis (talk) 23:21, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
raising N has to start somewhere and happen everywhere. Of course academic bios are not "breaking WP". No single category is breaking WP. There are boatloads of crappy promotional bios of academics in WP and as I noted above, I find that universities and academics are some of the worst abusers of COI and PROMO in Wikipedia and am happy to provide examples. I find your suggestion that we invite even more academics to write their own bios on WP to be terrible. Jytdog (talk) 23:33, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
This is not what I said I would provide. Data about " most cases of abusers of COI and PROMO" does not exist. Please don't misrepresent me. Jytdog (talk) 02:59, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
  • "parsing the distinction about being notable for things one has done rather than "as a person"? An example is whether people feel the need to attempt to cover the person's personal relationships. It may not be an important distinction, but I think there is some merit to noting whether a particular biography is a full biography, or a particular biography with a defined focus, as is common for PROF articles. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:34, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I will add that if this supposedly "virtuous" project is unwilling to clean up its own act and raise standards here, and deal with the clear lack of coherence with NOTDIRECTORY policy, there is no way we can expect to be able to improve the WP:CORP N guideline/essay and others. There is actually a reason I started here. Will post examples shortly. Jytdog (talk) 23:38, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Reading more carefully, I'm suggesting that the academics who are already coming to Wikipedia to edit their own articles or research topics represent an opportunity to recruit expert editors to work on topics other than their own BLPs.
More broadly, if you have a problem with too many paid articles, then starting with a topic area where that problem is very rare is not likely to be an effective strategy or a good test case. The problem you are trying to highlight is a much less concrete "conflict of interest" issue, which is completely different in a) having nothing to do with the terms of use, and b) having a much more direct intersection with BLP issues because the COI editor is often the article subject.
Regarding "full" biographies, I'm not sure that the subjective sense of what the author "feels the need" to write is a robust enough definition to serve as the basis for broad content decisions. Personally, when writing about a living person who is notable but not a "public figure", I prefer to keep personal-relationship information minimal unless it is already widely known, because the other people in those relationships are usually not notable. Opabinia regalis (talk) 02:07, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
  • My goodness, it took very little time for this discussion to become tl;dr. At this guideline talk page, all we can really decide is whether to make any revisions in the guideline. We cannot stop editors from creating non-notable pages, but we can make clear criteria that should lead to the proper result at AfD. If there's a problem with a proliferation of promotional academic bios, then there need to be a lot of AfD nominations. I'd really like to see a collection of examples of AfDs where the decision was "keep" based on language in PROF, but where "keep" might have been the wrong result. For all this discussion, I'm not seeing that. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:39, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
There is a problem with this guideline, and the way it is used, leading to articles that violate NOTDIRECTORY. There is no point to AfD discussions if people are going to cite some criterion and argue that meeting it automatically green lights articles, regardless of whether there are sufficient refs with which an NPOV article can be written. Jytdog (talk) 02:58, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Can you please provide examples, because so far you re not very convincing as to there being a problem here. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:28, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
I haven't gone through the examples, yet, but I do agree that there have been instances all over WP where stubs are created - some based on nothing more than a CV - and abandoned, (reminds me of a cuckoo bird) leaving the work for other editors to expand and substantiate notability. When I've tried to G11 such an article, the tag was quickly removed. I've also been on the flip side of that coin, and have since become more inclined to help substantiate N and expand the article when there's collaboration. Perhaps we can cut down on some of these occurrences by setting a minimum word limit for article creation or approach it from a slightly different angle regarding content? Just a thought. I agree with what DGG suggested as I have participated in a few N discussions regarding educators and academics (and I'll add librarians and lawyers) wherein notability may not be determinable per our current citation standards even though the impact was substantial; the latter of which requires collaboration with experts in the field and far more research to determine impact. We also have to consider the practices and customs of other countries. Atsme📞📧 16:07, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Drive-by CV dumps by brood parasites are not the fault of WP:PROF. The parasites are not reading the fine text of notability subguidelines. The answer is WP:ACTRIAL. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:04, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

examples

I said I would provide examples of promotional editing by academics. I am introducing this not because it should drive change (or not) to the guideline, but rather because folks have been waving around some notion that academics are virtuous, and arguing that the low notability standard with its automatic greenlighting of directory entries should be OK because of that putative virtue.

some of the cases brought to COIN
Other examples
  • Misophonia, all kinds of problems with academics trying to skew this article; see its talk page and the listing of connected contributors there
  • Kasmith did nothing promote themselves in WP
  • Ariel Fernandez of course SPI
articles that are terrible - hijackings of WP space that are directory entries, serve as personal webhosts or "faculty webpages", or are otherwise promotional


All this list proves is that there are some junk articles on Wikipedia. What a revelation. Most on the list have not been to AfD, Lober and Lubin would likely pass with flying colors if they did. Some on the list are junk and would be unlikely to ever pass AfD. Anybody can write junk on Wikipedia and many do. The only cause for complaint would be if junk articles were passing AfD, and they aren't. I see no evidence WP:Prof is not doing the job it was designed to do. There has been a disagreeable feature of this thread which started here; bad language and claims of incompetent and corrupt are not useful for producing a collegial editing environment. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:58, 23 February 2017 (UTC).

Exactly. This category of articles is just as prone to promotional garbage as the rest of WP. People have been arguing above as though it should be privileged because it is "academic" and somehow more pristine. It isn't, and we should raise N standards here just like everywhere else. Jytdog (talk) 01:40, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Nobody has been arguing that above. Junk articles about academics should go to Afd like everything else. You could help with that instead of starting time-wasting threads. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:02, 24 February 2017 (UTC).
Jytdog: my short answer is ^what Xxanthippe said. My longer answer is that I posted this: [1], and you replied to it, but you clearly did not understand what I was saying. And just now you clearly did not listen to Xxanthippe either. I've looked at each of your links, and there isn't an AfD among them (maybe there had previously been one, but it wasn't linked to and I didn't bother to look for one). There's a PROD on the Welker page, and that's it (and I corrected a howler on the Lorber page). What editors here need to see are AfDs where such pages were kept on the basis of something in PROF. Anything else here is just wasting everyone's time. As I said before: there is nothing we can revise here that will change what kinds of articles people start. It's a matter of taking bad pages through the deletion process, and AfD is all that SNGs can really influence. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:47, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
I am also in agreement with Xxanthippe. Jytdog, are you claiming the biographies in your list are all non-notable? At a glance I'd say Trevisani (who has no article) and Takaku are not notable, Schmidt and Welker are too far out of my field and their articles are too bad to make their case, and the rest are just middling-to-bad articles of notable people. (Lublin in particular - the article isn't very good, but a notability tag is practically a BLP violation.)
You mentioned once above and again here that there is some sense in which academics are perceived as "virtuous" and this has something to do with the notability standards that apply. You're the only person here to use that word. I've never heard anyone make that argument and do not think that real or perceived "virtue" or lack thereof has anything to do with whether or not we should cover a subject. If you're going to make the claim that academic notability standards are lower (which they aren't) because of something to do with academics being seen as "virtuous" (huh?) then you're going to need some diffs. Opabinia regalis (talk) 02:07, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
You are the one who thinks academia doesn't pay for editing (or tell their admins or assistants to buff up their articles) and who thinks academics should have free reign to edit their own bios. For pete's sake. Jytdog (talk) 02:22, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
For pete's sake right back at you. You need to listen to what the rest of us are telling you. This isn't about the virtue of academia or lack thereof. Either show some AfDs as requested, or drop it. --Tryptofish (talk) 02:28, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
I can't see any point in proceeding with this thread. TFTT. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:31, 24 February 2017 (UTC).
  • I'll step away. Folks are focusing on me, as though this is my problem and not WP's. I said this earlier, and I will say it again: people, just like you, at every single WikiProject, are going to say the exact same thing you have said here. "No problem here!!" "You prove there is problem!" etc etc. Those who advocate for addressing promotional editing by raising N standards should reflect on that. Jytdog (talk) 04:48, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Of course you should show there's a problem if you want to change a long-established guideline, Jytdog, who the bloody hell else would? For the record, there's no "project" associated with this guideline (to my knowledge), you're just talking to the people who watch this page, and maybe you'd have found a more positive reception if you'd come with a specific proposal to address a specific problem, instead of a vague rant about WP:NOTDIRECTORY (which, by the way, doesn't seem to say what you think it does) and what has turned out to be a complete smokescreen about COI editing. – Joe (talk) 09:41, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I have a feeling this discussion may have reached the point where it should remain open another day or two in case anyone has something more they would like to say, and then the discussion should be closed. Alternatively: the best way to get the discussion back on track is to provide examples of AfDs (not pages, not COIN postings, but AfDs) where the current language in this guideline is being misapplied in ways that spammy bio pages are being kept. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:05, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Young scientist AFD - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hari Bhimaraju

I recently chanced upon this AFD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hari Bhimaraju about a young child who has won a few science awards and has been invited to the White house science fair. It would help if editors could have a look and decide if this is notable. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 04:02, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Criterion 10: AUTHOR?

Would like to float a suggestion for creating a criterion 10 (or adjusting criterion 9) to also include WP:AUTHOR. Publishing academics, those who have authored two or more books with non-trivial reviews, would qualify under AUTHOR. I've seen several AfD on the basis of not meeting WP:ACADEMIC while their authorship is overlooked. Feedback? K.e.coffman (talk) 01:20, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the point. There already is WP:Author, and current policy is that notability can be obtained from any of WP:Prof or WP:Author or WP:GNG or anything else. They are not mutually exclusive. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:29, 27 April 2017 (UTC).
And the lead makes that clear (last paragraph). EEng 01:40, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Edwin Ross Williams -- does this subject really warrant an article?

Hi folks -- I'm not an expert in this arena so I thought I'd bring this up to you. I came across this article while going through the underlinked backlog. Given its thinness, I consulted WP:NACADEMIC to see if this subject really warranted an article, and sure enough -- by the letter of NACADEMIC this physicist definitely merits inclusion.

Does that seem logical from your POV? Google searching verifies that the subject exists, but there's no other biographical data anywhere online. As it stands, the article simply reprints the paragraph-length entry in Williams' fellowship award 23 years, and there seems to be no danger of the article ever being expanded.

I'm in no great rush to delete it, but it strikes me as a clear example of Wikipedia uselessly reproducing a directory entry with no hope of ever spawning a real article -- but one that is protected by existing guidelines. Any thoughts on this? A Traintalk 17:08, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

I would say yes per WP:PROF#Criteria. Atsme📞📧 18:09, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
He clearly passes WP:PROF#C3, but if it's biographical detail you want, there's a paragraph of it in the author biography at the end of this paper. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:19, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
David Eppstein, thank you for finding that! I'll work it into the article. A Traintalk 18:27, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Citation metrics

In the Citation metrics section it states: Citation measures such as the h-index, g-index, etc., are of limited usefulness in evaluating whether Criterion 1 is satisfied. They should be approached with caution because their validity is not, at present, completely accepted, and they may depend substantially on the citation database used.

I have noted that in AfDs editors sometimes make the assertion that this statement implies that the metrics are too unreliable to be used at all. Because the coverage of citation databases has improved greatly in the last decade I suggest that the words by editors not familiar with the citation system be added after caution to justify metrics being used where appropriate. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:05, 3 April 2017 (UTC).

I can imagine a lot of gaming the system following that particular way of revising it, along the lines of "but I am, too, familiar with the system". Maybe it would be better to insert "Although they can sometimes be useful," before "[t]hey should be approached...". --Tryptofish (talk) 23:50, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
I can't see that there will be a problem. The rogues will go on being rogues whatever the guidelines say. The change would be useful as a guide for the perplexed and might discourage edits like this [2] by people who don't like what they find in the citation data. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:38, 16 April 2017 (UTC).
Can someone please a quick overview of the evidence in this area, both for the "their validity is not, at present, completely accepted" and the new counterargument that "coverage of citation databases has improved greatly in the last decade"? Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 02:58, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
That is a good point. The guidelines were written some time ago. Since then I am not aware of any challenge to the accuracy of citation statistics. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:26, 16 April 2017 (UTC).
they need interpretation. You can't just summarize them by a single measure. There's a immense literature in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and elsewhere on multiple attempts to find a single measure, but none is generally accepted despite a lot of propaganda by their inventors. Here's a simple illustration of the problem with h index: Professor A has 25 papers each with 25 citations,. Professor B has 22 publications with 100 citations each and one with 24, For A, h is 25; for B, 24. There are similar problems with the other indexes. What h is useful for is distinguishing among mediocre scientists. When using statistics of that sort here, I use words., e.g, Professor B has 22 papers with 100 or more citations, to avoid giving the impression of spurious validity.
There are other problems.They cannot be used between fields, because of the difference in citing behavior That is, how many papers does a typical article cite). It enormously lower in math than experimental medicine, to use what I think are the two extremes. It's also necessary to consider who is listed as principal author, and what the relative position means. This varies not just from field to filed, but from research group to research group. James Watson tells in his autobio Genes, girls, and Gamow : after the Double helix how, when he was a Professor at Harvard before going to Cold Spring Harbor, he deliberately left his name off his group's papers.
For the key objection in tha section quoted above, that it is not clear abput the coverage of the citation database, Xantippe is correct: the no only has Google Scholar been reliable, but Scopus and Science Citation index have been leapfrogging over each other to add more journals. At present WOs including Emerging Sources Citation Index and their Index to Scientific Proceedings have all together about the same coverage as Scopius.
However, what none of them cover is literature published in lesser developed academic systems except for a very few journals. Nor do they cover many of the Russian journals not translated into English, and even fewer of the ones published in Chinese and Japanese. It is possible to argue that we judge by world wide criteria, but for studies dealing primarily with situations specific countries, I consider them invalid as such papers are almost always published in national journals. Google Scholar, btw, has been shown in many studies,included one by one of my students,, to have about twice as many citations as ISI or Scopus, but to otherwise yield the same relative ranking. That's because they include other things than the peer-reviewed literature. I nowadays use GS for stats here, because they are universally available.
And they are not at all valid in the humanities. The who citation structure is different. Notability there is primarily based on books, and a book by a person will typically appear only once every few years, but may then have hundreds of citations. Most of them will be to other books, and in some fields to really obscure journals.
, I have frequently commented in AfDs that the use of raw h values without making corrections for field, and without checking the distribution of citation, is not valid,, yet people continue to use them that way, even in the humanities. I would certainly support modernizing the guideline, but certainly not to an inaccurate statement such as suggested.
I apologize for not including references here. I've meant for years to expand our article and our discussion. (JASIST is open access after 1 year--you can for a start just scan it--there's an average of two papers on this each monthly issue -- and an average of 1 per issue about Wikipedia) DGG ( talk ) 13:25, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Content question for professor article

I have always put both a professor's faculty website and curriculum vitae in the external links section. However I am being reverted at Michael Hammond with the note that only one self-published site is allowed in external links. Is this true for academics? Or just for those who are not Stephen Hawking? StarryGrandma (talk) 22:33, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

