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Quantifiable metric for WP:NACADEMIC

Hello, Is it possible to have some sort of quantifiable metrics that can be used for WP:PROF. My articles keep getting declined for unclear reasons. Some reviewers say I should not list publications, others say I should list a few, some other say list many more, or list citations along with papers. Some say having 5 edited books is notable, and others say something else. Some mentioned having 1 to 2 references in each paragraph of short 2-3 lines sentences even though all info came from a single profile page of the university website.

Is it possible to have a set measure of the following (or some other criteria that you can propose) for full-professors in scientific fields to be notable?

1. How many journal-publications are needed to be notable? (depends on the field but for medicine I would say >100?)

2. What impact factor journals should be considered notable? (depends on the field but for medicine I would say >25?)

3. How many citations per publication are needed? (depends on the field but for medicine I would say >100?)

4. How many edited books are needed? (depends on the field but for medicine I would say >3?)

5. How many book chapters are needed? (depends on the field but for medicine I would say >3?)

6. How many conference presentations are needed (if relevant)?

7. How many years the person should be teaching at a university?

8. How many subjects the person should be teaching at a university?

9. How much should be the minimum H-index? (depends on the field but for medicine I would say >45?)

10. How many patents (if relevant)?

Thanks Earthianyogi (talk) 17:34, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Most, but not all, of those points are irrelevant. In general those that are about other people noticing the work rather than about how hard the subject has worked count. If we could come up with fixed numbers then we would have no need for deletion discussions, which would be great if we could do it but is well beyond the current state of artificial intelligence. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:52, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
When you say most are irrelevant, it would worth picking up the relevant ones and discussing them further. The idea is to avoid too much discussion, if possible. It may be possible to achieve it for certain categories (if not all), for example, WP:NACADEMIC within medicine or engineering? Earthianyogi (talk) 18:59, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
No, this is all irrelevant. I understand your frustration but, as a new editor, you should have read the archived talk before asking a question in search of definitive answers you'll never get. Academia is too broad to have a single set of criteria; this has been discussed. Our goal writing the encyclopedia is gathering together enough source material upon which we base the article. We all agree that the news media will cover people who win Nobel Prizes, but after that it becomes uncertain. We don't use an arbitrary criterion like h-index because the historians that write about academics don't necessarily use h-index as a driver of topic selection. The reason why Wikipedia covers athletes so much more than academics is that fans create the market for sport media, which provide sources. Nobody cares about professors at universities. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:11, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Sure, I am new to Wiki and have read a few talk-pages but not the old-archives. Of course, academia is broad, and I am not asking for a single set of criteria for all, I am just proposing categories according to the fields so that historians can have a separate threshold, etc. I agree nobody cares about professors at universities, but they help shape the future of society. In one case, I also read that a person's profile on Wiki was rejected, and that person later got a Nobel Prize. Some also said it might be easy for others to game the system using fixed-matrix, but if you keep the criteria high enough, it may be tricky. With time, things have evolved, and with such experienced editors on Wiki who have dedicated so many hours of their life, it may be worth trying to consider coming up with a metric. The idea is simple, but if you want to ignore it bec I am new to Wiki, it is fine.
"Our goal writing the encyclopedia is gathering together enough source material upon which we base the article."- Is precisely the problem, I feel. Earthianyogi (talk) 19:29, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
How would we write an article without sources? The sources tell us what we're writing. We're not rewarding entities that garner coverage. We need facts so we can write an article. How could we write about a person if we don't have an independent source that tells us about them? Maybe you have a conflict of interest here. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:06, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

I have no COI. Please do not rush to any conclusion too soon. I have not been paid to write any article on Wiki, which many reviewers assumed previously, may be because they are paid to do so. I saw your COI in a few articles. I think there was some misunderstanding, as I agree that citations are necessary, but defining how many are enough is a problem. Earthianyogi (talk) 20:13, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

In my view, PROF works a bit differently than GNG. I see no problem with a substub that meets PROF #2, 3, 5, 6, 8, because at the very least the article can instantly make it clear why the subject is important. PROF #1, 4, 7 are more coverage-based, but because a lot of an academic's notability derives from their work rather than their biography, it is OK to devote a large portion of text to summarizing their work and have a smaller section on others' commentary on it, as opposed to a politician or sportsperson where almost all the content will be based on reporters talking about things the person did. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 21:27, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Unfortunately this means quantifying what is enough is going to be harder. For GNG the definition of "significant coverage" is not a fixed number of sources or words but rather "whatever it takes to write a reasonably sized article on the subject". For PROF we can always write a summary of an academic's work using their own papers, so the test is purely "should we have an article" rather than the "can we have an article" used for most other subjects. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 21:31, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
I, too, am skeptical that we could provide the kinds of concrete numbers for which you are asking. This is an incredibly challenging task even for experts who work at colleges and universities and evaluate faculty members and researchers as part of their full-time job. There are just too many differences across academic disciplines for there to be agreement on these quantitative metrics. I am not an expert on promotion and tenure standards - my expertise is in U.S. higher education as a discipline but not this specific topic - but my sense is that colleges and universities typically leave it to individual programs and departments to try to come up with these kinds of metrics that can be applied in annual appraisal as well as promotion and tenure decisions. But once decisions have to be made outside of those units, especially in tenure and promotion cases where many different committees and individuals vote on each case, these metrics are not applied as there is simply way too much variation between disciplines (and often within disciplines, too) for this to be practical.
For example, there is not even agreement between disciplines about what kinds of publications are most meaningful. Many humanities disciplines place a lot of value on single-author books ("monographs"). Many science and social science disciplines place a lot of value on journal articles and peer-reviewed books. And other disciplines, particularly engineering and computer science, place a lot of value on conference papers and patents. So the most basic question of "How many publications and of what kind?" has many different answers.
It might also be instructive to look at the efforts that have tried to rigorously answer some of those questions. There are some ranking systems and databases, some of which are proprietary (e.g., Academic Analytics), that apply algorithms to databases to rank faculty members or institutions. They're very contentious with widespread accusations and suspicion of faulty algorithms, woefully incomplete databases, and broken epistemological foundations.
It would be very nice if we had clear answers to your questions. But if the experts who have dedicated their lives to this and are paid to do this full-time can't answer these questions then I'm extremely skeptical that a small group of volunteers, many of whom are likely (very well-meaning, intelligent, informed, and hard-working!) amateurs, can answer them. We stumble along as best we can with fuzzy standards that are sometimes unsatisfactory and ill-applied. And we often reflect the biases and shortcomings of the broader cultures and histories in which we are situated.
Please don't think that they're bad questions! We need to be prodded and encouraged to improve our standards and our practices. And we need to be self-reflective and critical of our standards and practices. So please keep asking questions, even if we can't answer them. ElKevbo (talk) 21:33, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the encouraging answers. I think Wiki works in a completely different way than I thought until 5 minutes ago. I am just made to realise that citations are not important to satisfy the criteria-1 of WP:PROF for notability. See the following:

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse#Draft_talk%3AKawal_Rhode

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Earthianyogi#Your_articles_on_academics

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_talk:Kawal_Rhode

Thanks Earthianyogi (talk) 22:00, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Don't believe what Troutman says about academic notability. Troutman's claim on draft talk that we cannot use citation counts and instead must base WP:PROF#C1 notability purely on independent sources telling us that the research is of high impact is very far from how WP:PROF#C1 works in practice. Troutman appears to prefer either eliminating our academic notability standards altogether in favor of GNG or (as in this discussion) pretending they are based on GNG when they are not, and as a result tilting the balance towards only having articles on celebrity publicity-hound academics. Troutman's "Nobody cares about professors" above may be projection, but it is telling. Kawal Rhode clearly passes WP:PROF#C1, purely based on the high citation counts in his Google Scholar profile and calibration for his field of research (noting that it is a field where journals and citations are more important than books and book reviews, and where high citation counts should be expected, but nevertheless observing that his citation counts are high). Most full professors in the UK system would also likely pass. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:21, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, David Eppstein, that is what I thought a bit of mix-up between WP:GNG and WP:PROF. However, it is surprising that many others agree with him. I am been told by "David notMD" that all the articles I have created could be potentially be deleted, as they do not show notability, even though I think that they cover more than one criterion for WP:PROF. I am not sure what to do? Should I continue to contribute to Wikipedia or stop creating more articles? Also see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Earthianyogi#Your_articles_on_academics . Earthianyogi (talk) 22:28, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Citation counts are an objective measure of the impact that the work of a scholar has had on the scholarly community. The number of citations needed to obtain notability varies from subject to subject and is detremined by consensus. Typically a thousand are required, compared to the handful of sources required to meet WP:GNG. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:39, 23 July 2020 (UTC).
Thanks for your response. Do you mean a thousand citation counts for one paper, or for all papers combined of the subject in question? Where is this number coming from, and why do we not use H-index? Of course, for historians, we can have other criteria for other fields. Earthianyogi (talk) 22:57, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
All citations combined. H-index or total sum of citations are strongly correlated with each other, but the important thing to keep in mind about either of these measures of citation (or the variant I more commonly consider for these sorts of evaluations, number of publications with >100 citations) is that different fields will have different typical numbers, so the evaluation should be calibrated for that. Which is problematic, because we don't all know the norms for all fields or even what the boundaries between different fields with different norms are. It's also important to pay attention to authorship of the highly-cited works because for instance a paper with 10,000 cites and 200 authors should probably count less towards notability than a paper with 1000 cites and 2 authors. So at the end of the day it's more subjective than we'd like, just as GNG-based evaluations that hinge on how routine, local, or independent certain coverage is can be more subjective than the GNG-proponents pretend. Despite a certain level of subjectivity I think this is all usually better than evaluating people by how effective their employer's publicity department is. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:24, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, I had almost lost hope in citations! Total 1000 is doable for each professor. I want to add that as "David notMD" has advised me that he may nominate all articles written by me for deletion, as they are week on notability criteria. I feel that these are thousands of articles on Wikipedia, which I can find that does not meet the notability criteria, are a list of institutes, one-line articles for artists, and many other non-sense articles. Is it possible for me to nominate these as part of the cleaning drive? How can we do that? Earthianyogi (talk) 23:30, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Hello,

I agree David, but we have to accept that we will never be perfect. Some degree of uncertainty will prevail and will be covered by exceptions, no matter what method we use.

Also, is there a Wiki authority, who can help set these standards, or all aspects of Wiki, including preparing new guidelines, have been left for the community consensus?

Is there any weight-age to editors/reviewers who have COI in other articles, have accepted payments for creating articles on Wikipedia, or have created a handful of articles on it, or never had a COI? I assume that editor/reviews who do not have a COI may be stepping on the toes of those (un/knowingly) who may have COI, and we may never be able to come to a consensus.

Earthianyogi (talk) 23:44, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

These matters have been debated over the years in the archives of this talk page. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:34, 24 July 2020 (UTC).
There are no special authorities here when it comes to establishing or changing policies and practices. A handful of volunteers have been elected to positions of trust where they can block editors, protect articles, and perform other technical tasks. But they don't have any more authority in creating or changing anything; they just help ensure things run smoothly.
I don't quite understand your question about COIs. Editors who edit with undisclosed COIs are in violation of our policies, especially if they're being paid to promote the subject(s). Editors with a COI who abide by our policies are held in the same regard as other editors; we all have COIs, after all, it's just a question of whether we manage them appropriately. ElKevbo (talk) 00:31, 24 July 2020 (UTC)


  • As I have argued long ago, any full professor in a major research university is intrinsically notable; they have been judged to be so by more more competent people than us. The essence of the present guideline is what amounts to the same thing, having a significant influence of the filed. How this is measured depends on the field, the country, and the time period. For convenience, this discussion needs to be limited to the period of modern state-subsidezed research (1950-present), Western Europe and the United States and other countries with a similarly well developed meaurable system accessible to us ,

In the sciences, influence is obtained in only one way: by publishing peer reviewed papers (or in somefield, likeengineering, peer-reviewed conference papers, and ot-- and othe r special cases). One does not obtain inflluence by publishing any number of mediocre papers., andwhat the h facotr measures is exactly that: Consider two people

A, with publication with citation counts 500, 400, 300, 200, 150, 50, 40, 30 , 25, 20, 15, 15, 14, 14, 13, 12
B, with publications with citation counts, 30, 29, 25, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 18, 17, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12,

The h-factor of each of them is 14. The total humber of paper each has published is 16. Only one of them is notable. The actual numbers that are relevant depend upon the publication and citation density in the field. The more papers people write, the more they will have to cite. The custom of the field determines how many apers ofthe possibly elevant ones a person actually does cite. I could write a very long essay explaining the factors that go into this, and books have indeed been written on it, But basically, it is only important work that is highly noticed by one's peers that makes someone notable in science . Other questions brought up here are interesting, but secondary, I suggest a look at some of my archived discussions at User talk:DGG/Archive 0.5 -- my talk page archive for academic things and people for a discussion of some of them.easured depends on the field, the country, and the time period. DGG ( talk ) 00:47, 24 July 2020 (UTC).

What may be worth considering is an entity different and less subjective metric. On Polish Wikipedua the rule is simple: anyone who has a habilitation is automatically notable, regardless of their citation count or such. Given that we are super inclusive for sports people, and celebrities (IIRC the statistics say that like 30-50% of Wikipedia biographies are sports people, don't they?), I think there is a systemic bias against academics (because they don't get much coverage). I think we should lower our requirements of notability for academics, and say that anyone with associate professor degree and/or habilitaiton and/or equivalents is notable. WP:NOTPAPER, and we need to counteract the bias favoring the sports people; I have tried to tighten the notability policies for them but it is impossible, die hard fans will always prevent that. So the only solution is to lower the notability criteria for other 'important' people. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:37, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

an habilation essentially is the equivalent of having completed a post-doctoral fellowship, isn't it? DGG ( talk ) 00:25, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
Hmmm, as I haven't done either I am not sure. From a very simple perspective, habilitation always seemed to me like a 'second PhD', as far as amount of work and the final result, through I think it is much more common in Europe than getting a second PhD is in countries with no habilitation requirement. Ping User:Pundit? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:57, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Habilitation DEFINITELY is not equivalent to a post-doctoral fellowship. A postdoc is done after a Ph.D., for 1-3 years typically. Habilitation is done 6-9 years after a Ph.D. typically, it requires substantial publication record (typically, a book plus 5-6 articles in prime journals, but depends largely on the field), and the closest equivalent is tenure review / associate professorship promotion. In my experience the resemblance is quite close. Pundit|utter 21:15, 27 July 2020 (UTC)


  • about books: To meet wp:author usually takes at least two successful books-- successful in the sense of having substantial critical attention from reliable sources which have coverage/ In those fields of the academic world such as humanities or history where books count much more than journals the criteria depends to a considerable extent over which publisher it is: basically it has to be one of the major academic publishers -- which comprise the University presses plus the very few of the publishers that deal with serious academic books. With the editorship counts depends on the degree of involvement if the editor merely collects articles the degree of involvement can be very little. It also depends upon field the major editors of the most important textbooks in law and medicine can be notable on that basis. Pamphlets are not books even though published by the University press. Government documents are usually not books-- but there are exceptions and the individual titles have to be looked at. DGG ( talk ) 00:19, 25 July 2020 (UTC)


Thank you for all your replies. I have been recently told that all the academic profiles I have created on Wiki may be up for deletion (please see my user page and talk page)

  • David notMD: Many/most of the articles you have created about academics suffer the same weaknesses at the one for Rhodes. Even though most have been accepted, in my opinion they do not confirm notability, and if I was in a mean mood I would nominate all of them for deletion. How much a professor was awarded in grants, how many grad student degrees they oversaw, their articles being cited - none of that conveys notability. Academics doing what is expected of academics is not Wikipedia notability.


despite these guidelines

  • “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.“
  • “Some academics may not meet any of these criteria, but may still be notable for their academic work. It is very difficult to make clear requirements in terms of number/quality of publications. The criteria, in practice, vary greatly by field and are determined by precedent and consensus. Also, this guideline sets the bar fairly low, which is natural; to a degree, academics live in the public arena, trying to influence others with their ideas. It is natural that successful ones should be considered notable.”

I have read discussion archives (though not all of them, I confess) that had many ideas with great potential. I noticed two schools of thought on Wiki notability.

Briefly, one idea (WP:GNG) considers a subject notable when the subject is significantly covered (not just name mentions) by others in media, provided that the sources are considered independent & reliable. This criterion may be biased towards professions in the entertainment business, sports and the high echelons of power. Some of the contributors that follow this “school of thought” do no consider a subject’s authored publications/books and/or the respective number of citations as the primary criteria for Wiki notability. Others consider criterion-1 of WP:NACADEMIC to be subjective and raise questions about how many citations are needed to be notable despite the guidelines, as mentioned above.

Conversely, the other idea (WP:NACADEMIC) considers a subject notable on the basis of the citations of their work (criterion-1) by other academics. Since research papers are task (not people) oriented, the researcher's name only gets mentioned once (at the top). This criterion is slanted towards academics to some extent.

Are any of these ideas purely unbiased? Arguably, no. This may be the main reason why two separate guidelines exist based on community consensus, WP:GNG and WP:NACADEMIC. I am not going to question these fundamental ideas as a community consensus has been reached. I will only try to focus on criterion-1 of WP:NACADEMIC, which may help a way to quantify the citation criterion and describes that citation criteria may vary according to field/area of expertise.

However, I feel that it may be possible to define a quantitative metric by focusing on, out of the many factors involved, only the most relevant within the context of Wiki. The idea is similar to that used in biology, where mathematical models focus on a handful of essential parameters affecting a process (out of 15-30 parameters) to simplify the problem accepting a degree of associated limitation. For simplicity, I am going to ignore all the other factors, like country, race, gender, background, area of research, the era of research, impact, etc., for two main reasons. First, when an academic article is deleted, these items are not taken into consideration, so why should they be considered for article creation. Second, I am not trying to question the guidelines that already exist; however, I only wish to add some quantitative metrics in the hope that it will lead to less bias.

I feel that two main problems arise when trying to address criterion-1 of WP:NACADEMIC: I will try to address each of these points one by one.


1. How many citations of an article is considered notable? I found a list of the most cited articles in the world. The article on the 1st place has 305,000 citations (Google shows 218,578 citations). The article on 10th place has 40,289 citations. It shows a sharp decline in the citation numbers among the most cited papers of all time. https://www.genscript.com/top-100-most-cited-publications.html

May be it is possible to from a list with mean/median citations of the top 100 papers in various fields to get the citation threshold for the notability criteria for each area/field. A short list is presented below.

Based on this and other suggestions, would it be worth saying that an academic with 1,000 citations based on 3 of their most-cited papers can be considered notable for academics in SCIENCE (these numbers may be different for engineering, history, etc.)?


2. How do we transform/extend this notable “citation number” taking into account first/second/third authorship, number of co-authors, or number of years ago the paper was published? Do we need a separate metric for each? Another way to look at notability is to modify the number of citations based on the number of authors and the number of years after publications. So how do we calculate this number for each author?

a. Take the 3 most cited papers of an author.

b. Divide these citations for each paper with the total number of years they have been published.

c. Add these three values in the previous step and divide by a unique number of authors in these 3 papers to get Wiki Notability Score (WNS).

For example, consider the three most cited papers for Oliver H. Lowry’s (who has the highest citations counts in the world for one of his paper) as follows:

GoogleScholar Authors Citations Year Years till today Citation/year/paper
Protein Measurement with FolinPhenol Reagent OH Lowry, NJ Rosbrough, AL Farr, Randall RJ 222,940 1951 2020-1951=69 222,940/69=3,231
Estimation of proteins by Folin phenol reagent OH Lowry, NJ Rosenbrough, AL Farr, RJ Randall 15,945 1951 2020-1951=69 15,945/69=231
A flexible system of enzymatic analysis Oliver H Lowry, Janet V Passonneau 4,204 1972 2020-1971=49 4,204/49=86
- Unique authors=5 - - - Total=3,548

Now, divide 3,548/5=709 is the WNS for Oliver H Lowry. This is the highest WNS that any author can have today. It assumes all authors on 3 papers had an equal contribution.


I repeated the procedure for the Toby J Gibson, who is an author of the 10th most cited paper “Clustal W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice.”

