This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
"The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution"
This has been discussed several times to no avail. I think that I have advocated for changing this so it's more objective e.g., "accredited or approved college or university" (with perhaps the addition of "academic society, scholarly organization, or similar group" although that may pose similar problems). ElKevbo (talk) 22:05, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
I have suggested that it is removed altogether because it it too easily gamed by obscure institutions. The purpose of WP:Prof is to identify people who are notable for having created the intellectual and cultural assets of the world through their work in scholarship and research. Just holding a position, however lofty, does not accomplish this. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:26, 12 August 2022 (UTC).
I agree, it's basically impossible to argue an accredited or state-run university isn't major, but we all know the scholarly prestige necessary to become VC/president is incredibly uneven among different schools and countries. It would be more consistent if we defined "major" the way we do for C5: those that have a reputation for excellence or selectivity, which at least is rebuttable. JoelleJay (talk) 03:21, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I would be strongly opposed to any proposal that places more value on the research mission and output of colleges and universities at the expense of teaching and service. ElKevbo (talk) 03:56, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I think that would go in the opposite direction of what has typically been the test for notability of academics. Very few professors make into the encyclopedia (or, really, into high-level teaching posts) on the strength of their classroom competence or administrative performance, as opposed to research and publication. That said, it's hard to see how a particularly large university—say, one with over 25,000 students—wouldn't be considered "major" no matter what it's scholarly output. BD2412T04:05, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
Are there universities with more than 25,000 students yet without major scholarly output? We should try and identify specific universities that might be included or excluded by the guideline in order to get a more concrete sense of what we're talking about here. --Aquillion (talk) 04:14, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
The issue is that research and output tends to produce more coverage, which gives us more we can actually write an article about. It might not be fair but publish or perish is the reality in more ways than one. The ultimate goal of notability guidelines, to me, is to ensure that we only have articles on things we can actually find sufficient in-depth independent sources to write a neutral article for - and research output is more likely to produce those sources than simply being a good teacher (which is also less quantifiable.) --Aquillion (talk) 04:14, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I know this discussion has been quiet for a couple of weeks, but I wanted to chime in anyway and say that I think that combining JoelleJay and Xxanthippe's suggestions would be valuable, because "major" is pretty ill-defined.
Perhaps it could be done as follows:
"The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at an accredited or approved academic institution that has a reputation for excellence or selectivity, and/or has a major presence in scholarship and research." Would that help to address the concerns raised? Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 19:28, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
I cannot speak for other editors but that does not address any of my concerns. I do not agree with prioritizing excellence, selectivity, scholarship, or research. I acknowledge that those ideas are much more likely to have attracted attention by authors and publishers making the information more likely to have been published but I do not agree that they are more important than service and teaching. Moreover, this change would replace one set of ill-defined ideas with several sets of ill-defined ideas. If it's best to leave judgements to editors in particular contexts to make decisions about specific people, let's keep it simple. ElKevbo (talk) 22:22, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
I think that would address my concerns, at least. It doesn't make any sense to define "major academic institution" differently for distinguished professors versus university presidents. How else would we define "major", anyway? The overall purpose of the guideline is to identify people whose academic impact has been documented by others as exceptional within their field. If excellency in service or teaching doesn't correspond to leadership at selective or research-heavy institutions, what metrics would identify those people? How would we distinguish them from anyone else at a non-selective, non-research university? JoelleJay (talk) 00:47, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
Yes, that's my problem as well. Elkevbo, when I proposed that language I was thinking that the phrase "has a reputation for excellence..." would include institutions which have a reputation for excellence in teaching and service. I think we're on the same page, unless I'm mistaken. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 23:43, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
The usual problems I've seen with #C6 are (1) editors misinterpreting it and thinking that department chairs or deans are notable, (2) someone trying to claim notability through heading a tiny private startup "university" (most commonly in south Asia somewhere), or (3) people who actually are notable through heading a major university but being taken to AfD because their job title says "vice chancellor" and the nominator doesn't recognize that that title really means head of the university. To answer Aquillion's question a little earlier, I suspect that East Los Angeles College (with 35k students) doesn't have very high scholarly output; we often don't consider community colleges like that to count for #C6. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:24, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I'd remove it. Like a lot of subject notability guidelines, it runs into the basic problem that if the post is sufficiently "major", then holding it should be enough that they should be the subject of nontrivial coverage in multiple independent sources - in which case they'll pass the WP:GNG anyway. --Aquillion (talk) 04:14, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
This criterion is useful, for the same reason many subject-specific notability guidelines are useful: they quickly shortcut discussions that would otherwise drag out and reach the same conclusion. I haven't seen a lot of problems with it, and I've seen a lot of academic deletion discussions. To me, the problematic criteria are #C4 (rarely used, and when it is used it's for textbook authorship which is handled better by WP:AUTHOR), #C7 (also rarely used and too opinion-based; when it applies, WP:GNG is a better description of how to judge it), and #C8 (I am skeptical that being editor-in-chief of a journal should be enough for notability in the absence of anything else; if it's the kind of editorship that's given only to the leading scholars of their field, then that should be visible through other criteria). —David Eppstein (talk) 05:19, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I concur about the value of short-cutting discussions. I also agree that criteria C4 and C7 are rarely used, going by my experience with deletion debates since 2017. I'm not sure I'd call them "problematic", simply because they are so rarely used that they haven't provided many opportunities for misfires, and so it's hard for me to say whether there is a problem, empirically speaking. I'm also not convinced that the wording of the other guidelines mentioned is more helpful than the wording here. XOR'easter (talk) 16:59, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
With you on C8. If anyone can remember an AfD where that's been the criterion that closed it for keep, where the academic did seem quite notable but didn't meet any of the other NPROF criteria, I'd love to see it. -- asilvering (talk) 23:12, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
Agreed that C4, C7, and C8 are either ultimately redundant with other criteria as indicators of scholarly notability, or are applied too inconsistently or inappropriately to be useful. Regarding C6, FWIW a few months ago I looked at a handful of university presidents in the US (starting randomly at UMich's president and just opening up every wiki link to a university that appeared on his page, then doing the same for all the current presidents at each of those universities, until I got bored and closed like 90 tabs), and with the exception of people with humanities/law/business backgrounds, which I can't really evaluate on Scopus, most of the presidents of big R1 universities seemed to meet NPROF C1 or C5. JoelleJay (talk) 01:59, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
I am sure that that is the case for major US universities. But it is the obscure ones (in and out of the US) that give the problems. Their partisans and hired hands often try to push them up the notability scale. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:15, 14 August 2022 (UTC).
Please check
I think someone who knows how NPROF works should take a look at Draft:Eugene Eubanks ("one of the nation's leading experts on urban education" and the dean of the school of education at an American research university). It appears to have been declined for failing to demonstrate notability, despite already citing more independent sources than most NPROF articles ever do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:10, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
I would help, but I'm afraid the use of "the nation" prejudices me enormously. Is there only one nation on Earth? At least that should be fixed before this is accepted as an article. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:16, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
[edit conflict] Are you aiming for WP:NPROForWP:GNG notability? They are different, and nothing in the current draft addresses NPROF. Your discussion of citing independent sources suggests that you think this should be a GNG case, because independence of sourcing is irrelevant for most NPROF criteria, but that would not be an issue for this talk page. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:17, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
I think that presidency of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (incorrectly named in the secondary source cited in the article, but there's this primary source [1]) is a possible pass of WP:NPROF C6. Citations look a little low for WP:NPROF C1, but for someone working mostly in more mid-than-late 20th century, we could be missing some. First African American dean in 1980 is likely to be covered in contemporaneous newspapers for GNG. The article needs some fixing, but I've seen worse. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 08:29, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
I've taken a quick pass through Google to expand the article a bit. I suspect a deeper dive, especially into contemporary newspapers, would find more. Either way, it's no shame to the encyclopedia in its current state, so I've moved it to mainspace. Anyone skeptical of its notability is more than welcome to open an AfD. Ajpolino (talk) 13:48, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
There's a discussion at Talk:Ariel Fernandez#Book list? about whether or not to include a, well, book list. It's not specifically about notability, but I figure there are editors who watch here who pay attention to academic biographies. Comments there would be welcome. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:52, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
Thank you. I really only see one comment specifically about the notability of "professors" (more properly, academics). It's critical of the guidelines listed here, for sure. The basis of the criticism seems to be the use of guidelines that are specific to academics, sports figures, and so on. Not sure I follow the logic as to why this editor feels that this has been a bad thing. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 18:22, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
There are a number of comments that state or imply all articles, or just mass-created articles, should be subject to GNG and all SNGs should be subject to GNG. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:15, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
Google Scholar citation count discrepancy, gift authorship, and the case of PIs
In AfD discussions on academics, the Google Scholar citation count for a given academic is often mentioned, referencing NPROF Criteria 1.a. One discrepancy is that the Google Scholar count for a given paper or publication differs from the citation count on the website hosting the paper. Using this example: Google Scholar says 664 citations for the first paper, while the IEEE website says 215. GS says 610 for the second paper, while IEEE says 189. The MongoDB book has 289 on GS, but 50 on the SpringerLink site. Has it been discussed and confirmed before what the reason is for this discrepancy and which value is "correct"?
On this point, is any nuance given to how much, or if, someone contributed to a paper? If a paper has 25 named authors, the first 3 are credited with "contributing equally", the last 2 are PIs, what of the other 20? Do we assume they automatically benefit from the high citation count because their name is on it, whether or not it is a case of "gift authorship"?
P.I.s have their names on papers published by their grad students or lab, typically at the end. Does a PI become notable due to high citation count because of their lab's collective published works? Saucysalsa30 (talk) 22:04, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
All of you points are regularly taken into account at AfD discussions. In particular there is no "correct" number of citations - it pretty obviously depends on which publications you take into account. And, in regard to your comments regarding first, last and middle authors, the order of listing varies enormously by field of study, so you what you say only applies in certain cases. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:21, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your response. If Google Scholar has count X, and the publication itself has count Y, is it preferred to go with GS or with the publication? Like in the example, there's a large difference between 289 and 50. Saucysalsa30 (talk) 22:38, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Different databases measure different things as has been discussed extensively in the 14 archives of this page. It is best to uses as many databases as can be found and compare like with like. As always in Wikipedia, the more depth of knowledge an editor has about the subject the more effective their edits are likely to be. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:45, 2 January 2023 (UTC).
It is very difficult to define precisely what is exactly a single academic publication, for the purposes of counting how many citations it provides to other publications. For instance, it is common in my discipline to publish results in a preprint form (for instance on arXiv), in a preliminary but peer-reviewed form in a conference proceedings, and later in a more polished form in a journal paper. Does that count as one publication, as two, or as three? Bear in mind that the journal paper will often have significant added material over the conference publication, its references may be updated to journal versions of the papers it cites or may have added citations, it may have a different title or even a somewhat different set of authors, and in some cases multiple conference papers can be merged into a single journal paper or a single conference paper can be split into multiple journal papers. As another example, my publications include a few works in specialized society newsletters rather than peer-reviewed academic journals or conference proceedings, including at least one survey paper, at least one research paper, and at least one editorial on contributing to Wikipedia; which of these count as publications for the purpose of counting citations? Additionally, many of these citation-counting web sites deliberately focus only on certain disciplines or certain specific types of publications, while the academic literature may span those boundaries. With these considerations in mind, it would be very surprising if the different citation databases always came up with the same numbers as each other. All we can do is try to make comparisons as fair as possible by looking at numbers from similar research topics in the same database as each other; we can't determine absolute numbers in any meaningful way. Nor can we devise absolute thresholds for how many citations is enough that do not depend on the discipline and choice of database. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:20, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
This suggestion is prompted by an AfD for Phil De Luna at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Phil_De_Luna. My position is that our NPROF criteria, while they've served us well, have become inconsistent with the rest of Wikipedia and are encouraging the inclusion of people about whom nothing much can be written except an academic CV gleaned from their institutional web-pages and literature lists. It is too simple to be a Notable Prof. Specifically:
Criterion 1: The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources despite its copious notes still leaves things unclear. For example, authoring a highly-cited paper qualifies, but where in the author list do you have to be? Is middle-authorship enough, or must you be a first/last author? Are we allowed to assume that a set of Nature and Science papers qualify by virtue of these being highly-cited journals, or must we check the citation level of each individual publication? Is the independent reviewing carried out by a journal sufficient to indicate independent impact, or do we need another, different source referring to the work? Specifically, if Nature used independent reviewers to check the importance of X's work, and Nature is known to have enormous impact, does that instantly mean X has impact, or do we need the New York Times writing that X has influenced the world through his/her Nature papers? I don't know the answer... This, I think is the key criterion, but it could do with clarification about how we assess impact.
Criterion 2: The person has received a highly prestigious academic award or honor at a national or international level. repeats criterion 1e. I suggest we delete 1e and move any relevant information into this criterion 2.
Criterion 3: The person has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society) or a Fellow of a major scholarly society for which that is a highly selective honor (e.g., the IEEE). is a good one, but is it enough? If all we know about someone is that they won an award, then no matter how important the award, what sort of article can we write? I'd suggest that this contributes to notability but shouldn't guarantee it (as it currently does).
Criterion 4: The person's academic work has made a significant impact in the area of higher education, affecting a substantial number of academic institutions. overlaps with other areas. The example given is the authorship of a text-book. This would already be covered by WP:AUTHOR, and to avoid mixed messages and conflicts with other sets of guidelines, I think we should scrap criterion 4 here, and replace it with a note that WP:AUTHOR frequently applies to academics.
Criterion 5: 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). This is a horror that should be abolished. In no other area of Wikipedia do we declare someone notable simply for having a job. There are a lot of named chairs that mean nothing more than that the host institution was short of cash and found a benefactor. There are a lot of distinguished professors who aren't that distinguished. If they're that distinguished, they ought to be satisfying some other criterion. This really should be deleted.
Criterion 6: 'The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society. I've no huge gripes with this provided we treat business-people the same; if the head of Syngenta is automatically notable, then so is the head of Cambridge university.
Criterion 7: The person has made substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity. is unnecessary, because it's merely reiterating that if an academic meets general notability, they're notable.
Criterion 8: The person has been head or chief editor of a major well-established academic journal in their subject area. should be deleted. Again, like criterion 5, it's saying someone's notable merely for doing their job, and it's at odds with Journalists; we don't accept a journalist as notable because they write for, or edit, a major newspaper; we count them as notable if other people write about them, which sensible policy we should extend to academic editors.