See WP:EL -- normally only one personal we site is allowed. This is to prevent people listing facebook, linkedin, etc. etc., or sub-pages of their site. But there are all sorts of common sense exceptions, and I consider this one of them. See WP:ELIMINOFFICIAL. But if the cv is being used for routine personal info or a list of publications -- and an official CV is reliable for such things as schools and degrees and prior positions, it should be in the refs, and there's no point duplicating it. DGG ( talk ) 12:48, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Having just read a 2013 article about how Wikipedia has become to beauracratic and rule bound, I have to say I think both a website and a CV can be put in the external links section. That said, I think they both can be used as sources, and an external links section could be avoided.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:04, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Addition to description of Criteria 1

I'ld like to add the phrase "publications and citations should, at a minimum, qualify the person for tenure at a major research institution" [3], to the section clarifying Criteria 1 (Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#Specific_criteria_notes). I believe it's fairly uncontroversial, that if a person is deemed notable purely on the basis of publications and citations, those publications and citations should at the minimum, be able to qualify a person for tenure at a major research university. After all, there are very many tenured faculty at major research universities around the world, who are not in the least notable. Hence, publications and citations cannot (solely) qualify a person as notable, if they cannot even gain the person tenure at a major research university. LK (talk) 03:02, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

As an illustration of this, consider the faculty list [4] at Texas A&M University, undoubtedly a major research university. It's pretty obvious that the majority of tenured faculty there are not notable by Wikipedia standards. LK (talk) 03:05, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
I don't see that would be useful. Standards for tenure vary so widely, for example between Harvard and some cow college. On the other hand, the number of citations is an objective measure (of something). Xxanthippe (talk) 03:09, 25 May 2017 (UTC).
My point is, if the person's publications and citations cannot gain a person tenure at a "cow university", then they obviously do not qualify a person as notable by Wikipedia standards; and that we should be clear about this. LK (talk) 03:24, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
No thanks. Very, very few Wikipedia editors are qualified to make that judgment. Further, publications are only one potential part of the requirements and expectations for tenure at most institutions. ElKevbo (talk) 03:29, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
As far as I know, letters of recommendation from well-reputed researchers at other institutions are required for tenure decisions at all major research institutions. We have no such information. So the only way we could evaluate this phrase would be to use it to mean that tenured people at major research institutions are automatically notable, I think not the intent and not a good idea. Additionally, standards for tenure vary widely from institution to institution, from field to field, and from era to era even within the same field at the same institution. It would also be a good idea to avoid criteria that can only be evaluated by other academics. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:52, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
OK, I bow to the crowd. But I'll just point out here (for future reference) that we are all agreed that publications and citations just barely good enough to get a person tenure, does not make a person notable by Wikipedia standards. LK (talk) 09:34, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
I just made a related edit, before having seen this discussion here, sorry. I think that what I did was consistent with what editors are saying here, but... --Tryptofish (talk) 22:13, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
Another thing to consider is that what "tenure" means varies from country to country, and it doesn't exist in some places (e.g. the UK). We can't invoke it as a universal criterion. – Joe (talk) 00:55, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Academics and the GNG

Please see discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability#Does the GNG apply to academics? Josh Milburn (talk) 15:35, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

I've read it, and there really isn't anything already said there that I would disagree with or feel the need to add to. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:22, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Actually, I just changed my mind, and will comment. Sorry for wasting space here. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:57, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

For an update, Josh and Tryptofish, the closing rationale on the discussion about inclusivity of WP:NSPORTS says that no subject notability guideline would supersede or replace GNG. How would this decision affect this specific notability guideline about academics? --George Ho (talk) 02:12, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me, George Ho. I'm not sure that the close about NSPORTS really affects that earlier discussion that much, but it could have a significant effect on how PROF is interpreted at AfD in another way, and this is something that I would like to see comments on from other editors who watch here. There has been a longstanding consensus here that PROF should actually set a higher bar for academics (who do not otherwise pass GNG, and that's an important caveat) than GNG does, because otherwise we get a lot of non-notable bios being defended by subjects who want to misuse WP to advance their academic careers, on the grounds that having published some scholarly papers supposedly passes GNG even if that does not satisfy the criteria here. Now in my personal opinion, things do not really change as a result of the recent close, because GNG defines when a page may be kept, not when it must be kept, and because the basic concern about NSPORTS concerns SNGs that might set lower standards than GNG, so that's a different issue. But unfortunately, I have no doubt that this close is going to result in a new bout of AfD arguments that we must not delete academic bios on the basis of PROF, so long as a case for passing GNG can be made, which would be tantamount to deprecating PROF. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:50, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I've never interpreted or used specialty notability guidelines like this one as superseding or replacing GNG. I've always understood them to be alternative explanations of GNG in specific contexts. So I think that the close described above sounds like the right one. In particular, I don't share your worry that this will open up this project to hordes of new articles about lesser known academics who have only published some papers in their discipline. I don't understand any of the notability guidelines as according an author notability simply on the basis of having published lots of writing; we still need independent evidence that the subject-to-be has been the subject of other's writing or has somehow been recognized by others. Indeed, that - "has somehow been recognized by others" - is the utility of specialized notability guidelines like this one. ElKevbo (talk) 02:33, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
I agree with you. I'm actually not so much concerned about hordes of articles as about hordes of clueless and time-wasting arguments during AfDs. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:58, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
Contacted one of the closers, who made a response. --George Ho (talk) 00:41, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Citations for Distinguished Professors

I've recently started a few articles about Distinguished Professors at important schools. I could easily find information about them on their university websites, which provided quite a bit of useful information, including lists of publications. Other references were minimal or very hard to find, except that there were often many, many references to individual publications. Those references weren't highly useful, since they cover only one tiny part of the person's entire being.

One hopes that solidly informative university website pages, possibly supplemented by a few references to the person's publications, would be sufficient as references in Distinguished Professor articles. Some specific guidelines on this would be very useful to have. Lou Sander (talk) 16:23, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Somewhere or other there's a guideline to the effect that school websites are considered reliable for routine information such as positions held and dates of appointment, but are not independent so don't count for notability purposes. EEng 16:39, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
This guideline, says that. I think the OP is welcome to write an "how-to" essay, but I am having a hard-time thinking a guideline on how-to, would be adopted or really worthwhile. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:44, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
It would be good to know exactly where the stuff about school websites is. Distinguished Professors are notable by definition, so some reassurance that their university site is a reliable source would be welcome. Lou Sander (talk) 22:09, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Hate to say it, but I can't agree that a Distinguished Professor is notable by definition. EEng 22:29, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
See, General Notes. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:30, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Alanscottwalker just beat me to it, but the first bullet point in General Notes is indeed the place. In addition, Criterion 5 and its associated note address the notability of Distinguished Professors. There probably is not much need for an additional how-to. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:37, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Right. BTW what Crit. 5 says is 'The person holds or has held a named chair appointment or "Distinguished Professor" appointment at a major institution...'. It's the "major institution" bit that I was trying to emphasize when I said Distinguished Profs aren't notable "by definition". EEng 00:40, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
Roger that, and thanks to all for pointing out the General Notes. I'm assuming that the university site is sufficiently reliable that it can be used to verify the "Distinguished Professor" claim. I guess if a person is a Distinguished Professor at an Undistinguished Institution, he's just out of luck here. ;-) Lou Sander (talk) 01:00, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
I once started a guide to writing professor articles, aimed at students who try to add their professors. It's not yet complete, but it is here and provides help on finding references and using them. The person's CV if available will give you much of the information you need. StarryGrandma (talk) 00:23, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
Nice job on the guide, Gran! Lou Sander (talk) 01:07, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
There are hazards in writing about people you know. I add a warning. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:22, 12 March 2017 (UTC).
Off-topic friendly banter
Good point! BTW, many years ago I was in a freshman chemistry class at Duke University. The teacher was giving a lecture on the hazards of metallic sodium -- it explodes or bursts into flame upon contact with water or the moisture in the air. He wasn't careful with his materials, and the sodium caught fire, taking his beard and lab coat with it. An alert classmate grabbed the CO2 bottle and put out the fire. He was much-loved by his students, and while he was recuperating, he couldn't lecture in a standing position. His students pitched in and bought him an Eames chair. Thereby he qualified as an Extinguished Professor with a Named Chair at a major institution. Lou Sander (talk) 04:42, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
[FBDB]At Duke this passes for humor? EEng 16:27, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
[FBDB] Well, maybe. I never "passed" any courses there, including freshman chemistry, though I occasionally passed some chemical substances (gas and water). And I call Duke a "major institution" mostly because of its basketball team, which excels at "passing". The academic end of it has become infected with the sort of thing that has been troubling many universities lately. I passed on them when I saw the president's and faculty's activities surrounding the Duke lacrosse case. Having shredded my academic credential, I tried to find work in stand-up comedy, but that didn't work out, either. So I've settled for the sit-down variety. Lou Sander (talk) 16:54, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
On the basis of your contributions here you have been appointed an Honorary Assistant Curator at The Museums. EEng 17:07, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
He would actually qualify as a Relinquished Professor with an Unnamed Chair at a major encyclopedic institution. Happy to meet your acquaintence. Atsme📞📧 17:12, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
Well, I am honored to be an Honorary Assistant Curator. Not to pass any judgments, but The Museums seems to be something that passes for humor on Wikipedia. Lou Sander (talk) 17:27, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
We are obviously getting off-topic, but that's OK because the original question has been answered, and I was reminded of a true story. This really happened; I'm not making it up. In my own not-so-distinguished professorial days, I was on the admissions committee for the department's PhD program. We would get a very large number of applications each year from some east Asian countries, and they sometimes came with obviously copy-and-pasted personal statement essays (a sure-fire way to be rejected). From time to time, these identical applications would say: "I would like very much to attend your extinguished university". --Tryptofish (talk) 22:54, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
Harvard
Yale (formerly Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry)
Harvard wins!
Yale lost their luggage.
That would be Yale. EEng 00:25, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
No, it wasn't. But I wish I had gotten a job there, instead of where I actually did. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:34, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Indeed a shocking indictment of your institution. EEng 00:40, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
You don't know the half of it. I sued them and won a six-figure settlement. (By the way, for any innocent bystanders, this is [FBDB] between EEng and myself, as we both went to Harvard. Personally, I don't really have anything against Yale, and Yale has better architecture than Harvard does.) --Tryptofish (talk) 00:45, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
A six-fig. settlement, huh? Obviously you're a big fish in a little pond. And your architectural taste sucks. EEng 02:05, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
[FBDB] I returned to Duke to take a sequence of adult education courses on alternative energy sources. I either dropped out of or failed Hydroelectric, Geothermal and Solar, but I did pass Wind. I guess I am no scientist. (I promise never, ever to post here again.) ;-) Lou Sander (talk) 00:02, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
<Click here> BTW, you only have to use {fbdb} when your post might be mistaken as bringing disrepute on others, not (as here) yourself. EEng 00:25, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

It's time for a show/hide template. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:58, 14 March 2017 (UTC).

  • Comment Unless the professor has an actual named chair, just the amorphous title "distinguished" is not enough to show notability. Internal references from university webpages are not enough to show notability. Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia covering people with broad impact, not a platform to rehash PR material. Universities may be less slanted than some organizations, but they have a vested interest in building up the reputation of their professors. Wikipedia aims to be built on publications indepdent of its subjects, not on PR.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:00, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Your opinion doesn't seem at all in line with this guideline, criterion 5 of which is "The person holds or has held a named chair appointment or distinguished professor appointment at a major institution." Distinguished Professor is a specific academic rank and, as I understand it, it's equivalent to a named chair; they're just given out when there isn't an endowment to go with the title. It's incredibly unlikely that somebody who holds one is not notable by Wikipedia's standards. – Joe (talk) 15:15, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Modification of the last paragraph in the lead

There is a clear consensus against the proposal, and thus there will be no change to the guideline. Primefac (talk) 02:24, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hi all,

I'm proposing a change to the notability guideline for academics.

I am aware that a similar proposal was mooted about a year ago, however it was argued merely on the grounds of WP:GNG compliance whereas I am also arguing the case on consistency with other guidelines. In other words, don't speedily close it on the grounds that it's already been discussed.

The sidebar on the notability page gives eleven subject-specific notability guidelines, excluding the academic guideline.

These are:

  • WP:NASTRO, which specifically states These criteria do not supersede WP:NOTABILITY, they merely supplement and clarify it within the context of astronomical objects. If an astronomical object does not meet the general notability guideline, especially if it lacks evidence of significant coverage in independent, reliable sources, then it risks being merged or redirected to an existing article, or deleted altogether.
  • WP:NBOOK, which specifically states This is not an absolute guarantee that there will necessarily be a separate, stand-alone article entirely dedicated to that book.
  • WP:NEVENT, which specifically states Events are probably notable if they have enduring historical significance and meet the general notability guideline, or if they have a significant lasting effect.
  • WP:NFILM, which specifically states For the majority of topics related to film, the criteria established at the general notability guideline is sufficient to follow.
  • WP:NGEO, which specifically states Per Wikipedia's Five pillars, the encyclopedia also functions as a gazetteer; therefore, geographical features meeting Wikipedia's General notability guideline (GNG) are presumed, but not guaranteed, to be notable.
  • WP:NMUS, which specifically states Please note that the failure to meet any of these criteria does not mean an article must be deleted; conversely, meeting any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be kept. Rather, these are rules of thumb...
  • WP:NNUMBER, which doesn't mention the general notability guideline because numbers themselves don't really get coverage in themselves. Maybe this could be changed but that's a separate issue.
  • WP:NORG, which specifically states No organization is considered notable except to the extent that independent sources demonstrate that it has been noticed by people outside of the organization. This is almost identical to the provisions laid out at WP:GNG so it complies with it in everything but name.
  • WP:NPERSON, which specifically states Failure to meet these criteria is not conclusive proof that a subject should not be included; conversely, meeting one or more does not guarantee that a subject should be included.
  • WP:NSPORT, which specifically states Please note that the failure to meet these criteria does not mean an article must be deleted; conversely, the meeting of any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be kept. These are merely rules of thumb...
  • WP:NWEB, which specifically states These criteria are presented as rules of thumb for easily identifying web content that Wikipedia should probably have articles about. In almost all cases, a thorough search for independent, third-party reliable sources will be successful for content meeting one or both of these criteria. However, meeting these criteria is not an absolute guarantee that Wikipedia should have a separate, stand-alone article entirely dedicated to the content.

Please note that all of these guidelines either explicitly state that meeting their provisions and not the general notability guideline (or just merely meeting their provisions) does not necessarily establish notability, or offer deference to the general notability guideline and incorporate it into their criteria.

However, WP:PROF is the only subject-specific guideline which explicitly states that its provisions supersede the general notability guideline and that the latter is irrelevant when discussing the notability of academics, specifically stating If an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her failure to meet either the General Notability Guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant.