GoogleScholar Authors Citations Year Years till today Citation/year/paper
CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice JD Thompson, DG Higgins, TJ Gibson 62,536 1994 2020-1994=26 62,536/26=2,405
The CLUSTAL_X windows interface: flexible strategies for multiple sequence alignment aided by quality analysis tools JD Thompson, TJ Gibson, F Plewniak, F Jeanmougin, DG Higgins 41,980 1997 2020-1997=23 41,980/23=1,825
Clustal W and Clustal X version 2.0 Mark A Larkin, Gordon Blackshields, Nigel P Brown, R Chenna, Paul A McGettigan, Hamish McWilliam, Franck Valentin, Iain M Wallace, Andreas Wilm, Rodrigo Lopez, Julie Dawn Thompson, Toby J Gibson, Desmond G Higgins 25,471 2007 2020-2007=13 25,471/13=1,959
- Unique authors=13 - - - Total=4,024

Now, divide 4,024/13=323 to get the WNS for Toby J Gibson. It assumes all authors on these papers had an equal contribution.


Based on the methods described in point 1 or point 2, can we come up with a threshold value of WNS for an academic to be notable? Will these numbers may be different for engineering, history, etc.? Please take the above with a pinch of salt, as it has many limitations, just like any other method, but it can be taken as a first step in the quantitative direction. So as an academic, what is your Wiki Notability Score (WNS)?

Thank you Earthianyogi (talk) 20:56, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

"Science" is far too broad a set of areas to have a single numeric rule for citation counts that can be accurate for all of it. I don't think there is any getting around the need for both some amount of subjectivity and some amount of subject-specific expertise in these judgements. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:14, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
It has long been accepted (read the archives of this page) that citation patterns vary significantly from subject to subject. The practice is to compare like with like i.e. physicists with physicists, philosophers with philosophers but never physicists with philosophers. There are also differences within the sub-fields of both physics and philosophy so, as with all editing of Wikipedia, knowledge and experience of the topic are helpful to make useful edits. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:25, 25 July 2020 (UTC).
I think what has long been accepted is that citation counting is completely useless in arts subjects, and varies significantly from subject to subject in the sciences and social sciences. Botanists should never be compared with physiologists for example. So the answer to Earthianyogi's question "can we come up with a threshold value of WNS for an academic to be notable?" is no, we can't. Johnbod (talk) 00:05, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
What is your point? Both botany and physiology are sciences. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:17, 26 July 2020 (UTC).
EXACTLY - in fact both branches of biology; "never physicists with philosophers" was a BAD example, because citation counts are no use at all in philosophy, but botanists and physiologists is a GOOD one. All clear now I hope? Johnbod (talk)
The claim that citations cannot be used for philosophers is made without evidence. Philosophers like Isaiah Berlin[1], A. J. Ayer[2], Peter Singer [3], [4], Roger Scruton [5] show stunning citation data which effortlessly surpass any notability criterion. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:36, 26 July 2020 (UTC).
All these have/had very extensive and successful careers as public intellectuals, which most philosphers don't. Singer has been much involved in "applied philosophy" and gets cited a lot by medics etc. Again untypical. David Eppstein below is right. I expect much of the differences between the groups he describes relates to sub-fields of the subject. Johnbod (talk) 15:35, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
The citations that I have listed above are from Google scholar, generally from reputable academic sources. These philosophers do not get their citations from Tabloid or Social media. Similar values can be found on other citation data bases like Scopus or Publons. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:41, 27 July 2020 (UTC).
and your point is? If you've ever looked at one, you'll find tabloids don't cover public intellectuals very thoroughly. Johnbod (talk) 02:58, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
My personal impression is that the standards for excellence in philosophy are mysterious and a little cryptic. Some philosophers write journal articles with lots of citations. Some philosophers write well-reviewed books. But some other philosophers do neither of those things and nevertheless get described as being top philosophers by other philosophers. I don't understand why. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:54, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
If they are little noted they are not notable by Wikipedia standards. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:09, 26 July 2020 (UTC).
If the other philosophers write strong enough letters of recommendation for them they can obtain distinguished professorships and be notable by WP:PROF#C5. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:21, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
That's fine then. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:54, 26 July 2020 (UTC).

I mean WNS for botany, a different WNS for physiology, another WNS for Dentistry, and so on within various areas of sciences (sorry, it was not clear I point 2). I agree 100% compare physicists with physicists, philosophers with philosophers (I thought it is undeniable, but maybe not).

The idea is not to contradict or oppose or cut-down on any existing guidelines but to support WP:PROF#C1. All current exceptions, all other criteria 1-8, and subject-specific expertise in these judgement would still hold. The academics who are extensively cited will always remain; the ones who are not well cited could fall in the existing exception categories; therefore, this metric will only support WP:PROF#C1. Arts is a well-known exception and will be dealt with the way it is currently done.

Indeed, it may be best to leave the criteria-1 vague, as it works in favour of academics and would help keep the bar low.

All the best. Earthianyogi (talk) 08:37, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

The "WNS" proposal is quantitative, but it is not any less subjective than what we already do. For example, the procedure says, Take the 3 most cited papers of an author. Why 3? Why not 4 or 5 — just because 3 "sounds like enough"? In some fields, a scientist's top-cited papers are likely to be reports by massive collaborations in which they participated. Getting a thousand citations because you were working at CERN when they found the Higgs means something different than getting a thousand citations because you and a couple colleagues introduced a new idea. Why assume that all authors contribute equally? I can tell you straightaway that's not rooted in fact. Trying to invent a metric is just pretending that subjectivity can be eliminated. XOR'easter (talk) 18:14, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Quite. All that this proposal would do would be that argument would move from concrete examples of academics whose notability is in question to arguments about the general principles. The latter will never be resolved, because there are editors who think that it's more important to have sources about the subjects' favourite foods or their sexual partners than sources about their work. The way that Wikipedia has been so successful is that we get on with writing articles about specific subjects rather than try to settle such differences that will never be settled. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:28, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

I think there is some misunderstanding. I am not trying to eliminate all subjectivity; it is impractical to believe that any method can ever do that. The example mentioned about CERN/Higgs is just an exception, which would be covered within the current guidelines. This metric will hopefully address comments like these:

  • “Wikipedia hasn't determined if 300 is high impact. We don't have objective numbers. Maybe that's a lot; maybe it's not. Maybe it varies by field. I don't know. Ultimately, you think the subject is notable and you refuse to admit that N:PROF doesn't support your claim.”

But maybe it is not worth it, but it should not be rejected for any misunderstanding. As I said earlier, it may be best to leave the criteria-1 vague, as it works in favour of academics, would help keep the bar low, and that the differences can never be settled. Earthianyogi (talk) 10:39, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Once again a discussion that completely ignores humanists, academic artists, and social scientists. There's no way to implement this until there's at least an attempt to cover academia, not just science. So, of course, oppose. -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 22:37, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
The procedure is to compare like with like: philosophers with with philosophers and physicists with physicists but never philosophers with physicists. So there is no problem with dealing with any academic discipline; one makes a comparison with peers. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:00, 29 August 2020 (UTC).
  • Comment/oppose. I must admit that as time passes I become less and less fond of using purely quantitative metrics like citation counts, h-index and the like. I prefer that we relied on them less and relied more on the sources that actually discuss the significance of the suject's work in detail. I do think that to the extent that we use some quantitative measures, we should stick to the ones that have been used in the literature, such as citation counts, h-index, g-index, etc, and not try to invent a completely new measure here such as this WNS. Creating anything like this WNS would be a necessarily ad-hoc endeavor with a huge amount of arbitrariness and unknown unintended consequences. As others have noted, there is a huge amount of variations between fields of study and even within specific broad disciplines in term of the speed of publication, citation rates and publication practices (journal articls vs conference proceedings vs books). IMO, the only reasonable approach is to have a case-specific discussion of what the various numbers mean for each academic, rather than to try to capture everybody's level notability by a single number. Nsk92 (talk) 23:25, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose and close this discussion. We're not going to invent our own metric for measuring and comparing citations especially one with no apparent basis in the available literature. ElKevbo (talk) 00:01, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Question: Notability

Hello. If the author's (Sanjay Chaudhary) research papers have been cited in number of other research works, can we consider him 'notable' ? If the author is an editor of a book published by reputed scholarly publication, can we consider him as 'notable' ? Thanks. --Gazal world (talk) 16:16, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

I do not think so. All established academics publish research papers, but that does not make them notable. I think a significant number is required. Similarly just one book that he edited, particularly as he is one of three editors, does not make him notable. --Bduke (talk) 22:40, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
I see. Thank you, Bduke. --Gazal world (talk) 22:53, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Notability opinion

Anyone with experience of Russian academia have an opinion whether Draft:Zayceva Tatyana Ivanovna is notable? I have no idea. (t · c) buidhe 13:34, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

SNG and GNG

There is a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability on the relationship between SNGs and the GNG which might be of interest to editors who watch this page. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:46, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Regius Professors

Do Regius Professors pass WP:NPROF#C5 by dint of title alone? I stumbled on Vincent Thomas Hyginus Delany, who was Regius Professor of Laws at the University of Dublin, and I'm wondering if he's notable. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 01:05, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Well it certainly sounds very grand. EEng 01:27, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
Agreed. The lede makes it sound so: "Each [position] was established by an English, Scottish, or British monarch [and] this royal imprimatur, and the relative rarity of these professorships, means a Regius chair is prestigious and highly sought-after." ElKevbo (talk) 01:33, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
Yes, definitely, easily...at this point. The number of Regius Professors has doubled in the past 20 years, so if this keeps happening, maybe in 60 years we'd need to re-examine policy, but at present they are definitely far, far, more notable than the average professor, and historically each would definitely pass notability. -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 00:42, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
Completely agree. Johnbod (talk) 04:09, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
Mscuthbert, Thanks. Moreover, Prof. Delany certainly seems notable by virtue of his name alone so I will take that as a go-ahead :) AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 00:45, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Establishing notability through textbooks and handbook articles

I'd like to propose the following addition to Criterion 1, which would simplify judgments about the significance of an academic's contributions, especially in fields with low citation rates. I'm sure this can be refined but it passes an initial stink test at least with respect to my own field.

  • Criterion 1 can be satisfied if the person's contributions are discussed in a reliable independent publication which gives an overview of a topic area, for instance a handbook article or a textbook. Discussion of the person's contribution must cite them as a primary contributor must be more than a passing mention, but it need not explicitly state that their work is significant.

Botterweg14 (talk) 02:27, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

  • So you're notable if a survey paper has a paragraph about one of your papers? That seems too minimal, and too easily gamed. It would be far below the current threshold of notability for criterion 1. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:33, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
That's not quite what I had in mind, though I admit my proposed text might have set the bar too low. Would you prefer if the text instead read “substantially more than a passing mention”? The assumption behind my proposal is that your contributions to a field are significant pretty much by definition if someone has to be aware of them in order to understand the state of the art on a major topic. Handbook articles and textbooks are normally reserved for major topics, and try to boil things down to the essentials, so I think this is in principle a viable way of demonstrating notability-- and a much more useful one for many fields! Botterweg14 (talk) 08:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
Particularly when you get up to the graduate level, textbooks can include some pretty niche topics. I'm speaking as a physicist here, so what I know best are physics and mathematics. I'm sympathetic to the concern, particularly since pure math is one of those low-citation-rates-across-the-board kind of fields. But the bar does seem too low. Heck, it might even make me wiki-notable, and that's just not a proposition I can entertain. XOR'easter (talk) 17:23, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
Hahaha, yeah, I hear that. Can you think of a version of this general idea that would set the bar in a better place? I could imagine adding conditions to which {hand | text}-books count, for instance suggesting that they be published by OUP, CUP, and so forth. (Of course that’s a bit yucky.) I could also imagine specifying something about how deeply the reference discusses the academic's putatively significant contribution, for instance that it should be the main focus of a subsection or listed in the index. These could be phrased as examples of idealized cases, to allow for simple phrasing and to leave some room for editorial discretion. I'm not attached to any specific idea, but I'd be happy and much more inclined to contribute biographical articles if something like this could be added to the guidelines. Botterweg14 (talk) 18:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
Do you have a specific example of somebody who would pass a criterion like what you have in mind but would fail (or probably fail) WP:PROF as it stands? That might help clarify things. XOR'easter (talk) 23:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Rhodes scholar

Does the Rhodes scholarship count towards meeting criterion 2 of WP:PROF? I was looking at Hila Levy where the primary assertion of notability seems to be she is the first Puerto Rican Rhodes scholar. Thanks! TJMSmith (talk) 13:41, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Given the process and criteria for the scholarship, I would argue no, as its more a competitive scholarship. Getting one is a likely chance that person will go on later to meet NPROF but we should wait until that point is passed. --Masem (t) 13:49, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
It's a postgraduate student scholarship so no, per the notes for C2. Students aren't "academics" in the sense this guideline uses and winning even a highly prestigious is unlikely to generate any coverage. – Joe (talk) 14:00, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
On that note, the citations for Levy's Rhodes scholarship, and the other references for that matter, are extremely thin and none are independent. The article looks like a random selection of military recruitment brochures contorted into the shape of a biography and I don't see any indication of notability. – Joe (talk) 14:12, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
Thanks all for your 2¢ and confirming my thoughts. TJMSmith (talk) 14:19, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
It's a bit like "first female medical student from Idaho" - a few of those are around, on grounds of their notability in women's history. Rather depressingly, they tended to practise medicine for a few years, then marry another doctor & have loads of children, so do nothing else notable. You might get a surprise at AFD. See List of first female physicians by country, though there doesn't seem to be a by state US list. Johnbod (talk) 15:47, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
For every female doctor (at least before this century when gay marriage has been possible in some jurisdictions) who marries another doctor and has loads of children there is a male doctor who does the same. I agree that a Rhodes scholar is not automatically notable, but I don't see the relevance of your comment. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:44, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
Sure, but nobody gives them articles. Hope that clears up your problem. Johnbod (talk) 18:41, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
There's also the extremely relevant fact that male doctors can have loads of children without it negatively impacting their career... JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
Student awards (and the Rhodes is a student award) are explicitly listed as not counted towards #2. The Rhodes might well lead to GNG-type coverage, but it is not counted towards PROF. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:53, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

How strict are the current notability criteria for academics

I was interested to see how strict the current notability criteria for academics really are since we seem to have tons of discussions about this on AfD. For this I tried to compare *how many faculty at universities there are in the US* and *how many articles we have in Wikipedia* about US-based faculty. I used the most recent data from the NCES in the US which indicates that there are 832,119 full time faculty (and 1,542,613 faculty in total) in the USA and did a PetScan search intersecting the two categories "Faculty by university or college in the United States by state" and "Living people". This has a slight bias since some faculty may be emeritus and thus not be active any more but still alive. As of today, I found 36673 entries in those two categories, which means we currently have articles for 2.38% of all US college faculty or 4.41% of all full time faculty. Further restricting the analysis only to full-time full professors and associate professors (344,893 total), excluding assistant professors, lecturers and others, and assuming that most of our articles are actually for such faculty, we can see that we have articles for 10.6% of these. The main limitation of this *quick* comparison are: not all people considered faculty by nces.ed.gov are actively performing research (eg there are many undergrad-only colleges), while not all people captured in the petscan search are active academics that perform research (eg they could be emeritus or political figures with vanity appointments) while false positives could be active academics not categorized as either i) living or ii) faculty.

From these numbers we can conclude that we currently have articles for the top 2.4% of all US academics at the faculty level, this number would be even lower if we include all researchers (industry, postdocs, grad students), so we can conclude that our notability criteria only allows articles for the top 1-2% of all professional researchers, i.e. people who are paid full time to perform research and teaching. The ratio is likely lower if were to include other reseachers, such as government and industry, but they are harder to estimate and also not part of the original petscan search and are thus not included. We also see that we currently are working within the constraints of the "Average Professor Test" as we only have articles on 10% of all full time tenured professors in the USA, optimistically we can assume that this mainly captures the top 10%. Compared to other areas of society, we could also note that only including 1-2% of all professionals in a field is quite strict (i.e. if we only included 1-2% of all professional athletes, professional actors, professional book authors, professional politicians; with professional meaning that they derive their full income from their activity), while on the other hand it is positively surprising that for 10% of tenured faculty we could find enough RS to write an article in an area that is usually poorly covered by media. --hroest 14:18, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

That we have the right academics is a huge and unwarranted assumption. One useful piece of research a few years back compared a commercial database (from one of the big journal publishers) of most-cited scientists for a particular top-of-productivity age cohort with the WP biographies. There were something like 12k in the commercial database and 8k on WP. Apart from massive geographical discrepancies (your comment only deals with the US), there was also a high proportion of the WP articles that did not match entries on the database. I think the authors suspected this was from Wikipedians writing up their own profs, which sounds plausible. Of course some will be notable for non-research reasons too. I've lost the link for that - does anybody know it? User:Piotrus? Johnbod (talk) 15:15, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
Johnbod, Thanks for the ping, but I don't recall that paper :( Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:24, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for this, very interesting statistics. Given that a tenured professor in the US is very likely to have published enough to generate significant coverage of their work in the form of citations, book reviews, etc. (that's the strength of this guideline – it frees us from being tied to media coverage alone), I think these are depressingly low figures. We can probably also assume that they're lower for almost every other country than they are for the US. It would be interesting to do a quantitative comparison with e.g. sportspeople, and also look at how the numbers break down for characteristics we know tend to be subject to systematic bias on Wikipedia, like gender and ethnicity (although I can guess the answer). – Joe (talk) 16:40, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
I think it would be more in line with existing guidelines and policies to draw the line at tenured professor (whose workload includes a substantial focus on research e.g., not a teaching professor) rather than assistant professor.
Given the very narrow, niche focus that most researchers (and thus faculty) have and the volunteer, amateur nature of most Wikipedia editors it would not be surprising to me if there are many notable academic who don't have articles. I imagine that there is simply a paucity of Wikipedia editors who have the specific knowledge and interest to (a) know about these people and (b) take the time to write articles. I'm an academic and I don't have much interest in writing articles about the notable people in my discipline; I have more pressing concerns and interests about the state of more basic information in my areas of knowledge as they're included (or not) in Wikipedia. ElKevbo (talk) 16:59, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
My experience (in creating articles for women in mathematics and related fields) is that there are indeed many notable academics, ones who clearly meet our current standards for academics who do not have articles. The issue is maybe worse for academics from past times who do not have students to push for their articles to be created, so WP:RECENTISM is also a factor. That suggests that if we want to change the balance of which academics are represented here, loosening the notability standards is not likely to make an enormous difference. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:39, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
I agree that there are many more subjects that are notable and not yet written, one could probably make a good argument about each of the other 90% of the tenured faculty in the US + thousands of researchers abroad who dont have an article yet. The analysis above seems to generally support our notability guidelines and that before loosening them we should instead focus on these notable academics that dont have an article yet. Generally a tenured professor at a major university is likely to be notable, not because s/he is tenured but because a committee of peers have decided that the research output has substantially advanced human knowledge. Often the general notability criteria and the criteria for tenure at a research university overlap pretty well, both ask the question whether that person contributed substantially to a field, so it is reasonable to assume that a major proportion of these 90% of researchers would be notable. Also I agree with Johnbod that we dont necessarily have the "right" academics and many of the most important researchers are probably missing; it is likely that we have a substantial number of articles about less notable academics who happened to teach a class somewhere while a researcher at NIH has a much lower chance of getting an article since they dont teach. --hroest 18:43, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
I agree with Johnbod that these aren't necessarily the top academics in their fields, but rather the ones editors want to write about for personal, professional, or occasionally agenda-based reasons. 1–2% coverage also only includes who we've profiled so far; by all indications our criteria would easily include far, far more than that. Some of our criteria are also pretty lax and probably should be reevaluated. For example, the auto-notability of distinguished professors may be severely over-inclusive -- depending on the school and field. At Rutgers the math department has more distinguished and named professors than associate or assistant professors combined (28/63 distinguished/named, 7 associate, 10 assistant, 16 tenured). But other departments seem much more restricted:
Hannes Röst, I am in favor of making our criteria more open. Mainly because we are super inclusive when it comes to sportspeople and many other types of celebrities. As the sport fans are always ready to defend their turf, the only way to ensure equal coverage is to take a page from their book. If you play in a single "bigger" match/game, you are notable? Ok, then if you are hired by a "larger" university (let's say Top 1000 or whatever), you are notable too. That's would be an easy way to determine notability, without having to deal with citation averages by (sub)field and other headaches. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:45, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
Rutgers professor ranks by field

I excluded biology since I know for a fact they haven't updated their websites with professor accolades since 2015.