Sorry, perhaps this is all rather ferocious and provocative... I'm quite willing to be shot down in flames. I just think a general prune and clarification would help editors and AfD alike. Season's greetings to all who've read this far! Elemimele (talk) 00:10, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes and no. I agree that specific criteria, like the Named Chair clause, make notability too automatic and should be overhauled. On the other hand, what we are lacking seems to be some criterion that allows recognition of a lifetime of unspectactular but fundamental service to some branch of science that is obvious from within the discipline but hard to perceive from without. A peer obituary may rescue these for us, but if there is none, we are missing out on people who have had more lasting impact on society than any 15-minutes-of-fame ball-kicker will ever have. - Overall I doubt that we are erring too much on the side of inclusionism with academics. If you want to see that done, check out the German WP; they assume notability for every researcher who ever described a single species. Hoo boy. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 08:48, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Good point. This is maybe something where we need to level the playing-field for industrial academics and those in research institutes. The latter in particular are equivalent to University academics in every way. I worry about pre-internet industrial scientists, who often slip under the radar although their work has had major impacts on society. But if we've got no secondary sourcing whatsoever, and all we know about someone is where they've worked and what they've published, we just can't write a worthwhile article. You're right about obituaries, which are a very good measure of appreciation by the academic community, though it's rather a pity to have to wait for someone to die before they satisfy notability. Elemimele (talk) 09:36, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for making this, Elemimele. From WP:NPROF#C1 I think the criterion 1.a. is the most ambiguous. The questions you ask can all lead to possible distortions and issues in notability discussions. "Gift" authorship is a major problem in academia in that it leads to unnecessary citation inflation [2][3][4][5]. If one's name is on a paper because they proofread it for typos for example, the truth is they hardly contributed it to it. Yet the 100 or 1000 citations the paper gets can belong to them too, depending on how one interprets it. Criterion 1a should also clarify whether a Wikipedia editor pulling up a paper's citation count is enough, or if independent reliable sources speaking on a person's papers and citations counts are needed. 1a (not all of 1, just 1a) should either be revised or discarded in my perspective.
Yes, I very much hope that gift authorship isn't as common as it used to be. The better journals are definitely cracking down on it, some even insisting on knowing what contribution each author actually made. There's also a lot of focus on establishing who the first author(s) is/are, because they're generally young academics building their careers, and they need good papers to win their next position. But for our purposes, we're probably more concerned with who the last authors are - the senior academics whose careers have become notable enough for possible inclusion. Given that lots of work is now collaborative between multiple groups, we can't just assume that the last name is the (only) professor, but it's sometimes difficult to work out where the middle authors stop and the last authors start, and it's very difficult to differentiate between a minor collaborator who donated a student and a bit of material, and a major group leader whose lifetime of research created the foundation for this work, and the environment in which it was carried out. And we do need some filtering. So far, common sense has prevailed, but what would we do with the research assistant in a really good group? They will have their names on a long string of very high profile papers simply because they were there in the lab for 20 years genuinely making the group leader's ideas happen. Technically it's easy to make a case they meet criterion 1. But, although I respect their technical expertise and career, I'm not sure they're notable in a Wikipedia sense. Elemimele (talk) 09:49, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
but what would we do with the research assistant in a really good group? They will have their names on a long string of very high profile papers simply because they were there in the lab for 20 years genuinely making the group leader's ideas happen. This is part of why I think it's important to assess someone's citation profile in the context of their coauthors' profiles, and why it's also important to recognize the difference between first/last author and middle author. A tech who is on dozens of big papers will have a high absolute citation count, but compared to their coauthors they should come out as below average among professors/senior scientists in their field.
I've also written a short essay that sort of retrofits NPROF C1 criteria into GNG SIGCOV; if we approach C1 as an assumption that other scholars have discussed someone's work in substantial detail and with either explicit or implicit attribution (e.g. it is widely understood that the senior author is responsible for a publication even if they're not explicitly mentioned when referring to "X et al"), it can be possible to measure SIGCOV for academics the same way we do for GNG subjects. JoelleJay (talk) 20:23, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
Are we allowed to assume that a set of Nature and Science papers qualify by virtue of these being highly-cited journals? I don't think we've ever said that a journal being highly-cited overall translates to automatic merit for each and every publication there. That's not how science works. Relying on popular media to say what is and is not influential science means knuckling under to PR and sensationalism. (Indeed, most of the suggested changes in the list above would make for a less useful encyclopedia, by tilting our coverage in favor of people who have good PR departments and who drive flashy headlines, instead of those who have done solid, genuinely influential work. Moreover, they would inhibit efforts to overcome Wikipedia's systemic bias, like creating biographies of all women who have been elected Fellows of scholarly societies. I don't think we want to be making our encyclopedia more sensationalist and more sexist.) It is not actually difficult to check the citation level of each individual publication.
Jettisoning criterion #5 (distinguished professorship) would mean substituting our judgment for that of the people working in the field. That would be a colossal mistake. Likewise, criterion 8 is good (though in my recollection it is seldom invoked). Writing for a publication is not analogous to being the chief editor of one. If anything, the argument should go the other way: if (implausibly) someone became the head honcho of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal without much biographical material written about them, we should have an article about them, because it's helpful for the world to know about the person making the calls at the New York Times.
Frankly, the complaints here look self-contradictory. On the one hand, you say that In no other area of Wikipedia do we declare someone notable simply for having a job, while on the other, you're fine with the head of Syngenta being automatically notable just for being the head of Syngenta.
I'm fine with the criteria as they exist. Will there be edge cases and difficult decisions? Sure. Life is complicated. So is writing an encyclopedia about it.
Can I clarify on criterion #6. I personally don't think either the head of Syngenta or the head of Cambridge University should be notable merely because they are head of something, but I don't have a gripe with others disagreeing. I do think it's illogical to treat businessmen and academics differently, which is why I brought Syngenta into it as an example. It's difficult to have an article on a person about whom we have little biographical material, because although it would be helpful to inform the public, we've got no source.
Criterion #5 still bothers me. You've made the very good point of sexism. Criterion #5 creates indirect sexism, because we have a big gender-bias problem at the top end of the academic hierarchy that will take many years to clear. By definition, the top academics tend to be older people who've been in post a long time, so they reflect male-dominated recruitment decades ago, and not the success of female academics more recently. But my main gripe with criterion #5 is that it's not looking at the judgement of people working in the field (that's criterion #1), it's looking at an accident of nomenclature as administered by the (small) recruitment panel of a specific university. And it automatically favours university staff over those working in public research institutes, which almost never have named professorships.
On the journal editors, I don't feel too strongly because I suspect that most people who qualify as editors of an important journal qualify for other reasons already (that's why they were selected as chief editors). I don't think the job of editing is inherently notable, but it is a sort of secondary proxy/symptom of notability. But our current list of criteria encourages people to review notability in a very tick-box way: "has he/she got a professorship, yes, notable", where I'd prefer to see people thinking "is he/she of interest to our readers, and is there enough information about her/him to write a good, balanced article?". That, in a sense, is the problem with the De Luna article; really it comes down to a load of rather promotional stuff that we don't want to use, and a load of highly-cited articles authored by him (amongst others), that we can't really use except as evidence of notability. This means that I'm obliged to conclude he's notable in the sense of criterion 1 but I'm not convinced it's possible to write a good article about him. If all we're going to do with many academics is present watered-down LinkedIn pages, what's the point?
Why should businesspeople and scholars be treated the same? Those are different fields of human activity. Nothing logically requires us to evaluate them in the same way.
We can't be less sexist than the least sexist aspect of the institutions we cover. That's just a consequence of policy: it's not Wikipedia's job to go out, find women who have received negligible recognition, and generate coverage of them. We can, however, find women who have achieved a documented level of success in their fields and write about them. This is the benefit of a guideline that demonstrates notability if any one of multiple criteria is met. Remove any of those criteria, and it becomes harder to minimize our systemic bias.
The problem with people evaluating wiki-notability in a very tick-box wayisnot a problem with this guideline. It's a problem with people. Any guideline can and will be read in that way by the people who are inclined to do so. Hundreds of AfD's go by on a weekly basis with !votes to the effect of, "2 sources exist, meets GNG". The reasons for the paragraphs and paragraphs of caveats in this guideline is to strive against tick-box thinking. It can't be completely effective, because gosh darn it people want boxes to tick, but it's an attempt, and it does help some. XOR'easter (talk) 19:27, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
@XOR'easter Tagging to thank you for that last paragraph in particular. With some re-wording and elaboration, it's my opinion that should be a tip or warning banner at the top of every AfD page. I've been noticing that there is a certain kind of lack of thoroughness that otherwise competent editors have when it comes to AfDs. Lots of sources aren't usable for demonstrating notability according to various notability guidelines, but that often goes ignored. Those WP:LOTSOFSOURCES AfD comments are one of the more violated arguments to avoid on AfDs.
After reading through the above discussion, I agree to the points that we shouldn't be inadvertently suggesting more obstacles to overcome systemic gender bias, which is a often criticized issue about Wikipedia.[6][7][8]Saucysalsa30 (talk) 05:10, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
Additionally, RE: "In no other area of Wikipedia do we declare someone notable simply for having a job", WP:NPOL has this tenant for legislators. Curbon7 (talk) 19:29, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
but mostly based on more than someone's LinkedIn profile or their institutional web-page. In most cases we have some secondary coverage on which to base an article. The problem is the multitude of articles like Thomas Gil, a solid pass on notability because he holds a named chair, but our article is simply a CV dead-link-referenced to his institutional website. Unfortunately he's far from an isolated case. Elemimele (talk) 15:57, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
The fact that there are people whose work we have reason to write about but haven't yet is an argument to fix and expand those pages, not to remove them. XOR'easter (talk) 17:24, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
My point is that for some of these people, we can't fix or expand their article because there's nothing to fix or expand it with, there's simply no secondary sourcing to be found. Yet the person is notable by the current rules, so we can't delete the article either. We're left with a pointless article that says nothing more than where they worked and what they published. What I'd like changed in the current criteria, more than anything, is that it be recognised that merely holding a named chair or being a chief editor, or even having an amazing publication record, is not of itself sufficient to create an article. There must be some source somewhere, something that allows us to write. Incidentally, I haven't a clue whether that's true of Thomas Gil, I haven't looked for sources for him. I apologise also for focussing on the negatives; there are some really good articles too. My quick search of Profs with the (random) name Thomas turned up some decent ones too, sadly mostly deceased. We're definitely a lot better on historical figures than contemporary! Elemimele (talk) 20:55, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
An article that that says nothing more than where they worked and what they published is hardly what I'd call pointless. It may by dry or drab, but as long as it's not written in a disgustingly promotional tone ("a pioneer with seminal contributions that revolutionized the field..."), it's a net benefit. Most academic bio stubs can be expanded with secondary sources that talk about their work (e.g., book reviews). XOR'easter (talk) 15:38, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
I completely agree with the elimination of the "chair appointment" criterion. I know of universities where a "chair" position is simply a rotational assignment, rotating periodically to another senior professor in round-robin fashion. It looks good on their CV, but that is most emphatically not a notability indication. ~Anachronist (talk) 18:03, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes. A named chair is a recognition and an honor. Department chair is an administrative job that can fall on whoever fails to avoid it. XOR'easter (talk) 21:20, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
I think this reveals one problem with the current formulation (otherwise I am not very critical): it's very difficult for someone not already familiar with the concept of a named chair based on this. The term redirects to a section that does not use that term, and the meaning is not transparent from its parts. I remember the first many times I had the same confusion as Anachronist. Some further clarification or details on how to implement could be helpful, even if it can't be categorical. Replayful (talk) 18:19, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
I don't see the difficulty. If someone is the Phil Bridger chair of philosophy then this kicks in, and if they are simply the chair of the philosophy department then it doesn't. This is one of the areas where AFD works well - people are pretty quick to make the distinction. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:19, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
My point goes the opposite way. If you have never heard about the Phil Bridger chair, and are reading the description available here to assess whether some department chair is a "named chair", you will not think that they're obviously not. Replayful (talk) 21:54, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
What? It's not that difficult, if someone has a name or the word "distinguished" in their professorial title, then they meet the crit. Curbon7 (talk) 22:07, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
I feel that if someone doesn't know the difference between a chair and a named chair, they're not in a position to judge notability based on WP:PROF. If someone doesn't know the difference between high school soccer/football and Champions League Football, maybe they shouldn't be voting on AfDs on sports topics? -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)09:50, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
@Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert: That is ridiculous. Expertise should not be required to interpret a guideline. And I am sure there are plenty of "named chairs" that are simply named for the purpose of memorializing someone who is otherwise not notable, such as a beloved faculty member who died, or a former influential dean. If the "named chair" is itself a notable topic, such as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, only then is the criterion meaningful. If the chair is named after someone we don't have a Wikipedia article about, then the criterion is useless and serves only to justify keeping articles about otherwise not-notable academics. ~Anachronist (talk) 19:06, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
You appear to be confused about the purpose of #C5. It is about the scholar who is given a named chair, not the person for whom the chair is named. The namesakes of named chairs are indeed often non-notable. That has nothing to do with the criteria by which universities screen the holders of their named chairs. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:37, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
If someone believes that this guideline needs to be tightened then "scholars who hold or have held a named chair are only notable if that chair is itself independently notable" is a reasonable criterion to propose. It certainly has the elegance of being relatively easy to judge (especially in comparison to many of the other criteria under discussion)! ElKevbo (talk) 21:00, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't see what justification there is for calling it "reasonable". The fame of a chair has nothing to do with the selectivity of its holders. Academic notability is based on markers of recognition of scholarly accomplishment, not on inherited notability from wealthy donors. If the only goal is to reduce the number of people deemed notable, then it might have a very small effect on that goal (because the people who pass #C5 are a small fraction of our articles on academics and the ones who do not pass any other criterion are an even smaller fraction) but not a well-targeted effect. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:36, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
I feel that the concept of "named chairs" seems like a very US-specific concept; at least I am not aware of good equivalents in Scandinavia, or at least in Denmark. In any case, the redirect to "endowed chair" (that someone "might be allowed to name") seems to suggests that it is the existence of an endowment, that matters for the criteria, while Curbon7 suggests it is the naming of the position. This could be clarified in the criteria with one or two sentences or an example, which would also make the difference from a department chair clear.