The whole idea of a general notability guideline is that it can be applied to everything because it makes the process of establishing notability fair and even across different topics or at least evens the playing field. While in practice at AfD, stubs on sportspeople who meet WP:NSPORT but not WP:GNG are likely to be kept under the former, WP:NSPORT specifically states that it is merely a rule of thumb and is merely to be used as an easy method of interpreting WP:GNG: The guideline on this page provides bright-line guidance to enable editors to determine quickly if a subject is likely to meet the General Notability Guideline. I see no reason why we should allow academics to receive a free pass over the general notability guideline.

Therefore, I propose that we remove the paragraph from WP:PROF which reads This guideline is independent from the other subject-specific notability guidelines, such as WP:BIO, WP:MUSIC, WP:AUTH etc. and is explicitly listed as an alternative to the General Notability Guideline.[1] It is possible for an academic not to be notable under the provisions of this guideline but to be notable in some other way under one of the other subject-specific notability guidelines. Conversely, if an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her failure to meet either the General Notability Guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant.

Thanks,

DrStrauss talk 10:00, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Survey

  • Strong oppose--Hell no!This was initially implemented to counter a largely-evident systematic bias.A film-star partaking in some B-grade movie-flicks manages to get his name enlisted in some form of media(at-least in tabloids etc.). I know and/or have seen several top-notch academic(s) who have failed to garner notable media covg. despite being superb at their field.Winged Blades of GodricOn leave 11:38, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
  • There needs to be something done to move this policy away from using primary sources. I wonder if a sensible compromise might be to use the current guidance for what makes an academic notable, but then only allow an article if reliable secondary sources can be found to source the article (even if the reliable secondary sources wouldn't ordinarily be enough to demonstrate notability per GNG). Nick (talk) 12:26, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
  • I used to have a similar opinion to that expressed by Winged Blades of Godric above. However, I now think that the fairness considerations are much less important that the quality of articles considerations, and WP:PROF does result in a huge number of CV-like articles that are unimprovable and contribute little or nothing to the encyclopedia. I now think that we might be better off eliminating WP:PROF altogether, and just using the general WP:GNG/WP:BIO standards when it comes to academics. If that results in 90% fewer articles about academics, so be it. Nsk92 (talk) 14:01, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. PROF doesn't depart significantly from the GNG, it's still about making sure a topic has been the subject of multiple reliable sources. The difference is that whilst the GNG requires those sources to be "directly" about the subject, PROF allows us to substitute sources about an academic's work for sources about them personally. So unless you tweaked that part of the GNG, saying that articles had to meet both PROF and the GNG would render this guideline largely irrelevent in one fell swoop.
And to be blunt, why would on earth would we want to do that? What problem are we trying to solve here? A surfeit of uncontroversial biographies of accomplished scholars? PROF is a very long-standing guideline with a solid consensus behind it. It gives us clear and consistent criteria that has been applied in thousands and thousands of AfDs. I'd understand if it were letting in a flood of sub-par articles, but I can see no evidence of that. And I'd understand, if it were actually giving academics a "free pass", but in actuality it sets a substantially higher bar than the GNG or any of the other SNGs. "Consistency" strikes me as a very weak reason to throw out a guideline that is functioning perfectly well as is.
And on a more general, and probably more controversial, note: if we are going to insist on this one-size-fits-all approach to notability we'll never make any headway in countering systematic bias. – Joe (talk) 15:35, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose as none of these changes are relevant to how the mere judging and basis of PROF articles, which is what should be considered above all; instead it would mean applying a different criteria that excludes based on what is personally considered acceptable and not, and is thus unfair in actually weighing what indeed constitutes notability and significance by PROF's meaning. Because we have established for years, that any evidence to show the scientist is considered a notable figure in their field, which naturally includes their own publications or citations, that alone would be enough. For example, for the years we've had a Sports Notability which established that major leagues such as American football and baseball constitute as Notability; SportsNotability itself has indeed been used to keep an article. A different outlook in a different field because it's not sports-related goes against our principles of a relevant encyclopedia. Implementing any changes to satisfy a side that opposes the subject itself is in fact against our own Article Neutrality policies. Consistency with other guidelines would be like essentially pairing different criterias such as Sportspeople and Musicians which obviously aren't going to completely coincidence, and expecting that it would sort itself out. I'll note that, in the entire time AfDs for Professors have ever occurred, over three-fourths were kept therefore this is the established consensus we've applied to Professors; if at all, one was deleted, it was because of a technicality such as unresolved information violations. Changing the PROF would essentially cause worse in that unnecessary changes, in regards to the science field articles, would happen. SwisterTwister talk 16:48, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I believe that the paragraph should remain as it is. In some significant ways, this guideline is different from other SNGs, and that's a feature, not a bug. As others correctly note above, there are distinguished scholars who are not exactly tabloid fodder, and thus it is important to have scholarly-based criteria here. But there is an even more important reason as well. Contra NSK92, I have always found this guideline helpful at AfD in getting rid of non-notable CV-like pages. There is a significant problem with the creation of promotional pages about non-notable academics, usually junior level people who may become notable in the future but are not notable now, written either by the page subject or by someone editing on their behalf. There is a perception emerging that having a Wikipedia biography can advance one's academic career, leading to these CV-like pages. By explaining how to distinguish low-impact scholarship from high-impact scholarship, this guideline serves an important purpose (and in such cases actually sets a bar for notability that is higher than what a naive reading of GNG would produce). If editors are having problems dealing with low-quality pages at AfD, I recommend looking more carefully at the details here, because you can find solid reasons to justify deletion. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:18, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
    • My problem is that even with fairly prominent academics WP articles about them often still look like CVs. Sure, there is often enough there to convey a convincing impression that the academic is notable, e.g. perhaps a ref to an award, a society fellowship, some journal editorships, and maybe even a named professorship. But these are usually referenced to primary sources, and the articles themselves rarely contain substantive discussion about the subject's contribution to their field (because typically sources containing such discussion do not exist). It is even more rare for these articles to contain nontrivial biographical information, e.g. something about early life, family background, etc. I just don't see what value these kinds of article have for Wikipedia, even though they certainly do satisfy our existing WP:PROF criteria. Nsk92 (talk) 21:36, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
      • Yes, I see that a lot, too. But in those cases, it's not an issue of notability, but rather, one of bad and unencyclopedic writing. What really applies there is WP:NOTRESUME. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
        • Actually, I am not sure. I think that many of these articles look the best that they can under the circumstances. They provide a listing of formal indicators of notability per WP:PROF but not much else because there is nothing else to provide. It is just too often the case that, until a prominent academic is 70 (or 80 or maybe already passed away) and lucky enough to get a festschrift with an article providing the details of their biography and analyzing their research contributions, there won't be a secondary source with this kind of information. And so all too often we are left with a WP article saying that so and so is a Distinguish Professor at such-and-such a place, is/was and editor of particular journals, is a fellow of some scholarly society, and maybe at some point received some kind of a prize/award. I don't think that these kind of articles result from unencyclopedic writing but rather result from the fact that usually there just aren't sources to include much more than that. Nsk92 (talk) 21:59, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
          • In that kind of case, I think that PROF is a good thing. If someone is a Distinguished Professor, their publications must have been about something, so a competent editor should have been able to summarize how Person X contributed to knowledge about Topic Y, and that goes beyond CV stuff to actually be encyclopedic. Please note that, also, a scholarly paper by someone else, independent of the person that the page is about, that cites the work of the person that the page is about, is arguably a secondary source. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:05, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
          • @Nsk92: Could you give some examples? In my experience "CV-like" details (e.g. educational background, career history) form the backbone of academic biographies, but if an article passes this guideline it's not hard to expand them to include summaries of the subject's research and its reception. – Joe (talk) 22:55, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Some of the above are adequate as is, some could be expanded by experts. I invite you to do this where needed. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:19, 30 August 2017 (UTC).
I took a quick look at each of those examples, and a few of them are probably legitimate keeps. But Anna Mikusheva provides a good example of why this SNG is needed and should have been used better in the AfD: she is less than a full professor, and this guideline would have supported the argument that the page is too-soon. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:55, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. No need for change has been demonstrated. The issue seems to be that to write a bio of such people it needs an editor with more specialised knowledge than needed for a person in, for example, sport or popular culture. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:44, 29 August 2017 (UTC).
  • Oppose academic biographies are needed to form a credible encyclopedia. Many of these people who we should cover simply won't be covered in non-academic sourcing. The GNG is not a statement of religious faith: it is a practical tool to assess whether or not something is generally notable. WP:N, the guideline to which the GNG is only one part, explicitly states that something meets its first prong either because It meets either the general notability guideline below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline listed in the box on the right;. All subject notability guidelines create a presumption of notability equal to the GNG under WP:N, because the GNG is also not a guarantee that a subject will be included, it is a presumption that can pretty easily be refuted in favour of merger or deletion. The difference with PROF is that it sets an objective standard for what is notable. That is vastly preferable to the subjective standards of the GNG and the other SNGs, and rolling it back would be a net negative to the project. PROF is probably our most effective notability guideline, and I would like to see the others move in this direction, not vice versa. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:32, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Support.
(1) The Village pump would have been a better forum for this discussion, which as confirmed in the pagewatcher responses above, concerns not a paragraph but the teeth of this notability guideline.
(2) Two major omissions in the fact-finding above:

clear consensus that no subject-specific notability guideline ... is a replacement for or supercedes the General Notability Guideline
— Village pump (policy)/Archive 135, June 2017

and its precedent, the RfC on secondary school notability. In brief, our subject-specific notability guideline (SNG) talk pages, each a decentralized cloister deciding inclusion criteria on its own, had fallen out of sync with sitewide consensus on the primacy of the general notability guideline (GNG), as is confirmed on this very page.
The June quote is straightforward: WP:PROF isn't exempt from the GNG. Put another way, all individual topics on WP, including academics, must have significant coverage in multiple reliable, independent sources. Otherwise we cannot do justice to the topic without resorting to primary sources. And our other policy (Holy "Policy"!) pages are clear that as an encyclopedia, we cannot base an entire article on primary sources:

Do not base an entire article on primary sources
— Wikipedia:No original research

Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities ... so long as: ... 5. the article is not based primarily on such sources.
— Wikipedia:Verifiability