Caption text
Dept Total Prof Asst Assoc Dist/Named % Dist/Named
Math 63 16 10 7 28 44.444
Physics 71 24 14 9 24 33.803
Chem 42 8 10 6 18 42.857
Soc 32 11 7 12 2 6.25
Econ 35 19 8 3 5 14.286
Stats 38 13 10 7 8 21.053
English 61 25 3 25 8 13.115
Bus 28 4 12 6 6 21.429
Phil 35 19 8 3 5 14.286
Ed 58 15 19 15 9 15.517
CS 57 24 21 9 3 5.263
Comm 69 21 20 21 7 10.145
Engineer 180 61 58 34 27 15
JoelleJay (talk) 18:10, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
JoelleJay In principle, I tend to agree with you, however if there is no problem then dont fix it? Unless we have a ton of AfD candidates who only pass by their named professorship but are clearly non-notable, then I dont think we need to change it. On the other hand, it sometimes helps in a difficult AfD discussion to convince deletionist people if the subject holds such a chair and saves us some time. --hroest 18:46, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
Yes that's true, I don't think there are many AfDs where this is the major keep factor. It's certainly not something that needs to be changed in the guidelines. The extreme variability between departments is just yet another example of why we need to evaluate people within their own (sub)fields much more stringently. JoelleJay (talk) 20:11, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
I'd still support making the whole thing WP:GNG-based, to be honest. WP:NPROF is completely opaque to apply for someone outside academia, and the truly notable academics will be written about by someone else somewhere - the guideline could be rewritten to help people from outside the academy understand which in-academy sources demonstrate reliable non-secondary/non-independent coverage which demonstrates notability, so still applying the same exemption as before. I understand this proposal is unlikely to get up, but it'd be really helpful IMO. SportingFlyer T·C 09:21, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
SportingFlyer Sorry, I am not sure what you propose to change - are you suggesting to simply merge NPROF with GNG? Or are you suggesting to replace NPROF with GNG? Unfortunately the latter would never work and we would have to delete an estimated 90-95% of all articles due to lack of RS and SIGCOV. In general even academics that have made very important discoveries will not always have broad coverage in mainstream media and we would run into issues as with Donna Strickland who did not have an article when she won her Nobel Prize in 2018 due to lack of independent sources. This is because the average CNN viewer is not that interested in chirped pulse amplification and who invented, so there is no coverage (unless they get a Nobel prize for it). Even if everybody in a field agrees that a person made a major discovery, this is often not truly reflected in the "objective" academic literature since academics generally look down upon "vanity articles" and often stick to reporting the facts. So no, using GNG would not be helpful and there is a good reason for NPROF. Consensus here so far seems to be that the system works and we are actually missing articles on many notable people. But I agree that maybe we could do with a "lay summary" of the guidelines if that is what you had in mind. --hroest 13:28, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
That would be my general suggestion, yes, though it would still remain expanded to allow for academic sources to be used to demonstrate notability. I would not mind a "lay summary" either, often I'll see articles that are basically academic CVs at say AfC and I'll skip them entirely. SportingFlyer T·C 13:31, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
"WP:NPROF is completely opaque to apply for someone outside academia" -- I think that that's totally fine. Why shouldn't people who understand who academia works be the people who judge which academics are notable? I wouldn't want to argue that X English football player is notable without knowing what the difference between the Premiere League or League One or National League is; or be judging a baseball player if I didn't know what an RBI is. If anything Wikipedia has (in my opinion) a problem of people with too little knowledge of topics making decisions, not the other way around. Even within the WP:PROF world, quite often people from one discipline (say, science/engineering, since it's overrepresented here b/c of the technical nature of editing) weigh in on humanities/arts cases without knowing differences in publishing, research among fields. -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 00:05, 27 April 2021 (UTC)
User:Mscuthbert, I think the difference is that you don't need any expertise to assess notability in sports or any other bio really, since those all ultimately require GNG, whereas NPROF is uniquely not subordinate to GNG. So it is comparatively harder for someone editing bios to evaluate notability in academia versus e.g. baseball. I don't generally have much of a problem with this, except when certain fields come up that have extremely high citation rates/h-indices and everyone unfamiliar with the field uses the same benchmarks as they do for lower-citation fields. This results in non-exceptional people in e.g. experimental physics and clinical genetics being kept. JoelleJay (talk) 01:43, 27 April 2021 (UTC)
What is the use for an article? Why would a reader who is not the person's mother want to read it? Wikipedia is not a directory, even though the coverage of sports would lead you to think so. When I write articles on scholars in the humanities, I root around in reviews and summarize for students or general readers who want background on the author of a book or article. Representing a certain percentage of the field is not the point. Articles on individual scholars in the hard sciences may not have much use. Sure, if that person made an important breakthrough, then readers would look to Wikipedia (though maybe the article should be about the breakthrough, not the individual). But there is little use for articles that give the same information as a Google search and finding the CV on a department website. Students will find the information they want on Rate My Professor. As pointed out above, the problem mostly solves itself because few editors write about the Average Prof, so why worry? ch (talk) 16:30, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
CWH that is a good question indeed, for whom are we writing? I think bio articles of academics should cover leaders in their fields that had a significant impact through teaching or research, often these people did not just discover a single concept but contributed and collaborated on the establishment of multiple concepts, otherwise I agree they should not have their own article but should be mentioned in the history of the concept itself. I think it depends what you mean with "important breakthrough", for example in my field of mass spectrometry the development of electrospray ionization was an extremely important breakthrough, but likely the general public never even heard of the concept (or the people behind it like John B. Fenn) except graduate students in the field. However I think it is still interesting and important to document the history, the people and the technology in such a widely used method and probably more people than "the persons mother" will read it. Part of the "problem" we have is that people *do* write about their (non-notable) professors while many notable people (such as members of the Royal Society of Canada) do not yet have articles. Secondly, my analysis above does not conclude that there is a "problem" per se, it only shows the current state of affairs, but I think we can conclude from it that we are currently highly selective in who gets an article in Wikipeda since only a small number of academics have articles (compared to soccer players etc). Finally, you could apply the same argument to other areas, such as sports people where you could equally well say that we do not need an article since readers could look these people up on more specialized sites. --hroest 15:21, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
@Hannes Röst: You said " we currently have articles for the top 2.4% of all US academics at the faculty level, this number would be even lower if we include all researchers (industry, postdocs, grad students), so we can conclude that our notability criteria only allows articles for the top 1-2% of all professional researchers", are you implying that for each faculty member there's approximately 2 people that are either students or postdocs or industry academics? Dr. Universe (talk) 02:39, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
@Dr. Universe: this is based on estimates of graduate students (180k doctorate degrees per year, thus there are roughly around 500k to 1 million graduate students enrolled at US universities if we assume 3-5 year to a degree) plus this estimate of 64k postdocs currently working in the US. So this would mean around 1.5 M faculty + 1 M graduate students + postdocs = 2.5 M researchers at US universities (or 1.8 M full time researchers or 1.3 M if we only take tenured faculty). This provides us with the estimate of around 1.2 and 2.3% of all full time university-based researchers that currently have articles in Wikipedia, but there are also non-university affiliated researchers etc. This does not include master students, of which there are ca. 800k degrees per year, so another estimated 1.5M enrolled master students, but not all of them would be research master students. So yes, this would mean on average there is less than 1 graduate student per faculty and on average there is about 1 master student per faculty, meaning that there are many faculty that do not (currently) have a graduate student. Assuming a minimum size of a (functional) research group of at least 3 people + PI, we could also very very roughly estimate that there are at most 300k active university research groups in the US (likely much less given that some groups are large and have many students). This compares with a lower estimate of the total number of R01 grants by NIH of 15k per year with an estimate total number of about 75k active R01 grants in the US. --hroest 15:08, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
@Hannes Röst: Initially you said 1-2% of all professional researchers and did mention industry, but in your most recent comment you only seem to have accounted for grad students and postdocs. Industry and government labs (NIST, LANL, LBNL, ORNL, ANL, NASA, NSA, etc.) constitute quite a large part of research in USA compared to, for example Canada where there's only NRC and a few others. Consider Phil Bunker who easily passes NACADEMIC but has worked at NRC ever since completing his PhD in 1965 (here's a PDF of his CV). Likewise at NIST there's Jon_T._Hougen and others. I'm just saying that researchers at industry or government labs (or hospitals) can be "notable" too, but they seem to be neglected in those numbers (probably because it's much harder to find stats on them). What you've shown is still good for university researchers though. Another point: as you pointed out that many masters students are not doing research, the same is true for faculty, and I'm not talking about "lecturers", I'm talking about associate or full professors who are not doing any research (I can come up with examples if needed). Professors that are doing serious research in USA can have 30 students/postdocs in their group, or in some cases only 1 or 2, but the ones that pass NACADEMIC would I think rarely have 0. The idea that for every prof there's only about 2 students/postdocs surprised me, but that's because you're including profs that aren't professional researchers. Dr. Universe (talk) 17:06, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
@Dr. Universe: I did mention industry but I dont have a good way to quantify how many people are in industry working full time in research and how many of those achieve notability. However, the comparison is fair since I only included university faculty for the count of Wikipedia articles and I only compare to university-led research, so it for the comparison it does not matter if and how much research is going on outside universities. I also agree with your point about faculty, however it is harder to get information about "research faculty" because what counts as such? On the other hand it is very likely that all these people at least at some point in their lives performed some research (i.e. wrote a doctoral thesis) otherwise they would probably not be faculty. I also agree that the distribution will be skewed and there are some labs that are very active in research with 30-100 people and many labs with much fewer people; again the problem is that its hard to define if a prof is a "professional researcher" but its easy to use a definition of "holding a faculty position". For example in the number of full time faculty, people at undergrad only institutions would also be included. I think the limitations of the numbers above are evident, however they still give us a reasonable estimate on what percentage of faculty and percentage of researchers we currently cover. --hroest 00:19, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
@Hannes Röst: Perhaps leaving out the word "industry" from "if we include all researchers (industry, postdocs, grad students)" would have helped avoid some confusion. After your last message I can say I agree with pretty much everything you're saying. The undergrad-only institutions in the US (rare outside of USA as far as I know) are probably also a big factor causing the ratio of faculty to total researchers to be larger than expected if thinking only about professional researchers. Now, your initial post here seems to be very neutral. You point out statistics (the best you can do without turning it into an entire research project of its own) about the number of total university academics and the number of faculty members with Wiki articles, but it doesn't seem you're campaigning strongly for change in any direction (?). You said that we are "strict", but not whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (your follow-up comments reveal a bit more, but I still think you look fairly neutral in everything you're saying). I personally think our coverage has become too narrow. I would be in favor of going back to the "average professional baseball player test" which was used in this AfD: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ronald_Edsforth. Now 16 years later in sports it's relaxed to the "average college baseball player test" whereas in academia it seems I've seen academics far more well-cited than Ronald_Edsforth getting absolutely pulverized in the AfD discussions by trying to force a standard which can be maintained by extremely few people; and unlike in music where the test might be "the song has been on the weekly Billboard 100", this community doesn't seem to care if someone's paper was chosen by a major journal as one of the top 100 in the whole year. Personally I think that if someone's written a software which was cited in 300+ papers, that's more notable in the long-term grand scheme of things than someone who played basketball in the NCAA (well nowadays, it's become customary even to feature high school basketball players like Chet_Holmgren even for being "one of the top" players in the 2021 class, but winners of the William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition are not considered "notable" until they're basically "old enough"). While I think the criteria for academic notability are too strict and have a WP:Systemic bias towards people in university vs researchers at government labs or industry or Gentleman scientists, I think another major problem is people trying to judge academics in totally different fields from their own during AfD discussions. Dr. Universe (talk) 01:48, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
  • I'm still in favour of moving WP:NPROF under the WP:GNG guideline. I do think it's an issue since it's one of the few places on the site where we don't rely on GNG, and other places our notability guidelines are so lax (populated places) it doesn't require experience in academia to understand. I believe there shouldn't be any part of the site which is such a walled garden that only the people who work in the industry understand the notability guideline. I am glad though there doesn't appear to be a problem where we're turning into a who's who directory. I understand why this opinion's unpopular, but I don't think it's deletionist and think it'd be easily supplanted by documenting the types of academic sources which count towards notability, something also opaque to the non-academic. SportingFlyer T·C 21:00, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
    • Better to first get the house of GNG-based criteria in order. We have criteria that are supposedly based on GNG where a line in a database and participation in a single competition counts as in-depth coverage (NSPORT), and criteria supposedly based on GNG where in-depth and detailed coverage of someone's life story and opinions is routinely discounted as "routine" unless they win the competition they participate in (NPOL). That does not set a good example for pushing other criteria to be more like them. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:25, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
      • It's frustrating to me that you've presented two specific situations which aren't actually GNG-related at all instead of actually disagreeing with the idea for reasons specific to academia. Your first example should not be kept for failing GNG (WP:SPORTCRIT), while your second situation isn't GNG-related at all but rather WP:NOT (when someone's not notable enough for a stand-alone article in spite of the fact they've received coverage.) SportingFlyer T·C 23:06, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
        • It's frustrating to me that people keep making excuses for the failings of these notability criteria while other people continue to make these contradictory arguments along the same lines while claiming all along that they're following GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:15, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
          • I don't see either of those as the GNG "failing." One's a walled garden, the other is a notability guideline working correctly. You haven't addressed any of my points considering the difficulty of applying NPROF, and how it would benefit from source-based notability analysis. SportingFlyer T·C 23:34, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
            • We've addressed those points over and over and over and over. I have nothing new to add, and it seems neither do you. I still think we should be focusing on achievement-based rather than hype-based notability in more areas, not fewer. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:42, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
              • Well both "hype-based" notability and "achievement-based" notability have problems. For achievement-based notability it's very hard for Wikipedians to assess, and too often I see people trying to assess someone else's achievements in a completely different field to their own, based only on citations. An achievement can be extremely notable, without getting many citations at all, but such articles often get dismissed in AfD discussions early by people who think they're qualified to assess the situation based only on Scopus and Google Scholar. Dr. Universe (talk) 01:59, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
          David Eppstein, the issue you raise with athletes is not because of GNG issues but rather people misunderstanding/refusing to acknowledge the relationship between GNG and NSPORT (see for example this DRV) due to the wording in WP:N and NSPORT being confusing, and abusing the BIAS essay to claim sourcing must exist but it's somewhere offline in another language and we should keep the article around indefinitely until some hypothetical future editor with access to that hypothetical source can confirm whether the subject is covered there. From my somewhat intensive experience participating in NSPORT AfDs I definitely wouldn't characterize SF as making excuses for the behavior you've identified.
          Regarding the opacity of NPROF versus e.g. NSPORT, I spent roughly equal time (maybe 10-15 hours) reading the relevant pages and ~150 of the most recent archived AfDs over 10kb before I felt comfortable participating in the discussions. I have zero background in sports but am very familiar with academic publishing in at least bio/chem and pure math, and it was still more difficult for me to traverse the NPROF criteria because in the end, for athlete bios I don't actually need to know anything about any of the sports, I just have to develop a solid grasp of what constitutes SIGCOV. Whereas for academics I literally have a spreadsheet of citation metrics from 5000+ coauthors of AfD subjects which I wrote a python script to extract from Scopus, just to help orient myself with the standards for particular fields while I looked through old discussions. It is tough for people to gauge what a "well above average" citation count looks like for any given subfield, and we do get participants with the "3 papers with 100 citations = notable" mentality as our own version of the "played 2 test matches in 1893, meets NCRIC"-type !votes. So I can empathize with seeing the guideline as impenetrable, even if it's got a lot more strict yes/no notability criteria than GNG. JoelleJay (talk) 04:14, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
I think the "3 papers with 100 citations != notable" mentality can also be problematic. People can be notable without having many citations at all. There's things in the NACADEMIC article that try to give such people a chance, but I'm not convinced it's enough to remove the systemic bias — The majority of the AfD cases I've looked at have delete votes from people who dismiss the subject right away based on citation arguments alone. Dr. Universe (talk) 05:57, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
This is a real problem both for false positives and false negatives, and often the article does not make it clearly evident what the "major contribution" to the field was for a subject (as it should) and using the rational "high citations = major impact in the field" is clearly simplistic. However, to truly assess impact in a field, one would have to assemble one or several experts in that field to make a judgement. It may be helpful to reduce both false positives and false negatives if we required the article to exactly describe the impact in the field instead of relying solely on citations. On the other hand, nobody claimed that *not* passing the (artificial bar) of 3 papers with 100 citations makes someone *not* notable, it is just easier to argue for them if they do pass it; a good argument should always hold more water than relying on a single number. --hroest 01:48, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
I think the "3 papers with 100 citations" comment was not picked at random but may have been a reference to David Eppstein's quite recent delete !vote where he said "with only three papers with triple-digit citation counts [...] I'm not convinced." In this case the [...] represent's David's further comments about the papers having many authors and the subject not being 1st author on any of them, and the subjects being high-citation fields (for which I tried to argue that one of them was a medium-citation field and the other was a very low-citation field, as the first author had been publishing for 50+ years and this 12-years-old paper had the largest number of citations/year apart from software papers and review papers). I think a delete !vote just based on citations can be unfair, and in this case I tried arguing for notability based on specific contributions, but this became difficult to do because of the large number of authors on those papers and the lack of clarity about who actually specifically did what (even if there is an "author contributions" section, it would rarely say something so clear like "this paper was Author A's idea and the rest just helped put it together". I agree that having experts in the specific sub-sub-field could help, but could also start getting into COI territory. Dr. Universe (talk) 02:16, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
I wouldn't be too quick to assume that "faculty" captures the basis for encyclopedic notability at all. The faculty categories capture anyone who has ever been a university faculty member. For example, Al Gore is in the categories for Columbia University faculty, Middle Tennessee State University faculty, and University of California, Los Angeles faculty, and Newt Gingrich is on that for the University of West Georgia faculty. Many people achieve notability for reasons unrelated to academia, and then become part of academia in fields relevant to their area of success. Conversely, many people hold academic positions and then achieve notability in other fields (I write articles on state supreme court judges, many of whom taught law or an adjacent subject earlier in their careers). I would like to see more data on whether persons categorized as faculty also have another categorization indicating notability independent of academic affiliation. BD2412 T 00:09, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Good point. The existence of Al Gore in the faculty category may be a further reason why the faculty to student/postdoc ratio is so much higher than we expected (Hannes and I discussed this a bit above). Dr. Universe (talk) 01:59, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
BD2412 Dr. Universe I have added this to some of the caveats above, again this was a quick "sanity check" approach without launching a full-scale investigation. There are some issues with the numerator and denominator, both with "faculty in the US" being a term that includes many people that may or may not do research and the Wikipedia articles capturing alive people that at some point have been faculty but may not be involved in active research (or ever were as the examples you pointed out). --hroest 01:48, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
Now that we've learned that Al Gore is included in the "faculty" category, I think the coverage of professors is far smaller than the originally estimated 10% (which I think we both found surprisingly high at first). Dr. Universe (talk) 02:16, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Sub-labeling the criteria

Please pardon me if this is a bad idea, or if it's been discussed before. I've found myself wanting to refer to some of the "Specific criteria notes" in a simpler way, the way we refer to "Criteria" as C1,C2, etc. For example I'd like to be able to use the shortcuts:

  • "C2(a)" for this: "For the purposes of Criterion 2, major academic awards, such as the Nobel Prize, MacArthur Fellowship, the Fields Medal, the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History, etc., always qualify under Criterion 2" and
  • "C2(b)" for this: "For documenting that a person has won a specific award (but not for a judgement of whether or not that award is prestigious), publications of the awarding institution are considered a reliable source".