There's a different question of whether notability guidelines should be as comprehensible as possible to people not already familiar with the topic. Replayful (talk) 11:53, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I think that it is important to write about people having impact in the world of ideas. This is the core of WP:NPROF C1. Most of the other WP:NPROF criteria (with the exception of C6, and perhaps partly of C8) also try to get at people having such impact. I do not think it's a good idea to delete such articles. I do have one thought. Most GNG-based criteria say "are presumed notable", where NPROF says "are notable". I wonder whether it might make sense to roll back Criterion 5 (only), the named chair criterion, to "are presumed notable"? This is the part of the guideline that requires the most interpretation, and I think the "presumed" part is already implicitly what many editors do at AfD discussions. Named chairs are unevenly distributed between subjects/departments/counties, for one thing. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 07:16, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
NPROF is explicitly separate from and independent from GNG. Where those other criteria say someone is "presumed to be notable", what they really mean is "this guideline is only a quick and dirty guess at whether someone is notable and in all cases of dispute what we actually follow is GNG". But for PROF we cannot do that as written because it does not follow GNG. Saying that it does defer to GNG, even in that one case, would be a step backwards towards hype-based rather than achievement-based notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:21, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
David Eppstein, I see what you're saying, and I don't intend to suggest such a big change. So, perhaps the right suggestion is that NPROF C5 could say something like "is presumed to meet the other criteria of NPROF"? Russ Woodroofe (talk) 08:47, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree with this. Even "distinguished professor" can be a poor indicator of scholarly impact; there's no way 60% of all math professors (including assistant, adjunct, etc.) at my school warrant automatic Wikipedia articles, for example. There's also the issue that our guidance is so vague about what "major" means. A distinguished professorship at a non-research or even R2 college just does not reflect someone's prestige as recognized within their field at large the same way it does for someone at an R1 university. JoelleJay (talk) 21:36, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
"A step backwards towards hype-based rather than achievement-based notability". I've been mulling over this discussion for several days wondering how to say my piece, but this one phrase sums it up beautifully. Bravo. Curbon7 (talk) 09:35, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
But do you believe that modern academia is hype-free? A lot of young, up-and-coming academics are very self-promotional, as are their institutions, and given the extremely competitive environment of academia, they really have to be. It's not enough to be clever and well-intentioned to get tenure, you have to network frenetically and know the right people too. Modern universities are big businesses chasing the money. Academics are producing spin-out companies, and every university or research institute has an active Comms department (which is probably writing/updating most of the Wikipedia articles for its employees). We have to be very, very careful about saying academics are totally exempt from GNG. Yes, I want achievement-based notability, but I want articles that say something about the person's achievements, that point me at sources. I want information and evidence. Strewth, information and evidence goes to the heart of what Wikipedia is, and if we're going to throw away the requirement for both, and accept a job title instead, we're in very murky areas.
And another point to consider is that some academics are probably better handled at the article on their achievement, rather than separately. We've got a very short article on Yoav Benjamini and none whatsoever on Yoav Hochberg, but that's not tragic for either of them, because we have a good, thorough article on their major achievement, False discovery rates, in which they are correctly named and acknowledged. Hopefully they are happy that their work is handled properly, and their contribution to human knowledge is remembered and promulgated here. Elemimele (talk) 11:07, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
And another point to consider is that some academics are probably better handled at the article on their achievement, rather than separately. I strongly agree with this, and it's true for biographies in all disciplines. If a subject doesn't have comprehensive biographical info from secondary independent sources, it is not possible to write a neutral article on them. We should never have biographies on people (especially contemporary) where the only material on their life (not works) that exists comes from their professional profiles. If they aren't notable enough for major events in their lives (such as firing, divorce, public changes in gender identity, criminal cases, their deaths, etc.) to be discussed independently in RS, we can only ever present a wholly positive, out-of-date POV. Since Wikipedia is considered an authoritative source by much of the world and is often the first search result for a topic, that is a huge problem that far outweighs the perspective that an encyclopedia "should" have biographies on academics (or anyone). Coverage is also not a binary of "achievement" versus "hype"; anyone whose achievements are recognized as truly outstanding in their field will have some biographical commentary in, e.g., journals (see Beryl Benacerraf); and anyone whose impact is so limited that their only coverage is through self-promotion or reporting by niche biased media shouldn't meet GNG anyway. JoelleJay (talk) 21:03, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
I totally disagree. Academics are known for their academic achievements, and we would expect the coverage of them to be about their academic achievements. Similarly, we would expect most coverage of politicians to be about their political accomplishments, most coverage of sportspeople to be about their sporting accomplishments, and most coverage of working actors to be about their acting roles. We have a word for people whose coverage is primarily about their personal lives and not about anything they may have accomplished. That word is "celebrities". You may prefer an encyclopedia whose biographical coverage focuses only on celebrities, but I don't. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:34, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
Academic achievements can be mentioned on the pages relevant to those achievements (asElemimele mentioned re: Hochberg). A biography is supposed to include a comprehensive overview of someone's life, including but not limited to their achievements, and therefore personal details must not be based exclusively on PR/what the subject says about themselves. You've argued this position yourself--Unless we can adequately source the conviction, our article is going to present a seriously misleading portrait of him--so I don't see what you're disagreeing on. Someone whose felony conviction doesn't garner any published reliable discussion within their community, let alone the general media, is clearly not important enough in that community to warrant a Wikipedia biography. This should be the case across all professions, we can't just exempt academics. No one is advocating we only have pages on (your definition of) "celebrities", unless you're asserting that any SIRS coverage at all of someone's personal life makes them a "celebrity". You might prefer Wikipedia be a directory of professors' university bios or footballers' club profiles, but I don't. JoelleJay (talk) 00:40, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
You are arguing that we need sources that talk about "divorce, public changes in gender identity, criminal cases, their deaths, etc." That is not coverage of academics' academic accomplishments. It is the sort of accomplishment-unrelated coverage we might see for celebrities. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:22, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Moreover, the idea of just writing about a person's accomplishments in the article on the accomplishment becomes awkward at best when a person has done more than one thing in their career. There's no one article that can include all the contributions of an Asher Peres apart from the biographical page itself.
If we tried to judge scientists and academics by the GNG, we would pretty much immediately run into the problem of deciding what coverage is "significant", what is adequately "independent", what is "routine", etc., and we'd have to write something akin to WP:NCORP to tighten the rules up. So, after a months-long debate over the proper juxtaposition of abbreviations on an org chart that sidelines the basic question "What do you expect to find when you open an encyclopedia?", we'd end up right back here, with nothing gained.
(This thought-experiment is, of course, ahistorical, since the GNG and the whole of WP:N was written after subject-specific essays/guidelines had started.) XOR'easter (talk) 17:42, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
A biography on an academic/athlete/politician shouldn't be exclusively coverage of their academic/sporting/political accomplishments. If that was the standard then we'd have tens of thousands of articles uncritically promoting people's contributions while eliding all the negative details due to their not being "accomplishment-related". And anyway it's not like someone's accomplishments are divorced from the rest of their life. Do you think Beryl Benacerraf is a "celebrity" because various science publications have covered personal details in addition to her career? What is wrong with expecting that level of recognition for someone to qualify for a standalone article? Why not leave the tabulated accomplishment curation to the university profiles and CRICinfo stats pages if that's the only content we'd have in an article? All other general purpose encyclopedias have a way, way lower proportion of biographies than we have on Wikipedia -- maybe that's for good reason. JoelleJay (talk) 21:35, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
My sense is that in general, NPROF works well, both as written and how it is applied. Not every case will fit neatly into any guideline and there is always WP:OUTCOMES to flesh out the thinking of the community. That said, I do agree that serving as a journal editor may not provide notability and I do recognize there is always a certain tension in AFDs when a subject may only meet category 5 (named chair), but I do recognize that that criteria may be shorthand for performing a search for citations. I also do think that there ought to be a sustained effort to improve articles that are only or are primarily sourced to CVs. --Enos733 (talk) 18:32, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
Agree with the statement by Enos733. Personally, when writing pages about academic personalities, I look for satisfaction of multiple NPROF criteria to decide whether the person is suitable for entry. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 21:58, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
Okay, all: this, I should say, is one of my more spectacularly disastrous attempts, so I'll retreat a sobered and better person for the experience, and go back to quietly editing things! Thank you all for the comments. I shall focus particularly on Enos733 who said something I found very constructive, and about which we can probably all agree: "I also do think that there ought to be a sustained effort to improve articles that are only or are primarily sourced to CVs". I honestly didn't intend to turn our NPROF policy into a hype-driven Forbesathon. The potential good of all my throwing a hissy-fit above is that I might try to take Enos733's words to heart, find a few academics with nondescript Wikipedia articles, and just see if I can prove myself wrong by finding more source material about them, and improving their article a little. It's probably better than me getting all upset on a talk-page! Best wishes to all for the coming New Year! Of course if anyone wishes to continue discussion, they're most welcome, but I would have no objection to this being closed/archived and vanishing! Elemimele (talk) 22:16, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Having participated with Elemimele in the original discussion, I will add two notes (as briefly as possible) on difficulties encountered with the criteria as a relative newcomer:
The person's research has made a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources. This seems to be interpreted as suggesting that journals themselves, however prestigious, do not confer notability until a reliable tertiary source says so. Twenty-five appearances in Nature and Science are not notable unless a more general-purpose journalist tells me so. I can see a case for this in the humanities but it's an odd criterion to apply to scientists.
The demand to meet WP:N and avoid a lengthy deletion discussion is precisely what drives the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink problem in citation by new editors. This then pairs with a tautology at the heart of (some) deletion logic: please assert notability for inclusion but too obvious and copious assertions are shrubbery and grounds for deletion. Obviously, this is a more systemic Wiki issue, but boy is it a doozy. On the subject of scientists specifically, I like Elmidae's comment here: "On the other hand, what we are lacking seems to be some criterion that allows recognition of a lifetime of unspectactular but fundamental service to some branch of science that is obvious from within the discipline but hard to perceive from without." Greenbound (talk) 03:01, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
No -- it's not time to review this. It might be time to review whether citations as first author count as much as 100th author on a hugely authored paper. But as long as people keep thinking that the only professors we're talking about are scientists, the more they reveal their lack of understanding of the varied parts of academia that exist. Look above at the discussion and see how little of it applies to literary scholars, economists, music theorists, etc. Any reasonable discussion of the norms of notability of academia needs to move away from one field that is overrepresented on WP. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)09:30, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Though some people who are, from their experience, speaking particularly about science have made great points. I want to single out @XOR'easter and their defense of criteria 5 and 8 as particularly important to note--if we can't take academia's own criteria for notability, then is the press's criteria next to criticize? What is left? What we have in academia is the reputation of people who have traditionally created the scholarship that creates encyclopedias, and if we don't trust their judgement, then what is Wikipedia founded on? -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)09:38, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Not all disciplines have a "first author" policy, and what the first author means can vary - it can be the main researcher, the person who wrote the article, the author who agrees to be the "corresponding author," or the lab director who got the funding but did little work. In some disciplines the authors are given in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order is greatly complicated by lists that include multiple languages. It is very difficult make a judgment based on order. see thisLamona (talk) 17:56, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
@Mscuthbert: I'd already said that so far as I'm concerned, this is an idea that's now been thoroughly negated, and I didn't want to push it any further. But, (1) I'll apologise for a science bias; that's because I work in science and prefer to talk about what I know about rather than risk spouting nonsense about the humanties etc.; I'm very happy for those in the humanities to supply their side of the story. (2) I think Greenbound has a point. My belief is that a highly cited article is independent evidence for criterion 1 because it was presumably reviewed before publication by reviewers unconnected with the work - that's how journals work in the sciences. Okay, one article might not be enough, but if a scientist has a long string of highly-cited authorships over a reasonable period then it's pretty strong evidence that they've made a notable impact as judged by people other than themselves - more so than landing a professorship, in my view. But there is the problem of multi-author papers where the paper might be highly cited, but does it confer notability on everyone in the author list? What about the notable professor's research assistant, who's just doing their job, but is quite rightly a middle author on most of the professor's papers? And what do we do with the early-career researcher who's knocked out a Science and a Nature paper with huge citations, but we don't know yet whether they just got lucky with their supervisor's advice, or whether this is already deserved notability? But someone wrote above that there will always be edge-cases and things that need simple human common sense. I'm prepared to accept common sense on these questions. Elemimele (talk) 19:13, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
The practice has generally been the the first two or three authors are considered (depending on how many total authors there are), and the rest are not. Curbon7 (talk) 20:48, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
That is a very bad practice to use in fields such as mathematics where the author order is alphabetical, with no significance to being in the first two or three other than alphabetical ordering. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:05, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Wikipedia editors should not counting citations to determine notability. That's original research into the views of scholarly disciplines and communities. We need to rely on what has been written about scholars, not what has been written by scholars. ElKevbo (talk) 20:56, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
If we were to make academics subject to the general notability guideline then nearly all of them would pass, on the basis that citations in peer-reviewed papers are reliable sources, so only a few would be needed. Is this really what we want? Phil Bridger (talk) 19:54, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
Eh? Citations in peer-reviewed papers are usually not citations about the academic, but are references to that person's work. So they don't help the academic pass GNG. -- asilvering (talk) 01:40, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
What an obtuse way of reading GNG. Of course the references are about the person's scholarly work. We would expect references about academics to mostly be about their scholarly work, just as we expect references about politicians to be about their political activities, references to thespians to be about their acting, and references to sportspeople to be about their sporting accomplishments. We have a word for people with large amounts of in-depth coverage of their personal lives and not about any accomplishment they might have had: they are celebrities. Do you really want Wikipedia's biographical coverage to be only about celebrities? Why not just get yourself a subscription to People Magazine and stop editing Wikipedia if that's what you want to read about? —David Eppstein (talk) 02:40, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
??? A research article with a sentence that contains a citation to someone's paper at the end of it is absolutely not coverage of a biographical subject "directly and in detail". I didn't think it was at all contentious that straight citations do not contribute to GNG. If there are multiple sentences describing [subject's] research (and attributing it to them) then that's coverage in the same way a politician's political activities would be covered. But if it's just "protein X is known to interact with protein Y[ref1][ref2]", that's obviously not SIGCOV of the authors of ref1 and ref2. JoelleJay (talk) 05:06, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
You are missing the point. Citations may or may not include in-depth coverage of the subject's work. They may or may not be independent (for instance, they may be self-citations). And in many cases (for instance when evaluating for WP:PROF#C1) we don't look very carefully at those aspects of them. But when they are in-depth, independent, and reliably published (as are for instance most academic book reviews) they count towards GNG, just as much as (or perhaps significantly more than) a puff piece in an airline magazine about their favorite restaurants when visiting Cancun. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:44, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't see how that is in conflict with what Asilvering said, which is that most citations are not about the academic but are rather references to their work. I interpreted "references to their work" as being the trivial reflist appearances that make up the vast majority of academic citations, as distinguished from the more significant "[subject]'s group discovered..." paragraph-long discussions of the subject's work where the person is actually mentioned. JoelleJay (talk) 07:01, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
That reading of Asilvering's comment doesn't make any sense. It doesn't relate to the distinction Asilvering was making between being "about the academic" and relating to "that person's work". —David Eppstein (talk) 08:07, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
One helpful distinction that I've seen is between "essential citations" and "nonessential citations". An essential citation is one that the current work is using to build upon; nonessential citations might be background references or those in sentences like "Prior work includes [1,2,3,4,5]." (I had thought this was a term of art, but the only reference I could find on a quick search was [9].) Anyway, I think we might tend to agree that essential citations help support notability more than nonessential, but distinguishing between the two is difficult (and might tip over into WP:OR). Russ Woodroofe (talk) 19:39, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I agree with you about the distinction. The way the community has used citation counts is not a set number (and one that varies by field), but a sense that an author's citation count is much higher than average. - Enos733 (talk) 21:26, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I saw @Asilvering's comment as rebutting the interpretation that all citations count towards GNG (implicit from the assertion that "only a few would be needed" to meet GNG), same as ElKevbo did with his comment that the "vast majority of citations" do not meet SIGCOV. They're further emphasizing the distinction between coverage "about the academic" (surely including any discussions of a subject's work that were directly attributed and extensive enough that they would count toward GNG whether the subject was an academic or politician), which Asilvering specifically acknowledged constitutes some fraction of citations, and mere "references" to their work. The claim Citations in peer-reviewed papers are usually not citations about the academic is perfectly consistent with the fact that since GNG requires coverage be [direct] and in detail, the "vast majority of citations" are automatically excluded.