Based on prior precedent of the GNG's primacy and WP's highest policy, it is untenable to hold that academics and professors deserve a right withheld from other topic area: to have articles based entirely on primary sources, and accordingly, to have the PROF SNG supersede the GNG. (Also relevant: a 2016 proposal to relax the GNG for systemically underserved/underreported topics, similar to the category under discussion, did not pass.)
My reading of the tea leaves: WP, as a whole, wants SNG reform, namely because editors widely view the inconsistent application of the general notability guideline (GNG) as unjust (also linked to discussions for baselines of quality). That makes the paragraph under discussion the next logical barrier to surmount in the march of the two aforementioned findings of consensus. I am no longer watching this page—ping if you'd like a response czar 06:04, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
While I agree with your assessment in some respects, I think we need to be careful about our wording here. "Unjust" suggests that policy decisions would for some reason be made on the basis as to what is "fair" to individual editors on their preferred approach to content. But content policies have never been based on any such premise; they are instead predicated on assumptions about what makes the work of building the encyclopedia more efficient, while also preserving neutrality and encyclopedic tone. In the case of notability, as with any area where editor bias would invariably seep in if we did not remove our own assessments, it is ideal to use some sort of independent metric. Generally on this project such a metric comes in the form of the WP:WEIGHT of the sourcing; this is of course the approach of WP:GNG, amongst many other content policies. And yet, sourcing is not equal across all types of topic matter, and that stop-gap role is where these guidelines have developed. I'm not surprised to learn that there has been a snap back response recently with regard to the amount of community oversight that goes into some of the niche guidelines. But the argument remains ironic, insofar as this is th least amenable place to have it--not jsut because regulars here can reasonably be expected to oppose it on sight, but also because the counter-arguments of utility are much stronger on this guideline than they are for many, many other notability guidelines. It's incredibly self-defeating to have this discussion here, when it only hurts the case, undermines support and distracts from the more general (and important) principle. Snow let's rap 06:37, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Mixed perspective. I'm largely won over by the OP's argument, though respectfully I think they transformed this discussion into a pointless WP:SNOW vote by putting the discussion forward on a particular article talk page, where of course it is going to not be welcomed by most local editors to that page, and understandably so. But there is a larger principle here, and one I've noticed myself whenever RfCs or AfDs bring me into contact with notability discussions (which is, of course, frequent for anyone who responds to those process requests). Notability pages really get the greenlight with a lot less scrutiny compared against new developments in guidelines for other areas. I'm not even sure how strictly the process conforms with WP:PROPOSAL in some cases. The area is rife with idiosyncratic decisions made by small groups of editors (who are often aficionados of the area--understandably, but problematically), and said decisions are more likely to take the form of what those editors think is "important" of a figure or concept in that field, rather than utilizing some objective measure derived strictly from the sourcing. This at a minimum raises multiple questions as to how well these guidelines mesh with general community consensus regarding WP:V and WP:NOR. GNG clearly has the strongest community support of any portion of notability guidelines generally and it's reasonable to note the corresponding degree of community consensus for smaller guidelines.
All that said, this particular notability guideline is not an especially minor one. There probably does need to be a guideline (with the full explicit force of a guideline) for this particular notability area, and I expect this one still gets a great deal of scrutiny. I also don't think the proposed removal of text is necessarily the best solution; at most I think I would support the removal of the last sentence alone. I think there is a reasonable concern here, but I think this is wrong hill to have this particular battle on. The general argument might prevail for certain other notability guidelines, but for a mix of reasons, mostly pragmatic, it won't here. Snow let's rap 06:12, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • SupportThere are lots of people that are suburb in their field who don't get the coverage in secondary sources that those in other more populist careers do. I am not sure why academics should get signaled out for special treatment and not laywers, doctors, chefs, truck drivers or any other profession. I am seeing this as more of a systemic bias in favour of academics than the reverse. GNG should be the minimum for any article here and in many ways is the only way we can write an adequate one. AIRcorn (talk) 07:26, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
Man out standing in his field –EEng
Suburb as they may be, they're less urbane. EEng 14:16, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This would reopen the Pandora's box of whether the (typically) thousands of published works by others that cite a given academic, or the dozens of citations that even the most obscure and minor academic receives, would count as "multiple reliably published sources" for the purposes of GNG and automatically make those people notable. Better to have a clear standard based on criteria that are less arbitrary and less likely to be unrelated to any significance that an academic might have. It is already too easy for academics in book-based disciplines to become notable via WP:AUTHOR/WP:GNG by writing two books that each get two published reviews (unquestionably reliable published in-depth sources about the subject's contributinos). Similarly, if we were to let GNG take precedence, one could argue that almost all published mathematicians are notable because almost all mathematics papers are reviewed in MathSciNet and that is again reliable in-depth sourcing about their research. The solution to all those other non-academic topics using a big blunt instrument to test notability is not to make notability for academics equally blunt, it's to look more seriously about instituting better standards elsewhere. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:28, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Uninvited clerking note - this discussion was moved en masse to WP:VPPR by DrStrauss and then moved back by Nsk92. A less spiky way of accomplishing what was intended is to leave a neutral note at VPPR inviting interested editors to participate in the discussion, which I have done. Moving bot-IDd and advertised RfCs around breaks things, please don't. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 14:35, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for countering the WP:Forum shopping. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:40, 31 August 2017 (UTC).
  • Oppose This is one of the longest-standing, most effective, and least controversial, of all the WP special guidelines,. The GNG does not realistically apply to academic careers, and using it in the normal way would result in a dramatic decrease in our coverage: the net result, is that we would have mostly retired professors and dead professors, because those are the usual times when actual third party coverage that meets the intent of the GNG is published.
In practice, the current standard works perfectly: there are usually relatively few AfDs, and they are the inevitable marginal cases. More recently, there have been a number which have apparently been brought only to challenge the guideline(--and they have every single one of them been decided to support it. Beginners and peopel doing editathons in this subject know just what to do, and can immediately tell if a bio of a scientist will be acceptable. I suspect part of the reason this suggestion has been made is that a number of minimal stubs for academics have been recently added--but this is a problem in all areas, and it has long been unequivocally decided that such substubs are acceptable if theyare sufficiently referenced to show that they meet the criteria.
However, it is true that If this proposal were adopted, there are workarounds: first, There is also a somewhat less normal way of using the GNG which I sometimes employed 10 or 11 years ago before the WP:PROF guideline was firmly established--everyone who has ever published a few cited scientific papers -- which is everyone from Assistant Professor on up, at least in a research university, and a great many post-docs as well, has had their work discussed to a significant degree in at least some of them. This would be two or three times broader than our current standard The other will work for the humanities, and I use it now when convenient: NBOOKS, a very low standard to meet, as every academic book from a university press gets a few substantial reviews, many of which can be found in WorldCat. This amounts to every associate professor and up in a good research university, about 2 times broader than our current standard in that area.
What we need, is more guideline like this one. For the guidelines mentioned in the nomination where the result is just "presumption", there are continual clashes over the meaning and extent of this, and it is always impossible to predict how they will be decided. Thus newcomers have no firm standard, for the interpretation of the GNG depends upon the exact meaning of the key words substantial , independent and reliable. For any but the most obvious, it is possible to construct a rational argument in either direction--and the lengthy disputes over individual sources at the many AfDs demonstrate this, and exemplify the unsureness and ambiguities of the GNG and its relationship to the SNG. That would be true notabiity reform. We should do the very opposite of what this proposal suggests--we should rewrite the other special notability guidelines so they have exact criteria. And then we should try to make similar for other classes of articles. Then we can spend our efforts improving marginal articles, not arguing over which ones are worth improving. DGG ( talk ) 20:58, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Considering almost half of the !votes are in support of the guideline being changed I'd say it's not the least-controversial guideline and age doesn't imply validity. The last thing newcomers want is more guidelines to drown in. DrStrauss talk 21:37, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • DrStrauss, I think part of the issue here and in many of the recent discussions on SNGs is a misunderstanding of how a well functioning SNG works, usually brought on by a controversial experience with them either at AfD or AfC. SNGs are actually much easier to comprehend, and as a newbie back in the mid-2000s, I actually appreciated them for their clarity as compared to the GNG which is the most unclear guideline we have on this website: as DGG points out frequently, it can mean whatever the hell you want it to mean, and it is applied inconsistently through convention on different topics: namely we are hardest on BLPs and companies/orgs, somewhere in the middle on dead biographies, and fairly loose on most everything else (named species, inhabited places, proteins, chemical compounds, etc.) If you are a new person, not knowing that we apply this vague guideline differently to basically every different subject area becomes quite confusing.
    The advantage of SNGs is that when done well, they are objective and generally if you don't meet them, you don't get in unless you can convince people you meet the GNG, which is rare. Well formatted SNGs exclude more than they include, while keeping the formula for inclusion loose enough that those who should be in Wikipedia are in Wikipedia. PROF is the best example we have of this. It means that sometimes we get people in who probably shouldn't be in, but it also means that we keep a lot of people out who should be out. If we didn't have PROF the way it currently is, and removed it as proof of notability we would essentially get this down to a fighting match over whether the assistant professor at Harvard who published one well received paper should be included in Wikipedia.
    We don't have that problem now. What you seem to be advocating for is a stricter standard of notability than we have with PROF, but tinkering with the guidelines as we have it would actually open the floodgates for many more academics who shouldn't be in to pay for a biography to be written about them and have their author argue at AfDs that they should be kept. PROF prevents that because it gives us a lens through which to look at academic notability that is more suited than the GNG. Removing it as an alternative makes it easier for the less notable academics to be included and harder for the more notable ones. We do have issues with academic biographies, but PROF is not one of them. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:26, 30 August 2017 (UTC) Also 78.26, pinging you since you cited me directly below here, and I think its fair to let you know in case you don't share this view given the proximity of the text. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:31, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
    • DrStrauss, although I am sympathetic with the goals of the proposal, I can't say that I support it it its current form, largely for the reasons articulated by David Eppstein. If we do make WP:PROF formally subordinate to WP:GNG, then we'll have to explain precisely and in detail how that will work. One of the functional advantages of the current version of WP:PROF is that the criteria are reasonably precise and the guideline is reasonably easy to apply in practice; DGG is correct about that. However, in my opinion, this results in a large number of crappy CV-looking unimprovable articles about academics. Probably, as DGG writes above, making WP:PROF formally subordinate to WP:GNG could result in dramatic reduction of coverage of academics on Wikipedia. Personally I came to believe that this is a price worth paying, but others may disagree. However, as David Eppstein mentions below, one would need to explain in detail what making WP:PROF subordinate to WP:GNG actually means and what kind of coverage of academics constitutes specific and detailed coverage. E.g. Criterion 1 of WP:PROF can currently be satisfied simply by having a very high number of citations of one's work in published research literature. Would that count as specific and detailed coverage under GNG? From my point of view, no, but, again, others may disagree, and this issue would have to be explicitly addressed in WP:PROF if it were to become subordinate to WP:GNG. The situation with differences between disciplines, e.g. book-based disciplines vs journal based disciplines would also have to be addressed, as would special cases, such as mathematics where almost all published articles get in-depth published reviews by independent writers in MathSciNet. So it is not as simple as just eliminating the paragraph about WP:PROF being independent from WP:GNG from the text of WP:PROF. Moreover, it is possible (and perhaps even likely) that if your main proposal is adopted and then the specifics about its implementation are worked out (regarding how exactly academics may demonstrate satisfying WP:GNG) that the end result will be a de facto relaxation rather than tightening of the current WP:PROF standards, again for the reasons outlined by David Eppstein. So the end result might be the opposite of what you are presumably aiming for. Nsk92 (talk) 00:27, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose per DGG and TonyBallioni, who articulate it much better than I could. 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 21:15, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Support in some form. The GNG, when applied to people, basically requires the existence of two (2) sources written by someone other than the person or that person's employer. If you seriously cannot meet that very low standard, then you shouldn't be creating an article about that person. We simply should not have any articles sourced exclusively to a prof's own writings and whatever the publicity department for prof's university has written – it is always UNDUE and it may be a BLP violation to boot. If that means that we need to acknowledge in this guideline that "making a significant impact in the area of higher education" (as determined by your university's publicity department? The subjective opinion of a Wikipedia editor? There's no requirement for independent sources to verify that claim) does not make you absolutely entitled to a Wikipedia article, then we should do that. It doesn't need to be much: just a reminder that it's not absolute.
    And if your best argument is "but if we require two little independent sources about the him, then we'll never be able to write about the research he did, which is what we actually mean to talk about when we write these biographies", then I encourage you to actually write about the research, using an article title that indicates that the important subject is the research (or the prize, or the organization, or whatever). Using #4 as an example, there is no shortage of room in Wikipedia for well-sourced articles about academic research that has had a significant effect on higher education. You don't have to write about William Sanders' research on a page titled William Sanders; you can write about his research on a page titled Value-added modeling just as well – or even better, at least from the POV of readers who want to know about the research done on education rather than often-promotional articles about individual people. The article on the BLP should only be created if you have independent sources about the BLP. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:26, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
  • If that's the case WhatamIdoing, then we can start by deleting around 100,000 bio stubs1-line about soccer players. The only source most of them have is the squad listing on their club's page. This would be good, because I have never really understood why football players are considered so much more important that people who have heavily contributed to science and education. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:53, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • WFM – if no WP:Independent sources can be found about the soccer player, then the page should IMO be deleted. NSPORTS already says this: "meeting of any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be kept"; and that the basic requirement for all athletes is "the subject of multiple published non-trivial secondary sources which are reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject". NSPORTS complies with the policy requirement at WP:NOT: "All article topics must be verifiable with independent, third-party sources". It appears that this guideline does not respect that policy requirement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:36, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • I agree with you very strongly that we should not have biographical pages that are sourced only to what the page subject has written. But that is not what this SNG says. In fact, it requires secondary sourcing that demonstrates the impact of the scholarly work. It looks to me like a lot of the support in this discussion arises from AfDs where pages were kept on the basis of a misreading of PROF. That could be a good reason to clarify it, but it's not a reason to water it down. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:07, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • WP:Secondary does not mean independent. A secondary source – even if it is uncontestably an analytical secondary source – that was created by my publicity department is not good enough to justify an article. This SNG needs to require "independent" sourcing. The nutshell at WP:N has a good way of addressing the goal: you qualify for a Wikipedia article when you have received attention from the world at large. Something written by the organization that writes your paycheck is not "attention from the world at large" and does not confer notability, even if it's otherwise a top-quality source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • You misunderstand what I was referring to. The kind of secondary source I was talking about is one written by another scholar who is, in fact, independent of the page subject. (Of course I would not base notability on something from the home institution.) Something like this: the page subject publishes scholarly work, then another authority on the subject, someone independent of the page subject, as Wikipedia defines "independent", publishes a broader examination of the field, and states that the work of the page subject has had a major impact. That's what I mean about how this SNG defines "impact" and how to properly assess it for pages about academics. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:38, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • That wouldn't be so bad, but when I read the list of criteria at NACADEMIC, only one of the criteria requires an independent source (the first one). All the others omit this requirement. And since it's included as a requirement for #1, but not for #2 through #9, the most reasonable conclusion is that the writer of this guideline did not, in fact, think that independent sources were required for #2 through #9. If that writer meant this standard to apply to all, then the whole list would begin with "Academics/professors meeting any one of the following conditions, as substantiated through independent reliable sources, are notable." But it doesn't. It states that any reliable source, whether independent or not, is adequate for all points, except for #1, which specially states the additional requirement of INDY sources. The oppose comments in this discussion have convinced me that I am interpreting this correctly, and that the supporters of this guideline intentionally do not wish to require independent sources. See, e.g., Alanscottwalker's comment below here, which says that book jacket copy and the words said to introduce a speaker at a conference "are or should be taken" as independent reliable sources for academics ...even if, as is often the case, those words were written by the BLP or approved by him in advance. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:49, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Criteria #2 through #9 deal with positions and honours, which in practice are almost always sourced to the person's faculty page on their university's website. These are not independent sources but it's highly unlikely that they contain false information, and it would be ludicrous to ignore them in a deletion discussion. Using them to gauge notability doesn't mean the article itself is going to be based solely on non-independent sources. What the guideline is saying is that if someone is verifiably a Distinguished Professor, for example, we can presume that their work has been written about in many independent reliable sources and therefore that there is sufficient basis for an article. – Joe (talk) 10:03, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
  • And I'll add to that, that Criterion #1 is the one that defines "impact". That said, I can see how it can be at least annoying to see pages where notability has been established by the other criteria and only primary sources are cited. But that seems to me to be a case of bad writing that can be fixed by revision, rather than of non-notability. If a scholar's notability has been established by any of those other criteria, then it inevitably will be possible to add content to the page that reflects Criterion #1, and any such page seems to me to be incomplete without it. I, too, would much prefer pages that discuss the impact of the subject's work over pages that simply list honors. And it might be a good idea to have a template to mark those pages where such content still needs to be added. But notability serves only to establish that a page should be kept rather than deleted – not that the page is so complete that no further revision is wanted. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:22, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
  • I just remembered that there already is a useful template for what I was talking about here: Template:Like resume. I'm all in favor of putting that tag on any page that fails to explain the impact of an academic's work. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:51, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
    • Joe, there are no "positions and honours" in #4, ""The person's academic work has made a significant impact in the area of higher education, affecting a substantial number of academic institutions" or #7, "7. The person has had a substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity"? I'm not too worried about the six reasonably objective criteria, since there probably is an independent source available for each of them (perhaps just a short blurb in the prof's hometown newspaper, but still: a little news story probably does exist for it, even if it's not cited). But #1, #4 and #7 are entirely subjective criteria, and we should not just assume that the faculty page is a reasonable source for that. At minimum, all three of those criteria should be demanding independent sources, but right now, NPROF says it's perfectly fine to rely entirely on the faculty page on the university's website for two of those notabilitiy criteria. It's not okay. If you want to claim that you've had a substantial effect on higher education or outside it, then we should publicly and unambiguously insist that those claims have to be made by someone other than your own employer, your book-jacket copywriter, and yourself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:08, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Arbitrary Break 1