Do you think there's a way to do this in a way that doesn't disrupt things too much? Dr. Universe (talk) 03:03, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is the best idea. Why would sub-labels be more useful here than just quoting them or explaining in your own words to someone with a link? — Wug·a·po·des​ 00:14, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Saying "C2(a)" is more succinct than quoting the entire paragraph, and it takes up less space. The AfD discussion would look less WP:BLUDGEONED. We say "C1" and "C2" all the time, why not make it possible for us to also say C2(a)? See this edit summary for example, it's better that the user doesn't need to quote each criterion. Why is it that this would not be a good idea? Dr. Universe (talk) 02:04, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
I can't see the point. What is wrong with WP:Prof#C5? Xxanthippe (talk) 04:40, 30 May 2021 (UTC). (changed for clarity) Xxanthippe (talk) 09:26, 30 May 2021 (UTC).
It's not as specific as it would be if you were to specify which specific bullet point you're referring to. Dr. Universe (talk) 05:45, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Give it a click. It goes to exactly the bullet point it is supposed to. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:26, 30 May 2021 (UTC).
Not only have you changed the link right before saying that (making the timeline of this conversation a bit confusing), but even in the new link, it doesn't go to C5(a) or C5(b), it just goes to C5! Dr. Universe (talk) 18:45, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I do see what Dr. Universe means with this -- it is bulky to have to quote the portion of, e.g., C1 that refers not to strict citations (the first bullet point) but to the bullet point discussing people who have pioneered or developed a significant new concept. JoelleJay (talk) 21:11, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia editors should be capable of reading 36 lines of text. However I agree that is desirable to make WP as easy to use as possible. There may be a technical fix if the dot points were numbered. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:44, 31 May 2021 (UTC).
It would make it easier to reference certain points, for example in edit summaries where # of characters is limited, or in AfD discussions where we're discouraged to do anything that might look like WP:BLUDGEONING the page. Dr. Universe (talk) 16:13, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
Not bludgeoning is easy. Just don't go around replying to everyone else; make your point once and then stop. I tend to think that the idea behind this proposal is misguided: if the intent is to allow you to avoid explaining your reasoning for an opinion and just point to a piece of the guideline as the only explanation, then WP:JUSTAPOLICY. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:20, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
The intent is not at all to avoid explaining reasoning, it's to be able to explain reasoning more succinctly by citing (for example) "C2(a)" or "C2(b)", just like we already say "C1" and "C2". Dr. Universe (talk) 03:58, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Massive fail

According to this guideline, we can have a "biography" of an academic with no reliable independent sources at all, based solely on their publication count. Not only is this a repudiation of WP:NOTDIR, it's also explicitly contradicted by WP:BLP. Guy (help! - typo?) 14:21, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

The only time that the word "independent" is used in WP:BLP is specifically in the context of dates of birth. That policy is concerned with reliability, not independence. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:39, 13 May 2021 (UTC)
I am not a huge fan of WP:PROF#C1, but there is a big difference between citation count and publication count. WP:PROF explicitly disallows the latter: "Simply having authored a large number of published academic works is not considered sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1." Significant academic citability, on the other hand, is evidence of coverage of an academic's work by independent WP:RS. Nsk92 (talk) 18:48, 13 May 2021 (UTC)
This for me is the kicker: if an academic's work is highly cited then there is a high likelihood that sources about them and their work exist. Things like prefaces to festschrifts, popular press interviews or coverage, biographies given in presentation of awards, colleague-authored obituaries (if they are no longer alive), and interpretation of their work in secondary literature like literature reviews. WP:N is about whether sources exist or are likely to exist, and a high citation count justifies an assumption that sufficient sourcing does exist even if not in the usual places wiki editors look. — Wug·a·po·des​ 00:12, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Wugapodes, only a very tiny fraction of the people technically meeting NPROF would ever meet GNG. It's not like NSPORT where the criteria (are supposed to) predict significant coverage in RS; the whole reason NPROF exists is to bypass that requirement since it's acknowledged that even highly influential academics rarely receive biographical coverage. I think this is a reasonable way to treat notability in these cases, since someone whose work is regarded as impactful by everyone in their field clearly is notable, but the guideline can only really approximate testing that via citation counts, so there will always be a substantial number of articles on non-renowned researchers simply because they're in high-publication, high-citation fields. JoelleJay (talk) 04:50, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
@JoelleJay: I never said that they would meet the GNG, though reading it again perhaps I was too vague. Compare my comment with WP:SNG: The subject-specific notability guidelines generally include verifiable criteria about a topic which show that appropriate sourcing likely exists for that topic. The GNG and all SNGs are about figuring out the likelihood that enough sources exist to write an article complying with WP:V (see WP:WHYN). If we can find no suitable biographical sources, it doesn't matter how many citations a researcher has because we could not possibly write an article complying with our content policies. As I explained above, a high citation count implies that specific kinds of sources exist for us to write an article with. Citation count also has a secondary use as an inclusion/exclusion criteria like you said, but as NPROF says: Differences in typical citation and publication rates and in publication conventions between different academic disciplines should be taken into account.. If someone is in a high citation field, we cannot assume their contribution is impactful just because they have more citations than those in low citation fields, and the point of this policy (partly) is to prevent having a substantial number of articles on non-renowned researchers simply because they're in high-publication, high-citation fields as that would arbitrarily bias our coverage towards particular fields. — Wug·a·po·des​ 02:38, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
Wugapodes, oh I agree completely with what you're saying, it's just in practice biographical feasibility is rarely discussed in deletion or talk page discussions since the focus is almost always on notability. It is very common for an inexperienced academic AfD nom to miss an NPROF criterion (or even neglect to apply the guideline), and if someone finds the subject is described as a distinguished professor or is an IEEE Fellow that's basically a guaranteed SNOW/speedy keep, regardless of whether biographical material exists. If you look at my NPROF AfD participation you'll also see I'm strongly on the side of evaluating citation counts relative to subfield for the reasons you state, but this can be a hard sell for subjects in, say, particle physics or medical genetics where you can get an h-index of 107 for an assistant professor despite basically zero web presence. JoelleJay (talk) 03:10, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
Guy apparently forum-shopped this mini-rant to WP:BLPN#NACADEMIC as well. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:05, 13 May 2021 (UTC)
JzG, it specifically says "as demonstrated by independent reliable sources". For me, that means, in my field, book reviews. Citation indices are just notoriously difficult in many ways, including that in some fields citations are only there to fill up the first two pages of an article with platitudes and generalisms. Drmies (talk) 15:22, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

University Presidents - Minor?

Am I reading the rules correctly that if a Sorority lists an alumna who is a President of a Regional State School (For example, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Cal State Fullerton or SUNY Oswego) in its list of Notable members, that that list entry should be deleted? And that an article about that person (who has no other notability) should be deleted? I'm reading the explanation of entry 6 here and "Major" seems not to include them. (Note, I have no idea how to properly determine "Major")Naraht (talk) 15:43, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

(1) What does being listed as a sorority alum have to do with anything? (2) People who come close to one of the criteria but do not meet it should not always have their articles deleted; they may well be notable for other reasons; (3) Listings of alumni should almost always only list bluelinked articles, with other entries deleted regardless of apparent notability; (4) CSU Fullerton is a major university and (while smaller) IUP and Oswego are also significant; it is not the large state schools that the "significant" of this rule is intended to filter out, but the tiny seminaries, small unaccredited schools, high schools and preparatory colleges, or (in countries where this is an issue, mostly in South Asia) no-reputation startups. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:24, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
In general, the larger Wikipedia community has rejected the idea that material in an article, including entries in an embedded article, must be independently notable. Our notability guideline explicitly says that it "does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic should have its own article." The specific notability guideline for people also says that "[i]nclusion in lists contained within articles should be determined by WP:SOURCELIST, in that the entries must have the same importance to the subject as would be required for the entry to be included in the text of the article according to Wikipedia policies and guidelines (including Wikipedia:Trivia sections)."
I agree that the adjective "major" in criterion 6 of this guideline is unhelpfully vague; I would not know how to operationalize it without delving into personal opinion and original research. Moreover, I object to it as the correct criterion. It would be much easier, clear, and aligned with WP:GNG if it were simply "accredited" or perhaps "legitimate (i.e., accredited)." I'm certain that the president of any accredited institution will receive enough coverage in independent, reliable sources to meet our notability guidelines so we won't be opening any doors for non-notable people by simplifying this criterion. ElKevbo (talk) 16:40, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
Although accreditation is also relevant, I think the line should be drawn somewhere that (for the US) places it between large four-year bachelor's-degree-granting colleges and universities and two-year associate-degree community colleges. I don't think, for instance, that the president of Orange Coast College (to pick an example local to both me and Fullerton) is notable by WP:PROF#C6, nor should be. Also, "aligned with GNG" is wrongheaded. None of this is aligned with GNG, nor should be. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:40, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
David Eppstein, ElKevbo OK. Responses to both. First, I picted a Sorority as an article likely to have either a list of Alumni as part of their article or even a spun off list of notable Alumni. Secondly, my line between major and minor appears to be significantly different than what was intended. If four year second tier state schools (mostly equal to the old state teacher's colleges) are fine, then this removes most of my concerns.Naraht (talk) 18:43, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
My largest concern on what was written is (3). If a Reference lists that the first six presidents of a school are all Brothers of Mu Xi Fraternity, It seems very odd that only the 2nd, 4th and 6th should be listed in the Mu Xi article if those three are the ones that have articles.Naraht (talk) 18:43, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
David, I'm not sure why a line needs to be drawn between community colleges and four-year institutions. Can you clarify why you think this is so? These public institutions educate over 8 million students each year and have huge economic impacts in their communities. Moreover, we end up with a dichotomy. For example, Orange Coast College is notable enough to have a page, but its President is not notable enough to have a page (at least, not unless other criteria are satisfied). And my understanding is that women make up a larger percentage of community college presidents than any other kind of college president, at least in the US, so this particular criterion seems to have more effect on women than men. See https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/20/college-presidents-diversifying-slowly-and-growing-older-study-finds#:~:text=Community%20colleges%20were%20the%20most,and%2013.6%20percent%20in%202006.. For these and other reasons, I tend to lean towards Elkevbo's POV but would value your perspective. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:02, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
"Major" sounds nice and meaningful but is just impossible to quantify. The difference between two- and four-year colleges makes sense in relation to WP:PROF, but it's a fact also that presidents often don't really qualify in terms of scholarship. So we can't have it both ways. The problem with presidents of smaller schools, and two-year colleges, is that sourcing beyond the institution's websites and press releases is always hard. Ha, the problem with presidents of bigger schools is that they have their PR departments write their articles, no doubt, and it's all fluff. Presidents get all the credit, but when our former chancellor left he made a point of telling the Faculty Senate that the then-recent drop in enrollment was all the faculty's fault. So no, I am not opposed to getting rid of "major". I really want to keep it, because I have higher standards for notability than others, but being selective in my own area when every voice artist gets an entire resume without a single secondary source is kind of like fouling my own nest. Drmies (talk) 15:15, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
And yet, occasionally there are good and notable presidents of small colleges and community colleges. But right now this standard is being interpreted very narrowly, and even a notable community college president with sources establishing notability beyond press releases will probably not be listed if running their college super well is the only thing they are notable for. Maybe instead of thinking of college presidents as academics, we should be thinking of them as business leaders and using those criteria instead? The only thing that matters there is that they run something big enough, and some community colleges are quite large institutions serving thousands of students. KeeYou Flib (talk) 17:53, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
(Note: I was being hyperbolic above. Obviously, "run something big enough" isn't really the case). KeeYou Flib (talk) 17:54, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
We need to recognise that there is a world beyond the United States, in much of which you don't have the situation where everyone can use the word "university" to name an institution. The Hamburger University would have to use a different name in most countries. This criterion is easy to understand for the 95% of people who are not American. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:13, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
Please explain how countries other than the U.S. have codified or defined "significant accredited college or university" or "major academic institution" (emphasis added). ElKevbo (talk) 19:33, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
(And now that I've copied the specific text from the current guideline I notice that we use different language - "significant accredited college or university" and "major academic institution" - in two different places. This needs to be corrected.) ElKevbo (talk) 19:37, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
In most of the world the very word "university" can only legally be used for significant, major institutions. The United States is very much an outlier in this regard. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:01, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
Please read the guideline that we are discussing; it doesn't just say "university." ElKevbo (talk) 20:04, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
Maybe instead of thinking of college presidents as academics, we should be thinking of them as business leaders and using those criteria instead? I think this is a very good idea. C6 is strongly divorced from the spirit of NPROF, which is to provide wiki coverage of people who have made important scholarly contributions but are unlikely to receive GNG coverage. Presidency/vice chancellorship of a university does not at all require academic impact but rather administrative prowess and business savvy, and it really should be treated like the head of any other corporation when it comes to notability. I would say such positions can presume GNG notability but should not be automatic passes for standalone articles -- that is, that criterion should operate the same as any other SNG does. JoelleJay (talk) 21:45, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Comparing co-authors citations

A caution against comparing to only co-authors. Perhaps it can be done to argue in favor of "keep", but for a "delete" !vote it can be too distracting and therefore harmful. Dr. Universe (talk) 08:44, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

So are you going to claim ignorance of wp:canvassing here like you did with wp:hounding the first time I asked you to stop harassing me over your article getting deleted? JoelleJay (talk) 08:59, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

(1) I truly was ignorant of wp:hounding at the time, and my revision history will show that I had in 13 years never got involved in wp: articles, never used or cited any of those WP terms like "hounding" or "canvassing" or "bludgeoning" or "sealioning" until that AfD discussion. Dr. Universe (talk) 17:02, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
(2) I'm sorry that you think this was canvassing, but I really don't need to canvass for the article about Levon Pogosian to be kept from being deleted. If you want to remove this "Comparing co-authors citations" section until that AfD is over, please go ahead. I had been concerned about how co-author citation comparisons were being used, since long ago, and wanted to write something here about it earlier but just never got around to it (I also said the same thing on your talk page, weeks ago). Dr. Universe (talk) 17:02, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
(3) An author's citations should be compared to other authors in the same field, not to their own co-authors. A co-author of Geoff Hinton and his large team of lab members, will often fail your tests because their co-authors will have gigantic citation counts compared to the author in question, but this doesn't meant the author in question is not remarkable compared to other authors in the field. Dr. Universe (talk) 17:02, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
(4) Even if an author has an unremarkable citation count, that would only imply they fail C1(a). All eligibility criteria have to fail (not just one of them), in order for the subject to be ineligible. Dr. Universe (talk) 17:02, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
Clarification on my methodologies

In the cases where someone (subject ) has fewer than like 50 coauthors and the outcome isn't already clear, I do branch out to the 40–100 coauthors () of their 3–10 most frequent collaborators' () 5–30 most recent papers. I choose the most frequent collaborators () of A to better ensure papers/authors remain in largely the same subfield*. And I choose the most recent papers of so the bulk of their coauthors () are much more likely to skew toward newer, lower-cited researchers (new post-docs, grad students) rather than people who have since become established. I always include a description of my methodology in my AfDs and generally provide both the first-degree coauthors' metrics alone and the combined first- and second-degree coauthors' metrics.

*Although in all cases, whether evaluating first-degree or second-degree coauthors, if I come across someone who is very highly cited and primarily publishes in a very different field altogether from the original subject, I don't include that person's metrics. This happens often in bioinformatics where someone on the informatics side of things has some papers with like a medical geneticist or whatever with 500 papers and 30k citations; I always remove these anomalies from the coauthor analysis, but not the subject's citation metrics even though they rarely actually raise the medians significantly.

I would expect someone who has only published with large, extremely-highly-cited teams to also become extremely-highly cited very quickly. If the depth of their collaboration is so shallow that their only coauthors are members of these teams, a majority of whom, by the time of my Scopus analysis, have achieved excellent citation metrics, then either they don't have very many coauthors in general (in which case I expand to second-degree coauthors), or they are publishing in a subfield that is large enough to include dozens of high-publication, high-citation professors and therefore evaluation should occur within that subfield per the language in C1. If a subject (B) (who otherwise has many papers with few authors each) publishes a couple papers with a large enough, highly-cited enough group that the median coauthor citation metrics jump up significantly, then a) they're publishing in a sufficiently different sub-subfield that I would exclude coauthors of those papers (as I did in the initial Pogosian analysis); and b) those papers are very likely to attract dozens or hundreds of self-cites, which would consequently raise the citation metrics of B such that they ought to be significantly inflated relative to those of their non-mega-collaboration coauthors. This was the advantage I originally gave Pogosian, whom I analyzed with his citations/h-index elevated by his mega-collab papers while excluding the highly-cited mega-collab coauthors as comparables. JoelleJay (talk) 21:38, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
I expect some form of the friendship paradox applies here: that one would expect most people to have coauthors with higher average citation count than their own, because the coauthors are preferentially selected from people who participate in many collaborations. However, coauthor-based analysis is also likely to select for people who are the leaders of small walled gardens, or in disciplines where this style of research is common: if someone collaborates only with their own students, and in all of those students' collaborations, then they're going to appear stronger according to this analysis than someone with a wider network of collaborators. If you're going to do this sort of analysis, you should quantify these effects and factor them out. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:43, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
David Eppstein, yep, that paradox went into my early design considerations. I would expect the boosting effect to generally be offset by my lowering the productivity (paper number) threshold by 2–10x the all-authors median. That is, I calculate the median paper number of all coauthors (including those with 1 paper) and, depending on the subject's (I rarely set a threshold above ) select a cutoff at least half of that for the coauthor comparison pool. The second-degree coauthor comparisons are meant to dampen any small-N effects. I generally avoid getting involved in HEP or medical genetics discussions since they're defined by mega-collaborations, and almost entirely ignore the fields where coauthorship/Scopus-indexed publication is low (except particular areas like combinatorics or set theory where I feel more comfortable assessing non-C1 evidence of impact). JoelleJay (talk) 22:08, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
Considering that pretty much every professional athlete is considered notable enough; and same for not only every musician but also pretty much every song that's landed on the Billboard 100 chart, even if just for a week; and that a baby that's not even 38 days old is considered notable; if a cosmologist with an h-index of 43 and 6900+ citations is not notable enough for a Wikipedia article, something has gone very wrong and we are not in line with the goals of the Wikipedia project, to provide interesting/valuable encyclopedic information (as long as it's well sourced). Dr. Universe (talk) 07:43, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
Yes, it's ridiculous that some sports editors insist meeting a sports-specific guideline supersedes not meeting GNG (despite the explicit wording to the contrary on NSPORT), which is why I participate in NSPORT AfDs. I'm also strongly against presuming notability of people belonging to nobility; so I participate in those AfDs too. And if a researcher has an h-index of 43 in a subfield where the average h-index is 66, then yes, that researcher does not meet that specific NPROF criterion. Because I believe subfield context is important in gauging academic notability, I provide that information in AfDs in the most repeatable way I can: by comparing a subject to many dozens or hundreds of their 1st/2nd-degree coauthors. JoelleJay (talk) 21:20, 14 July 2021 (UTC)
My take on this is, as with any citation metrics and pure number games, that the analysis of JoelleJay should be considered in a holistic discussion as one piece of the puzzle to identify outlier fields that have either surprisingly high or low citation rates of which typical editors are not aware of. I do agree that there is a bias on both directions: a researcher who only publishes with other poor researcher will more easily look "above average" compared to their (underperforming) peers whereas a researcher who strives to publish with the best of their field may look "below average" comapred to their (overperforming) peers. There is a reason WP:NPROF does not specify hard cutoffs and neither should we use the citation analysis to make blind decisions. However, the main problem in typical AfD discussions is that hardly ever does an editor actually advance an argument beyond citations counts, such as what the person in question really discovered and what their impact in the field was. It therefore often boils down to non-experts discussing the merits of an academic sub-field or researcher.
@Dr. Universe: as you might recall, we had a recent discussion of our criteria for academics, finding that we are relatively strict overall with our articles only covering between 1-2% of all professional (full-time) researchers and less than 5% of all tenured faculty members; which is quite strict compared to athletes where generally all professional (e.g. paid for their efforts) players are inherently notable. Also, often the same problems are encountered with lack of extended RS etc and it would be nice to have some consistency here. It seems the general consensus from that analysis was that we are doing quite well overall but could probably afford to be a bit more lenient. --hroest 17:35, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
I definitely agree citation measures should be considered as part of a holistic discussion (and of course I do disregard my own analyses when other NPROF criteria appear to be met). But as you said, frequently citation counts are the first and sometimes only metric offered for notability, in which cases I do think the coauthor assessment provides context. I think it's hard even for experts in the field to demonstrate a particular paper or corpus is especially impactful when the claim isn't supported by citations; I think the primary situations where expertise is truly valuable is in identifying an award as being prestigious or assuring us their field has abnormally high or low citation rates.
I think another important takeaway from our previous discussion is that we don't know whether it's our criteria that are depressing the percent of academics we cover or the fact we just haven't written articles yet on notable scholars. Based on how many women coauthors without articles come out of my analyses definitely meeting NPROF, and especially because there are concerted wiki efforts to write about STEM women which should increase their proportional coverage, I strongly suspect we just haven't gotten around to writing most of these articles (rather than that we're excluding them).
And re: athletes -- the NSPORT guideline actually doesn't confer inherent notability from any sport-specific criterion (like playing one pro footy match = notable) -- it explicitly requires the subject meet GNG. However, meeting an SSG criterion does presume GNG so an AfC submission can be accepted with just a citation showing, e.g., the subject played one pro match without having to demonstrate GNG at that time. The issue is that many sports project !voters either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge that nuance and make the "notable: meets NFOOTY" argument at AfDs where actually that presumption shouldn't exist. And because so many admins and NACers are also unaware of these NSPORT details we end up keeping a lot more microstubs on athletes that will likely never meet GNG. It's a whole thing that I decided to get weirdly passionate about some time ago, so if anyone here also feels sports is too lax in its notability requirements we could always use more reasoned voices in athlete AfDs. JoelleJay (talk) 19:13, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
@Hannes Röst: Thanks so much for the feedback. I do remember that conversation, but I also remember that the conversation ended on May 31st 2021 and that it was only 1 day earlier that someone pointed out "I wouldn't be too quick to assume that "faculty" captures the basis for encyclopedic notability at all. The faculty categories capture anyone who has ever been a university faculty member. For example, Al Gore is in the categories for Columbia University faculty, Middle Tennessee State University faculty, and University of California, Los Angeles faculty, and Newt Gingrich is on that for the University of West Georgia faculty." Therefore whatever consensus about "doing quite well overall" was before we found out that we thought we had far more articles about academics than we actually do. Combined with the difficulty in figuring out how many postdocs, industry researchers, paid grad student researchers, etc. exist, we probably underestimated the number of total researches, and we probably overestimated the number of them that have a Wikipedia article! In any case, I also pointed out in that discussion that you as the initiator of the conversation, did bring up an interesting point, but didn't seem to say whether or not you want us to do anything about it. Personally I think we should be more like sports and be more inclusive. If someone has published 30 papers (at least 5 of them first author) in journals that are well-respected in their field, don't you think they are more notable than a 17-year old high school basketball player who competed in a few televised tournaments? Or a 38-day old baby who's notability is only inherited from her parents? Or a song that appeared on the Billboard 100 list for only 1 week, or whose notability is inherited because the singer is famous for some of their previous work? Why do they have to have thousands of citations? That's like saying that a rookie NBA player needs to have played at least 50000 minutes which would only be possible for players that have played in the NBA for over a decade (that is absolutely not the way it works, they get a Wikipedia article even in their rookie season because they're a professional basketball player, no matter how many minutes they play). Sadly, we're even excluding people that do have thousands of citations, even if they're in a field that is in the "middle" in terms of citations. This article: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yu-Shan_Lin_(chemist) was almost lost because her # of Scopus citations was only 2449 which apparently wasn't enough more than the median of 2001 citations of her co-authors. Apparently in biomedical science "For about the last 5 years the practice in biomed was 2 or more papers over 100" was enough for inclusion (see DGG's comment at the very end of this: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Levon_Pogosian). Considering that biomed is probably one of the most cited areas in all of academia, that is an extremely lenient criteria compared to what I've seen others using (Yu-Shan Lin had 13 articles with 100+ citations and she's in theoretical chemistry!!!). Dr. Universe (talk) 20:26, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Possible BIAS against non-university academics?