On another note, this thread would be a lot healthier without all the cloaked aspersions, like the condescending mischaracterization of Asilvering's argument as if its desired and inevitable conclusion is some repugnant celebritypedia. JoelleJay (talk) 23:51, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I do not have any reason to believe that Asilvering desires that outcome. However, I would appreciate it if you would respect my belief that taking this argument to its conclusion would have that outcome, regardless of whether its proponents desire it, rather than mischaracterizing this belief as a personal attack. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:57, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I doubt that a repugnant celebritypedia is the conclusion that anyone desires, but I do think that conclusion would be likely, perhaps inevitable. (I read Asilvering's comment in the way that David Eppstein did, and after considerable head-scratching I still can't read it differently. The stress on the academic versus that person's work is hard for me to take in any other way.) Or, to be more optimistic, the only way to avoid it would be to write another guideline in the vein of WP:NCORP that restricts and clarifies the GNG, and so we'd be right back here after months of bikeshedding about all-caps shortcuts.
To be honest, I'm not sure what problem we're trying to solve here. The thread was started way up there with a pointer to a slightly messy AfD — a no-consensus close, but not an epic trainwreck. The most clear case for wiki-notability was through WP:PROF#C1, but the content was advertorial. That's not an exhibit which indicates the notability criterion is bad; it's an example of what happens when a notability criterion is met but the article text is bad. XOR'easter (talk) 00:30, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm utterly confused by this reaction. You appear to have read motivations into this response that aren't written or implied there, and argued with this imagined other person instead of what I said. This especially confuses me given that we have responded to many of the same AfDs, almost always in agreement with each other - whatever strawman you're arguing with, it surely isn't mine. I was replying to nearly all of them would pass, on the basis that citations in peer-reviewed papers are reliable sources, so only a few would be needed. The quoted assertion is not true; most citations that any academic receives in a peer-reviewed paper are not GNG-passing sigcov, as JoelleJay points out. I like the bit where you say that her reading of my comment "doesn't make any sense" (!). -- asilvering (talk) 19:12, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
There's no objective standard for GNG-passing sigcov; "significant" is whatever people in the AfD's agree that it is. And even if most citations fall short of what we deem sigcov, there are still a lot of academics and educators out there with two or three publications that have gotten sigcov. That would be a much lower bar than the one this guideline sets. XOR'easter (talk) 21:04, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
There is an objective standard for what never passes for GNG SIGCOV: trivial mentions in lists of names, which are precisely what most citations in most fields are. Additionally, GNG requires SIGCOV to be directly on the subject, which is not going to happen with the majority of primary research coverage even when a particular study receives SIGCOV; the exceptions would be when a study is reviewed and the contributions of particular authors (usually first or senior author in fields with ordinal authorship) are discussed. JoelleJay (talk) 23:36, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Re "most citations that any academic receives in a peer-reviewed paper are not GNG-passing sigcov": true but this does not in any sense contradict the statement that you say that it contradicts, "citations in peer-reviewed papers are reliable sources". Despite most citations not being in-depth coverage, the number of citations is generally so large that many others remain that are in-depth. And as the quote you claim to be false correctly concludes, "only a few would be needed". Part of the point of #C1 is that it shortcuts the effort of sifting through thousands of citations to find the in-depth ones. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:59, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
If we were to make academics subject to the general notability guideline then nearly all of them would pass, on the basis that citations in peer-reviewed papers are reliable sources, so only a few would be needed. Is this really what we want? (emph mine) The full quote implies that all citations would contribute to GNG and therefore almost all academics, not just the ones meeting NPROF, would pass GNG. How else would you explain the bolded question? JoelleJay (talk) 02:44, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
In the logic I'm familiar with, at least, "enough to have multiple of them, out of a much larger number" is not even close to the same thing as "all". —David Eppstein (talk) 04:29, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
So you are claiming that nearly all academics do have a large enough number of citations that there are multiple containing SIGCOV? JoelleJay (talk) 04:37, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
The ones that are typically deemed to pass WP:PROF#C1, yes. They have typically thousands of citations. What percentage of those do you need to be nontrivial, in order to have multiple nontrivial sources? Additionally, in some fields where most research publications routinely are given independent published reviews, the threshold would be far lower, as only a very small number of publications might be necessary to meet the threshold of significant coverage. Mathematics is an example, where most publications receive in-depth published reviews in both MathSciNet and zbMATH. WP:PROF warns that the routine nature of this coverage means that it should not count towards notability. WP:GNG has no such exception. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:03, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
But we aren't talking about just the ones that pass NPROF. The comment says nearly all academics would pass GNG, as made evident by the question Is this really what we want?; why would that be asked if "academics" was limited to the same set that are already notable through NPROF? And you know I generally agree with you that people passing C1 are likely to have received GNG SIGCOV through detailed coverage of their work, and also that I'm quitefamiliar with math publishing, so I don't know why you're bringing those things up. JoelleJay (talk) 20:26, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Citations to a person's work help to show the relative importance or influence of that person's work. If a person is influential, they are (or can be) notable. - Enos733 (talk) 07:19, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I am completely with David Eppstein on this. If we say that citations of a person's work are only about the work and don't convey notability to the person who created it, then are discussions of a Lady Gaga album only about her work and don't convey notability to the person who created them? Citations of a senator's advocacy only about the work and not the Senator? Eppstein is right that this line of thinking leads to a WikiPeopleMagazine and not an encyclopedia. Academics' articles on Wikipedia suffer from two problems: (1) non-notable researchers (often graduate students and postdocs) create promotional articles about themselves, (2) tons of notable academics (especially outside the fields that edit Wikipedia and women and minority scholars) lack articles because no one has created them. WP:PROF has done a great job with (1) and has only occasionally been an impediment to (2) (and not as much as GNG would be). I'll ask again: people who want to scrap, tighten, or rewrite the guidelines: can you point to people who have survived AfD on the basis of WP:PROF that you think shouldn't be here? It keeps sounding like a POINT argument about a supposed supremecy of GNG and not an actual problem in improving the encyclopedia. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)10:57, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
In no other area of Wikipedia do we declare someone notable simply for having a job. What, apart from WP:POLITICIAN you mean? This criterion does not say that someone is notable for having a job. It says they are notable for being appointed (or elected) to a major chair at a major university, something they have probably taken years to work up to. Part of the problem here, I think, is that American universities have a lot more named chairs than universities in other countries, where they are relatively uncommon, and America also uses the term "professor" far more freely than other countries (where it only applies to the most senior academic rank). And yes, as discussed above, a lot of people seem to confuse the chair of a department with an academic chair (I've seen this several times in AfD discussions). Not the same thing at all. They also seem confused by the difference between a personal chair (a simple promotion to "full" professor rank), which certainly does not make one notable on its own, and an established chair, which always exists and is only held by one person at a time (who is appointed or elected to it). A professor of history (personal) as opposed to the Professor of History (established). Until a few decades ago, the former were rare and most professors (of whom there were far, far fewer than today) held established chairs, but now the vast majority of professors hold personal chairs. When I was at university (in England) in the 1980s, my department only had a single professor; now it has half a dozen (but still only one of them holds an established chair and only they would be notable per #5). But ignorance of the terminology and usage is not a good reason to delete a criterion. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:10, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
This has always bugged me. I don't know anyone who actually studies "Drosophila genetics", but I do know dozens of people who use flies as a model organism and thus have to use genetic tools to work with them. Most wouldn't consider themselves geneticists at all, but the ones who do would call themselves...geneticists. The only people who are actually known for researching the genetics of Dmel itself rather than using it to model genetics in general would be early pioneers like Thomas Hunt Morgan et al, or maybe evolutionary biologists doing specifically Dmel phylogenetic analyses. I think a better representative for this spectacularly minor aspect of the guideline would be "cancer genetics". JoelleJay (talk) 00:21, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I don't know how I neglected to actually contextualize this with the guideline, but I'm glad others are familiar enough with it that my post didn't come off as a bizarre irrelevant rant! JoelleJay (talk) 00:43, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
I have to say, that one does stand out pretty strangely against, say, "medieval history" and "algebraic geometry" when the issue at hand is "overly specific subfields". -- asilvering (talk) 17:09, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
I've been reviewing articles at AfC and came across the following: Draft:Elisabete A. Silva. The person is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. This could potentially satisfy WP:NPROF c.3, but looking through the organisation's website [10] it's an organisation a little over 20 years old. Not quite sure if this should be considered a learned society. Thoughts? Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 08:13, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
A (full) professor at Cambridge, and a trailblazer at that -- should be an easy WP:PROF pass if sexism and lack of respect for the social sciences doesn't get in the way. Yes that fellowship is pretty recent, but Cambridge is not. Between having the respect of a newish organization and a very old one, I don't see why our judgment of her notability wouldn't accept their judgments. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)11:02, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
Yes, she probably passes on #3, but she does not pass on #5 as she appears to hold a personal chair and not an established chair. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:25, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
The article is almost a stub, though. If it were developed a little more fully it would become clearer to everyone wrt notability. As I google around I see clear evidence for #C1, but that evidence should be in the page itself. That said, looks like #C1 and #C3 to me. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 14:36, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
ASS seems to be a serious & respectable professional organization, but has "Fellow Annual Subscription / 2023 subscription rates are: Full Fellow – £278.00 (£240.00 by direct debit) / Retired Fellow – £139.00 (£120.00 by direct debit) /Overseas Fellow – £139.00 (£120.00 by direct debit)", which the Royal Society certainly doesn't. In fact the great majority of Fellows (per the directory) are professors at British universities (including my distinguished sister, who I'm sure wouldn't waste her money on anything that wasn't respected), but not all. I don't think it counts much towards WP:NPROF c.3 by itself. Johnbod (talk) 15:57, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
Criteria 1a
It seems like Criteria 1a, even with the explanation at Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#Specific_criteria_notes, is abused or misunderstood the most. The most typical way of satisfying Criterion 1 is to show that the academic has been an author of highly cited academic work. Later on it also addresses assessing this by discipline since citation rates vary widely based on that.
Those italics stress one of the things that gets glossed over often, that the academic falls into a highly cited range rather than just an average professor that's summarized well in the general notes The criteria above are sometimes summed up as an "Average Professor Test": When judged against the average impact of a researcher in a given field, does this researcher stand out as clearly more notable or more accomplished? It seems like those key points get skipped over often at AfDs. Is there a change that would work well to further emphasize the already italicized highly cited portion for further illustrate it?
Related to that though is seeing comments ignoring the part in the guideline about accounting for citation rates in different disciplines. Even though the criteria is already subjective, but I've seen people ramp up the subjectiveness based on their personal opinions about what a high citation count is even in opposition to actual sources. An example for chemistry for instance, around 80 is considered the average for a "highly cited" researcher.[12] That can seem like a lot of citations to someone used to another discipline that isn't such a high citation field, so it's common to see someone saying, "keep, that's a lot of citations" when it's just run-of-the-mill range for that field.
Those are the two problems I've seen the most though that I was wondering about changes for. Maybe somewhere in those criteria 1 notes we need an additional reiteration (1) and something I'm not as attached to right now but will bring the idea up (2):
An academic's citation metrics should significantly stand out from what is typical in their field (i.e., clearly surpassing the "average professor test").
If this criterion is barely met or if a highly-cited researcher lacks significant coverage in independent sources, consensus may still determine that the subject is not notable enough for an article.
The second idea is really trying to encourage people to weight multiple aspects instead of focusing just on the murky topic of citations or reminding them that criteria 1 can sometimes be the weakest or most difficult justification to try to use correctly. Basically, if you're using criteria 1 alone, it needs to be done carefully and it needs to be a pretty obvious exceptional citation record. I'd personally focus more on reiterating the first item at the end of 1a though after mention of specific disciplines. That one at least isn't really introducing anything new, but more clarification. KoA (talk) 16:53, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
From time to time, usually once or twice a year, somebody becomes inspired with a mission to change radically the criteria of WP:Prof. Sometimes they want to make the criteria astronomically high, so that only Nobel Prize winners will readily qualify (if at all). Sometimes they wish to dumb the criteria down to basement level so that members of their constituency can pass more easily. See a critical analysis of another similar approach here. The advocates of both extremes often hold their views passionately in their attempts to save Wikipedia from itself. My own opinion is that the current practices of WP:Prof, established through consensus over the years, are the best way of plotting a course between this Scylla and Charybdis. As always in Wikipedia, the most useful edits will be made by those who have the greatest background knowledge of the subject that they edit.Xxanthippe (talk) 05:29, 2 May 2023 (UTC).
Often this seems motivated by the beliefs that subjectivity and judgement can and should be avoided in place of purely mechanical rules, and that criterion 1 is more subjective than other notability criteria. This is incorrect. In particular there is significant scope for subjectivity in WP:GNG, especially in what constitutes "in-depth" coverage and in what counts as a sufficiently reliable and independent source, and considerable variation in how its standards are applied to people in different occupations or from different parts of the world. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:27, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
I hear again and again the idea that WP:GNG is "objective", which is to me so self-evidently an absurd proposition that I can't see how anyone believes it. XOR'easter (talk) 12:56, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Subjectivity is always going to be a thing to some degree, though when I brought it up, it becomes an issue when people are outright making things up on the fly about citations rather than say looking into what an average professor is in that particular field. That's mostly what I'm hoping to help curtail a bit. KoA (talk) 15:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
It's a good thing this rough proposal isn't doing any of that then. It doesn't really change the fundamentals of it, but only clarifies what exists in the text already that often is glanced over. 1 should be pretty non-controversial, and while I know of some that may be opposed to the idea of 2, it's already the current practice if we're actually following what WP:PROF says. KoA (talk) 15:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Belatedly reading the thread above, the main problem seems to be that PROF requires too much inside-knowledge of academia to interpret, since almost every single objection above is based on a misreading or misinterpretation of what it's taking about (e.g. what a named chairis). This isn't a new observation. Five years ago, Megalibrarygirl and others made a convincing case that the obtuseness of the criteria masks significant systematic bias and makes it harder for us to cover notable academics, especially if they aren't an American man with a traditional career path. A couple of years later I tried brainstorming a simplified guideline, but it hasn't got any momentum. Not to mention the countless discussions of individual criteria on this talk page over the years. Almost everyone seems to agree that the current guideline is over-complicated and unfair, but any attempt to change it gets stuck because those who think it's too easy to pass (or just dislike SNGs in general) won't countenance anything that might just possibly lead to more articles, whilst those that lean towards inclusionism don't want to risk losing the limited benefits the current guideline has in a widely-attended RfC. The result is a status quo that is overly inclusionist for some (fellow of one of a handful of members-only clubs in the US and UK? Come right in!) but ridiculously exclusionist for others (distinguished career in non-Anglophone research at a non-Western university? Sorry, we don't cover the 'average professor'). – Joe (talk) 06:42, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
I don't think the current guideline is "over-complicated". Maybe I am alone in this, but in my experience, it seems to match up roughly with the intrinsic complexity of the question it is trying to address. As to the issue of whether it is "fair", well, call me a pessimist but there are some kinds of bias we're just stuck with thanks to the same policies that make this an encyclopedia worth reading at all. WP:NOR alone means that this is not a good place for social change to begin, but I wouldn't want a wiki-based encyclopedia without something like WP:NOR as a basic rule. Now, it's almost certain that we can be doing better within the confines of policy than we are, but then again, that kind of bias can't be ameliorated by bikeshedding bullet points in guidelines. XOR'easter (talk) 13:06, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
I definitely agree that criteria 1 (especially 1a) is not overcomplicated relative to the actual subject's complexity, but that's also the caveat I was hoping to get across better in the above proposals. If you're going to rely on Criteria 1, especially 1a alone, it's going to often be messy and isn't so simple as saying "yup, they got a lot of citations". Us academics are typically already cautious and hesitant about citation metrics, so I'm mostly just trying to reflect that a bit clearer in the guideline. KoA (talk) 15:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
I'd point to the now rather large body of published empirical studies demonstrating that the current guidelines produce unequal outcomes that can't be blamed on bias in our sources, but you've already written an essay dismissing it. The community's tendency towards bikeshedding is definitely one part of the problem. Its tendency to circle the wagons when confronted with external critique is another. – Joe (talk) 08:58, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Are you talking about the retraction request on the universally trashed "Wiki bias in academia" paper that came out recently? Because that paper in fact did not apply any NPROF criteria in its evaluation of academics and instead relied on literal google hit numbers, which it claimed was the standard Wikipedia-endorsed metric for determining notability of academics, and counted use of NPROF at AfD as wrong, leading to the conclusion that AfD participants are biased against women because the "wrong" metrics are applied more often than crude search results in AfDs on women academics. This is the general quality of those "empirical studies" we're supposed to be listening to. JoelleJay (talk) 19:56, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Universally trashed if your universe is the tiny subset of highly active Wikipedians who are highly invested in the current notability guidelines for academics, yes. That's sort of my point. Are you suggesting that a study seeking to investigate whether PROF is a biased measure of notibility should do so by comparing it to... PROF? – Joe (talk) 04:51, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
It didn't seek to investigate whether WP:PROF is biased. Or if that was their original intention, one could never tell from the text of the paper. It pretended that WP:TOOSOON is the standard for notability and that WP:Search engine test says the opposite of what it does, and then it quote-mined a bunch of !votes to omit what they actually said about WP:PROF.