  • Oppose per DGG and TonyBallioni who due to their time zone have beaten me to the discussion. There's nothing more I can add now without repeating them. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:03, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Like Kudpung I am relieved not to have to compose an essay on this. "Notability" is based on guidelines, not rules that must be obeyed. Human nature makes for WP being skewed towards 21st-century populist topics and regarding the GNG criteria as rules drives this further. I welcome the further development of autonomous special guidelines. Thincat (talk) 07:04, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose I think the objective focus on impact is good and strict in this area, and avoids the rather sterile arguments that biographical publisher notes, conference notes/introductions, awards notes/citations are 'truly' independent or 'not long enough' -- which they are or should be taken so, in this area, given objective impact measures - responsible, reliable others taking note of the person. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:48, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose If we had to evaluate academics by the GNG, we'd have one crowd insisting that "reliable sources" means news media, so that we'd only have articles on retired professors, dead professors and physics cranks; and we'd have another crowd claiming that every MathSciNet review is a reliable source, so most of the working mathematicians in the world deserve articles. WP:PROF has worked pretty well so far at avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis. The fact that it reads differently from other notability guidelines is just a reflection of the varied challenges faced in writing about different fields. XOR'easter (talk) 17:05, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Support The broader community has been very clear that guidelines and advice that apply to specialized areas of Wikipedia cannot override general guidelines and policy. In fact, I'm quite puzzled by many of the "oppose" votes as I simply don't see how this guideline contradicts or overrides GNG; it merely provides some specific guidance on how to interpret the general policy in this specific area. So not only is the paragraph in question contrary to established, broad consensus it's also factually incorrect and both are excellent reasons to delete it. ElKevbo (talk) 18:39, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
    • The relationships of SNGs to the GNG is handled on a guideline by guideline basis. WP:N considers them equal to the GNG (point 1 of the two part test for notability in the summary), but we have through discussion of various guidelines decided to subordinate some of them to it, which is also fine. PROF is not one of them. This discussion may decide to do that, but there is not currently a community-wide consensus that all SNGs are subordinate to the GNG. That would require a community-wide RfC on WP:N itself, rather than ones on various SNGS, which we have not had. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:12, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
      • I'll add that the relationship of SNGs to GNG is not as simple as saying that no SNG can set requirements that are not implied or stated at GNG. GNG is the general, overall definition of notability, and the responsibility of SNGs is to make sure, in the case of specialized subjects, that notability criteria are understood according to the spirit of GNG, rather than according to a rigid interpretation of the "letter of the law". For example, NSPORTS makes an athlete notable if he or she ever set foot on a professional playing field, however briefly and uneventfully, even if the sourcing does not go much more than documenting the setting of that foot. (As it happens, that gives me a severe case of IDONTLIKEIT, but that's my problem.) And that is justified by the argument that we have readers who want to know about every athlete who has ever set such a foot upon such a playing field. Well, our readers do not want to know about every professor who has ever published some academic papers. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:53, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
        • Regarding the sports-specific notability criteria, it's not true that any professional athlete is presumed to meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. For the major sports, there are restrictions (such as which professional leagues qualify), and as mentioned above, an appeal to validate the general notability guideline can always be made. isaacl (talk) 12:40, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
          • Nonetheless, there are far too many athlete bios that are little more than CVs. My major point is that NSPORTS is predicated as much upon what readers want to find as PROF is. And PROF, too, allows appeals to GNG. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:02, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
            • Although the guidelines for different sports are of varying quality, as far as I can tell from the past few years, the regular interested parties who discuss this at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports) and other locations are in general agreement that the guidelines should reflect the probability of the general notability guideline being met, with no concern regarding what readers want to find. The recent discussion at the village pump is the latest to reaffirm this consensus. isaacl (talk) 02:41, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
              • This is probably getting off-topic and beating the discussion into the ground, but I used to be a regular at discussions like that one at VP. I agree that the stated rationale is about GNG, but I remember many discussions in which the question of "why do the criteria for notability of athletes appear to be lower than those of academics?" was answered by "they aren't lower, because sports are hard, and readers are more interested in athletes than academics". And there is nothing wrong with considering what readers want to find: readers are the people this website is for. And I still think that a page that simply lists the positions and seasons played for an athlete isn't any better than a page that simply lists the positions and publications of an academic. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:50, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
                • I can't speak about the original notability guidelines for athletes, which were replaced by the current sports-specific guidelines. However for the current guidelines, in the past few years, the standards have not been set based on what readers are interested in. It has been stated, though, that sports figures tend to get higher coverage in secondary sources because the general public is interested in sports, which means the number of people at the peak of a given sport who pass the general notability guideline can seem large compared with other topic areas. Stats sites are not considered (*) to be sufficient secondary coverage that meet the general notability guideline, and so if a bare stats page is all that can be sourced for a given sports figure, that person is not presumed to meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. (*) That is, based on consensus from discussions; I can't vouch that the guidelines for all sports have been updated accordingly. isaacl (talk) 02:30, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment If the proposal is just about removing the paragraph then better to start at the beginning, by which I mean WP:N. The paragraph is consistent with the provisions of WP:N. Dropping the paragraph still leaves WP:N still giving a green light if the criteria in Academics is met. I suppose adding "It is possible for an academic not to be notable having met the provisions of this guideline." could add some consistency. Although the "Note that as this is a guideline and not a rule, exceptions may well exist." line seems to cover that. Changing WP:N to say "A topic is presumed to merit an article if it meets the general notability guideline AND all of the subject-specific guidelines that are applicable.", that could be a real free pass killer. BTW, WP:ORG and some other subject guidelines add requirements beyond GNG. We delete organization articles that meet GNG but fail ORG. Which doesn't match the WP:N language which says presumed to merit an article "if it meets either or". I suppose this is where using common sense comes in. If the proposal was intended to be "Delete this paragraph and revise the criteria to require meeting GNG and one of the following additional items" I'll have to start over. Gab4gab (talk) 18:51, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
no, the relationship between the GNG and the SNG can and should be defined separately for each SNG. WP:N merely says that the GNG is the general rule, not that it supersedes any of the specific rules, unless we should by consensus decide that. In this case, we have long by consensus decided just the opposite. I'll say quite directly that we should do the same for most of the others--it would give better and simpler results. (In a sense, this will deprecate one of my special skills--I have long experience arguing on either side using the GNG. The less we use the GNG the less this peculiar skill will matter, and the more the decision will go on the basis of the actual subject--which is as it should be. Notability should not be dependent on the relative skill and dedication of the people who join the discussion. ) DGG ( talk ) 23:48, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
Can you give examples of academic bios kept by Afd "that do not have adequate secondary sourcing to support them"? Xxanthippe (talk) 23:06, 1 September 2017 (UTC).
exactly the opposite---the WP:PROF guideline as it stands is the main door, and notability of any academic that does not meet it is very rare--the GNG has only been used for academics getting unwarranted publicity without real accomplishment. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs) 04:35, September 1, 2017 (UTC)
  • Suggestion. It occurs to me that a major part of the issue here is not the paragraph as a whole, but rather just the last sentence of the paragraph: Conversely, if an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her failure to meet either the General Notability Guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant. I cannot support elimination of the entire paragraph, but I would have no objection to removing just that one sentence. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:29, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
But that's just the summary of the relationship as explained in the guideline--if the rest of the guideline stands as it is, this is true also. DGG ( talk ) 04:33, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose, because (as others have already said) there are many important academics without coverage in reliable sources. To address a point made originally by Nick above, and by others later; in the absence of secondary sources an individual may not meet GNG; but primary sources are often good enough for a bare-bones article. It is quite possible to write a neutral stub based on primary sources in academia, since basic details are rarely controversial; born here, studied here, professor here, researches X. Such an article is a definite net positive. Also: WP:PROF isn't the oonly guideline that has this effect, even if it's the only one phrases this way; WP:NPOL also leads to the creation of hundreds of stubs based on primary sources. Vanamonde (talk) 05:22, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
  • I'd disagree, there's a fair amount of over-egging that goes on in academia and some CVs are quite controversial. I can't help but think for many of the scientists we're including with only primary sources, they themselves would be aghast. I think requiring some secondary sources to support the primary sources is simply common sense, given we're purporting to be a reliably sourced encyclopedia. I know being a little more strict on the sourcing might reduce some of the stubs being created; that's not my intention as such, I just want to see some better quality, more reliable content in the project. To be clear - I'm not suggesting adopting GNG wholesale, just, as I said before, keeping the existing PROF notability guidelines but strengthening the quality of the content they lead to by asking for some secondary sources to be included. Nick (talk) 10:25, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
Can you give an example of scientists we're including with only primary sources that have been kept after passing AfD for academics and educators, which has pretty rigorous standards? Xxanthippe (talk) 12:04, 1 September 2017 (UTC).
Sure: Sanjeev Arora (physician) cites only non-independent sources that are primary. Maybe Shintani Tadahiko, too, although I'm not certain about the offline source. NB that I'm not arguing that either of these are the wrong decision – only that they meet your criteria of only primary sources (I think you meant only non-independent sources? WP:Secondary does not mean independent, and independence is much more important for notability), and had been kept after passing AFD. Both of those AFDs were this year, so there can be no argument that they are based on outdated guidelines.
That said, I think that your request for articles that survived AFD kind of misses the point. I think it's much more common to find a BLP article about an academic, notice that it cites only the university website and the prof's own writings, to not be able to find much about the BLP from independent sources, and never take it to AFD in the first place, since "everybody knows" that PROF doesn't care about independent sources (except for criterion #1) anyway, because WP:ITSIMPORTANT. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:16, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Those are interesting examples, so thanks for pointing them out. What I'm about to say is closely related to the reply to you that I just made above. Both of those pages seem to me to be shoddily written in their present versions, as opposed to being of dubious notability. And they remind me of athlete bios that report that the person once played in a significant league, and thus pass NSPORTS, but contain nothing about why that athlete's performance was interesting or distinctive – so this is not a PROF-specific problem. If the person is notable, there should be independent sourcing that demonstrates their impact. You said that there have been cases where you were unable "to find much about the BLP from independent sources" for subjects that passed criteria other than #1: I'm puzzled by the possibility that there really could be cases where no such sources exist at all. If nothing else, such material is almost always required for promotion to high professorial ranks, so it would have to exist somewhere. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:33, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. Both of the cases you give seem to be marginal. This type of discussion has taken place on this page before and I refer you there.[5]. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:41, 2 September 2017 (UTC).
  • Support in principle, but suggest another direction. I agree word-for-word with Snow Rise's neutral !vote, but feel the issue is more serious, a WP:CONLEVEL policy failure from one angle and a misperception of what WP:V and WP:RS (thus also WP:GNG) really mean from another. I also agree with SR that perhaps it's the last sentence that should be excised. But that's not the only issue here. Many of the oppose !voters are mistakenly supposing that GNG means coverage in news sources; it does not. What really needs to happen here is identifying (or, if you like, reidentifying) what constitutes reliable, independent academic sources, and notability-indicating non-trivial coverage in them. E.g., it is not unreasonable that one's work being cited repeatedly, favorably, and in detail in various literature reviews (secondary sources) in peer-reviewed journals is the academic equivalent of journalists deciding to cover you in a non-trivial manner. Other criteria can probably also be developed. Anyway, I do strenuously agree with the above concerns that we have to move this away from primary sourcing; that aspect of this guideline (and yes, I too wonder whether WP:PROPOSAL was really followed) is simply incompatible with encyclopedia writing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:30, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Yeah... Welcome to the late 20th century. The kind of Literature review that you are asking for and that the Literature review claims is ``a basis for research in nearly every academic field" does not really exist as a genre (except for the book reviews) for most natural and exact sciences. That's not how the research is done there. The basis of research there is articles, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of research articles, in journals and in conference proceedings. Typically these articles do not provide reviews or in depth treatment of the work of other scholars. Usually they provide brief mentions or various degrees of substance. Every article has an introductory section where the results of the article are motivated. There there will be some discussion of relevant prior work by various other authors, usually a few paragraphs or sentences and a bunch of citations. Possibly some prior motivating results and questions, with attributions, will be stated explicitly. There may be some isolated sentences mentioning someone's more specific work and contributions. Then new results will be stated, and sometimes their differences/novelty with respect to prior results would be discussed. There may be occasional references throughout the paper when the work of others is being used, but again those references are usually brief. It is essentially never the case that in these kind of articles one analyzes the work of someone else specifically and in detail. That kind of thing only happens in some survey articles, and in some festschrift volume articles in honor of particular academics. So what a typical prominent practicing academic in natural/exact sciences gets is thousands of brief mentions/citations in secondary reliable sources but NO in-depth specific and detailed coverage of their work that we might ordinarily expect under WP:GNG. Nsk92 (talk) 12:42, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
More strongly, my impression is that literature reviews are often or even primarily published these days as a mechanism for increasing the impact factor of spammy journals, by citing many papers in those journals. So changing the standard to move away from general citations and towards these kinds of reviews would be actively counterproductive in keeping our standards based on actual scientific impact rather than self-promotion. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
I agree that there is a problem with promotional reviews in seemingly scholarly journals, alas. But that's where "independence" comes into play, because most of that promotion consists of self-citing – so in fact, a statement in such a source that the work of someone from whom the author really is independent ought to mean something for our purposes, if a review writer motivated by tooting his/her own horn still finds space to praise the work of a competitor. By the way, I was never thinking of news sources, as opposed to more scholarly ones. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:42, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
So, why would "thousands of brief mentions/citations in secondary reliable sources" not be something we define as, collectively, non-trivial coverage in this context? The reason people have a problem with this page is that it's declaring that a particular category is exempt from the rules, rather than finding out how to make the rule apply to the category in a contextually sane way. Such a definition of contextual "coverage-enough" would even be conceptually compatible with other topical notability guidelines, e.g. where receipt of a major award, or having a platinum selling album, or other form of industry-wide recognition is a significant enough claim of notability. Just stop saying "GNG doesn't apply here" and alarming everyone. There a "political" or "how to make friends and influence people" basic hominid psychology factor in play, and it matters even when we'd rather it did not. Take seriously the WP:CONLEVEL objections, because they're very likely to be taken seriously by the community and by admins. The result you want is for there to no longer be any perception of a policy conflict (even if you don't believe there really is such a conflict now).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:15, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
With the explicit caveat that I'm referring only to my own opinions, and that other editors who oppose the proposal may see these things differently than I do, here is my take on those points. You are quite right about the politics of how local consensus can get a resentful reaction from the broader community. Indeed, I think I see a pattern in this RfC discussion, where much of the support comes from editors who do relatively little editing in the subject area of this guideline. As for many brief mentions in multiple sources, I also agree with you, in terms of many independent (and independence is critical here) scholarly papers saying briefly in their "introduction" or "discussion" sections that someone's work has had major impact. It depends upon the specific content, but sometimes that can be as good as coverage in a review article. On the other hand, if multiple authors are saying those things, there probably will be review articles anyway. And as for deleting the last sentence in the paragraph, I would prefer to delete it too, just not the entire paragraph. But as for "GNG doesn't apply here", that's not something that I would say, and after just having gone back and reread the wording on the guideline page, I don't think it says that either. There is a difference between saying that GNG doesn't apply and saying that an SNG is "an alternative". And after all, per the footnote to the sentence here, it even says that at GNG itself. All SNGs are alternatives. This one, in my experience, usually has the practical effect of resolving borderline GNG cases in favor of being not notable (the common example being a junior level scholar who published something that got a pretty good number of cites, but who fails the "average professor test" described here). So, as I personally see it, this SNG does not blow off GNG, but rather sets a necessarily high bar for borderline GNG cases. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:15, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Fair enough, and I can't see anything in that I strenuously disagree with (though I note that many do not agree with this interpretation of the GNG:SNG relationship). Even aside from the community perception matters, what I think I most care about is the "cited thousands of times still isn't enough" problem. To diverage considerably (since it's clear that this RfC is already over, a SNOW oppose): At this point, we have a Wikipedia where important academics have no article, but pretty much every single person who was ever in a band that had a top-ten single for a week will get an article, and so will anyone who was ever a character actor in a couple of movies and TV shows (Chipo Chung, I'm looking at you, again; narrowly survived AfD on the presumption that the aritcle would shortly improve and hasn't improved in any noticeable way since then). These people are not notable in any sane sense of that word; they're nothing but "just barely competent enough in their field to not be unemployed 100% of the time". The same "no article here because you're not in the entertainment field" problem applies to many other areas, including, e.g., software development, and grassroots activism. WP:Notability and, countervailingly, WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE are not really working properly. Old hands will remember the amount of fuss I put up about WP:Notability back in the day. Tempted to start again.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:27, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: I agree 100% with your comments immediately above, but then fail to understand your logic in not opposing the proposed change, which can only make things worse. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:04, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Well, the RfC's a dead stick, but I'll strike the "support in principle" part. What I support is removal of the CONLEVEL-problematic last sentence, plus using the alternative approach I outlined, of looking for new ways to define non-trivial coverage in multiple indy RS for this context. I.e., I'm not buying an ends-justify-the-means argument. It's not okay for a guideline to create rifts in the policy fabric out of expediency. Or, I'm not accepting the logic that "any step toward more coverage of academics is a step we must take, no matter what it is, what the costs or side effects are." The more I think about this, the more I think that maybe the solution to this problem of "the only way we think we can do notability criteria for academics is to say that the notability criteria don't apply to them" issue isn't (or isn't entirely) to rewrite the wording here with some new approaches to what qualifies as sufficient coverage, but to actually change GNG. Maybe the solution is as simple as GNG saying, "usually, this is required but for some topics including academics and [whatever], this other standard is more appropriate." Not only would that resolve the "guideline x versus guideline y" problem, it might actually inspire better and more nuanced Notability criteria for multiple fields. Maybe even (fingers and toes crossed) a more stringent one for entertainment industry faces. Just eliminating even 10% of the worst and most pointless pseudo-celebrity articles would free up a tremendous amount of editorial resources wasted on maintaining useless schlock. (In my mind, any bio subject for whom IMDb is almost certain to have a better article than WP is a good candidate for not having a WP article. If we can have varied CSD criteria that are topical, we should be able to handle varied notability ones. Something has to change somewhere, because Seraphimblade's interpretation, just below, is common, if not dominant. Of course there's a totally different problem, of some academics being practically "source invisible". E.g., today I thought "why I don't I try to write at least a stub on Robert M. Ritter, editor of New Hart's Rules/Oxford Style Manual and Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors from 2000 to 2012. Can't find a damned thing on him, even though he is (was?), in direct everyday effect, one of the five or so most influential applied linguists in the world.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  12:14, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. Celebrity biography standards should not become the norm for determining the notability of people who do real work. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo). Treated like dirt by many administrators since 2006. (talk) 13:55, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Support for clarity's sake, but it doesn't in the end matter. SNGs can't override the GNG, per WP:CONLEVEL. The GNG is a project-wide policy, so any language here saying it's overridden doesn't matter and should be discounted. For clarity's sake, since it has no impact, it should also be removed. Yes, celebrities and athletes are covered more than professors. They are also covered more than airline pilots, doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, and many other professionals who do valuable work. At the end of the day, we don't "correct" sources, we reflect them. If a professor's work is notable but the professor isn't, cover the work and mention the professor in connection with it rather than having a separate article for the professor. No permastubs or thinly sourced BLPs. Seraphimblade Talk to me 22:49, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
    • You are incorrect. GNG is just a guideline, no different than the SNGs. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:41, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
      • David Eppstein: to be even more precise, the GNG is just one heading of a larger guideline Wikipedia:Notability, which lists the SNGs as equivalent to the GNG (point 1 in the summary). The GNG cannot override the entire text of WP:N. The subject level guidelines can make themselves subordinate to the GNG if they want to, but the assumption of the notability guideline is that they are all equal. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:39, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
        • Alright, let's head on over to WT:N, and see if there's a consensus to add "except professors" to it. Otherwise, GNG is the standard. SNGs can point out cases where it's likely to be passed, but they can't override it. Seraphimblade Talk to me 03:48, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
          That's definitely been the site-wide interpretation to date, and adding such an exception wouldn't fly there, so trying to create one via "local consensus" on a side page like this won't either. See my longer comment above for a way around the issue. It's a matter of finding a way comply with GNG by using definitions of "non-trivial coverage in independent reliable sources" that make sense for the context, rather than trying to have an anti-GNG wikirevolt.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:22, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
    • Do you honestly think, you can demonstrate in practice that the GNG does not result in permatsubs or thinly sourced BLPs? Now, you might argue that that's because people are not doing it right, but practice is policy on Wikipedia. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:50, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
      It results in bibliographies, which are ostensibly more valuable than stubs. Subjects without basic independent sourcing don't even have that hope. czar 21:15, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose If any Catholic Bishop is notable by definition (WP:CCMOS), then so is every academic, who is also a teacher and administrator with life tenure. I would suggest that one (of many) tests of academic notability might be 'election as an officer in an academic organization', e.g. The American Historical Society, the Association of Ancient Historians, the Modern Language Association, the American Numismatic Society, the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (or Rome), etc. --Vicedomino (talk) 15:24, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Comment: My comment was meant sarcastically, as the genuine suggestion of a useful criterion of selection indicates. I too am an Academic, and a Professor Emeritus, voted by my department, the University Personnel Committee, and the President of the U. I do not consider myself notable. --Vicedomino (talk) 02:42, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
Oh, I didn't realize that, sorry (ah, the difficulties of humor online). Thanks for the clarification. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:25, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Catholicism/Notability guide is (a) a WikiProject advice page rather than a notability guideline adopted by the community, and (b) probably correct on that point. Unlike academics trying to claim notability for "having an impact" on the basis of their CVs, I don't think that we've ever encountered a case of a Catholic bishop whose appointment cannot be documented in at least an independent local newspaper article. If you can think of an example of that happening, then I'm happy to be corrected. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:18, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
Fun fact to know and tell: I don't know about bishops, but cardinals can be secretly appointed -- see In pectore. EEng 18:33, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
EEng, yes on cardinals, no on bishops (cardinal is an office while bishop is both a sacramental order and an office). One cannot be a secret bishop, because one has to be publicly consecrated as one. One can be a secret cardinal because it requires no public rite. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:30, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. I'll keep that in mind once I'm pope. EEng 18:45, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
Newspapers are a rather recent invention. Name a bishop in the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, and you will find that most of them are undocumented for date of appointment. Take, for example, Bishop Adelfius of Poitiers. And most of them, like Adelfius, are not noteworthy. There are even popes whose date of election has to be calculated, and is controversial. When did Saint Peter become Bishop of Rome?? It wasn't in the newspaper.