I noticed that Jon T. Hougen didn't have an article until he died and plenty of obituaries were written about him. Phil Bunker seems not to have one yet, and same with Bob McKellar. All of them would easily pass the C1 criteria based on citations, but they're also all well beyond retirement age (Hougen was 83 when he died, Bunker's first publication was in 1964, and McKellar's first paper was in 1970). It seems all of them would have taken decades to reach the C1 citation criteria, however there's another thing about all three of these researchers which I think is important to note: Hougen was at NIST, and Bunker and McKellar were both at NRC. They didn't have research groups containing 40 postdocs/students like other theoretical chemists like Alán Aspuru-Guzik who was at a private university (Harvard). They in fact seemed to have pretty much 0 students throughout their career, which makes it much harder to publish 100 papers and reach an h-index of 20, or 5000 citations or whatever the C1 criteria are. My understanding is that NRC researchers cannot apply for the major research grants that the university researchers can apply for. However, WP:NAUTHOR says that as long as "The person is regarded as an important figure by peers or successors" the author meets the criteria. I see a lot of people in AfDs going immediately to citation metrics and casting delete !votes solely based on that. For academics like the above three, who are not at universities, would it make sense for them to need fewer citations to pass C1, if they don't have a large group of students/postdocs helping them publish 10 papers/year yet still published 1-2 high-quality papers/year for maybe 15 years and are highly regarded by their peers (for NAUTHOR I've seen people say in an AfD "their title of executive editor of X newspaper" would only be given if they are highly regarded by their peers, so similarly I suppose "senior research officer" at NRC would be similar)? This seems like a way to correct for WP:BIAS in the same way as we might not expect an academic from a very poor country to require the same number of citations as one from a country where any non-tenured assistant professor will by default already have start-up funds larger than what the other academic would see in their entire lifetime. Dr. Universe (talk) 20:52, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

No. We are not here to rectify biases in society by creating double standards. If they made significant accomplishments they made significant accomplishments, regardless of where they were posted. If they were recognized for those accomplishments by major awards (#C2) or society fellowships (#C3) then they were recognized, again regardless of where they were posted. If they did not do these things, we should not be in the business of trying to guess how well they might have done under other circumstances. You might just as well say the system is biased against community college professors, because it is based on research and community college professors have neither the time nor the graduate students to work much on research. It's true that our criteria tends not to regard community college professors as notable, but that's not evidence that the criteria have a problem and need any adjustment. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:16, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
Art history can be another area where the best scholars are not university academics, or only for part of their career. Johnbod (talk) 22:15, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
But it's also a field where book-writing is common, so we can use WP:AUTHOR instead of WP:PROF. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:35, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
Sometimes - not sure what the criteria there are to be honest. Johnbod (talk) 22:37, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
It's certainly true that Hougen, Bunker, and McKellar were/are/are important and notable scientists in theoretical physical chemistry. I recognized all of their names instantly and so would anyone else working seriously in the field. We should get busy and make those pages. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:15, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
Just found a page for Andrew McKellar. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:38, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
...and just realized it's not the same person, sigh. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: Rather than looking at just raw citation numbers, we hold it against people if they are in a "high-citation field", or if their papers have dozens of authors. Why not also hold it against people if their large number of citations is due to having a group of 50 postdocs/students doing all the work? For example consider a rather low-citation field (like theoretical chemistry, compared to medical science or particle physics), and an author who has only 2-3 co-authors on each paper (so their high citation count is not due to being in a "high-citation field" or having dozens of authors on each paper). Let's now say there's another author in the same field with the same number of citations and the same average number of co-authors on each paper. But author A has 50 students/postdocs in their group at any given time (for example Alan Aspuru-Guzik at Harvard) and author B has pretty much 0 students in their entire career (for example Jon Hougen, Phil Bunker, or Bob McKellar at NIST/NRC). You wouldn't consider this last difference when judging if they have enough citations for C1, the way you consider "high-citation field" and "dozens of authors on each paper"? Dr. Universe (talk) 19:02, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
That reasoning, taken to the limit, would make people who are not in research fields and do no research be the ones who are the most notable, because they meet or exceed the expected amount of research someone like them does. If someone is notable for doing research, then it is the significance of the research they do that makes them notable, not (except in rare cases where they get a lot of press for it) for doing less-significant research that exceeds expectations. We normalize for the citation standards of different fields because citations are an inaccurate way of measuring significance and normalization makes them more accurate, not as a way to give a leg up to those poor unfortunates who chose a low-citation field to work in. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:08, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
"We normalize for the citation standards of different fields because citations are an inaccurate way of measuring significance and normalization makes them more accurate" so shouldn't we normalize for the comparison I gave in the paragraph you're referring to? Dr. Universe (talk) 23:31, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
No. Because that's not about how significant their accomplishments were (the output of their research process), it's about what resources they had available (the input). For the same reason we should not normalize for workaholics or people who only started their research careers late in life or people stuck in places with limited access to the literature or people in a different part of the world from where the field research needs to be done or whether they were lucky enough to be raised with a native language matching the one in which the mainstream of their research is published: those things are all not about the significance of their research results. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:14, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
  • This isn't really very different from the way that we discriminate against amateur sportspeople or people who take part in amateur dramatics - they are simply not as notable as their professional counterparts. Yes, occasionally someone working at the Swiss Patent Office can have an annus mirabilis, but that is so unusual in the 21st century as to not be anything that influences our general guidelines. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:55, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
@Dr. Universe: I feel like you are missing the point of WP:NPROF here, criterion 1 does not say "you must have X citations", it says "you must have contributed substantially". Nobody would claim that Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel or Peter Higgs are not notable even though they have h-indices below 10 (in the case of Mendel just 1). It just means that you have to show some other way that their contributions were significant to their field which should be easy in the cases I mentioned. In the worst case you will have to wait until obituaries are published and use those to justify an article. I think you are focusing too much on citations here and less on the spirit of C1. --hroest 17:28, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
I'm a bit confused as to what the problem is. If a scientist has managed to build themselves a fiefdom with 40-odd students and postdocs, then they've most likely done so by doing influential work; funding agencies do like some indications that their money won't be wasted. All else being equal, that would indicate that the person has played and is playing a significant role in their field, meaning that we should write about them. (There may of course be individual cases where this isn't true, but that's my guess of how the overall trend goes.) XOR'easter (talk) 18:50, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
@XOR'easter: I think the question relates to scientists in government institutes, private research institutes or companies that do not have large research groups but still contribute significantly to academic research. Sometimes these researchers cannot apply for research funding due to the government regulations (as in Canada for example). My point is that such scientists can still have Wikipedia articles as long as its shown they significantly contributed to research (C1). In the three examples I mentioned above (Higgs, Newton and Mendel) which all achieved their fame without large research groups and with only one or two critical papers that were highly influential. Another example would be Curt Brunnée who was never an academic but there is a medal named after him and he received one of the most prestigious awards in the field -- so here citations are not used but other criteria to assess notability. I also think Jon T. Hougen is an example listed above, a person who clearly could have been written about after receiving the Ellis R. Lippincott Award award for example. Or take Alexander Alexeyevich Makarov who made a major contribution to the field, recognized by the Fenn Award and the Thomson Medal. Note that we dont make people notable who otherwise would not be, we describe people who are found to be notable by the field (either through press coverage, independent awards or high citation counts). --hroest 20:25, 27 July 2021 (UTC) PS: see also List of amateur mathematicians. --hroest 20:27, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Living, vs recently deceased, vs historical

Is it agreeable that the NPROF criteria are to be read with varying strictness against, albeit roughly, the number of years since the subject died. I think so, and I think it is standard practice. NPROF can be played against NOTPROMOTION. Young rising academics are likely to be actively promoted by their institution. Old academics also may be promoted. For the recently deceased, the existence of an independently written, distant perspective, obituary, not a family paid obituary, is a weighty factor. For historical academics, mere verifiability is often enough. Is this an unwritten rule? SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:56, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Could you say more? Distant perspectives are helpful, but an obituary published in a journal by a colleague covering their contribution to the field is still useful for demonstrating notability. For living academics I agree that being careful of covert promotion is important but if a university is hyping their own faculty it's not particularly independent when compared to coverage in a literature review. — Wug·a·po·des​ 01:22, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
Hi Wugapodes. The question is coming from an AfC / NPP approval process. For the recently deceased, I expect to see an independently written (not by family) reliably published obituary, for NPROF borderline cases. For 100 years deceased academics, I don't see them even nominated for deletion, and am happy to accept a stub, where I wouldn't for a BLP. SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:17, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
There are no unwritten rules because this is a collaborative project. Wikipedia already suffers too much inclusionism, in my opinion. Wikipedia condenses what reliable sources say and for many people, those sources come about after they have died. This is not a matter of restricting our innate ability to promote subjects just because someone's career is still happening while the dead are beyond caring. This is about sources. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:38, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Revisiting some deleted mathematicians

I noticed that Michael Shulman (mathematician) was deleted, but it never went through AfD. It seems no one noticed the PROD, so the article just got deleted unilaterally. I could not find a Google Scholar page, but he is ranked 21 out of 253,000 users on MathOverflow, and he's a tenured prof at UC San Diego. I had seen the article before, and don't recall any alarm bells telling me the article about him didn't belong. I wonder what other mathematicians here think about recovering this page? Maybe @David Eppstein: can see whether or not that article was really delete-worthy? Dr. Universe (talk) 16:50, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

I noticed at the top of this talk page (for Notability (academics) that Nicholas J. Hopper was discussed a long time ago in 2005. There was a keep !vote which said "keep all tenured professors at all institutions" and in the end the article didn't get deleted after that discussion. While things seem to have changed (I still don't see the reason why, and I disagree with this change, but it happened somewhere along the line) enough for his article to have been deleted later on in 2008 (using A7 rather than AfD!), his citation record has also changed, and he easily passes C1. Maybe someone like @David Eppstein: might be able to see if the old article is salvagable, or if it is just too out-of-date and would be better off starting all over again. Dr. Universe (talk) 16:50, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

We are a long way from the wild west days of 2008, when you registered your account. Such inclusionism has since been found to be inappropriate. Regarding your claims about citations, you'll note that this guideline does not cite any actual numbers as a threshold for notability, so such a subjective standard might be insurmountable depending upon the editors at a given AfD. Tenure absolutely doesn't matter regarding notability, so that's nonsense to even mention. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:02, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
Within 35 minutes of my post here, there were 2 admins that either recovered the deleted articles or agreed that they passed C1. You're right that things have changed since 2008 (which I pointed out in my original comment too), but inclusion of these two articles was actually not found to be "inappropriate" in the end. Please also don't call what I say "nonsense". I'm allowed to mention whether or not someone has tenure, and if you re-read the initial post you'll see that I was calling for other mathematicians (including David Eppstein who had the power to see the original article) to comment on whether or not the page should be recovered, because I'm aware that my opinion alone wasn't enough to form a consensus here. Dr. Universe (talk) 18:00, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
@Dr. Universe I have gone ahead and restored Shulman treating your message as a WP:REFUND request. As for Hopper, we are a long way from 2008. I will note that the AfD discussion that was going on when that page was deleted seemed like it was headed towards a delete consensus. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:19, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
The deleted Hopper article was a one-line stub saying he is an assistant professor and in some versions listing his early research interests, without sources. I think if we want an article on him (and I agree, he now passes C1) we'd be better off writing a new one. It was long enough ago that I wouldn't worry about a DRV before re-creating it. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:25, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
@Barkeep49: I wonder if we could also restore Jon Skeet in the same "REFUND" way? He seems to easily meet C1 of WP:NAUTHOR which is "The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors" — It says "336.8 million people reached" here, which is based on the number of times people with various IP addresses clicked on his writings, and he is so "widely regarded by his peers" that there is this entire thread with 367000 views written completely about him. BBC wrote about him here and it wasn't for a "one-time event" but for fame that's been sustained over 13 years now. I could start the article for scratch, but it may be better to start with one of the previous two articles written about him if they could be REFUNDED. Dr. Universe (talk) 00:02, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
@Dr. Universe speedy deletions are not always eligible for refund. In this case it seemed appropriate to restore in draft space and so I have done that at Draft:Jon Skeet. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:54, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
@Barkeep49: Thank you! Although it seems there's now some text below which has been maybe corrupted from one of the previous edits? Dr. Universe (talk) 19:48, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
@Dr. Universe: Looks like it got there in this diff. I've gone ahead and removed it based on your message. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:59, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Has any AfD nomination resulted in "keep" based ONLY on C1(b)?

C1(b) currently says:

"(b) Criterion 1 can also be satisfied if the person has pioneered or developed a significant new concept, technique or idea, made a significant discovery or solved a major problem in their academic discipline. In this case it is necessary to explicitly demonstrate, by a substantial number of references to academic publications of researchers other than the person in question, that this contribution is indeed widely considered to be significant and is widely attributed to the person in question."

It seems that people satisfying C1(b) will almost always also satisfy C1(a) which is:

"(a) The most typical way of satisfying Criterion 1 is to show that the academic has been an author of highly cited academic work"

or they would satisfy C1(c) which is:

"(c) The publication of an anniversary or memorial journal volume or a Festschrift dedicated to a particular person is usually enough to satisfy Criterion 1, except in the case of publication in vanity, fringe, or non-selective journals or presses."

or they would satisfy C2 or something else. I wonder if anyone's article has survived based only on C1(b)? Dr. Universe (talk) 09:07, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Maryna Viazovska is a likely case. (She didn't yet have the awards and citations that would now give her a case for 1(a) and 2.) More generally, mathematics can be a low-citation field, making 1(a) notability hard to achieve, but when a mathematician becomes the namesake of a notable concept (for instance, "so-and-so's theorem" is called out by name in the title of publications by multiple independent groups) it gives them a case for 1(b). The references need to be higher quality than the citations in 1(a) but I think fewer of them are needed. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:56, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: Wow! Thanks for remembering that from 5 years ago, and replying so quickly! Your comment about namesake people reminds me of an article about Matthew Pusey (a grad student at the time) which came up on Wikipedia 9 years ago when he proved what's now known as the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem, though that article was quickly deleted/re-directed to the PBR theorem page. Dr. Universe (talk) 17:11, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: Looking more thoroughly at the AfD summary for Maryna Viazovska, it seems her article was kept because of meeting GNG, much more so than because of meeting criterion C1(b). There was already 4 articles about her work (in Quanta Magazine, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Gil Kalai's blog), which some people (including you) were arguing might be enough to pass GNG. For C1(b), people were actually arguing that the work was not yet peer-reviewed and that the 4 GNG articles were not scientific sources. I think this was also a unique case, where someone "has pioneered or developed a significant new concept, technique or idea, made a significant discovery or solved a major problem in their academic discipline" but it was such a famous problem that it led to satisfaction of GNG criteria before the article was even published (meaning that the NACADEMIC standards, such as receiving academic citations, were not applied). So I wonder if anyone ever had an article survive AfD based only on C1(b) without satisfying GNG or anything else? Also, one argument in that AfD discussion was that a Field Medalist was already editing a bunch of Wikipedia articles saying that the sphere packing problem was solved, do you know who that Fields medalist was? Dr. Universe (talk) 15:32, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Weird case needing input from experienced editors

Hi all, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Karl Bleyl, has some unusual issues that have arisen. Essentially some quality references have been discovered, but they also reveal the person was not actually a professional entomologist, but an amateur hobbyist. However, that person seems to have done some notable field work in entomology. Not sure how to evaluate this one. All opinions are welcome. Best.4meter4 (talk) 22:05, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. This 2-line article about someone who seems never to have published a paper in their life, and has no references in the article apart from two German-language articles in Zobodat, was kept due to the keep !votes by hroest and David Eppstein. This calls into question a lot of the other articles which have been deleted here. Dr. Universe (talk) 23:56, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Yes, indeed it does. Just goes to show how arbitrary the choices have been and continue to be. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:26, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Interim/Acting University presidents

Is there consensus on if interim/acting university presidents meet PROF #6? TJMSmith (talk) 02:20, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

In my opinion they do not, and even when permanent, only for the best universities. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:30, 31 August 2021 (UTC).
I would say that they would need to meet other criteria in addition to being an interim/acting president. Being newsworthy might possibly do it, for example. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:25, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
Why not include them? Dr. Universe (talk) 00:20, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
Agree with Dr. Universe - regardless of whether they are interim/acting, they have still held that role and so there is no reason why they wouldn't satisfy PROF #6. Polyamorph (talk) 09:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
No, I don't think there is. I would oppose this as people in interim and acting positions have not received the full scrutiny of someone who is hired for a permanent position and they are often there only in a caretaker role until a permanent hire is made. Those explicitly mitigate against our ideas of notability within this guideline.
With that said, being in this role even temporarily greatly increases the likelihood that someone would pass WP:GNG as it makes it much more likely that substantive sources specifically about that person were written during their brief time in office. ElKevbo (talk) 13:34, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
#6 does not specify the position must be permanent. Provided it is backed up by a reliable source then any person holding the highest-level post for any amount of time will very likely be notable. Polyamorph (talk) 21:16, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
I still don't see an answer to my question "why not include them?". I appreciate the attempt at an answer by ElKevbo, which seems to be that they haven't received the full scrutiny, but why do they have to receive scrutiny to have a Wikipedia page if there's enough sources confirming what's written in the encyclopedia entry? If you want to remove people that you feel haven't been scrutinized enough, then you can work perhaps infinitely on removing such articles (right above this section I wrote "Interesting. This 2-line article about someone who seems never to have published a paper in their life, and has no references in the article apart from two German-language articles in Zobodat, was kept due to the keep !votes by hroest and David Eppstein. This calls into question a lot of the other articles which have been deleted here. Dr. Universe (talk) 23:56, 25 September 2021 (UTC)") but I'm not convinced that this will improve anything in terms of the purpose and aims of Wikipedia. If I want to know who the president of a university is, I want to be able to find that on Wikipedia reliably and easily. I don't want to have to scavenge for information and do my own primary research just because this particular president has a different title compared to the last one. Dr. Universe (talk) 23:04, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
We are essentially relying on the judgment of the institution that a person who is hired as a president is highly qualified in many ways and accomplished enough to meet our standards of notability. In my opinion, we cannot rely on that for interim or acting presidents as the institution has not made that judgment, a judgment that is usually based on an extensive search process or long-standing familiarity with the individual.
I don't completely understand all of your question as you seem to be bringing in a lot of context that I don't have. Let's be clear that we're only talking about whether these individuals should, solely by holding this title, have their own article. This is not about whether they should be named in the article about the institution (if it matters, I think that if we have information about presidents in a college or university article then it's reasonable to insist that the information be complete and include interim and acting presidents).
Again, I imagine that in many cases this is all moot as many of the people who are appointed interim or acting president will have sufficient qualifications either under this guideline or the general notability guideline to merit an article anyway. So I don't understand the question of "why do they have to receive scrutiny to have a Wikipedia page if there's enough sources confirming what's written in the encyclopedia entry?" If they already pass WP:GNG or other parts of this guideline then this question about whether their time as acting or interim president alone qualifies them as "notable" is unnecessary. I bet that will be the case much of the time. ElKevbo (talk) 23:25, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

What is the justification for NPROF being above/separate to WP:GNG?