I'm willing to consider all sorts of modifications to WP:PROF, but the suggestions I've seen so far over the years might well make inequity worse, e.g., by giving more credit to self-hyping PR stunts in which white men indulge more often. XOR'easter (talk) 12:01, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
I have not written an essay dismissingabody of published empirical studies. I've written a criticism of one paper in which I argue that it is flawed on so many levels that it should be retracted. (In some places, it was so wrong as to be legitimately funny, like when they quoted something from an AfD for a "white, male, assistant professor" who turned out to be named Shivendu Ranjan.) I also point out that one earlier paper by one of its coauthors contains factual inaccuracies. I mention a few other papers in passing, to say that they don't say what the article being critiqued says they do. I take external critique seriously, which sometimes means putting on my serious academic hat and writing a serious response. XOR'easter (talk) 20:16, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Just a note that this was specifically about Criteria 1a if it wasn't clear enough in the initial post. I changed the section title to reflect that. Right now I'm mostly posting this to see if folks have tweaks or other ideas for two the proposals that should be relatively minor changes without substantial change the guideline itself. KoA (talk) 15:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
I am of the opinion that the current guidance (with all its warts), still remains pretty good at determining when an academic meets our notability standards. I do not see the criteria as overcomplicated and what I like about the guidance is its flexibility to work across multiple disciplines. --Enos733 (talk) 16:46, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
There has never been a problem with dealing with multiple disciplines. One just compares like with like: physics with physics, philosophy with philosophy, never physics with philosophy. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:50, 3 May 2023 (UTC).
I don't disagree. I was saying that the standard works across disciplines, as the expectations of what is a high citation count varies across discipline. - Enos733 (talk) 04:00, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm just going to pick on you as the most recent main comment, but the proposal was never mentioning anything about existing guidance being overcomplicated. It looks more like others are just continuing broad discussion from Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(academics)#Is_it_time_we_reviewed_the_NPROF_criteria? and not really focusing on the specific topic at hand. Do you (or anyone) have comments focused on the proposed language that's meant to reiterate or solidify existing language? KoA (talk) 01:31, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
If you think "what is typical in their field" is somehow any more objective, or more accessible to non-academics, than the current wording, you are badly mistaken. Typical for whom? Everyone who has ever earned a degree in the field? Everyone working as a professional academic based on a degree in the field? Full professors at R1 universities? And how wide or narrow should we interpret the word "field"? This enormous ambiguity makes your proposed wording meaningless and likely subject to endless argumentation. I'm not convinced that the word "typical" can even be applied to something that is more typified by significant variation than a common and uniform level of production. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
My reaction to that phrasing was less strong, but I do agree that it's not more solid than what the guideline already offers.
I'm in principle amenable to something like the second suggestion, but I'm not sure that it has its finger on the problem. The trouble comes in (rather rare) cases when an individual has a citation record that looks pretty good, but there is nothing else available to write about their life, or they are known for fringe claims much more than for serious work. For example, an electrical engineer might publish enough decently well-cited papers in engineering journals that a WP:PROF#C1 pass could be argued for, but his real passion is for promoting creationism. All the debunkings of his creationist ravings are on old websites, science blogs, etc., which don't meet the sourcing requirements of WP:BLP. What do we do? At some point, it's sensible to say that the encyclopedia doesn't need an article on the fellow and not have one.
Maybe what the guideline needs in order to be more approachable is a few illustrative examples. We could link to prior AfD's that demonstrate the concerns which motivate the criteria, and/or invent some examples about evaluating the notability of Alice and Bob. XOR'easter (talk) 01:58, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
With any policy or guideline there are going to be edge cases. To me, the starting point for revisions to any policy or guideline is a) will the change provide greater clarity to those edge cases and b) what are some of the expected and unexpected impacts to the change. In this case, the general goal of WP:PROF is a) sourcing about notable academics might look differently than other biographies and b) identifying a notable academic, since most academics (specifically most research-based academics) have broadly similar credentials (degree, publications, tenure [or tenure-track position]). Since with limited exceptions, the community does not equate title/job to notability, we need some guidance for determine which academics are "worthy of notice." While citation counts are not perfect measures of notability, the approach is intuitive and defendable. - Enos733 (talk) 23:04, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
Early career awards
These are commonly dismissed as not meeting C2 or C1 (for reasons that are clear from the requirements of those criteria, i.e. awards dedicated to emerging academics are by definition not going to include established academics), but they are not explicitly discussed in the guideline. I propose adding "Early career awards (such as the Sloan fellowship) and honors are not sufficient to count towards Criterion 2" to C2a. JoelleJay (talk) 02:22, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, for the Sloan fellowship I agree. But some awards, limited only to young researchers, absolutely do count towards Criterion 2, enough to be a pass on their own. The obvious example would be the Fields Medal. I think we have to count it on a case-by-case basis rather than adding absolutist language to the guideline. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:34, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Agree that the Fields Medal is certainly enough for a WP:NPROF pass, although I usually think of it as a mid-career award more than early career. Perhaps adding that early career awards, such as those that require the recipient be pre-tenure, generally are not sufficient to count towards C2? So, I'm suggesting some career-based tests for "early career", and also adding a qualifying "generally". I'd also suggest that 2c (or maybe a new clause just after) would be a better place for any language like this than 2a. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 10:39, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Including tenure as a test is a very US-specific thing; many other countries either do not have tenure, or grant it at a different point in an academic career. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:33, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
I agree the Fields Medal is clearly a C2 pass, but also agree with Russ that it's not really an "early career" award in the same sense as Sloan. Are there any other examples of prestigious awards that should count towards C2 but are limited to career stage? JoelleJay (talk) 22:22, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Hmm. Not unreasonable in principle, but I think we need more examples of what counts and what shouldn't count before we try formulating language to draw the dividing line. I am not sure the meaningful distinction is between early-career and later-career, per se, but between more grant-like "awards" based on future potential and awards based on recognizing accomplishments already made. XOR'easter (talk) 16:58, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Bio-notability of a "rosh yeshiva"
Is the position of rosh yeshiva of a notable (bluelinked) yeshiva generally sufficient for notability? I sometimes see non-bluelinked entries in the alumni lists of school articles, such as in an article about Yeshiva Bluelink
Rav Some Person, rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva Elsewhere
and cited to verify that Some Person did attend Yeshiva Bluelink and is rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva Elsewhere, but without an existing (bluelink) article for that person. I assume if Yeshiva Elsewhere isn't known to be notable, typically via having an article, this isn't an appropriate entry. But if Yeshiva Elsewhere is notable, is this a sufficient claim of notability for Some Person, even if they do not have an article yet, to include in the list?
The only way for that to be an inherently notable position would be via WP:PROF#C6. I wouldn't have thought that most yeshivas would qualify as "a major academic institution or major academic society", but some might. It certainly is not enough that the institution is notable. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:22, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
I’d say “no” as a general instant notability consideration. While yeshivot may affiliate with a particular denomination of Judaism and in doing so may align with standards of rigor and scholarship equivalent to a university, they do not do this as a rule, and many yeshivot are quite small, insular and may not generate external coverage. Further, Jewish theology is more dialectical than analytical in structure, which means that simply being an active scholar does not guarantee the production of independent coverage the way that secular academic disciplines would, and a lot of coverage produced about rabonim unfortunately tends toward hagiography. Being rosh yeshiva is certainly a credible enough claim of significance to clear A7, and reason to consider searching in Hebrew and Yiddish before giving up on finding sources, but it’s not enough to claim automatic notability in itself. It’s not the same kind of red flag that an unaccredited secular university would be, but ultimately a yeshiva essentially is an unaccredited institution of higher education. signed, Rosguilltalk20:12, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
Judging from some recent newly-elected fellow announcements found in a quick search [13][14], and from the statement at [15] that "one fellow for every 1000 voting members is elected each year", it looks to be of the right level of selectivity, to me. Associate fellow would not be enough. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:21, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
I would say that yes, election as a fellow of the AIAA should satisfy Criterion 3. If you are thinking of writing a page about someone, you might see if they satisfy multiple criteria to make the entry as strong as possible. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 20:23, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
Absolutely yes. This is by far the better of the two AAAS's. Back when my campus was using academy membership as its criterion for the distinguished professor title, the academies it considered were basically only NAS, NAE, and Amacad. They are much stronger than the specialized-society fellowships (or that other AAAS fellowship) more typically used to satisfy #C3. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:44, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
The number of citations and related indices are considered indications of notability/significance/importance within academia. How, if at all, should these be used in determining Wikipedia notability? Kdammers (talk) 23:00, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
What Phil said, but note particularly that citation counts are more important in some fields (esp. most science and engineering fields) than in others. I've sat in on or chaired many promotion cases at MIT in the arts and humanities and citation counts were never mentioned at all. Nor even the number of book reviews, just the quality of the reviews. (Even negative reviews tended to count positively if they showed that the scholar was making a clear impact by tweaking others' noses by breaking assumptions.) -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)21:19, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
The conclusion should be: high citation counts can make an academic notable, especially in fields where that is more important. Low citation counts cannot remove notability from an academic, especially in fields where it is not important, but we need something else in those cases instead. Often, humanities scholars go through WP:AUTHOR rather than the academic notability guideline. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:23, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
I will say it again as I have said it many times before. We compare like with like: physicists with physicists, philosophers with philosophers, never physicists with philosophers, because judgements of notability vary considerably from field to field. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:28, 23 September 2023 (UTC).
Fellowships
I have read a lot of discussions as it relates to WP:NACADEMICS #3 but still confused. While reviewing Franco Orsucci, I see a claim that he is a fellow for a few institutions. However, I cannot tell if the institutions are considered "highly selective societies" (how do we determine that) or if they reserve "fellow status as a highly selective honor." Outside of this person being a fellow, there would be nothing else that shows notability under as sources are primary, bios, etc. CNMall41 (talk) 20:46, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
Maybe this has been discussed here, but if so I haven't found it, and it isn't mentioned on the page. What about the successful organization of major / impactful national/international scientific conferences? For example, if a scientist is the principal organizer of AAAS conferences, or other conferences which are deemed notable. Conversely, I'd think that the organization of local organization conferences (say, a local chapter of a larger scientific organization) might not suffice. There might be other exclusions/inclusions to consider as well in terms of assessing the impact of the conference (for example, if it has gone on for many years it might ).
Being the program chair of a major conference might plausibly be considered analogous to editor-in-chief of a journal, but being organizational chair would be at best analogous to managing editor. In any case I would tend to view these as suggestive rather than definitive. Someone with a program chair position probably passes WP:PROF in other ways. Someone with an organizational chair may have gotten it mainly by being young and energetic and known to the steering committee. —David Eppstein (talk) 13:19, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
Many large conferences employ a company to do the work which, anyway, is purely administrative. The "organizer" may be just a figurehead. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:37, 23 August 2023 (UTC).
True, but this is usually clear from the job title. Still, I think that you and David both make strong points, and I now see why it's not included. At a minimum, it's very difficult to sort out. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 16:23, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
I would consider it evidence of notability but not a clear pass in itself. Generally when someone like this retires there will be published tributes etc. that provide a basis for writing a well sourced article, but while they're still working, the evidence for their notability separate from the organization/conferences is harder to find. As an example, the executive director for the American Musicological Society had a WP page since 2006 that for 13 years would probably have been closed as Delete if anyone had ever chosen to bring it to AfD, but immediately after his sudden death enough RS tributes came in to make clear his impact on the field as a whole. So it can be tough to find the evidence even if it's obvious to the field. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert(talk)21:16, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
Discussion re notability of academics at a different location
There's a discussion about this guideline, taking place at a different location: [16]. I'm not sure why the question (which might amount to a proposal of some sort) is taking place there instead of here... Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:59, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
Acceptable references for facts in professor articles
I have always used faculty web pages and CVs as sources for facts such as dates and places of education, etc. in their articles. I am getting objections to these sources at Talk:Laurence D. Marks. As well as objections to using an academic's thesis and papers as sources for their work. Any suggestions on how to proceed? StarryGrandma (talk) 18:13, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#General_notes, "Once the passage of one or more notability criteria has been verified through independent sources, or through the reliable sources listed explicitly for this purpose in the specific criteria notes, non-independent sources, such as official institutional and professional sources, are widely accepted as reliable sourcing for routine, uncontroversial details."
@PatrickJWelsh and @David Eppstein, Thank for advising on this. I am struggling with pairing Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#General_noting: "Every topic on Wikipedia must have sources that comply with Wikipedia:Verifiability. Major awards must be confirmed, claims of impact must be substantiated by independent statements, reviews, citation metrics, or library holdings, and so on." with WP:BLPSELFPUB, saying personal web pages and CVs are acceptable for routine, uncontroversial details as long as the article is not primarily based on such sources. Specifically, what do you consider routine details? If we are talking about where someone went to college, that info is available elsewhere, meaning that a vita or self-published source is not needed. What about scholarships received? Or where someone did post-graduate research and who they worked under? What about academic work history, when they were hired, and when they received a promotion? I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the only source for someone's education and work experience being a vita, especially since the latter is typically part of their notability. But I may be overthinking this?