More to the point of WhatamIdoing's comment, "academics trying to claim notability for 'having an impact' on the basis of their CVs" would be disqualified on the basis of being too close to the article and an 'interested' contributor. --Vicedomino (talk) 20:20, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Vicedomino, I hope that you're correct. But the oppose votes are opposed to the guideline saying that. That's all the supporters (such as me) are really asking for: The guideline ought to say, in plain, unmistakable English, that you aren't notable just because your self-published CV looks impressive. You can only be notable if someone who is not you, your employer, or your publisher took some sort of notice of you. We just want to replace "having an impact" with "having an impact as demonstrated by an WP:INDY source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
That is exactly the effect of the current guideline — it asks for impact to be noted by citations, academic awards, titles, etc. What the support votes are asking for instead[Maybe not really, but it's as fair as your claims of what the opposes are asking for] is to discount all of those kinds of sources and only count the popular-culture ones that are particularly unsuitable for academics. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:20, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose per DGG and TonyBallioni. Samsara 16:01, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose -- I don't see a need for a change; the current guideline works fine. K.e.coffman (talk) 06:56, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose. The basic argument that the GNG is intended to make the notability "fair and even across different topics or at least evens the playing field" is fatally flawed. That is not a desirable goal; Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a game, and notability has to be based on what makes for a useful encyclopedia, not based on arbitrary notions of "fairness". As other people have said, above, academics often attract little coverage while still being extremely important; our notability guidelines need to reflect this. The idea that we should ignore that in order to be "fair" to other topics is absurd. If anything, other topics need wording like this one. --Aquillion (talk) 00:36, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose per DGG and TonyBallioni; there's already far too strong a presumption that minor "celebrities" are notable, and guidelines like the current one don't go far enough to counterbalance this. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:00, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Support SNG's can't be making such pronouncements. Interestingly, what it is saying is currently the case anyway, as stated in GNG; meeting either GNG or SNG is generally considered to be sufficient. So it is also redundant, moot, in the wrong place and overstated. North8000 (talk) 11:34, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Arbitrary Break2

  • Oppose (Summoned by bot) The GNG is a general guideline, meant for ease of use and clarity. I wouldn't make an article that didn't pass the GNG, even if it passed an alternantive guidelin because AfDs are hard and painful. However, the GNG isn't the Wonderful Supreme People's Guidline because it is both vague and very constricted. Life doesn't fit up exactly to mold of an encyclopedia.L3X1 (distænt write) 20:09, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
BTW I added the Survey heading and Arb breaks. Hope no one minds. L3X1 (distænt write) 20:16, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Helpful.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:31, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
I object strongly to these actions and will take this to ArbCom! Just kidding, good idea. DrStrauss talk 22:17, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
But see Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines#Guidance against interleaving replies for a thick pile of WP:OWN/WP:VESTED thinking that is dead serious about "How dare you refactor!?!". Pretty sad, really.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:37, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment Rather than trying to decide on how to subvert WP:GNG (which is what WP:NPROF is all about) we should come up with a better way to deal with systemic bias. For example all relevant academics would be notable if we relaxed WP:RS rules to allow specific 'peer reviewed' primary and related academic sources to be used to show notability. At the moment this is effectively what NPROF does, why don't we make it clearer that is what is happening? a simple tweak at WP:RS would suffice. This would pave the way for Wikipedia to use higher quality primary sources more constructively. Of course this could be extended to cover academic institutions themselves in limited situations. Various people also use citations of an academics work in other works to prove importance, this does need to be addressed.
My point is basically that doing what is suggested will result in mass extermination of perfectly reasonable articles. Therefore working on an plausible alternative would expedite the replacement of this point of policy.
specifically altering the point of WP:GNG which says --> "Independent of the subject" excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent. To include certain academic sources as independent provided there is no reasonable concern that the subject participated in its creation directly. Α Guy into Bοοks™ § (Message) -  13:29, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
The problem there is that it would be too loose and virtually any academic could be let in. The point of a good SNG is that it restricts much more than it lets in, while guaranteeing that everyone who should be covered is covered. By changing WP:N (we would likely not be changing the GNG) in a way suggested above you would have one of two possible outcomes
  1. WP:N effectively incorporates the current SNG of PROF into its text so as to make sure we don't have a stub on every person who graduated with a PhD in North America.
  2. We have a stub on every person who graduated with a PhD in North America.
Why just North America? Why not the whole world? Xxanthippe (talk) 22:31, 10 September 2017 (UTC).
Well, North America and Western Europe. Because under WP:N notability rules, just as they are now, articles on subjects outside of those areas will be viewed with much greater suspicion by new-page patrollers, and will have to actually demonstrate some notability immediately rather than (as happens for the North Americans) only rarely being tested for notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:23, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
What is the source for your claim? It certainly doesn't work in practice, judged by the vast number of dud BLPs from outside these areas that get deleted at the Academics AfD forum. If the current proposal is adopted, there will be even more of them. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:46, 11 September 2017 (UTC).
I agree there are many BLPs that are and should be deleted from there. I don't want to change that part of the process. What I am saying is that the dud BLPs from North America have a much greater chance of passing with little scrutiny. If they go to an AfD they also stand a good chance of being deleted but they don't get taken to AfD as often. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:41, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I used North America as an example because I'm familiar with the process there, and am also pretty familiar with the academic job market there, where you have a fair amount of younger academics trying to promote themselves because of how tough the competition is. What PROF does is it gives us a relatively objective means to judge academic notability that is independent of the GNG. Anyone who has a PhD from that region will likely have enough publications that have been cited elsewhere that they could pretty easily try to load the article with citations to their own articles, and Wikilawyer an AfD into being kept. They wouldn't be judged with suspicion as David Eppstein above points out, and you'd have the real possibility of a bunch of young media-savvy assistant professors who shouldn't be in Wikipedia getting in, while the major researcher from Egypt is excluded because the person at NPP has no idea to assess academic notability since the PROF guideline no longer exists independently of the GNG, and no one has gone to the trouble of loading his or her article with publications. As I said above, this will lead to the deletion of more articles of professors who should be in here because they aren't familiar with how to market themselves, and make it easier for the ones who shouldn't be in to play the GNG to their liking. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:11, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
PROF restricts much more than it lets in, and the idea here that removing the independence from the GNG will do anything but make it easier for young academics trying to promote themselves without having achieved anything to get a page in Wikipedia is wrong in my opinion. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:40, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
how to subvert WP:GNG (which is what WP:NPROF is all about)? Wow. Maybe there was humor that got lost on me. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:28, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Pity, I was hoping that it was a joke. And I do not need you to lecture me. It comes down, to a large extent, to the verb "subvert". It implies intentionality and bad faith. It is essentially saying that any editors who support WP:PROF as it presently is, are entirely ("all about") motivated by the desire to disregard the guidelines and norms of the larger editing community. (And here I am, believing all along that WP:PROF is all about determining the notability of academics.) That's an assertion that is easily worth a "wow". If, instead, the comment had been something like "Rather than trying to decide on whether to contradict WP:GNG (which is the effect of this language in WP:NPROF) we should come up with a better way to deal with systemic bias", I would not have batted an eye. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:10, 17 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment For those that are saying that "virtually any academic could be let in. Why would this be a problem? Take a glance at the Sports guidelines. Any player who has played for a professional team deserves a page according to that, The film guidelines too, all they require is that a film is reviewed in a national publication, a very low standard of notability that virtually ensures that every big budget American film will have an article. By any standard, these two notability guidelines subvert the GNG. but I'm not arguing they should be more restricted. On the contrary, subject specific guidelines SHOULD overrule the GNG. The idea that something or someone is only notable because they were the subject of an article is quite frankly an outdated guideline and one of the key reasons why Wikipedia shows a heavy systemic bias, particularly to western pop culture. Subject specific guidelines should be the rule, not the exception here. In the case of PROF, I see no reason why a peer reviewed publication cannot function as a source of notability, because peer reviewed publications are how academics assess notability. Forcing notability of academics to be assessed by articles in the media completely misses the point of what academic notability is. Egaoblai (talk) 11:25, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
    • As I noted earlier in this discussion, the sports-specific guidelines for league-based sports do not presume that all professional players meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. Only players from specific leagues (either by name or by their level of competition) qualify for this presumption. Additionally, the sports-specific guidelines explicitly defer to the general notability guideline. isaacl (talk) 20:19, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
      • A sports-like guideline for academics with the same league-based restrictions would be something like "anyone who has ever worked in a post-doctoral or faculty position at an R1 university is notable". But this would bring in a lot of people that we wouldn't consider notable, and exclude a lot more people (especially outside North America, where the R1 categorization is defined) who really should be considered notable. As for your claim that "the sports-specific guidelines explicitly defer to the general notability guideline": can you please provide examples of athletes who meet their sports-specific league guideline (played in at least one game in a top-level professional league of a major sport) and yet were deleted because they failed GNG? Because it doesn't matter whether it claims to defer to GNG if in practice it actually doesn't. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:41, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
        • I don't have a parallel proposal for academics; I was simply noting the statement regarding the sports-specific guidelines was inaccurate. I'm not a regular participant at articles for deletion discussions, but from what I recall in discussions on the sports-specific notability guideline talk page, I believe there have been European ice hockey players whose articles have been deleted due to failing the general notability guideline, and there I think there have been early century baseball players about whom no information could be found and so their articles have been deleted. (If I recall correctly, though, those were extreme cases where the full name of the player was not known.) As for practice, closers ignoring the explicit consensus that has been reaffirmed over and over again regarding the need to meet general notability guideline are choosing to uphold a local consensus instead of the consensus agreed upon by a relatively broad cross-section of the English Wikipedia community. But I appreciate that given the lack of deadline, it is challenging to construct a convincing case that the general notability guideline can never be met for a given person. isaacl (talk) 02:25, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose. Academics have a clear and present need in this area, and removing this paragraph will do irreparable harm to the inclusion of academics on WP. I haven't found any of the arguments above convincing as a useful alternative to the status quo.--Shibbolethink (♔ ♕) 19:29, 17 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose Bios of academics are different than other bios. Their work is specifically in the realm of expanding human knowledge, as such, their work is inherently more encyclopedic than, say, a soccer player. That's why this SNG specifically allows us to swap out coverage of them for coverage of their work when notability is concerned. — InsertCleverPhraseHere (or here) 19:02, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose - A solution in search of a problem. Beyond My Ken (talk) 06:37, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Relationship between core polices, WP:N, GNG, and SNGs