I understand that the WP:NPROF special notability guide is not presently subordinate to the general notability guide that governs all other area of notability on here other than legally-recognised populated places. I also get the history around this being that WP:NPROF came before WP:GNG. What I don't understand is why this situation has continued and why it should carry on into the future.

Why should the notability of academics be judged according to a different ultimate standard to authors/artists, criminals and victims of crime, politicians, singer/bands, athletes, and so forth, none of which have their own special notability guide? Schools used to have their own special notability guideline but this was subordinated ultimately to GNG in the 2017 RFC, so the present situation seems anomalous. FOARP (talk) 16:37, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Two reasons that I'm aware of: that there were effectively notability guidelines for academics before we actually had notability guidelines, so the principle is grandfathered in, and second, academics themselves are generally notable for the research they perform and not as people; academia tends to not have multitudes of sources ready to outline an academic's biography. Because of that, given that academics play important roles in research and education, we should be striving to cover them as long as their research has been deemed important, or they otherwise satisfy the GNG or other NBIO criteria (eg Bill Nye is recognized more as an actor than as a scientist). --Masem (t) 16:44, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
The historical thing I am aware of but it isn't an explanation as to why it's still the case now, the thing about research sounds perilously close to saying "because academics are more important than everyone else". FOARP (talk) 18:12, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
Short answer: consensus.
Longer answer: this obsession with systematising the notability guidelines is if they're a legal code, worrying about what is and what isn't "subordinated" to the Holy GNG, etc., is a recent development. And when the GNG proselytisers turned up at this talk page demanding submission, some argued that PROF is historically independent from the GNG (based on the line in the lead – whenever that was added) and that seemed to satisfy them. Another argument used, just as valid in my opinion, was that PROF is actually perfectly in line with the GNG, if you take it as a guide to when academics will meet it, assuming that coverage of their work can substitute for direct biographical coverage (and why wouldn't it?) Of course the real answer is that nobody ever bothered to make the notability guidelines consistent with each other, because they're not a legal code, they're a set of guidelines about which subjects will probably survive AfD, pieced together through years of compromise between inclusionists and deletionists in Wikipedia's early days. – Joe (talk) 18:26, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
I think this SNG stuff is fine until someone finds a database of people/places that supposedly meet the guide and start cranking out one-line articles about every single listing. At that point it just becomes bad, because those basically aren't encyclopaedia articles, and the need to rein things in using the WP:GNG becomes obvious. In this case the risk of that seems low as the actually requirements to meet the WP:NPROF guide pretty much rule that out because they require multiple points of data, and yeah, it is pretty close to GNG anyway.
Mostly I'm just asking here to see whether there was ever any reasoning provided beyond "because it is" for this state of affairs, and because the "independence" of NPROF has been cited as a reason for why GEOLAND#1 isn't so bad. FOARP (talk) 19:03, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia is written by a selection of folks and they built their systemic biases into the system. You dare not threaten these SNGs because you're going to anger the very hobbyists who made this website, which is what these GNG-only folks are doing. First they came for the porn stars but because I'm not an onanist I said nothing. Then they came for the military heroes but I was no hero so I said nothing. Now you're here for the academics but I only have a terminal Masters so I'll ask nicely that you cease and desist. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:31, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Re User:FOARP's "why?": There are no good answers to the question of why Wikipedia's wackiest policies are the way they are, beyond historical contingency and post-facto rationalisations. Surely one of the most wacky is the schizophrenic combination of enshrining in WP:GNG the principle that only the most successful of publicity-hounds deserve an article, with the inherently-contradictory principle in WP:PROMO and elsewhere that publicity-hound behavior is inherently suspicious and not a good basis of an enyclopedia. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:33, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
No, not a recent development, but a recent resurgence. There were battles to formally suborninate all SNGs to WP:N by mandating {{pnc}} as their headers. It ended with Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Template:pnc. Following that, the worst of the SNGs were merged or deprecated. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:32, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
I feel like we just went through this in May of this year (see the most recent archive) and had a strong (though not unanimous) consensus to continue this state. Consensus can change, but highly unlikely in 6 months for a policy that has had strong support for over 15 years. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 21:05, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
Because WP:PROF-passing WP:GNG-failing articles are not really biographies on the professor, but are focused on the professor’s work and impact of that work. They do not begin with the professor’s date of birth, parentage and family, and history of personal partners, and do not try to source content from tabloid newspapers, or gossip magazines. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:18, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
Perhaps this proposal should be listed in WP:Perennial proposals as it come up time after time (with the same result). Xxanthippe (talk) 21:40, 28 November 2021 (UTC).
actually, SmokeyJoe, like any biographical article, they should begin with a sentence of two on why they person is notable , and then if possible should have a section on date and place of birth, parentage and family, before going on to education and career history. It's not fatal if the brief bio part is omitted, but it's a better article if we can find the information. Readers want to have at least that background, because we're dealing with people. For that matter, it would be true in other fields also: an aticle on a visual artist with information just about their work and its recognition issufficient,even if thee's no bio portion. Even an article on a politician. Even a sportsperson. DGG ( talk ) 01:38, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Even a sportsperson. Anyone want to guess what percentage of athlete bios even have the sourcing potential for one article section, let alone enough for anything beyond ==Club career== + a statistics table? JoelleJay (talk) 04:05, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Another attempt then: The work product of the GNG-failing research professor is more scholarly than the work product of other GNG-failing biographies. SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:53, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Of course it's more scholarly;--that's their profession--I think you mean whether it's more important -- which raises the question, important to whom? Do we mean important to the world, or important to our likely readers? (and isn't our likely readership in turn a fuction of what we choose to includue and emphasise) DGG ( talk ) 07:48, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Not quite. Wikipedia is not driven by raw readership. Scholarly content is more important? Yes, I guess that’s right.
Wikipedia:Purpose. “free access to the sum of all human knowledge”
DIKW pyramid
Information and knowledge comes from data via scholarship.
Data is the primary source material. Secondary sources generate information and knowledge from data. WP:PSTS, the policy basis of Wikipedia-notability, compels the use of a balance of secondary sources. Somewhere in there is why academic scholarship is preferred. SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:08, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@DGG and SmokeyJoe: - Sports bio stubs and GEO perma-stubs are a plague on this here encyclopaedia and exist entirely because of the idea that a single statistical listing in a database (typically either sportsreference.com or GNIS/GNS) indicated sufficient notability to write an article. There is no corresponding rash of PROF stubs. I don't like the idea that PROF bios are somehow more important, but ultimately the WP:NPROF guide is far less problematic. FOARP (talk) 08:52, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Concentrate on the word “somehow”, not the word “important”. There’s plenty of space. Space is not the problem. Disagree about “plague”, unless you can explain how plague spreads plague. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:17, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Forgive the hyperbole, but: the contagion is real - it spreads! More accurately, editors see how it is possible to rack up superficially-impressive article-creation statistics simply by going through a database and writing articles about every single line-item, and so do it themselves. The harm here is that in reality encyclopaedic articles cannot be written about most, or even any of these items they are creating, and in fact the data is very often inaccurate or simply not meant for the purpose it's being used for. The massive clean-up we're doing on GNIS, GNS, and census-sourced GEO stubs throws up loads of example of this, and I thoroughly expect the sports-reference.com articles to also include this once people get around to checking the more obscure articles against other sources.
The "somehow" here is that a standard appears to have been set up entirely to cater to what academics (and not the general public) think makes academics notable. My WP:NLAWYERS hypothetical below is why I think this is bad. FOARP (talk) 13:15, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
There's definitely a valid point that even if we take that notability of academics do not necessarily need to be about their person but can include their research, the weight of using citation counts/indexes/etc. is not a sign that that information necessarily translates to significant coverage about the person or research. We do not want articles on academics to be bare-bones CVs (per WP:NOT) and there may be a need for this guideline to address the normal "rebuttable presumption" of notability if all that can be written about one is a CV-like article. --Masem (t) 13:23, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@FOARP: Have you ever considered that these editors do not care about statistics, but genuinely think that a good encyclopaedia should include comprehensive coverage of geographic places? I understand that sometimes these mass stub creation efforts go badly wrong, and that cleaning up after them is an extraordinarily time-consuming and thankless task – but when it doesn't go wrong, where is the harm? Is it so terrible if a reader searching for Smalltown finds out that it is a village in Middleshire with a population of 100, and nothing else? Or that Jane Smith played three seasons for the Smalltown Rangers in 1967? Or that the same year, her aunt Mabel published a moderately impactful paper on a new barnacle species? It seems to me that the key element missing from your recent campaign against our notability policies is an appreciation that not everybody understands "encyclopaedic" the same way. – Joe (talk) 14:07, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
I am not campaigning against Wikipedia's notability and inclusion standards. I am campaigning in favour of them. Particularly, I am campaigning in favour of the proposal that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a directory or a dictionary or a database. Editors are free to list all the villages of the wonderful county of Middleshire, including Smalltown, in the article for Middleshire, in a form that is ultimately more accessible and easier to manage. FOARP (talk) 14:23, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Comment - the premise the general notability guide that the GNG governs all other area of notability on here other than legally-recognised populated places and PROF is still wrong. NORG and NNUMBER, for example, set aside the GNG in favor of a higher standard, NFILM excludes topics that would otherwise be presumed "to merit their own article" because they meet the GNG, and NBOOK and NAUTHOR specify criteria assuring notability for topics that, without those specifications, might not meet the GNG. So I reject the premise. :). Newimpartial (talk) 12:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Remember that throughout all this, notability is a rebuttable presumption that we should have a standalone article, and at least with topics like NBOOK and NAUTHOR, they point out that even just meeting one of the criteria may still result later in deletion or merging if there's not much significant coverage to be written about it. NORG is unique in that it overrides what "significant coverage" needs to be as to avoid self-promotion, while NPROF is different as it allows focus on a subject's academic research to be considered part of the topic. --Masem (t) 14:15, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
A better question would be, "why do people assume that the WP:GNG is superior to other guidelines?" It is not historically, as many subject-specific notability guidelines pre-date it, and it is not currently, as it contains the same wording about only showing "presumed notability" as the other guidelines. The decision about any topic's notability is taken by consensus. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:21, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
The GNG combines reliable with the extreme end of WP:PSTS. WP:PSTS requires independent others have written about the topic. If not “others”, then Wikipedia will accept articles sourced from the topic, non-independent, risking deeper unreliability issues and promotionism. If not “”written about”, meaning secondary source material, then you are talking the repeating if facts, and that leads to accepting directory information, or editorial original research. So, this goes to whether the core content policy, WP:NOR, can be possibly satisfied for the topic. An even better core policy rationale is found in the text of WP:A. It’s what constrains new articles to be encyclopedic.
The SNGs are easier-to-assess indicators of whether the GNG is likely to met. The SNGs are easier to use in deciding whether to attempt to write that article, and for reviewers to quick-assess them. If push comes to shove, go to the GNG, and then AfD. SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:51, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Only two SNGs predate WP:N. They are WP:CORP and WP:PROF. SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
I don't think that is precisely true; I'm fairly certain that the consensus embodied in GEOLAND predates the GNG as well, for example.
In any event, the current text of WP:SNG resulted from an RfC with wide participation, which rejected the view that SNGs, in general, are (or ever were) presumptive of GNG notability (easier-to-assess indicators of whether the GNG is likely to met). Rather, unless otherwise specified - as in NSPORT - they are and have always been, as Masem says,