@StarryGrandma, as far as I can tell, there are not any issues with articles and the thesis citated in this article; there may a case where a stated fact is not obviously backed by a journal citation as another editor was asking for the specific page within a long article, but that is a different issue altogether. Rublamb (talk) 05:48, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
Verifiability means that we must have reliable sources. We can believe that certain types of sources for certain types of information are reliable, when they are not secondary or not independent. All of these things describe different characteristics of sources that may be true or untrue independently of each other. It also depends on what kind of information we are using the sources for. In cases where we have reason to believe that someone has exaggerated their background, or where we are using sources to say what the impact of some work is rather than just bare-bones career milestones, personal statements might be unreliable, but in most cases things like degrees and professional positions held can be sourced to a cv, because we take it as reliable even though it is clearly not independent. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:27, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
@David Eppstein, That helps. I have written articles about academics before but found adequate sources elsewhere, so this was something new to contemplate. I also see from #3 of WP:BLPSELFPUB, that we should not use a cv to detail who they worked with, which tracks with your explanation. Rublamb (talk) 07:13, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
A line that I find helpful: if a fact is a plausible pass or progress towards a pass of a notability criterion (thinking mostly in NPROF now), then I look for a reliable source that is at least independent of the subject. So, being a fellow in an academic society, awards, an editor-in-chief-ship, etc. Basic career details, earlier degrees, birth date, etc are fine from CV, so long as no other source contradicts. I'll comment that for the PhD thesis, the library record is a reliable secondary source for the fact that someone got a PhD (but the thesis and other papers are primary for their contents). Russ Woodroofe (talk) 12:13, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
proposal for modification of guidelines
The proper application of these guidelines has come up again for me in an AfD discussion during new page patrol. In that case, it is genuinely unclear to me whether the subject merits an article. What I find significant, however, is that everyone else who has weighed in supports inclusion—in spite of the subject clearly not meeting the current criteria. This is entirely fine with me, as it is just a stub without self-promotional language or puffery, and it might in fact be useful to readers. I mention this only as evidence of general disagreement among often very experienced editors about the criteria for academic notability, which (anecdotally) seem to be enforced in a highly inconsistent manner.
I would suggest that the reason for this disagreement is in large part due to the criteria as written, which too frequently just defer the question with reference to the notability of journals, societies, et cetera. All of this, however, is very difficult for non-experts to assess. There will always be borderline cases in both directions, but the community would be well-served by a clearer set of guidelines. It should be easier than it currently is for non-specialists to determine notability, especially when assessing newly created articles.
One criterion that I think would make assessing notability much easier would be to make it, in general, sufficient that the subject is a full professor at a research university. (If that is overly inclusive, this could be restricted to R1 universities or, for the US and Canada, members of the Association of American Universities.) This would act as a proxy for the first criterion – "The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources." – because the entire hiring, tenure, and promotion process is effectively a peer-assessment of just this.
I actually think that even having tenure at any research university would be an even better criterion. The main reason for this more inclusive proposal is that when I work on academic articles, I like to Wikilink out to authorities mentioned by name. Even just a stub allows readers to quickly get background context on who is being cited without leaving Wikipedia, which I think makes Wikipedia a better encyclopedia, more useful to its readers. Current criteria, however, exclude many high-quality academic sources from inclusion—or, just as bad, make establishing notability so onerous as to not be worth one's time. (What sort of WorldCat data, for instance, is sufficient to establish notability? How does one cite that? With reference to what public standards? I genuinely have no idea.)
The only downside I see to expanding inclusion criteria is increased need to patrol for self-promotional articles. This, however, does not require any expert knowledge; most editors are already highly alert to this across all of Wikipedia. Further, restricting the university rank criterion to tenured professors makes it less likely anyone would bother inflate their own coverage. There would be grad students, of course, probably unfamiliar with Wikipedia policies and guidelines, but I just don't think it would be difficult to manage that.
Other suggestions for simplifying or otherwise clarifying the guidelines would be most welcome! My view is that anything that would make assessing notability less of a research project and less dependent, in general, on discipline-specific expertise would be an improvement.
You may also wish to take a look at this recent discussion–although it is quite long, and I am alerting editors there of this post. Please also share to project pages as you find appropriate.
Patrick: I suggest you read this talk page and its archives thoroughly. Only after doing so and clearly identifying how what you suggests differs from the many many many past discussions on this topic would it be appropriate to raise this shit again. As for the specifics of your proposal: setting the bar to "full professor at R1 university" is very US-specific, would include many people for whom notability under current standards is difficult to discern, and would exclude many rising stars for whom notability is already obvious. In short, it would make our inclusion criteria more indiscriminate. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:05, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
Hi David,
To state the obvious, you definitely do not need to justify your individual editorial decisions to me. Nevertheless, I consider it evidence of a problem that an editor both supports inclusion of an academic these criteria are clearly written to exclude and also opposes reconsideration of the criteria.
As to the R1 status of a university, I presented that only as an alternative for consideration by those who think my preferred alternative of being a full professor at a research university is too expansive.
In cases where a subject's university rank seems out of proportion to their actual publication record, this could be discussed and assessed on a case-by-case basis, as we do now in the other direction. So too with rising stars, who presumably meet one of the other criteria anyway.
Although I do not accept as a reasonable burden to review years' worth of archives just to raise the issue, I would gladly consider any arguments reproduced from the archive. In particular, if there is some devastating objection against implementing a change along the lines of what I am proposing, I would be grateful to anyone who might share it with me so that I could acknowledge its force and publicly withdraw my proposal on the record.
Otherwise, folks who don't want to have this discussion can all just simply ignore it. No? For I am not going to edit the article without strong consensus.
No, that just happened to provide an occasion for me to finally raise an issue that has been bothering me pretty much since I started editing.
Also, if the WP:AUTHOR criterion of simply having had one's books reviewed by multiple independent sources applies to academic authors as well as (per that policy) "creative professionals", this would also require altering the current guidelines by loosening (or at least decomplicating) criterion 1(a).
You may also consider me here to entirely drop the proposal of the R1 restriction, which was literally just a parenthetical in the original post.
Finally, in case this was not clear, I am not proposing replacing everything with this or any other single criterion. Editorial judgment will always be a factor, and further discussion will often be necessary with respect to what is specific to any given case. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:13, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
Re: "this would also require altering the current guidelines by loosening (or at least decomplicating) criterion 1(a).": No. We do not require people notable under one criterion to be notable under all criteria. Book authors with multiple reviewed books can be notable under WP:AUTHOR, and if they are, they are notable, regardless of whether they also happen to be academics, politicians, or sportspeople. Academics who happen to play sports or who happen to run for public office can be notable under WP:PROF, and remain notable regardless of whether they also happen to be notable as electoral candidates, sportspeople, or authors. People who win high public office can be notable as politicians, even if they happen to be academics who do not pass WP:PROF. Etc etc. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:25, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
I don't think that writing academic monographs on Gadamer (or whomever) qualifies one as a "creative professional", which is the heading under which WP:AUTHOR appears.
Or, if it does, it applies to so many folks I would categorize as academics as to merit mention in this policy guideline.
More to the point, and with all due respect, I find this strategy disingenuous. Someone whose job is university teaching and research is an academic first and an author only as a means of sharing ideas with other researchers and advancing their academic career. Unless someone is, for instance a professor of creative writing, academics self-identify and are generally regarded as lectures/teachers/professors/researchers, who are only incidentally authors of monographs (as part of their academic responsibilities, and as a condition of academic promotion) from which they do not directly make any money and do not expect anyone outside their specialization ever to read.
So unless an academic can be established as notable for work written for a popular audience (definitely some are!), I continue to believe that the current guidelines to be followed are those at 1(a) in WP:ACADEMIC, which I continue to believe are overly strict and unnecessarily difficult to apply. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:45, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
You are writing as if you think our notability guidelines are based on how significant the topic is. Most of them are not; WP:PROF and WP:NPOL are exceptions. For the other notability guidelines, notability is based not on editors' opinions of significance but on depth of independent reliable sourcing. If the sourcing exists, they are notable even if you somehow think it shouldn't count because they were only doing their job. If an athlete wins a gold medal at the Olympics and wins major newspaper coverage, they are notable by our current standards for that newspaper coverage, not for the medal. If another athlete has a sob story that causes all the newspapers to cover their failed attempt at qualifying for the Olympics, they are notable by our current standards for that newspaper coverage, even if you happen to think they are not significant. The same goes for book authors. If they get lots of publications covering their work in-depth, they are notable, regardless of whether they or their reviewers happen to be academics. If they publish a book and nobody reviews it, then that will not contribute to notability. There is no "this only counts when it was intended for a popular audience" exception to our author and general notability guidelines, nor should there be; that would skew the encyclopedia even farther towards being an encyclopedia only of celebrities and pop culture than our coverage-based notability guideines already skew it. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:12, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
If I anywhere appear to be suggesting that my own personal assessment of a subject's notability is at all relevant, I certainly recant such implication.
What I am arguing is that it is a category mistake to apply criteria designed for authors known as creative professionals to authors known as academics. For I simply do not see how reviews of an academic monograph in an academic journal demonstrate notability as an author.
I see that your are yourself a distinguished professor (I tip my cap, sir!), and so I expect you know even more than me how tragically/comically small most print runs of academic works actually are. To say that someone is notable as an author when there are very possibly only a few hundred copies of their books in circulation strikes me as just completely wrong. All the more so when these books are only even intelligible to other academics in the same area of specialization.
For instance, two or three books on Hegel with, say, Palgrave Macmillan would not make me notable as an author even if they garnered a handful of reviews from specialist or mid-tier academic journals. Any notability that might accrue would come from the academic community and would be notability as a Hegel scholar. (I have no plans to publish, I hasten to add, and no expectation or ambition of ever meeting any notability criteria for inclusion on Wikipedia.)
Do you actually disagree with this?
If it helps, I am entirely happy to expand the final paragraph of my previous post to include academics whose academic monographs actually do make their authors notable as authors as evidenced by, for instance reviews in the NYT, New Yorker, and the like (e.g., Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor). It's just that this is rare occurrence, and so it didn't occur to me to mention.
Also, revising the notability guidelines along the lines I am suggesting would make Wikipedia less for only "celebrities and pop culture", not more. More people could be included, and included under the most appropriate category. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 21:51, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
Just for anyone following who has not linked out to WP:Author, these are the criteria:
=== Creative professionals ===
This guideline applies to authors, editors, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, architects, and other creative professionals. Such a person is notable if:
The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors; or
The person is known for originating a significant new concept, theory, or technique; or
The person has created or played a major role in co-creating a significantorwell-known work or collective body of work. In addition, such work must have been the primary subject of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews, or of an independent and notable work (for example, a book, film, or television series, but usually not a single episode of a television series); or
The person's work (or works) has: (a) become a significant monument, (b) been a substantial part of a significant exhibition, (c) won significant critical attention, or (d) been represented within the permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums.
___
The emphasis in italics in the first sentence and third criterion are mine and are added to show that these criteria do not, in general, apply to academic works not covered outside specialized academic communities. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 22:16, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
No, "other creative professionals" does not exclude academic authors from being authors. To argue that it does is ridiculous and tendentious. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:21, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
Well obviously they are authors! The question is whether they are notableasauthors. Although by no means excluded from notability as authors by virtue of academic profession, the majority of academics, however well-published, are not independently notable as authors. And this for the obvious reason that their works exclude from their readership almost everyone without at least post-secondary training in the appropriate academic field of specialization.
More to the point, I fear this discussion has veered rather too far from the issue I intended to raise in my initial post, for which purpose I quote:
The main reason for this more inclusive proposal is that when I work on academic articles, I like to Wikilink out to authorities mentioned by name. Even just a stub allows readers to quickly get background context on who is being cited without leaving Wikipedia, which I think makes Wikipedia a better encyclopedia, more useful to its readers. Current criteria, however, exclude many high-quality academic sources from inclusion—or, just as bad, make establishing notability so onerous as to not be worth one's time. (What sort of WorldCat data, for instance, is sufficient to establish notability? How does one cite that? With reference to what public standards? I genuinely have no idea.)
My appreciation for the various Wikipedia policies has (mostly!) grown as I have become a more active editor. Without at all dropping these from consideration, however, I would love for this conversation to be focused more upon what helps editors make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia for readers.
I do not doubt for a second that this is also your goal; you have put in far more time and effort than me to improving this open resource. I only suggest that our discussion has veered rather too far afield from what I, at least, take to be the central issue.
To return to the example from my own area of expertise, publishing multiple books about Hegel does not, in any ordinary (or, I at least provisionally contend, defensible) sense make one notable as an author just on account of receiving reviews in academic journals (exceptions, of course, for raves in elite journals or by those at the top of their field). However, barring coverage in general interest publications, which here might include even the NYREV and peer publications, this just does not make one a notable author.
What matters instead is the reception of one's work by other experts in the field. This is what the current criteria at WP:ACADEMIC are intended to capture. Pretty much all that I am proposing is that one's rank at a research university is, generally, a good proxy by which to assess this. If some folks who work at universities happen to be independently notable as authors, that's great! Also, lots of scholars who do not work at research universities are absolutely notable. Nothing that I am proposing excludes anyone for not holding a certain title at a certain category of institution. What I am saying is just that some small changes to the existing criteria could make life easier for editors who work on academic subjects and, by extension, make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia for readers interested in these sorts of articles. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 00:12, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
I suspect many who have written articles on academics wish that WP:PROF could be loosened to include more people, but the status quo is a longstanding but fragile compromise between those who think academics are worthy of articles even if they don't pass GNG, and the growing group who think GNG should apply to all articles. Given the increasingly loud calls for all subjects to fall within GNG, talking about loosening WP:PROF is at best a waste of time. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:41, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
Okay, but bracketing Wikipedia politics, what do you think would be the best policy on principle?
(In no way does answering this question commit you to defending it from an angry mob of GNG fanatics—or anyone else.)