I already !voted, but I made a statement like what follows at NSPORTS yesterday that, re-reading the replies here, bears reiterating for discussion:

Our ultimate goal, giving no DEADLINE and an infinite amount of time, is to have every article on a topic to meet the core content policies (V/NOR/NPOV along with any NOT/BLP considerations), and one facet of that is notability, showing that the topic has been subject of detailed discussion in independent, secondary sources. Some topics clearly meet that off the bat, like World War II.

But for most topics, collecting and showing this type of clear notability required time, cost, and effort (namely to search print sources, etc.) We want to be as helpful as possible to help an open wiki work together to develop these, so we have the GNG and the SNGs that serve as rules of thumb to presume notability as to allow a stand-alone page to be given to a topic if the GNG or an appropriate SNG are met, with the expectation that given an reasonably long period of time (per DEADLINE), the articles would be fleshed out further and notability no longer needs to be presumed. We also strongly put forth guidelines like BEFORE that prevent deletion of such articles before editors have had the chance to really scour sources, putting onus on the nominator for AFD to do this work if they really feel deletion is appropriate. GNG and SNGs are means to tradeoff the open development of topics without fear of a deadline, against the ultimate goal of high quality articles.

This is why neither the GNG nor SNGs are inclusion guidelines, because we are not saying that passing these bars means the article will stay indefinitely. The GNG and SNGs are relatively objective indications that certain criteria are met that assure that more significant coverage of the topic in independent secondary sources will come along (either already out there but hard to access, or likely to come as a result of some figure of merit) to build out the article so that we no longer have to presume notability. The GNG and SNGs are equal in this fashion in that they give the allowance for a standalone article to start and grow, though over time, we expect more sourcing in the realm of meeting the GNG become available. Key is that an encyclopedic article that cannot show any secondary, independent sourcing (necessary for V/NOR/NPOV) at all and only can demonstrate meeting an SNG is never going to meet the ultimate quality we desire, and should be deleted.

And this is where is sucks in academics (I've been there, so I know how it works). The people behind research are rarely celebrated or even talked about, at least in print or a manner that meets WP:V. I remember from my own time that we're recognize names as key people in a small field, but this was never the type of thing documented, just passed on from teacher to student. Recognition for work often comes years after the work was completed (like with Nobels). It is not the case of systematic bias where there are field-specific V-meeting sources that we could pull from to account for the lack of coverage of these people in more mainstream sources - it is simply that we are absent the necessary sources to meet V. At worst, sources that talk about academics typically end up as first-party or dependent sources (the academic's own webpage), and that still is a failure of V.

This is unfortunately a systematic bias created by the academic field to not recognize their own but primarily focus on the research rather than the people. That's really really really hard to overcome in terms of WP. Using this SNG and claiming it overrides the GNG to try to overcome that is extremely problematic, because very few of the criteria this provides give a reasonable path towards showing meeting notability and not requiring presumption of that notability. That cannot work, regardless of what the proponents of this guideline state. At the end of the day, these articles, if they cannot show expansion of sources, proven out through proper BEFORE searching, will still be deleted regardless of what the SNG says. Which is why ignoring the GNG or claiming the SNG overrides it is a bad thing and gives a false impression.

Not all of this SNG's criteria are bad. #2 and #3 - demonstrating an external merit via award or honors in an external society - are great and mirror similar SNGs for other biographic areas. #5/#6 (named chair or highest appointment) are also good ones as this mirrors the the NSPORTS "played at professional level", and I would even go a step further to say that we could reasonably allow for any tenured professor at a public institution of higher learning this leniency for presumption of notability, since they had had to do something of merit to earn their tenure which can be documented (again, mirroring the similar "professional player" lines from NSPORT). But all of the rest, particularly #1 (citation counting) #4 (textbook counting), #8 (editor of a journal), are not indications that secondary sources will be forthcoming in most cases. While this SGN says it can override the GNG, it still cannot override the overall goal of notability, and that's where the problem with the current lead paragraph highlighted by this RFC lies. It's ignoring the fact that SNG is only a presumption of notability, not an assurance that we will keep the article indefinitely. That paragraph gives a false sense of what will happen to articles once editors show that the presumption of notability is not there.

Now, there is another idea that comes up, in that notability affects the articles that meet WP's encyclopedia goal. We are not simply an encyclopedia, but have other functions like a gazetteer, and to that end, we have 10,000s of articles on every small village and town documented in government records that are stubby and built out via automated text generators to at least establish the place to fulfill the gazetteer. One could argue that a similar thing could be done for academics, creating an academic researcher directory, in a manner that individual pages do not need to show notability but simply meet WP:V (validating that the person is an academic), with the ability to expand if a more encyclopedic article could be written. That's clearly going to have to clear a few hurdles to pass from WP:NOT, such as that we are not a directory nor a who's who. But refinement of this idea could be a point to establish a subset of pages that allow us to include all academics with tenure or more than X publications or more than Y books or etc and not worry about any notability after that. --MASEM (t) 15:45, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Masem, the people in academics are not as invisible as you say. Citation counting is an independent secondary source, not an indication that secondary sources will appear. It has been used in hiring and evaluating academics and researchers for decades (for better or worse). It is not some product of the internet age invented by Google. In 1964 Eugene Garfield began the printed subscription publication Science Citation Index with the government support that became available after Sputnik was launched. Agencies wanted to be able to evaluate the research they were funding. For each article published the SCI provided a list of citing articles. However it also provided an author index, listing the papers published by each author and how often those papers were cited. This rapidly became an important tool for evaluating academics and research proposals. Over the years citation indexing expanded to other fields and has lead to academics' current concerns about their citation indexes, since they are so visibly public. With the internet age these indexes have moved from massive annual volumes with their tiny print to online databases, most by subscription. StarryGrandma (talk) 16:52, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
The problem with citation counting - even if it is a useful tool in grants and funding - tells us nothing towards notability (broadly) or V/NOR. I do know some people get recognized as a result of their prolific publishing, but that's using that third-party/secondary source to say "hey, this academic did a heck of a lot of publications", and avoids us on en.wiki engaging in OR to determine that. --MASEM (t) 17:14, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Citations ≠ publications. We have never considered academics to be notable merely because they published a lot. I can't believe you would confuse or obfuscate this issue so late in this debate. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:17, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Yes, citations are different from publication, though there is a relationship. But irregardless, how many times an academic publishes or is cited means nothing towards notability without understanding why that was the case, which is how we define notability broadly. Notability does not rest merely on viewership, popularity, or sales numbers - and by extension citation counts - but how secondary sources see large numbers in these areas are important, the OR step we just can't do.
For example, WP:NBOOKS does allow books that fall on notable Bestseller lists to be considered notable. But it is not because they simply appear on these lists that gives them notability, but the fact that to make these lists nearly all the time means they have been subject to some type of critical review or similar secondary coverage. So it is a fair SNG criteria. The same simply is not true for citation counting. Just because an article is cited 1000 times does not give any assurance in secondary sources that the authors are notable. It only tells us the work is used frequently. That's the problem here. In academic circles, that's clearly important, but filtered into a general purpose encyclopedia, that tells us nothing and fails our content policies. It's equivalent to player and team statistics in sports - alone they make sense to those within that field, but without secondary sources telling us why having, say, a 0.300 batting average is great, it's just numbers and fails NOT#STAT. --MASEM (t) 17:30, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Masem, thank you for that very thoughtful analysis, and especially the important idea about how we need to consider what will eventually come along in the future. (Although I also agree with what David Eppstein just said.) You repeated something that keeps getting repeated in this discussion, against which I want to push back: that this SNG claims to override GNG. Editors keep saying that, but it's not what the guideline page actually says, and it's not what most editors who support the existing language are arguing. In a sense, it actually explains how the assumptions that editors might make based upon GNG can be unreliable for academics, which is very much what you just said as well. I also would not want to see every faculty member who gets tenure be considered notable, even though tenure does reflect some of the attributes that we recognize as contributing to notability. I think that it's very helpful to read this SNG in the context of what it describes as the "average professor test", which puts much else into perspective. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:26, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
It is not so much that it overrides the GNG, but that it forgets the purposes of an SNG as an alternative to the GNG is to establish the presumption of notability for a standalone article. How the paragraph is written, and the like of the word "presum*" specifically in the criteria, make it read that this guideline supersedes the GNG and WP:N. Specifically Conversely, if an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her failure to meet either the General Notability Guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant. as written and with what I outlined above means it is impossible to challenge the notability of those academics that meet one of the criteria, making this an inclusion guideline rather than a notability guideline, and we don't use inclusion guidelines. SNGs are met to give leeway to creation of articles that have a chance to meet notability and the core policies, not to override that. --MASEM (t) 17:36, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Yes, that sentence causes more trouble than it's worth (ironically, added to ward off the criticism that the SNG sets a higher standard than GNG). As I said much earlier in this discussion, I'd support deleting that one sentence. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:42, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
There's a lot more to discussion on the individual criteria, but I think a short-term bandaid that minimizes disruption (read: mass AFD rush) is to make sure this guideline borrows similar language from other SNGs that establish that these criteria lead to presumed notability and allowance for the standalone. While I have problems with some of the criteria, I would not see a problem if this page otherwise followed the lede/hatboxes of guidelines like NBIO and NSPORTS, emphasizing that these are presumed notability, and makes this read less like an inclusion guideline. --MASEM (t) 17:52, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
  • I'll also say something similar to what I said at NSPORTS: Masem makes a good point but is conflating what the SNGs and GNG do. Notability is Wikipedia-shorthand for "Would be reasonable to include in a general purpose encyclopedia". To that end, the SNGs are much better indicators of whether something is notable. The GNG, however, is a much better indicator as to whether something is verifiable and if there will be verifiable content to include on a notable subject. The GNG does not prove notability, it also simply is a presumption, same as the SNGs.
    That presumption of inclusion in a general purpose encyclopedia can be contested at AfD, for either the GNG or the SNGs. Notability is only one of many valid deletion rationales. People who complain that subjects who meet an SNG but fail the GNG are typically appealing to WP:V/[[WP:DEL7], WP:BLP/WP:DEL9, or some criteria of WP:NOT/WP:DEL14. They are not appealing to the WP:N, which makes it clear that either the GNG or an SNG give the presumption of inclusion, baring a failure of NOT. If an academic passes PROF but the article meets any of the other reasons for deletion, that is a valid deletion rationale, but it is not the same as deleting on grounds of not being notable. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:03, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
  • "Citation counting" has everything to do with notability. If a scholar has 2000 citations (so at the low end of notability under PROF), that equates to roughly 2000 (excluding self-citations etc.) mentions in what are, by definition, independent, reliable sources. So the breadth of coverage criterion of the GNG is easily satisfied. The obvious objection is that we also need depth, but if you combed through those thousands of citations you are bound to find enough coverage to meet the vague threshold commonly accepted under the GNG (and I think somewhere on this talk page DGG mentioned that he used to have to do just that at AfDs). PROF gives us some rules of thumb that let us skip that tedious process. – Joe (talk) 18:50, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
    • On the depth issue, I disagree. There are times where a paper will cite another and discuss that paper's conclusion in some depth (most commonly review papers), and that's definitely secondary, but most of the time, when a paper cites another, it is just saying "someone else found this out too", the equivalent of name-dropping, and that's not secondary for en.wiki. Further, citations speak to the research and not the person(s), for the most part. There's an element of inherited notability with this. --MASEM (t) 18:56, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
      • But even if 99% of those 2000 citations are name-dropping, that still leaves twenty sources with more than trivial mentions – more than enough for the GNG, no? I do agree that substituting coverage of a person's work for coverage of a person is one point on which this guideline substantially departs from the GNG, but I think it's an entirely reasonable departure. As somebody said above, the GNG is not an article of faith, it's a tool for writing a good encyclopaedia. Do we really want to exclude hundreds of accomplished scholars based on the technicality that we can only write an article about their work and not them? Could we not then just move Prof Bigwig to Research of Prof Bigwig and sidestep the problem? – Joe (talk) 19:13, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
        • Keeping in mind factors like "publish or perish" and the various fields/journal reputations, etc., just saying one has 2000 citation across all papers doesn't necessary tell me much about the usability of those citations. But a factor like (citation count/published paper count) would be more telling: a person with 2000 cites from 20 papers is likely to have a better chance of one of those citations being in-depth, than for a person with 2000 cites across 200 papers. --MASEM (t) 19:39, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
Another issue not yet resolved is the number of authors on each paper (say N). Should each author be granted a full citation or 1/N of a citation? Only the database owners have that information and they do not choose to reveal it. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:31, 22 September 2017 (UTC).
I have to confess I didn't actually read the entirety of your original comment (it's very long, in my defense!) and am nitpicking something that, now I have, seems peripheral to what you were trying to say. I actually really like your idea of acknowledging this is an area where we can accept being a gazetter instead of an encyclopaedia. Do you think it's actually something that could get community support? – Joe (talk) 19:20, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
No worries on the tl;dr part. It would definitely take a global consensus to decide that, so that likely would be a WP:VPR (proposal) starting point. Optionally, keep in mind that WikiCite remains an active WMF work in progress to create a fully-functional bibliographic database to support WMF projects. Part of this, if I'm reading this correctly, would be landing pages for academics tied to their papers. If that actually happens, then that would be preferable to having this functionality on en.wiki, though obviously notable researchers would have links to the Wikicite entry from here. --MASEM (t) 19:39, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
I'd never heard of WikiCite, thanks! Maybe importing something like ORCID or WorldCat identities into Wikidata could also be a starting point. – Joe (talk) 19:56, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Using citations has to be done intelligently. The worst possible way is the one we're increasingly seeing, often from promotional editors--- 100 papers with 1000 citations in all. This says very little about either the quality of the work or the degree to which it is recognized; it doesn't even say much about quantity, because they are often repetitive or constructed by splitting everything into what has been called the Least Publishable Unit, especially in clinical medicine. Using the h value is only a little better. An h value of 30 can mean either 30 papers, each with 30 citations, of 29 papers each with 200 citations and one with 30; the second is surely notable, but not likely the first. Garfield who invented citation indexing in science was of the opinion that significance as a scientist was about one or more papers with 100 citations each. But it depends on fields--the field-dependent factor is the density of citation: papers in mathematics typically have only a dozen citation, in biomedicine 50 at the least, and the needed citation record for notability is proportionate. It's not usually necessary to worry about self-citations, but in extreme cases it can be, especially at the low borderline of notability; in most fields it is not necessary to excessively concern ourselves with fractional authorship. They usually don't affect the overall result. (The two exceptions are experimental high energy physics and clinical trials, in which it is necessary to know the subject to figure out who are actually the most important people.) We're not trying to do real scientometrics here, just distinguish between who is or is not worthy of an article. I continue to think that the best factor is recognition within the profession as expressed by its native professional hierarchy of ranks and universities. A first rate research university does not generally appoint anyone to tenure unless they are an authority in their field, and certainly not to full professor. Lesser universities and colleges are much less strict about this: their senior faculties will have a few stars, and these need to be distinguished by other criteria than just their rank. Im general we do not have nor are expected to have the professional knowledge to distinguish who are worthy of such appointments--but the collective faculties of the first rate universities are, and we can and should rely on them. They're the experts. We go not by what we think, but what the real world thinks, and they arethe relevant part of the real world. (Not the sort of newspaper writers who publish college's press releases, which is what the GNG blindly applied comes down to)