a rebuttable presumption that we should have a standalone article in the same sense that the GNG is also a rebuttable presumption. Newimpartial (talk) 20:58, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features) dates from an essay written 20 April 2008. That’s almost 2 years after stable acceptance of WP:N, and after formalisation of the GNG.
Yes, all notability guidance is rebuttable, and the actual decision is made at AfD. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:19, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Comment What baffles me is why anyone thinks that the question of what deserves to be an article in an encyclopedia that aims to cover every area of human knowledge is going to have a simple answer. There's no way to give a universal criterion for that which will boil down to a set of three bullet points. Also: to the extent that the squishy concept of "notability" is defined at all, it is not defined in "the GNG", but in the part of Wikipedia:Notability that comes before the GNG. XOR'easter (talk) 23:49, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Which is why it is important to recognize that the GNG itself is a rebuttable presumption and not a final goal. Our target should be to have articles where there is no question about its notability, but in the process of building the article, you may not have access to all the sources, so the GNG is showing that some coverage exists for the topic to avoid immediate deletion, but it itself is not the final goal of notability. --Masem (t) 00:21, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I've always thought meeting WP:GNG was simply a requirement of "can we write a valid encyclopaedic article from neutral sources on this topic." As I understand it, NPROF incorporates sources which we normally would discount at GNG on secondary/independence grounds. I don't have a problem with this, but in practice, whether someone meets NPROF is exceptionally opaque, especially if you're not from academia, and I'd gladly vote to have it fall under the GNG (with the sourcing exceptions I've noted above.) SportingFlyer T·C 00:55, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
"I'd gladly vote to have it fall under the GNG" - Same here. It has the feel of something designed by academics for academics, based on an assumed importance of the role of academics above all other professions. I can easily imagine people from my profession creating an WP:NLAWYERS guide predicated on the prominence of the cases they worked on, what courts they were qualified to practise before, whether they were ever a QC or similar, which would pass a whole load of lawyers who could not pass WP:BASIC and create superficially-encyclopaedic articles: the issue would be that the articles wouldn't really be about the subject, and would be sourced to a whole load of court papers and law-firm biographies. In the end WP:GNG may not be the answer, but it is still a decent basic standard. FOARP (talk) 09:05, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
If you think PROF should fall under the GNG, find some GNG-failing, WP:PROF-passing, articles, and take them to AfD.
The PROF bar is quite high. Most professors fail it. If you can’t find many GNG-failing WP:PROF articles, then WP:PROF is doing an excellent SNG job of predicting the meeting of the GNG. However, predicting AfD results is what they should do. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:25, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Uh I would say the vast majority of the professors kept at AfDs do not meet GNG (and a very large percentage that never have notability challenged don't meet it either). But @David Eppstein: would have a better gauge of this proportion. The guideline is not at all intended to be used as a predictor of GNG. JoelleJay (talk) 09:40, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
That’s right. It’s a predictor of AfD. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:59, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
The articles are kept at AFD because they meet this guideline. Very few AFD keep/delete arguments nowadays attempt to argue from first principles, most instead just refer to the guides that are passed/failed. It doesn't predict, it determines what the outcome is. FOARP (talk) 13:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
The vast majority of professors kept at AfD have thousands and thousands of sources about their work. The vast majority of academics not kept still have hundreds of sources about their work. The key is that the vast majority of those sources are low-quality (drive-by citations to their publications) so rather than sifting through them as GNG would force us to do we look for other indicia. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:35, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
There is definitely something to say about circular nature of notability here. We know from the problem with schools and WP:OUTCOMES (prior to the revamping of NCORP to include schools) that it is very easy to create a circular loop that says "these articles are kept at AFD so here's guidance for creating articles" followed by "we have this guidances for article creation, so these articles must be kept at AFD". At some point we need to be able to apply a rebuttable presumption of notability granted by notability guidelines and break the "automatic keep at AFD" cycle, and what FOARP describes is part of that. Mind you, we also want to edge on the side of retention of articles if the presumption of notability hasn't been fully challenged yet (hence why we have WP:BEFORE) but after 3 or 4 times at AFD without any sign of further sourcing, that feedback loop has to be broken. --Masem (t) 05:39, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
No. Really no. Completely wrong. "At some point we need": Only if we take GNG as handed down on stone tablets as something we must obey at all costs. If we view it as just another rule for trying to cut off what to include and what not, as fallable as any other (and maybe more fallable than many because it is so easily gamed by publicity-seekers), then no, we do not need to obey it. What we need is a way to set limits that keep in the topics we want to keep in and keep out the junk. As long as WP:PROF does an adequate job of that, then there's no reason to supplant it or challenge it or defer to other guidelines. And in practice, GNG is used more as an excuse for keeping what we want and for excluding what we don't want (regardless of what the letter of the guideline actually says) than for what it actually says about how to make that decision. Or else, why would so many people argue that in-depth newspaper articles about political candidates don't count for notability because the candidate lost the election? It's not because it's part of what GNG says, but because they want to keep losing candidates out. Why would so many people argue that athletes in certain pro leagues are notable when the only thing to say about them is a line in the statistics for a single game? It's not because they're reading and following what GNG says about in-depth coverage, but because they have set in their minds that athletes at that level are always notable and therefore they will interpret whatever sourcing is available as providing that notability regardless of whether it actually does. Achievement-based notability like WP:PROF (or for that matter WP:NPOL if applied as an actual rule rather than a rebuttable presumption) get rid of that charade and provide what we actually want, a cutoff that keeps enough of the important content in and enough of the unimportant content out. These rules are not perfect: some unimportant academics will still pass PROF and some important ones will still not, but their precision and recall (to borrow a phrase from information retrieval) are much better for this topic than publicity-based guidelines like GNG can be. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:39, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Except of course that WP:NOT is a policy that is meant to avoid indiscriminate information, and to prevent WP from simply being a who's who. We want articles that show coverage that is more than database listings or something that approaches a CV. Academics don't have the problem that sports figures and politicians have, in that there is far too much routine coverage about them. Instead, academics have the issue with lack of sourcing generally, particularly about them as people rather than their research, but we need to be careful. NPROF does set that we don't need to expect significant coverage about those academics that meet the achievement-based principles, but if the article still can't be fleshed out to be more than just a CV, WP:NOT gives us good reason to delete it. Of course, we're using the achievement-based NPROF as an expectation that more can be written about the person or their research with more indepth sourcing, so that articles on academics can be created, but that still is a rebuttable presumption that the article will get past the WP:NOT aspects rather than failure to meet the GNG. --Masem (t) 13:20, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
If you really believed that notability was supposed to be about whether one had enough information to create an article rather than what it really is, a gatekeeping mechanism, you would be arguing for including articles on anyone with a local-newspaper obituary. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:45, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
The inclusionists/deletionists war was years ago. This isn't about gatekeeping at all (and we do frown on editors that do try to use notability for gatekeeping). Notability, with its rebuttable presumption, is to temper the fact that we have no process with regards to article creation, and any editor can create an article on anything without any checks. We need a means to be able to make sure there is enough evidence that an article in progress meets the core content policies so that it can stay as a standalone and benefit from the open wiki nature of contribution. This is not saying that NPROF doesn't aim towards that, but the point is that NPROF doesn't exist because AFD results say articles meeting NPROF exist means that NPROF must remain. If someone does the legwork and finds that an academic that may have 1000s of cites back to their articles as to meet NPROF but absolutely nothing more than basic CV details and citation count, that's not a reason to keep the article around. That is in no way gatekeeping as it requires significant effort for those seeking to delete the article to prove this (per BEFORE), and hence why we edge on retention over deletion. Mind you, the same principles apply to NBIO, NSPORTS, and the GNG as well. It's why notability is not to be considered as inclusion guidelines. --Masem (t) 01:24, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Very theological, but also very unrelated to actual practice. If you want to worship holy GNG, do so in peace, but please do not pretend that what you are doing corresponds in any way to how people are using the guidelines in practice. And regardless of inclusionism vs deletionism, it is necessary to set a threshold somewhere; the question is where and how. Your statement that "how" can only be determined by the availability of material is useless for academics, because a tsunami of material is always available in the references to their works. Your example of an academic about whom we have only CV details and citation count is not only factually incorrect (we have plenty of articles, and articles that would be kept in any AfD, that report only this much) but almost vacuous, because in almost all cases we could go on at considerable length on their research accomplishments. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:41, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
If someone has thousands of citations but we can't find anything more than a CV (e.g. a BEFORE search can't even find a solid body of research that can truly be attributed to them), they're probably in a field where everyone in the department through whose hands any data passed in any capacity gets authorship (experimental physics, clinical genetics) and likely don't have a position that would normally correspond to NPROF notability anyway. These people exist, and they fail NPROF because their academic impact isn't demonstrably exceptional in their subfield, not because we can't find biographical sourcing outside their CV. JoelleJay (talk) 05:19, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
A key difference between academics and lawyers (and most other professions) is that an academic's main job is to publish: publish works that are overwhelmingly likely to be considered 'reliable sources' and which routinely reference other works by other academics. Intrinsically, this generates an enormous quantity of 'coverage' compared to most other fields of practice. That is why we have a guideline to help us sift through that mountain and decide which academics are most likely to be notable. It has its flaws, for sure, and the degree of insider knowledge needed to apply it is definitely one of them. But the alternative, to paraphrase something I heard DGG say once, is to, at each individual AfD, laboriously comb through a papers that cite the subject looking for the ones that amount to a pass of the GNG. Since these are inevitably there even for the 'average professor' (which, remember, this guideline excludes), this would be a complete waste of time.
And honestly, regardless of how it "feels", PROF wasn't really "designed" by anyone. Like any successful policy, it documents a consensus around the notability of academics that emerged in the project's early days and has been reinforced by thousands of individual AfD discussions since then. To suggest scrapping it entirely, based on these abstract, legalistic understandings of GNG vs. SNG vs. WTF—which hardly anyone even agrees on anyway—is frankly pure arrogance. I'm giving into pure frustration here, but I really, really wish we could spend just half the time talking about the effects of our notability policies as we do about the fictional axioms that (don't) underpin them. – Joe (talk) 13:53, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
"A key difference between academics and lawyers (and most other professions) is that an academic's main job is to publish" - speaking as a lawyer of a kind whose work is mostly published, I think I may disagree with this. Similarly journalists, judges, politicians, legislators, etc. FOARP (talk) 14:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Please read the quoted sentence as a whole. Lots of professions centre around publishing, but this tends to generate only primary and/or non-independent coverage of the author. What is unusual about academics, from Wikipedia's point of view, is that they publish and extensively cite each others' work, generating independent, secondary coverage at the same time. We already have an SNG for legislators and judges that is fairly distant from the GNG; you are welcome to draft one for lawyers or journalists if you think that is valuable. – Joe (talk) 15:09, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree with Joe Roe here. If the situation for lawyers or journalists is more akin to that for academics than current guidelines reflect, then the guidelines for lawyers or journalists should be brought closer to that for academics. (I'm not convinced that it is, but I'm open to the possibility.) As to the topic of "insider knowledge", I'd say that WP:PROF makes evaluating academic biographies less insular, by spelling out a significant amount of that "insider knowledge". It gives people who aren't deeply versed in a subject things to look for which they can evaluate without specialist experience (e.g., anybody with a baseline level of competence can check that someone does indeed hold the title "Distinguished Professor"). Does it make specialist experience completely superfluous? Of course not. But the vaunted GNG has the same problem: sometimes, you need "insider knowledge" to tell what counts as significant coverage, for example. XOR'easter (talk) 16:23, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Another example: it can require specialist knowledge to tell whether a source is reliable in the first place. So, it can actually be impossible to apply the oh-so-simple GNG without being an "insider", too. (Or at least a hobbyist who has taken the time to gain some of that "insider" experience, which is what documents like WP:PROF and WP:MEDRS help with.) XOR'easter (talk) 13:40, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Although this does not affect your argument, note legal writing extensively cites other legal arguments and judgements, thus establishing their significance. isaacl (talk) 00:28, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I say, because "the reason" (TM) anyone cares about these people's lives is ideas, not events, nor jobs, nor inventions, nor publicity, nor celebrity . . . 'no one' would care about that Swiss patent office guy, but for his ideas. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:51, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Eh, as some other editors have conceded, the rationale behind NPROF is simply the large number of editors pissed off that "important" people like academics are utterly outclassed in the WP:SIGCOV department by "unimportant" people such as actors, garage bands and third-division soccer players, and that it was one of the successful carveouts along with WP:PORNBIO and WP:SOLDIER. I'm honestly astonished that PORNBIO lasted as long as it did -- between native puritanism and the degree to which articles were based on industry-specific sources and awards -- and equally surprised that SOLDIER and NOLYMPICS were the next dominoes to tumble. Inertia is a tough thing to combat. Ravenswing 02:06, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
    • "Pissed off" that this is one of the parts of the encyclopedia where accomplishment remains more relevant than celebrity? "Pleased and protective of that status" might be more accurate. Or "pissed off" that paparazzi don't care about how accomplished an academic is? No, relieved might be more accurate. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:46, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
      • Proves my point, pretty much. "Accomplishment," of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and doubtless many millions more people believe the accomplishments of your average celebrated athlete matter more than those of any academic you can name. The question is this: what makes your definition of important accomplishments more valid than theirs? And that's the problem with any non-GNG based notability criterion: it is entirely subjective. Ravenswing 03:43, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
        • If you think GNG-based notability criteria are evaluated in any way but subjectively, you are fooling yourself. What is "significant" coverage? What is "in-depth"? How independent is "independent"? It is a subjective decision. Many of the PROF criteria, on the other hand (although not so much #1) are quite clear-cut and objective: one is a fellow of a national academy or not, with no gray area there. As for the choice to abide by one notability criterion or another: that itself is equally subjective regardless of which way one chooses. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:46, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
          • True. And if WP:PROF really were something cooked up by academics who think that any academic is important by default, then it would say something like "all professors with tenure are notable". Heck, the analogy for a lot of the WP:NSPORT standards would be "anyone who has published in Nature or Science is notable". And if we followed the lead of WP:NACTOR, we might get "anyone who has published in top-tier journals multiple times is notable". WP:PROF is pretty stringent in the segment of the relevant population that it lets through. (I share the sentiment articulated above that investigating the effects of our standards is more interesting than pseudo-legalistic wrangling over which abbreviation comes out on top.) XOR'easter (talk) 13:58, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
The thing about WP:NACTOR and WP:NSPORT is, that they still ultimately answer to WP:GNG. This facilitates a process of tightening-up where you can point to the SNGs not actually conforming to the general guide even though they are supposed to, and passing people about who no actual article could be written. The main good thing about GNG is just that it means you can write a meaningful article about the subject - that is the real test. FOARP (talk) 21:05, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, NACTOR and NSPORT do not have the same status: NSPORT is (since the RfC a few years ago) presumptive only of GNG Notability, but NACTOR is directly presumptive of Notability itself (as the framing text of NBIO makes clear - either BASIC or one of the "additional criteria" result in presumptive notability, but both are not required). While the real test is indeed whether editors can write a meaningful article about the subject, the GNG - and its application for people, NBASIC - is only an indicator of whether that is likely (and there are other indicators among the SNGs); it is neither a definition of Notability nor a guarantee of deserving an article. Newimpartial (talk) 21:21, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
@FOARP "that is the real test": no, it is not. If coverage reliable and in-depth enough to write an article were actually the real test, we would have articles about every local bakery that has reviews in the local newspaper's food supplement and in the other local free alternative weekly. Those would be independent, reliable, and in-depth, all that is needed to write an article. Instead, people like you claim principled reasons based on the ability to write articles as a justification for GNG, but then actually use it in AfD to mean "this coverage doesn't convince me that the subject is important, therefore delete" or alternatively "I am already convinced that this subject is important, therefore these weak sources are sufficiently in-depth". If you're going to do that, then let's skip the indirection and really test whether the subject is sufficiently important. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:05, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
An ongoing case in point, not about academic notability and where GNG is the only applicable notability standard: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Carlsen versus Nepomniachtchi, World Chess Championship 2021, Game 6, well attended after being linked at WP:AN. Most of the comments there are over the significance of the game, not of the news coverage. Even the few that directly concern coverage (Jobie James, Calistemon, etc) view that coverage through the lens of whether it conveys importance (James: "most of it recent", as if recency makes sources less significant; Calistemon: "on non-chess specific German sources" as if non-specificity makes sources more significant). Further down, in replies to Calistemon by Natg 19, the later opinion of Sjakkalle, etc., we have explicit opinions that GNG produces the wrong result and therefore we should use some unstated higher standard. I have also participated in that discussion with opinion that like the rest is more based on significance than the existence of in-depth sources; I'm not saying that sort of participation is a bad contribution. What I'm saying is that the arguments here of GNG-über-alles promoters, claiming that its connection to article-writability makes GNG the only possible standard for inclusion in Wikipedia and the standard that all other topics currently use, are objectively contradicted by current AfD practice. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:38, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
As an aside, the sports notability guidelines have always, since their inception, been designed to predict the existence of suitable coverage meeting the general notability guideline, and have always deferred to it. isaacl (talk) 00:31, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I agree with a partial carve-out here, but not a total rejection of the need for coverage of the subject. Only needing one of the eight items is too little, especially when several are far too vague. Far too many people think that a high citation count is enough for (1), when in fact there should be independent sources covering the researcher's work in some fashion, not merely citing it in footnotes that don't substantively show impact. (5) is also far too broad, and someone could conceivably mass-produce tens of thousands of articles on people with some sort of endowed professorship but who don't necessarily have a significant impact or coverage independent of their employer. That sort of recognition is made at the local university level rather than a wider discipline level like (3), though having that alone is still pretty broad. Reywas92Talk 23:01, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Why should the notability of academics be judged according to a different ultimate standard to authors/artists, criminals and victims of crime, politicians, singer/bands, athletes, and so forth, none of which have their own special notability guide? That would presumably be apart from those who do! WP:POLITICIAN, for example, and WP:NATHLETE. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:18, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
    NSPORT is subordinate to GNG (per the first sentence, the applicable policies and guidelines section, and the FAQs at the top of the page.) JoelleJay (talk) 19:19, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
  • De facto No particular justification is needed because none of the notability guidelines are fundamental principles; they did not exist during the first five years of Wikipedia and are not core policies or even policies. They are just indicative advice, based upon our experience and outcomes. Per WP:NOTLAW, we don't make prescriptive rules because we have no authority or mandate to do so. And a fundamental principle that we do have is that we should Ignore All Rules! The situation is therefore de facto rather than de jure. And the fact is that most readers understand and expect us to have articles about respectable professors like Niels Høiby. They command respect because of their achievements and status; not because of the extent to which they have appeared in the newspapers or politics or sport. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:56, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Help me assess notability please

--Ubershmekel (talk) 07:29, 8 January 2022 (UTC) Sorry to ask this. I just couldn't figure out what are the citation count guidelines from the article itself. Do the following notes qualify as a notable academic?

Probably GS would pass, although this is a very highly cited field. The other two would not count by themselves. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:41, 8 January 2022 (UTC).
(Person being discussed is Yehuda Afek) -- Agreed that third point alone isn't enough for an independent article, GS citations look more than enough (there are MIT full profs in CS with lower h-index). I think that point 2 though is pretty important -- it's a large, major research institution. I would think nearly all full professors from Tel Aviv University would pass here. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 19:02, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you folks. Based off of your feedback I've edited Yehuda Afek.--Ubershmekel (talk) 21:52, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Need someone to help me assess the notability

Ravi M. Gupta (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Can someone take a look and help me assess if this meets WP:NPROF ? What about his position in the university does it make him notable. Venkat TL (talk) 13:13, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

"holds the Charles Redd Chair of Religious Studies at Utah State University" ⇒ passes C5
Five reviews of his books on JSTOR [7] and more on Google Scholar [8] ⇒ passes WP:AUTHOR
(This appears to be more a book-based humanities field than a journal-based sci/tech one, so we should not expect high citation counts on Google Scholar leading to C1.)
—David Eppstein (talk) 16:48, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
@David Eppstein thanks a lot for the detailed reply. So holding any named chair in university makes the person notable. I was under the impression that named chair in major mainstream fields were only to consider, and had doubts about religious studies chair. Will keep this in mind. Venkat TL (talk) 17:16, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
Named chairs held at a lower-than-full-professor rank and chairs held by virtue of holding some administrative office rather than given as a recognition of scholarship do not count. There is some question whether departments that hand out named chairs like candy (maybe some business schools) should count. But there is no prejudice regarding some fields being less worthy of counting than others. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:37, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
Only full professors (or professors, as we call them in the UK!) hold chairs in any case. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:47, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Religious studies is a major mainstream field. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 18:40, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
At most old universities for most of their existence religion was not just an important area of study, but was the main one. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:34, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I think we should remove the "named chair" criterion altogether. It's difficult to determine whether it's meaningful and based on merit. I know that some departments simply rotate professors through the "chair" position periodically. ~Anachronist (talk) 16:03, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Are you perhaps confusing "[department] chair" with "named chair"? In the U.S., at least, "[department] chair" is usually a position like what you describe where faculty members often serve terms (e.g., 3-year term, 5-year term) and then sometimes step down. A "named chair" usually isn't like that. It is a bit confusing that they both have the title "chair" (even more confusing when someone who has a named chair also serves as the chair of a department!). ElKevbo (talk) 16:13, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
Agree, rotating of department chair duties is certainly understandable whereas rotation of a named chair would be very unusual in my experience. I wonder if you can provide an example or two of a department that does this? KeeYou Flib (talk) 16:26, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
Yup, definitely some confusion here. A chair in this sense is the position held by a (full) professor, not a head of department. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:49, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Clearly meets WP:PROF #5 as holder of a named chair at a major university. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:47, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Is it worth revisiting #5 - "Distinguished Professor"?

"The person 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."

I've run into a number of discussions recently about whether this rank is REALLY enough to confer notability, even at a prestigious institution, as well as arguments over how on earth to interpret the last clause about professors in different countries. I'm starting to sense, in those discussions, that there's a lot of frustration over academics who are dragged across the finish line by this one metric.

Is it still necessary in 2022? It seems unlikely that the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, to pick an extreme example, isn't going to be notable by the other metrics, let alone simply by WP:GNG. And it's not hard to envision a case where an otherwise mediocre academic simply outlasts their colleagues into the named chair. I suggest it might be worth at least having a discussion about modifying or even removing this item at this point. PianoDan (talk) 20:34, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