Also, I should add, my concern here is not directly with the coverage of living academics, only an elite few of whom merit more than a stub, but with Wikipedia's ability to meaningfully contextualize sources cited as experts on subjects of undisputed notability. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:37, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
There is a very basic thing that you are missing, PatrickJWelsh. This is all about how we construct biographical articles. They are about a person's life and works. We can document both from independent coverage of them by reliable sources, which academic reviews of books and whatnot by other qualified experts in the field definitely are (as long as they don't spend most of the review not even talking about the work being reviewed ☺). So even if we cannot write a biographical article documenting someone's life in detail, because the world hasn't independently documented it, if the world has independently documented that person's works in depth, then we can write a biographical article on that person's works. (There are plenty of authors throughout history for whom this is true, note.) Moreover if the world has independently documented neither, then we cannot write an article, irrespective of what position(s) someone might have. It's always about what the world has documented. Because it's always about how we can construct an article in accordance with content policy. Notability is not a blanket. The actual documented world, that we are making an encyclopaedia of, is uneven. We have limited exceptions and we used to work on the bases of blanket notability a lot many years ago, but since the advent of the Project:Biographies of living persons policy many years ago, as well as the (rightly so) failure of the Project:Fame and importance idea even before that, a lot of people have come around to the idea that if we cannot write a biography legitimately, we cannot have an article, and when blanket criteria contradict this it is the blanket criteria that are wrong, and overriden by core content policies. Uncle G (talk) 05:15, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
My suggestion is that the publication by a research university that they employ someone at the rank of full professor is documented independent coverage of that person being an expert in their field. The internal processes for hiring and promotion completely blow away the standards of journalistic coverage. This for the obvious reason that university administration and departmental faculty experts have commented to invest their resources and reputation in a scholar for (quite likely) decades, whereas a journalist is probably just unhappily seeking daily clicks in order to keep their job. (Please excuse the hyperbole. I am well aware that there are a handful of reliable news outlets that can afford much higher standards.) Academic book reviews are also strange in ways that I would be happy to discuss further if this seems important to anyone.
This, I stress again, is just something that should – absent factors to the contrary – establish notability. If there are not reliable sources establishing further facts, then the article must remain a stub. Even a stub, however, is a service to readers and so makes Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. This primarily for the reason that editors citing these academics can Wikilink out to these stubs, even if all they say is that so-and-so has been a professor at university such-and-such since date and these are some select publications. Secondarily, it also makes it possible for novice editors who would not think to create an article to make additional contributions should further independent coverage subsequently emerge.
I appreciate your taking the time to weigh in on my proposal.
See WP:NOTDIRECTORY #1: "Simple listings without contextual information showing encyclopedic merit". In particular, Wikipedia is not a faculty directory listing all professors at major universities. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:39, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
I doubt the community would change PROF to say that holding a full professorship without multiple independent, significant coverage. With limited exceptions, neither GNG or any of the SNGs provide presumptive notability for holding a position or participating in an event. When there is any presumptive notability, it is because the subject won an well-known and significant award or there are alternative methods to capture the significance of the subject or a lot of information that can be used to construct a biography. For WP:PROF, citations are an in-direct measure of the significance of a scholar's importance, as other scholars are writing about or responding to the work of the subject. For elected officials, editors have lots of information about the subject, from election results, introduced legislation, votes taken, speeches on the public record, in addition to any media coverage the subject received during the campaign or term of office (while recognizing that WP:NPOL is written with a global perspective). So, even in those cases, the expectations of GNG are met ("significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"), but there is less reliance on news coverage. --Enos733 (talk) 20:16, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
I agree that citation metrics and library holdings, both of which are already included in WP:PROF, are in principle better indicators than having such-and-such rank at this-or-that status university. The problem, however, is that in practice the relevant standards vary wildly among (and even within) disciplines, and so both article creators and curators are presented with a research project, rather than a general policy guideline, when attempting to assess notability.
If someone smarter or more tech-savvy than me has a solution, I would gladly withdraw my proposal. As things stand, however, being a full professor at a research university is the best proxy I can think of to capture the academic notability of folks doing highly-regarded work in fields that don't routinely award prizes or attract media attention.
Notability within Wikipedia is a fuzzy ecosystem. There will always be edge cases where real world notability and who participates at an AFD are going to impact whether an article is kept, deleted, or redirected. But, if you look at NSPORTS, you will see the community is moving away from concepts of notability that are tied with a particular position (or participation). So, even if I thought that your proposal does a better job of informing edge cases, the larger community would likely respond negativity with several aspects of the proposal (does your proposal fit the need of of a global encyclopedia, is being a full professor verifiable (and does this always mean someone with tenure), what does this mean for the notability of any junior professor (as you seem to be discarding the citation metric), and as I have articulated, attributing notability with a particular title or position without any relationship with GNG. - Enos733 (talk) 00:50, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Notability is a fuzzy concept, and any Wikipedia policy that obscured this would be suspect on these grounds. So, I think we agree on this point. There will always be a lot of folks somewhere in between the clear passes and clear fails that require editorial judgment and reasoned discussion.
My attempt at an intervention here is motivated by what I perceive as an inadequacy of Wikipedia's guidelines with respect to assessing academic notability with respect to criterion no. 1. I believe that what I propose would be helpful to both article creators and curators. In no way am I proposing that this should be the one governing criterion or that this should automatically qualify someone as notable. It is just something that I think would, especially in the humanities, helpfully serve as a proxy for metrics that can be extremely difficult to assess.
In no way, however, I am proposing we do away with citation metrics as a direct indication of notability. In the medical fields, for instance, citations are a far more reliable source than academic titles, and anyone qualified to create articles about medicine is unlikely to have a difficult time demonstrating notability with such data.
In the humanities, however, things are much less clear.
For background, I have PhD in philosophy, and I worked for several years at an academic journal. Yet, in spite of this, I have no idea what kind of data about library holdings would constitute Wikipedia-quality evidence of notability in my own discipline. Also, although I do know what journals are the most prestigious, it's not clear how to me how I might demonstrate the relative significance of being published here-rather-than-there according to Wikipedia standards of reliable sources. This is because, in philosophy, as I expect just about everywhere else, such criteria are not publicized in a way that Wikipedia can (or should) recognize as authoritative (i.e., I can tell you what Internet sources are generally to be trusted in philosophy, but I do not think that Wikipedia should rely on the assertions of any editors upon the credibility of these kinds of self-published sources.)
If I'm just unusually ignorant in this respect, I will not be offended by anyone who can explain what I have been missing. I would only then request instead that whatever the criteria or the guidelines for establishing them are spelled out in the policy. Right now, however, the section on metrics barely mentions the humanities at all and, even for the sciences, is overwhelming devoted to the untrustworthiness of basically everything available.
Let me define the two key terms of my proposal for at least ameliorating this shortcoming in the current policy:
i.) "Full professor": the "full" is mostly specific to the United States and Canada, where I received my education. What I mean, however, is pretty much what is meant by the Wikipedia entry professor. In particular:
Professors in the United States commonly occupy any of several positions in academia. In the U.S., the word "professor" informally refers collectively to the academic ranksofassistant professor, associate professor, or professor. This usage differs from the predominant usage of the word professor internationally, where the unqualified word professor only refers to "full professors." The majority of university lecturers and instructors in the United States, as of 2015, do not occupy these tenure-track ranks, but are part-time adjuncts.
The presumption of notability that I propose applies only to those shy of the (already acknowledged as default notable) distinguished professors – who have been promoted on the basis of peer-testimonials that their work has reshaped the direction of research in their discipline – but whose published research has nevertheless earned them the the highest academic rank internally awarded by a university. (Lots of folks, for instance, retire at the "mere" rank of associate professor. Many more eek out a month-to-month living as adjuncts at multiple institutions.)
I submit that it is in general a safe assumption that full professors at research universities pass what the policy calls the "Average Professor Test", i.e., "When judged against the average impact of a researcher in a given field, does this researcher stand out as clearly more notable or more accomplished?" Although I cannot find good statistics on this, these positions are extremely competitive and are not awarded lightly.
ii.) "Research university": by this I mean an institution of post-secondary education accredited to award terminal degrees (usually a PhD) in the field of the professor in question. So, for instance, even if you are a full professor at a U.S. university accredited to grant MBAs or nursing degrees, this does not qualify you unless your department is also accredited to award terminal degrees in your own field. Neither would one be qualified merely on grounds of being a full professor at a community or liberal arts college—although, of course, scholars at these institutions may still qualify on other grounds.
A final note to this lengthy post: WP:NOTDIRECTORY, as written, is not relevant to this question. And even if that is the policy that ought to be refined, it would make no sense to me to do so in such a way as would exclude articles on scholars being cited as high-quality sources in other articles.
Thanks for reading through! I've not yet looked at NSPORTS, but I'll try to get to that in case it might prove to be an instructive model.
Propose that Wikipedia entries on academic researchers move to its own separate wikiacademic.org place. Wikipedia should not be a CV for academics. Please look at the many stub topics linked from List of members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for examples.
wikipedia should not be a current and former academic staff at each university directory.
Looking at several academic entries, listing statements in them, excluding birth place, family, where they went to school and non notable jobs like professor of math, university D, 1998-2006, many of the topics do not have any real content — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:D591:5F10:855E:9015:7127:7D67 (talk) 05:49, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Maybe sometime after all Wikipedia articles on footballers get moved to their own separate wikifootball place, I might take your suggestion more seriously. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:00, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Agreed. Although I have some complaints about the current criteria, particularly as they apply to folks in the humanities (see above), notable academics very much belong on Wikipedia. To give just one reason, when I work on academic articles, I like to Wikilink out to authorities mentioned by name. Even just a stub allows readers to quickly get background context on who is being cited without leaving Wikipedia, which I think makes Wikipedia a better encyclopedia, more useful to its readers.
That said – and even though I think the fear of Wikipedia becoming a directory is overblown (an insufficiently notable academic is just not going to get any traffic, so who is this hurting exactly?) – I certainly agree there need to be inclusion criteria more-or-less along the lines of what we currently have. In particular, Wikipedia cannot become a venue for self-promotion. But I think the community is already plenty good at spotting this and dealing with it as appropriate.
Named chair positions tied to administrator positions
A situation arose in a recent AfD, where a university apparently tied a named chair to their law school deanship. (Not linking to AfD, as I don't want to relitigate, and I'm not sure that it really matters.) Is a named chair granted for administrative office a pass of WP:NPROF C5? My suggestion would be "no": I think that WP:NPROF C5 should be a signal for the kind of research impact discussed in WP:NPROF C1. Perhaps it would be worth adding to the subcriterion notes "Criterion 5 is intended to to cover endowed appointments granted for research accomplishment"? (We may otherwise wind up in a situation where many law schools and business schools create named chairs for their deans.) Russ Woodroofe (talk) 19:55, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
Not to be nitpicky but I just have to say that I prefer "scholarly impact" to "research impact," in honor of my many colleagues who are professors of art, music, drama, architecture, and so forth - and who may occupy endowed chairs in recognition of their contributions in those fields, sometimes entirely on the basis of the impact of their performance work. With that caveat, I have no problem with making an addition. I'd suggest "Criterion 5 is intended to apply to endowed chair appointments which are granted in recognition of impactful scholarship in the subject's field," or the like. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 21:35, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
That connects to Qflib's point, because if we remove the use of above-full-professor professorial titles as a way of recognizing scholarly impact, we would be left with mainly #C1 and #C3 (as the others are rarely used). This would exaggerate the already-disproportionate advantage to scholars in STEM fields where journal citations and fellowships in discipline-specific societies are more common. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:22, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
1) I like Qflib's wording, and agree that it is better to be more inclusive along these lines. 2) On a different tack, I have in the past suggested subordinating C5 to other criteria: the language I suggested then had problems that David Eppstein pointed out at the time, but an alternative along the lines of what Xxanthippe suggests would be to make C5 a presumed pass of C1. (I think this is in effect how we think about C5 anyway, or at least how we would like to think about it.) That might be a conversation for another time, however. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 01:41, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
If we don't want to get rid of C5 because of all the C5-passing academics in non-stem fields who do not pass C1, why would it be any improvement to keep C5 but make it (C5 and C1) instead of C5? What even is the point of having one criterion that is the conjunction of something with another criterion? —David Eppstein (talk) 05:57, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Who says they don't pass C1? The proof needed to demonstrate a C5-meeting prof doesn't pass C1 would presumably involve a much more detailed BEFORE and go beyond the usual citation analysis used in STEM. JoelleJay (talk) 18:00, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Maybe, but do we have any more examples that could help illustrate the issue? Are we contemplating changes because of a single recent AfD, or has this been a more recurring case? Offhand, I don't recall another example that was just like the recent instance (where to all appearances the named chair was a package deal with the deanship). XOR'easter (talk) 18:30, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Quite. Guidelines are not intended to cover every possible case, and should allow for exceptions. That's why we come to a consensus by discussing things at AfD rather than just treat guidelines as tick boxes. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:49, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
notability of the " professorial chair" endowment
There's an AfD at the moment where the point of discussion is NPROF, in particular the notability of the endowment (not sure if that's the best or correct term)
behind a named professorship. The nom admits there are insufficient sources for the GNG but essentially says that if NPROF uses a "chaired" position as a sign of notability for inclusion then it stands to reason that the chaired position itself must also be notable.
I'm not linking to the AfD as I'm not asking anyone to go there and !vote in any direction, but it does seem to be an oxymoron which may need thought and clarity here.
As it stands, it seems like having a "named chair" professorship acts as a shortcut/proxy for academic seniority and therefore notability in the wild, and hence notability on en.wiki via this guideline.
However if the chair itself has been met by shrugs and without any significant coverage in RS, can it therefore be used to give notability to the individual that holds the position? On the other hand if this is considered a reliable shortcut, can we ever then say that the chair endowment is non-notable given that the guidelines states that the person who occupies it would be considered notable? JMWt (talk) 10:05, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
I would assume the chair endowment would only be notable if it itself were covered in depth in reliable sources, which certainly is not true of most named professorships. I'm not really sure what the oxymoron here is (isn't this precisely what WP:NOTINHERITED is supposed to be about?) and it seems to me that AfD is the right place for the argument, not here. Am I missing something? -- asilvering (talk) 12:54, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
The oxymoron is the idea that something non-notable in terms of the GNG could give notability to someone via NPROF.
This isn't about an AfD because this is something that needs clarity in this guideline - if the chair endowment is to be used to show notability, isn't it also necessary for it to be notable?
I don’t think so. NPROF is best taken at face value. That is how it was always intended to be used. You seem to think it is some sort of logical contradiction; I don’t see it. In this case a university can create a new named chair and honor a scholar with it, helping us to identify the scholars notability under NPROF, with the chair position itself not yet being sufficiently notable to merit a Wikipedia page of its own. NPROF is designed to help identify important scholars as notable, full stop. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 14:49, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
This also seems to me the plain meaning of the policy. If the chair itself has some kind of historical significance (as I'm sure a few do), then independent sources should establish that. Otherwise, what is the article even going to say? "It was established at x date with a donation from entity y at institution z, and this list of people have occupied it"? That seems like trivia. Maybe some of this would be worth mentioning in the context of an article about a notable professor who occupies said chair, but I don't see how a one-off academic title needs its own Wikipedia entry. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 15:23, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
No, the article-worthiness of the person does not have to be inherited from article-worthiness of the position. That's not how the criterion works or the rationale behind it. The point of C5 is that a person gets the kind of position it talks about for having done important things, and people who do important things are the kind of people we can write articles about. XOR'easter (talk) 18:20, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
For the record, my opinion is that a non-notable 'endowment' giving evidence of notability to an academic is only the same as a non-notable published book giving significant coverage to a topic. However I think it is something worth discussing here to clarify, hence why I'm bringing it up. JMWt (talk) 15:26, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Most of the independent reliable books that have significant coverage of a topic and so give it notability are not notable themselves. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:45, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Someone will please correct me if I am mistaken, but this is my understanding why occupying a named chair is an indicator of notability:
What distinguishes a named chair from an ordinary tenured professorship is that the funding comes from a private source controlled by the department, rather than from university funds. This means that the faculty have much more leeway about whom to hire. They don't have to deal with deans, and there is much less risk of an offer falling through over salary negotiations, for example, because the university administration is far less involved. Also, I suspect they pay more than would otherwise be typical. The main point of establishing one, after all, is to advance the mission of the department by allowing them to hire (in effect, to poach) more senior folks they would not otherwise be able to get.