I did long ago suggest (not seriously, but to show the absurdity of using the GNG) that if the only factor were the GNG, one could meet this by showing that the person's work had received substantial criticism from others. Not every cited paper will show it, but many of them will--there's no fixed proportion. In one of my fields, open access, every published paper has received substantial criticism from numerous other people with other views, and I could easily show by the GNG that anyone who has ever published a single paper or even substantial web posting in that field was notable. Some fields in the social sciences and humanities are just as easy; while in other fields nobody much bothers and everyone goes on publishing in their own niche, making only token gestures to other published work.

The subject area is fortunate that has such authoritative internal ways of reliable discrimination. The academic world is one, sports can be another. Some are much more difficulty, where we can only go by common report, and must use the GNG because there's nothing better. But in general we should try to stay away from it if there is any alternative. The only merit of the GNG in Wikipedia is the opportunity it provides for ingenious arguments at AfD about the exact reliability and independence and substantiality of the references--arguments whose result tends to approach random, and is affected not b the merit of the subject, but the particular people who choose to join the discussion. If I cared only about having WP reflect my own interests, perhaps I should support the use of the GNG, because I think I've shown myself rather good in arguing these often ambiguous points in either direction, and could try to shape WP's coverage towards my own personal preferences. That's all the GNG is good for: a contest of sophistry and [prejudice. DGG ( talk ) 02:23, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Well said. WP:GNG is the last resort of the desperate. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:53, 23 September 2017 (UTC).
The contortions we go through to justify not having articles on restaurants with plenty of reliably published reviews, for instance (this was the first example I found in the active logs), are an interesting commentary on whether we really believe GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:04, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Jean Monnet Chair

How significant is holding this title toward establishing a claim of notability under point 5? I've noticed articles on several academics who seemingly don't have much going for them in terms of notability, but do hold this chair. Given that there are around 900 of them, though, maybe it's not really in the spirit of the "named chair appointment" mentioned by the guideline? - Biruitorul Talk 21:18, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't see why not. Criteria 5 is fuzzy on "Major institutions" but given that this is an EU program, I think anyone with such a chair would qualify. Chairs need not be notable themselves to confer notability under #5. 900 people out of an enormous number of academics is still selective. I don't think there's necessarily source material to write an article about every holder but I wouldn't dispute the presumption of notability. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:25, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
In North American terms, I typically take point 5 to refer to research universities or prestigious liberal arts colleges. I also concur with Chris on this that given that it has been established by the EU, it probably qualifies. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:37, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Criteria for awarding of these chairs seems hard to ascertain. Can you help? I would like to see some more details before endorsing. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:21, 19 November 2017 (UTC).
According to the source cited at the page, it is the European Commission that established the chairs and the related programs, which I take to mean that it provides funding but does not necessarily decide who to appoint. Given that there are almost 900 holders of the Chair, that actually strikes me as a lot, and it leaves me wondering how high the standards really are – and perhaps the criteria vary from institution to institution. We generally do not consider "named chair appointment" to apply to junior faculty who have a name in their title that reflects the source of funding. Taking these things together, I'd be reluctant to consider that holding these Chairs is always sufficient proof of notability, maybe sometimes or even frequently, but not automatically. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:52, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
I agree. Holding such a professorship may contribute to notability, but it should not, without other evidence of passing the core category WP:Prof#C1, give a pass on the basis of WP:Prof#C5 alone. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:42, 20 November 2017 (UTC).
All fair points, which on reflection, I'm inclined to agree with. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:08, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
While on the topic, I find the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe rather fishy. It seems to exist for the purpose of letting the great and the good of the EU scratch each others' backs. I hope I am wrong but there is not enough transparency in their public material to allow such doubts to be subdued. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:54, 20 November 2017 (UTC).

Suggestion

Can we add major well-established "encyclopedias" in criterion 8? Ali Pirhayati (talk) 07:22, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

No. Such positions usually are held by people with publishing expertise rather than scholarly expertise. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:29, 5 December 2017 (UTC).

What are the references for this claim? Ali Pirhayati (talk) 06:58, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Beginnings of an idea

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant material elsewhere.

I've been ruminating on the subject of the big RfC up there (and had been thinking about the gist of it earlier – all the way back to 2007).

Please see User:SMcCandlish/Notability and Deletion policy#2017 update – we still have some problems.

It's the germ a notability reform proposal, and I'd like to run it by the crowd at this page first, since it's closely tied to the issues in the RfC. The is page is an {{essay}} but really more of a notebook that I add to every few years when inspiration (or frustration) hits me in a flash.

The teaser: In GNG, we're already redefining for notability purposes what "reliable sourcing" means (without any effect on what it means in sourcing actual article content; notability is an internal determination, i.e. a form of permissible original research just like assessing publisher/author reputability in deciding whether a source is reliable). Let's just take it a step further to account for level of influence of the subject, and whether the "reliable" sourcing is too close to the subject by nature rather than in specifics. Details at the link; I wouldn't go further with this until after some input.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  02:37, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for starting this discussion. I agree that So, it's not much of a stretch to add another layer; e.g. for academics, in-depth coverage need not be required, but frequent citation would be is a reasonable step towards reflecting the actual intent of this SNG (with fleshing out: the nature of citation matters, and varies by discipline, and it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be some "in-depth coverage" of the appropriate type; maybe "popular press" or "popular media" coverage is more to the point than "in-depth"). I'm not won over to the broader idea of getting rid of SNGs and replacing them with revision of GNG, but I'm open to persuasion. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:05, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
This is similar to the conversation we are having at WT:CORP and which DGG (and to a much lesser extent, me) have been pointing out for a while: the GNG is horrible at telling us whether someone is actually important. My longterm vision of notability reform is scrapping the GNG from WP:N and transfering it to WP:V as the General Verifiability Guideline, as that is what it actually tests. Subjects would then need to meet the GVG and the relevant notability guideline, and where lacking, achieve local consensus in an AfD for inclusion. Whatever the steps forwards, I think there is an emerging reform movement for notability that is arguing for GNG-plus. It is much more fair and would reflect what the de facto practice is in many cases already. I think I've described WP:CORP as basically being a list of arguments to argue that the GNG doesn't say what it clearly says and not get laughed out of an AfD. PROF isn't angled in that direction, but I do think it could use some reform, because there are complaints that it brings up the problem of not being able to verify BLPs in some cases. Anyway, that's my ranting, but I just wanted to say this idea is a step in the right direction. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:18, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
I sympathize with the analysis of the problem there, though it is imo seriously overstated, but as discussed here at various points in the past, citations are a slippery and unreliable criterion. A "good" number of citations varies drastically between fields and sub-fields, and a Nature piece a while back showed that the highest citation factors of all go to people, often essentially lab technicians, who publish protocols for lab procedures for a new technique. And they probably aren't notable. Maybe someone has the link for that. Johnbod (talk) 20:54, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
The issue of the number of citations in different fields is well known to and dealt with by people who operate on Prof AfDs, but less known to those who don't. I see a more pressing problem in WP:Prof#1 being the number of authors on a paper. Clearly a citation to a 1-author paper carries more weight per author than a citation to a 50-author paper. This is now treated on an ad hoc basis but could be improved. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:12, 17 December 2017 (UTC).
If we convert GNG to GVG, it will be necessary to change the wording. Verifiability is of course always necessary, but it does not have all the source restrictions in the current GNG. The rule there is just a reliable source i, but for verifying routine facts about a person or organization the publication does not have to be independent--nor, of course, substantial.
We will then, of course, have to have standards for the inclusion of each type of article on which we can agree, which will not be all that easy. I think it's worth doing, and I think the best way is to go field by field, and the obvious way to start is with the SNGs--they should be converted into being the notability guidelines for their subjects, not just and extension or limitation on the GNG. To start with one relative uncontroversial example, we could establish that for people notable as academic faculty or researchers only the WP:PROF guideline applies, and the GNG is not an option unless there's also notability in some othr manner. For a somewhat more controversial step, we could do exactly the same with the SNG for athletes,and conclude once and for all the discussion of whether it extends of limits or "presumes" in some undefined manner the GNG in that field. I'd go on with areas where there are very well establish SNGs: CREATIVE , or MUSIC, or POLITICIAN, before tackling the somewhat more difficult ORG. --though probably we should deal with some current problems by establish a special one for some particular classes of ORG. I think the most critically needed first step is commercial organizations established in 2000 or later. DGG ( talk ) 23:03, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
Agreed that formally changing PROF to be exclusionary would be an important step down this road, and I strongly support it. I think we already de facto apply it this way at most AfDs, and I will always !vote it as exclusionary personally, but moving to that as a formal standard would provide an example for other notability guidelines and move in the direction of a broader reform of the notability system that everyone seems to talk about but no one has wanted to take on. Perhaps doing this guideline-by-guideline is the best approach as a larger undertaking would likely be too much to handle at once. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:29, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
I'd like to see the SNGs used to help address other systemic issues facing Wikipedia. The GNG leaves considerable wiggle room in terms of how much coverage is enough and what sources are considered reliable; the better SNGs, like WP:PROF, simply reduce this ambiguity by giving concrete and objective criteria. But we can and, in my opinion, should raise or lower the bar depending on the context. For example, we should demand a higher standard of sourcing for topics that are frequent targets for spammers, like companies and corporate biographies. Conversely, we could be more inclusive in fields that are less prone to self-promotion and/or where Wikipedia has a known systemic bias. – Joe (talk) 23:42, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

To clarify, I didn't really mean getting rid of SNGs, but rather fixing GNG so none of the SNGs are put in the continually controversial position of trying to be GNG alternatives; the handful that are would rejoin the fold as advice on how to apply GNG topically, and as predictive assessments of what sorts of subjects within the topic area are likely to be found notable or not, which is what all of the SNGs are except a couple that I know of trying the "un-GNG" route. But that's rather different from this make-GNG-into-GVG-and-the-SNGs-into-independent-guidelines idea. Not sure how I feel about that. I'm always highly suspicious of topical decentralization, because it gives undue power to wikiprojects to tell other editors what they are "allowed" to do in topics the wikiprojects feel proprietary about. I suppose there's less risk or effect when it comes to notability than for style, article naming, etc., which is why I'm neutral on this idea.

One thing not covered in the loose formulation of this idea above is the flip side of the "it's too hard to get WP to keep an article about an academic" problem: it's way too easy to keep one about some B-movie actor or a singer who charted once, because there will always be a thick stack of "in-depth" coverage in entertainment-industry rags. The gist of my argument at the other page is that being an actor with some bit-part credits in actual feature films or TV shows, or being a band more than your local bar patrons have heard of, indicates nothing but competence in one's field, which does not equate to encyclopedic notability. We have thousands and thousands of non-encyclopedic stubs on all these "five minutes of fame" nobodies; any time IMDb or Discogs has a better article on someone that we do, we have a page we should delete.

I get a fuzzy sense that making the GNG the GVG and having different, topical notability criteria could maybe address that, but a "consistency nut" like me, when it comes to how a massive project like WP can be self-managing, rebels against the idea that decentralizing this is going to work. If anything, we should still have a WP:N page that lays out the basics on a broad-topic-area-by-broad-topic-area basis, with the SNGs being elaborations. That's what my instinct tells me. But, I came here to open a discussion not dominate it. Me having initial qualms doesn't mean they can't be assuaged. Anyway, I updated my page on this stuff with a mention of the GVG idea. PS: If anyone's wondering why I'm "suddenly" chiming in on this stuff, see the page I pointed to in the first post; I was deeply involved in WP:N back in the day, and have just left it alone for several years.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  22:29, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

Fulbright Scholars?

Does a Fulbright Scholarship tick the box for criterion 2 please? (I err on the side of "No" given that around 8,000 are awarded every year, but I want to double-check.) Zigzig20s (talk) 20:48, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

My opinion is no. It will add to notability but is not sufficient on its own. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:32, 18 January 2018 (UTC).
I agree. It is not enough by itself. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:43, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
That is my view too. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:06, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
Same here. I doubt that future journalism/ scholarship about each subject can be assumed based on the scholarship alone. You'd have a bunch of entries with almost none passing ANYBIO. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:17, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
No. Johnbod (talk) 08:50, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red#Systemic bias in notability. Despite the location, the "bias" in question is much more about notability of academics vs sportspeople than it is women vs men. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:21, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

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