One advantage of this criterion is that it is much less ambiguous than #C1 — it doesn't require a judgement call about whether the number of citations is really enough. And is there really a case where someone with a "distinguished professor" title was kept when deletion would have been the better outcome? (Disclaimer: I have this title.) —David Eppstein (talk) 20:44, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
I would only think such a discussion might be useful were you able to point to AfD's where this particular point was decided against use. I see no point is addressing it in the abstract, in part the point of these is to say to people, Lucasian Professor? Perhaps good topic to research, go look into it and see if you can write it up. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:46, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
Are there really any major institutions of higher education and research that grant this title to otherwise mediocre academics who simply outlast their colleagues? I can imagine that in many parts of the world chairs and professorships might be granted for political reasons, but does this make their recipients less notable for the purposes of Wikipedia? Phil Bridger (talk) 20:55, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
It is hard enough to get tenure and far harder to get into a named chair. I doubt there are many articles about academics that ought to be deleted for being too brief although the subject met this unambiguous criteria. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:19, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
All of you are asking rhetorical questions. Go pick out say 10 people from various levels of institutions (not just ivy league) and see what kinds of people get "distinguished professor." Academia is as political as Washington D.C.; I would not be surprised if a number of people carry that appellation without substantial publications or accomplishments. - kosboot (talk) 22:01, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
Let's face it: this whole discussion, under the pretense of being general, is about one particular case, that of Timothy Jackson, as discussed on Music theory. I agree that Jackson's title of "distinguished professor" may not deserve a WP article. The real question, IMO, is whether Philip Ewell does. Perhaps advices from people outside Music Theory could help us get a clearer, less biased view about that. — Hucbald.SaintAmand (talk) 22:23, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
If that's the case, then the discussion is totally ill-founded. I left a comment on the talk page you link. With many published reviews of his works, Jackson obviously passes WP:AUTHOR as well as WP:PROF, and he has far more mainstream media coverage than most professors, even notable ones. The opposition to having an article on him appears grounded in opposition to his beliefs rather than a neutral view of his notability. And "I don't like this guy therefore we should nuke any notability criteria under which he would be deemed notable" seems like a bad way to run an encyclopedia. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
As David Eppstein points out, Timothy Jackson is an obvious an easy pass of notability, and Ewell even easier. The bar that WP puts against humanities (see "religious studies" discussion below) is really absurdly high and out of line with the criteria in the sciences. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 18:46, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
The only point of discussion I can readily recall over the last couple of years is what we mean by "major institution." For example, in the U.S. context does that mean the members of the AA? "Research I" universities? Accredited institutions? Or some other metric, classification, or title? ElKevbo (talk) 22:35, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
If this discussion is really about Timothy_L._Jackson, though, that's also a total non-issue. The University of North Texas is an R1 university with over 40,000 students. There's no question that it's a major institution in this sense. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:35, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
Not only that, but it's one of a fairly small number of PhD granting institutions in Music Theory in the US. No question that it's a notable institution in the field. PianoDan (talk) 03:50, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
I'll note that something like 50% -- so equal to all assistant, associate, and "regular" profs combined -- of the tenured and TT faculty in the math department at my university have a distinguished or named professorship...and that's not even including the living professors emeriti. Some of them definitely deserve Wiki articles, but I feel like automatic notability for 40+ current or recently-retired professors from one department is perhaps a little overly-inclusive. JoelleJay (talk) 02:04, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
A similar situation recently came up with the Leeds School of Business, which seems to have a large number of named chairs. (Perhaps business schools have better access to the pools of money used to endow chairs?) Most of the Leeds chairs appear to be otherwise notable, but for a few it was only marginally so. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 10:15, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
To the original question, it is worth revisiting the criterion to affirm that it is a fine and useful basis for including a subject in the encyclopedia. BD2412 T 02:11, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
I think named chairs are overrated. My buddy is one, at an R2, and I think he'd agree that his being in that position is much less meaningful than it sounds, nor is the paycheck that much bigger. He'll pass NPROF on his own merits and I'll write him up one of these days, but I agree with the nay-sayers, that merely occupying a named chair isn't all that important. I think we have one at my little university too, and the machinations of tenure and promotion prove just how much politics are involved, and how little academic merit matters anymore. Drmies (talk) 02:17, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
Named chairs are becoming more popular but solely for financial reasons. They have nothing to do with merit, but are merely a way to get donors to contribute funds to faculty salaries. I feel this should be entirely discounted as a criteria. - kosboot (talk) 02:45, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
I am guessing but it looks as if all these comments are from the US. The position of named chair differs I think from country to country and we should try to take this into account. --Bduke (talk) 02:55, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
To be clear, Timothy Jackson was the last straw on the camel's back for me, and the reason I brought this up, but I've been reviewing the backlog of physics professors, and this question came up repeatedly for me in that pile too. Bduke also makes a great point that this is a hopelessly confusing criterion for non-US editors, for example see the current AfD for Enzio Tonti, and a recent one for a Japanese professor whose name escapes me. My position, and one I think I share with kosboot, is that the title of distinguished professor should not, BY ITSELF, confer notability. If the argument is that anyone who earns the title is going to have sufficient accomplishments to be notable anyway, then why bother having the criterion? Why not just judge them on their accomplishments? I'll also point out that this is NOT the right place to bring up Philip Ewell - his notability is NOT based on that criterion, and bringing him up here is a serious case of WP:WHATABOUT. PianoDan (talk) 03:45, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
Why have this criterion? Because it helps bring deletion discussions to a quicker end. The actual line between which people tend to get kept and which don't is somewhere around "full professor at a good university", and these people are another step past that line. We're not likely to delete any of these even after a longer discussion, because as you say they pretty much always have enough other accomplishments, so we might as well decide more quickly and avoid wasting our time on them. That's more or less the same raison d'être as all the other notability criteria. Another reason is that having a clear line makes it easier for article creators to decide which people might be worth deeper investigation as candidates for new articles, and which just aren't ready for an article yet. And your continued harping on Timothy Jackson doesn't help your cause, when he also obviously passes WP:PROF#C8 and WP:AUTHOR, and has enough news coverage for WP:GNG on top (on one event, but as he's not notable only for that one event that's a non-issue). In fact, he's a good example of the general principle that distinguished professors tend to pass multiple criteria and that in such cases C5 and the distinguished professor title can be useful as a way to shortcut having to do a more detailed evaluation. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:01, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
I tend to agree with this. However, in my interpretation of NPROF the underlying barometer for notability is ultimately scholarly impact, which is really only measured directly (albeit subjectively) by C1, ~C4, and somewhat C7. The other criteria presume a person has had outsize influence on their field, and were probably highly accurate when NPROF was crafted, which is why they were chosen in the first place. But perhaps it's worth reassessing every now and then how well a given criterion predicts someone having extremely high citations or multiple book reviews, particularly at institutions that are borderline "major" or belong to non-R1 Carnegie classifications, and in countries outside the anglosphere (do they even have equivalents to distinguished professorship?). JoelleJay (talk) 19:25, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
Those are reasonable points and most of them align with my thinking. The fundamental purpose of all of these criteria is so that editors - very few of whom are experts in the many different ways that scholars in different disciplines measure and characterize scholarly impact - do not have to make every discussion about a scholar using complex, drawn out arguments of first principle. In other words, we try to have some reasonable guidelines that non-experts can follow that will generally land them in the right area without them having to do a lot of detailed, laborious work that clearly does not scale to our volume nor is appropriate for the majority of editors who are at best interested amateurs in these specific areas. On those grounds, I believe that this specific criterion still merits inclusion as it still provides fairly accurate guidance in the vast majority of cases.
There are, of course, going to be some situations in which the criterion is misleading or not helpful. Some institutions may indeed award these titles to scholars who don't meet our expectations for notability. I also (very intensely!) dislike the adjective "major" in this criterion; it is undefined and lends itself very well to elitism which is most certainly *not* the purpose of this criterion. So we should be wary of discussions that focus solely on this criterion and always be mindful that it's imperfect. But nonetheless it remains eminently useful. ElKevbo (talk) 19:41, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
As a European I agree that the guideline is very confusing. My university has no named chairs or distinguished professor positions, at least in my department, but has a really high research output and is highly reputable. I also agree with JoelleJay's assessment above of the other criteria. I strongly believe that it is worth re-assessing C5, as I think its bias towards US academics and lack of direct proof of notability might be an issue. A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 19:28, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
The main point of having C5 is to avoid arguments like this about obviously notable professors near the tops of their fields by nominators who haven't taken the time to survey the forms of citation and recognition in those fields. Can we drop this until there's an actual deletion argument lost on this ground which wouldn't obviously pass other detailed examination? (And I don't even like Jackson's recent work one bit, but it has gotten press precisely because a very notable person made his claims) -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 18:54, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I would remove "chair" as qualifying for notability. I know of universities in which some departments simply rotate professors in and out of the "chair" designation. So eventually everybody gets a turn at being the "chair", and it isn't any indication of notability. ~Anachronist (talk) 15:45, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

See discussion below. Not the same thing. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:50, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Notable?

Hi, would someone please have a look at Gregory J. Feist and let me know if you think this person notable under these guidelines? I'm not seeing it, but maybe I've missed something. KeeYou Flib (talk) 18:15, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

I believe that this citation record is plenty for WP:PROF#C1, even in a high citation field like psychology. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:26, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, glad I asked. The whole high-citation thing is difficult to get a handle on across different fields. It still needs POV editing, though - it looks like it was self-written to me when I look at the page's history. KeeYou Flib (talk) 21:28, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
While the GS profile looks impressive, Scopus tells a very different story, giving him an h-index of 18 and only 2,479 citations total. I think a comparison to other professors in this field is warranted to make sure he's actually well above average. JoelleJay (talk) 21:39, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Is this person notable?

Hi all

I've never written about an academic before, please could someone tell me if the sources below establish notability? If not what kind of source is missing? There may be other sources which I'm not aware of.

Thanks very much

John Cummings (talk) 10:01, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think so. Not an obvious no, but I don't see him meeting any of the NACADEMIC criteria, and looking on google, I can't find independent anything written about him. SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:39, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
Citation record looks good enough for WP:PROF#C1 to me. Other sources are adequate to make at least a stub about him. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:29, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks very much SmokeyJoe and David Eppstein for your thoughts, I don't want to create it unless its definately in the rules. I found a CV of the person here which has a lot more information about sources, do these fill in any of the possible gaps in notability? John Cummings (talk) 17:58, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
Academic notability is not about finding better sources. For notability criteria that are based on sourcing (WP:GNG), a self-published source like a cv does not count for anything. And none of the claims in the cv add anything to the case for notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:07, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
Hi David Eppstein thanks for explaining, what kind of thing is missing? If I know what to look for I may be able to find it. As you say before the best criteria would be Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#C1, but I don't want to make it if it will fail. Thanks, John Cummings (talk) 18:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
Since the heaviest citation counts are for Global Innovation Index, I would look for sources written and published by people and organizations completely independent from Wunsch-Vincent that provide in-depth detail about his role in editing this index. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:40, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
David Eppstein thanks very much. John Cummings (talk) 10:37, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes, exactly. I personally don't see him as having satisfied Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#C1. At least it's not obvious, and it should be obvious. KeeYou Flib (talk) 14:59, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
That isn't actually a CV at all. Who, if anyone, has he worked for? What is his academic career? It's called "Roles, Publications and Courses", but it doesn't at all make it clear if he is, or ever has been, actually an academic. Johnbod (talk) 17:00, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
It's true-this may be the wrong forum for discussing this case. KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:00, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Citation metrics

Although this section on metrics mentions a few assorted issues with citation metrics, it fails to convey the main message, i.e. that citation metrics are not a proxy for value and that closed unverifiable sources like Web of Science and Scopus must be avoided. Citation metrics do not need to be advertised; they are already over-used. The only reason to mention citation metrics in a page like this should be to discourage their usage, for all the well known reasons. Nemo 15:29, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

How are Web of Science and Scopus unverifiable? Phil Bridger (talk) 16:15, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
Also, what does being subscription-access have to do with verifiability? None of our sourcing policies require sources to be open-access. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:55, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
The linked declaration says not to use the Journal Impact Factor to evaluate individual researchers. Well, we don't. It advises considering a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice. Well, we do. XOR'easter (talk) 17:41, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
I agree. It doesn't say not to use citation metrics to evaluate academics, but to use them differently from the way the authors think they are being used. I was hoping that the OP here would say whether only sources that are freely available to everyone on the Internet should be used here. If that is the case then we might as well pack up and get on with something else, because there are search engines produced by companies with almost limitless resources that find such content much better than we ever could. The whole point of Wikipedia is that we can take information (not wording, which is subject to copyright) from closed sources and present it in an open source way. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:29, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
I note that we have an article on the declaration linked by Nemo. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:48, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Notability of Draft:Kara Federmeier

This seems to be the hot spot to get a quick assessment of notability for those of us who have no idea what a good h-index is, or exactly what qualifies for WP:NPROF. Her h-index looks good to my untrained eye, and I think This, this, and this make it look like she may meet NPROF#7 as well. It was declined at AfC, and definitely needs some more work, but I'd like to make sure she seems notable before spending too much time on cleanup. Thanks for any assistance. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 14:15, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Certainly looks notable to me, although psychology is a high-citation field. It seems that the AfC decliner has judged the subject against WP:GNG rather than WP:PROF. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:50, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
I'd say she's notable based on C1 alone. Here are the Scopus citation metrics for her and the 60 coauthors of hers who have published 25+ papers:
Total citations: average: 9382, median: 3382, Federmeier: 10656.
Total papers: avg: 117, med: 79, KF: 132.
h-index: avg: 38, med: 29, KF: 46.
Top 5 citations: 1st: avg: 1172, med: 374, KF: 2195. 2nd: avg: 620, med: 322, KF: 1425. 3rd: avg: 494, med: 209, KF: 523. 4th: avg: 369, med: 171, KF: 489. 5th: avg: 310, med: 145, KF: 352.
She's got much higher numbers across the board even compared to the average (I normally compare to median). JoelleJay (talk) 16:34, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
Sounds good, I'll try and get that draft cleaned up soon. Thanks Phil Bridger and JoelleJay. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:36, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Jaap Mansfeld

I've translated the article for Jaap Mansfeld, and I believe he passes NPROF. But I was wondering if someone could give an assessment of it? - LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:38, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what these stats mean (what is h-index), but I thought a link would be helpful. - LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:40, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
They support notability under WP:Prof#C1, particularly in a low-cited field like philosophy. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:21, 10 April 2022 (UTC).
Membership in Academia Europaea and KNAW definitely makes him notable (twice over). That's a more definitive way to go than groveling through citation counts or book review counts in philosophy (where both tend to be low). —David Eppstein (talk) 22:23, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
Thanks Xxanthippe and David Eppstein. I'll leave it in the AFC clue and see how it does. - LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:32, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

interim/acting?

  • Let's say that University of Michigan lists the following Presidents:
    • Richard Adams (1901-1920)
    • Sam Baker (Interim) (1920-1921)
    • Mark Cook (1921-1931)
    • William Donalds (Acting) (1931-1932)
    • Ethan Edwards (1932-1945)

Adams, Cook and Edwards pass notability based on this, do Baker and Donalds?Naraht (talk) 16:37, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

    • I would tend to lean against automatic notability for interim office-holders. It seems likely that they might be notable on other grounds, though. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:08, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
      • Also, leads of course to the question of what the difference is between Interim and Acting...Naraht (talk) 20:14, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
        Note the person that I'm curious about, is Edwin Fife (https://www.nsuok.edu/News/Story/911.aspx covers everything I've seen). At this point, I'm thinking of adding him as a notable honorary member for a group rather than writing an article, but given everything I've found, an article wouldn't be too bad. :) Naraht (talk) 20:19, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
        I agree: those in interim or acting positions have not received the kind of extensive vetting that we hope that those in permanent positions have received. 22:26, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
        • I'm not sure that Vetting is a standard for notability. If a Kleptocratic national leader appointed the son of his mistress as President of their National University, they would still be notable for that.Naraht (talk) 17:42, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Application of BLP1E to academics

Although it's extremely rare, I do see WP:BLP1E being applied to academic AfDs from time to time. The guidelines for BLP1E don't seem to be written with academics in mind though. If a full professor at a university with an endowment of $150 million, was an author or co-author of about published 100 papers, and an editor or co-editor of about 20 academic books, but they have only one single-author textbook which is potentially saving (per WP:AUTHOR) their article from being deleted because it has 10 published reviews, is BLP1E the reason to delete the article? Does the author need to have something like a second textbook with sufficient reviews to meet WP:AUTHOR, to have their article kept? Do they need to satisfy C1(b) for at least two different things, or is one enough? Dr. Universe (talk) 18:20, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Why do you appear to think academic monographs don't count towards WP:AUTHOR? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:33, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
Please link some of the AfDs where this has happened. I don't remember any, but it's possible that I have missed some or my aging brain has a faulty memory. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:08, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
WP:BLP1E is very specifically about events, because it is there to avoid us turning into a news outlet. A textbook is not an event and its publication doesn't usually make the news. – Joe (talk) 21:49, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
A widely-used textbook might yield a pass of WP:NPROF C4. I think Dr. Universe does not mean to talk about textbooks, however, but monographs as in the recent AfD case of Fred Miller (philosopher). In the past, an author (including an academic) with a single notable book might have an AfD case end in a merge or redirect to an article on the book per WP:BLP1E. That didn't happen in the case of Fred Miller (who had a good number of edited volumes to round out his record, plus a solid citation record on the single monograph). I'm not sure what Dr. Universe is trying to accomplish here. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 22:14, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
I think a couple of academics have survived Afd for being the authors of long-running multi-edition textbooks that were/are the set texts for professional qualification exams in some business-related area. And rightly so, imo. Johnbod (talk) 00:08, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: I do not think that academic monographs don't count towards WP:AUTHOR. I would like them to count. There has been at least one AfD where the academic had an academic monograph with about 10 reviews (and a lot of other academic work published) but BLP1E was quoted. I read about BLP1E and it didn't seem like it was meant to be applied to academics in this way (much like Joe Roe explained in a comment after yours). Phil Bridger your comment is exactly why my opening words were "it's extremely rare" — I don't expect everyone to have seen BLP1E brought up for an academic work, but it has happened. One example was given by Russ Woodroofe in a comment shortly after yours :) Russ Woodroofe can you give examples of academics who have had their article merged or redirected due to their notable book being a "BLP1E situation"? As for what I'm "trying to accomplish", it's just to get better clarity on how BLP1E is applied for academics, because when I read WP:BLP1E it seemed to be for "events" and I also read the article "When not to use BLP1E" and didn't see anything about academics there either. It has been mentioned that athletes can have articles even if they're only famous for "one event", because athletes have their own BLP criteria. Academics are one of the very few other categories of people that have their "own" criteria, but I didn't see anything about BLP1E there. Dr. Universe (talk) 04:40, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
I don't have specific examples at the top of my mind (I would have to dig through my edit history, which I don't have time for at the moment). However, there have been academic authors over the last few years who have a book with, say, 3-6 reviews, where the discussion ended in redirect to an article on the book per WP:BLP1E. Any notability in such cases was due to WP:NAUTHOR, and I don't think I've seen WP:BLP1E applied in AfDs where the discussion hinged on WP:NPROF. As most of the criteria for WP:NPROF are things that happen over a period of time, I wouldn't expect WP:BLP1E and/or WP:BIO1E to be generally relevant for WP:NPROF. (Possibly on occasion for WP:NPROF C4.) Russ Woodroofe (talk) 09:22, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
@Russ Woodroofe: I will take your word for it. It seems that C1(b) in WP:ACADEMIC just requires one example though (an bit like BLP1E). Do you think it should require two? Dr. Universe (talk) 16:56, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
@Russ Woodroofe: If I can ask just one more question (then take a break to let others participate more), you said that AfDs in the past have resulted in a merge or redirect to the Wiki article for the single Wiki-worthy contribution of the author/academic. I've taken your word for that part. Do you know if any AfDs resulted in delete because of BLP1E rather than merge or redirect? Basically I'm talking about cases where the 1E in BLP1E did not already have a wiki article. Dr. Universe (talk) 21:23, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
This search returns approximately 16k results mentioning BLP1E in the context of an academic deletion debate. Probably many of them are relevant. The first hit, for example, is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bert Tatham (2nd nomination). —David Eppstein (talk) 22:52, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Thank you David. Looks like I have to learn how to use the search function in Wikipedia! Until now I've only used the one in Google, even when looking for WP articles. However, the example you gave doesn't seem to be in the context of an academic deletion debate. After adding "academics and educators" to your search, the list drops down to 5k results, which is still quite significant. Thanks again! The first result was BLP1E for a scandal though (not academic work), and the second one was a "seedy keep", so I need to refine the search more. Dr. Universe (talk) 23:43, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
I thought I put that in but apparently the advanced search interface dropped it from my search for some reason. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:57, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Notability of David M. Nisson

Encountered this article at NPP. I don't know whether the article subjects passes WP:NACADEMIC#C1 through being highly cited, which is probably the only path to notability in this case. Alas, I'm not an NACADEMIC connoisseur and I don't know what average citation counts in solid-state physics are. Ovinus (talk) 18:46, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Just going by what's in the article, someone who "After completing his doctoral degree ... left full time physics research, but continues to make minor contributions" is almost certainly not WP:PROF#C1-notable. Even if their work becomes highly cited, if all of the significant work was done as a graduate student, we cannot disentangle their contributions from their advisors'. But also in this case I am only seeing citation counts of 50 and 24 on Google Scholar, and then a bunch of uncited papers, certainly not enough. The only appearance of notability is a profile in a user-contributed piece in Forbes, generally not considered to be reliable per Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources#Forbes.com contributors. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:58, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
Thanks David; I'll PROD it since it's not a borderline case. Ovinus (talk) 19:03, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I see that the article now redirects here; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 15:21, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Per discussion on Talk: David M. Nisson. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 17:52, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
Many thanks - looks like the right outcome, sadly - the story is very interesting. Deserved some press coverage. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 20:38, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Academic ranks

The article states that "academic ranks are different in different countries". This is true. I am less than convinced that are as uniform in a country as some would have us believe though. They also have different meaning across time, which is possibly an important statement to make.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:03, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

    • I think at least in the US the meaning of academic rank also in some ways reflects the level of institution someone is at. Those at community colleges are much less likely to be involved in scholarly output, no matter what their rank is, as opposed to those at research institutions. Some of this may in part be reflected by what percentage of the full-time faculty holds certain levels of academic position, but there may be other ways this is reflected. Which is probably why it is good that we never have assumed that everyone granted a full professorship is notable.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:04, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
      Which seems a higher bar than we have for sports BLPs. Doug Weller talk 15:52, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
There are many - like me - who believe that our standards for sports figures are way too low (although they do have the advantage of being much more clear in most cases). ElKevbo (talk) 22:06, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
You are indeed in the company of many. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:42, 13 August 2022 (UTC).
All sportspeople are required to meet GNG. Is that necessarily much easier than NPROF? JoelleJay (talk) 03:23, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I do think it's a bit easier in the sense that lots of non-sportspeople are interested in sports, whereas a very, very small number of non-academics are interested in academics.
Sportspeople train their whole lives, and then a small percentage of them end up playing professionally and/or at international competition levels. They perform their sport for the public, and lots of people watch their work on TV, on the web, and/or in person, and it is covered by the press. GNG is satisfied.
On the other hand, academics also train their whole lives, and a small percentage of them end up being tenured faculty at accredited colleges and universities. They publish their papers for the public, and sometimes even give public lectures (like TED talks) about their work, but with some exceptions most people will not hear about them because they won't read their papers or hear their talks. For academics, if they haven't been the subject of independent news articles, served on editorial boards, been given national or international awards, sat in named chairs at research universities, etc etc, one ultimately has to decide whether their body of work is significant enough for inclusion. Citation rates can be looked at in this regard, but it can be difficult to tell whether someone's body of work has really had a big impact on their fields sometimes because citation rates vary wildly from field to field.
This is not to say that I disagree with the current criteria we are using, because I don't. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 20:18, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
and some academics (broadly construed) have changed the nature of the human world, like Newton, Freud, Darwin, Einstein, Marx and the inventors of the technologies that have revolutionized society in the last century. Which is more than sportspeople have done. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:33, 14 August 2022 (UTC).
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