Also, just anecdotally, those at research universities seem to have lower undergrad teaching requirements than their colleagues. But I have no idea if this is something built into the appointment, or something negotiated later on.
That's not really how it normally works in British universities, I can't comment on US universities. I don't really understand why you think the source of funding matters in terms of notability on en.wiki JMWt (talk) 16:11, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
To the extent that it matters, this is because faculty can approach someone at another university and credibly promise a position at a certain salary with, perhaps, a lower teaching load or other perks. There are a lot more things that can go wrong when multiple levels of university administration are more heavily involved. It's a lot easier to get someone to move to your university when they know that some parts of the application process are basically a formality. This means that endowed chairs tend to go to more senior people that the faculty really want who would otherwise probably not consider relocating. This is a rather weak indication of notability, but it's my best reconstruction of the reasoning behind including it as a criterion. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 16:32, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Ok well other countries exist and the words "professor" and "chaired professor" do not mean the same things everywhere. JMWt (talk) 17:03, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
In my university, at least, what distinguishes a named chair, or a title like "Distinguished Professor" or "Chancellor's Professor" (also covered by C5, but not named chairs) from an ordinary tenured professorship is that a special campus committee has examined the accomplishments and recommendation letters of the person to be given the named chair, and has agreed that they have a level of special scholarly distinction beyond that of an ordinary full professor, worthy of the title. It is that "one step beyond a full professor" that we are trying to capture in C5. That is why chairs given to associate professors do not count, for instance. It is also why (see discussion above) named chairs given as a slush fund for specific administrative titles should be treated differently than named chairs given to a person for their scholarly accomplishments. (Also, in my experience, lower teaching expectations are set for new faculty and administrators but not advanced-rank regular faculty.) —David Eppstein (talk) 16:12, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
I've only ever seemed named chairs used as a hiring incentive—or just something the faculty was happy to have more in their control.
If they are sometimes awarded as a form of promotion indicating exceptional contributions to the discipline as a whole, via a process similar to that of promotion to Distinguished Professor, that certain makes those chairs far stronger indications of notability!
I'm not sure what the language should be, but it seems like we might want to introduce more fine-grained distinctions into the criteria to reflect these differences beyond the simple distinction between holding a named/endowed chair and holding the administrative position of department chair. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 16:41, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
We've been down this road in the past re administrative department chairs versus named chairs. The current language reflects all of that discussion - but I think anyone is welcome to make suggestions to the project to make it clearer. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 20:45, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi! I wanted to ask for more information about the h-index, something I'm particularly unfamiliar with. Specifically, I wanted to ask if it accounts for factors such as regional bias. I created Draft:Carolina Chang a couple of months ago and thought that due to her publications and citations, she could meet WP:NPROF, and I'm afraid that she might be underrepresented in this regard, being from South America. Do you think the article could stand a chance in a AfD?
The h-index is based on a simple count of citations, not taking into consideration any other factors. Some points to bear in mind are that computer science is a very high citation (and so h-index) field, and that it is unusual for an associate professor to be notable. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:40, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
There are WP:PROF criteria that can to some degree factor in regional bias. One of those is membership in the official national academy of a country, criterion #C3. For Venezuela that would be the Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales de Venezuela, https://acfiman.org/. I suggest that you look at its full (numerary) members, https://acfiman.org/academicos/, to find underrepresented Venezuelans whose articles might survive an AfD. For Carolina Chang, WP:PROF#C1 is out of reach currently and there seems to be nothing else; I think that if the draft were made an article it would be surely be deleted. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:52, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Community College Presidents and Interim-Presidents...Notable?
There have been a number of BLPs recently created/expanded that are focused on university presidents, including a number of interim college or university presidents, and presidents of community colleges. The notability guidelines would, at first reading, suggest that this is enough to establish notability by the following bullet: "Criterion 6 may be satisfied, for example, if the person has held the post of president or chancellor (or vice-chancellor in countries where this is the top academic post) of a significant accredited college or university, director of a highly regarded, notable academic independent research institute or center (which is not a part of a university), president of a notable national or international scholarly society, etc."
The question is two part: do interim presidents count as holding the post of university president for purposes of identifying notability, or is the intent for this criteria to be limited to individuals placed in the post in a non-interim status? Secondly, would a community college count as a "significant accredited college"? A narrow reading of the first would seem to indicate that no, they would not meet the criteria, but a broader interpretation could be that an interim president is still a president. For the second part, a narrow reading would be yes, a community college is significant so long as it meets the WP:ORG notability requirements. But that begs the question: is every president of every community college that has, for instance, write-ups in regional newspapers in sufficient volume to narrowly meet the significant coverage requirements *really* notable without meeting additional criteria? Not saying that it isn't the case, but I'm genuinely curious if this is the spirit of the criteria!
My understanding is that interim presidents do not "count" in this way and their notability would have to be established otherwise.
In the past, I have been told that serving as president of a community college does not convey notability in itself, even if the college is itself notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia page. Once again, notability would have to be established otherwise. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 03:46, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
My understanding is that community colleges do not count as the sort of "major academic institution" that this criterion concerns. That does not mean that their presidents are automatically non-notable, but it needs to be demonstrated through WP:GNG rather than being automatic. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:56, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
I agree with this interpretation. I suggest that arguments of this sort could be avoided if in WP:Prof "major academic institution" was changed to "major academic institution with a significant presence in scholarship and research"? Xxanthippe (talk) 07:10, 26 November 2023 (UTC).
I'm not sure this is needed. Moreover "siginificant" seems up to substantial interpretation.
Personally I favor removing college and university presidents entirely from this Notability project. Once upon a time, presidents of major universities were academic leaders with influence far beyond their own school. Nowadays, most of the presidents are primarily focused on fundraising/currying alumni support for a living and I really, honestly strive mightily to see what it is about their career path that makes them automatically notable from the specific standpoint of Notability (academics), which is really oriented around scholarship. Some of them have no academic experience at all before becoming presidents. They don't manage budgets (they have people for that) or the faculty (provosts/VPAAs do that for them) or the students (again, various administrators) or deal with their communities (they have offices for public affairs). The exceptions to all of that? Community college presidents. They do all of those things and some of them are running institutions with more than 40,000 students and larger budgets than some of the major universities. The whole idea that being the president of a major academic institution makes you notable, but being the president of a major community college does not, makes no sense to me at all. I'd rather get rid of the whole thing and put presidents in lists at most.
Of course, some presidents have had notable academic careers, and that's fine, they'd fit under the other criteria. Other presidents are notable for other, general notability reasons. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 01:20, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for all of the feedback and discussion! I, personally, am softly leaning towards the proposal to remove presidents entirely from the notability guidelines, per the reasoning outlined above by Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib. There are plenty of college and university Presidents who are notable, either through academic notability other than being a president or through general notability. There have been dozens of articles created in the last few days meeting these criteria that are of, in my opinion, questionable notability, and I want to continue to get more consensus here on their status before I start pushing them through the AfD process. nf utvol (talk) 13:13, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
I support removing the position of university/college president as a qualifying criterion for academic notability. It's a full-time administrative position that actually takes the office-holder away from the research and publishing activity that is the core of specifically academic notability. Moreover, even those who do not already meet other PROF criteria very likely meet other notability requirements in the same way as top executives at other major institutions. This proposed change seems to me like just a bit of housecleaning that is unlike to have much practical effect on the encyclopedia itself.
I made this spreadsheet a while ago looking into the academic credentials of various university presidents in the US. The entries were chosen by starting at U Mich's president (don't remember why) and clicking any universities linked in his profile and looking at their current president (and so on). For the R1 and maybe R2 universities, the presidents are mostly already notable through other NPROF criteria. This changes if they weren't previously a professor, though; a couple places have career admins who never had academic impact. I think looking at places we would consider on the edge of "major" (non-research-heavy, small and private, etc.) would be informative. JoelleJay (talk) 21:01, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Although I am super impressed with the work you put into this, I do wonder if presidents who are academically notable might have more likelihood to link to others that are also academically notable. I'd say your study shows that we have a policy that errs on the side of the president being academically notable (I'll go ahead and grant that this might sample might be representative of the majority), but it's also clear from your analysis that there are situations where this is not the case - and I think we should not err on the side of assuming them automatically notable.
I don't recommend changing the criterion lightly. In general the NPROF criteria have served Wikipedia "as is" very well. So along with nt utvol, I'd say that I'm "softly leaning" in this direction. I would be pleased to be educated by others as to why it's a bad idea to change it. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 21:56, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
I think that I could be persuaded to go along with this change as long we make other changes that naturally follow the same logic. Specifically, it would seem that the entirety of criterion 6 ("The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society.") would need to be removed. ElKevbo (talk) 00:39, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't think it has served us well to combine discussion of these two very different populations.
Can those who are opining that interim presidents of major institution of higher education do not meet this notability guideline please explain why?
And can those who are opining that presidents of community colleges do not meet this notability guideline please explain why? (For this population, I am particularly worried that we could omit them because of popular views of community colleges as being less important or meaningful than other colleges and universities.) ElKevbo (talk) 22:13, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
These are excellent questions. I can only answer that my perception of the community college issue has been based on other, more senior editors telling me so in the past. For example, I think I made a page for a community college president once that seemed to me to meet GNG as well, but I was told otherwise - that NPROF 6 did not apply and that the GNG was too weak, and the page was not accepted for inclusion - an outcome I accepted. I think we discussed it on this talk page, too. It was a lot of years ago, though.
Interim presidents of colleges are sometimes career administrators working at the school and who the trustees ask to run things for a few months. I think that is why I was told that they should not be considered notable solely on NPROF 6. But again, I could be misremembering something. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 16:05, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
@ElKevbo, I don't read this as "community colleges are less important or meaningful" since that isn't really what the notability guidelines are about. We don't make articles on educational institutions based on their "meaningfulness". WP:NPROF is a notability guideline based on the idea that researchers are important to have in an encyclopedia because of their role in generating the knowledge that we use to write the encyclopedia - ie, that they are notable for the research they produce, in a way that WP:GNG does not account for well. Community colleges are extremely meaningful institutions, but they are primarily about teaching, not about research, so I would not expect "is a president (or similar)" of this type of institution to be a useful metric to determine "is influential in the history of ideas". -- asilvering (talk) 16:20, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for the explanation. I think it might be helpful to expand your borders or maybe just shift your language from "research" to something a bit broader like "scholarship" or even "scholarship and creative activities" to more broadly encompass how college and university faculty, staff, and students contribute to the world (outside of teaching). (This is on my mind because my current university has been changing language in policies over the past several years along these lines - it makes it easier for us to recognize the important contributions of colleagues in the humanities, in particular, whose work is not always characterized as "research.") ElKevbo (talk) 00:36, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
The more I mull over this, the more I lean towards completely getting rid of, or substantially narrowing, criteria 6. I, too, don't come to this conclusion lightly, as it will almost certainly require a substantial review of every article subject currently considered notable solely due to this criterion. I understand that the president of Harvard, Penn State, or Stanford could be considered de facto notable, but the odds are that they would already meet GNG, NPROF, or NPEOPLE criteria. But the president of, say, Dyersburg State Community College or Clear Creek Baptist Bible College, would probably not meet any notability guidelines other than NPROF criteria 6...and not to discount their accomplishments or the challenging nature of their work, but are they *really* notable just because they're the senior administrator of a small, two-year school with smaller enrollment than some high schools, or a bible college training a few dozen future Baptist ministers? As it stands, I think that the criteria casts too broad of a net.
Separately, if criteria 6 is retained or not substantially altered, it should at least be clarified to purposely include or exclude individuals in an acting or interim role. I would argue more confidently that these individuals should not be included in criteria 6 for notability, as they are, generally speaking, only placed in these positions in a temporary status purely for the sake of continuity and administrative functionality.
I think it would make more sense to subordinate it than to remove it entirely. As in, we should keep it as a "presumed notable" criterion (AfC reviewers should accept, NPP shouldn't draftify, PROD should probably be avoided) but not a "confirmed notable" (ie, rock-solid AfD argument) one. I say this from the point of view of an AfC reviewer who frequently sees incorrectly declined articles on academics. "At least notable enough to deserve an AfD" is a really useful metric for reviewers and patrollers to have, and those are easiest for generalist editors to apply when they're something clear-cut like "is the president of a university". -- asilvering (talk) 23:17, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't disagree with trying to find a middle ground between keeping it as-is and removing it, but how do you propose we create this subordination? I think it's a good idea, I'm just not sure of how to approach that, technically. Would it be appropriate to get rid of it but put a note in the General Notes stating something along the lines of, "Individuals holding the highest elected position at a major academic institution (e.g., a tier one research university) are likely to be considered notable, although merely holding this position at every institution of higher learning does not necessarily confer de facto notability. Individuals in these positions often meet notability through other WP:PROF, WP:PEOPLE, WP:AUTHOR, or WP:GNG guidelines." Just a thought, not sure if that is appropriate or fulfills the requirements. In the meantime, if there are no objections, I think we should go ahead and spell out that individuals in an interim or acting capacity are not considered notable unless meeting other guidelines. nf utvol (talk) 00:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Re: "I think we should go ahead and spell out that individuals in an interim or acting capacity are not considered notable unless meeting other guidelines." - yes, I agree with this, I think we should do that. Everyone here seems to be in agreement on this point unless I have missed something. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 14:38, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
Based on the discussion above regarding notability of interim/acting university presidents and the applicability of community/junior colleges to the guideline, I propose the following re-write of criterion 6. Please vote below or provide feedback as needed, thanks!
6. The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or society.
For documenting that a person has held such a post (but not for a judgement of whether or not the institution or society is a major one), publications of the institution where the post is held are considered a reliable source.
Criterion 6 may be satisfied, for example, if the person has held the post of president or chancellor (or vice-chancellor in countries where this is the top academic post) of a major research university, director of a highly regarded, notable academic independent research institute or center (which is not a part of a university), president of a notable national or international scholarly society, etc. Appointment to such a post in an acting or interim status is not generally sufficient to qualify under Criterion 6 alone.
Lesser administrative posts (provost, dean, department chair, etc.) are generally not sufficient to qualify under Criterion 6 alone, although exceptions are possible on a case-by-case basis (e.g., a provost of a Carnegie Classification R1 Research University may sometimes qualify).
Heads of institutes and centers devoted to promoting pseudo-science and marginal or fringe theories, two-year colleges (including community colleges, junior colleges, and preparatory schools), or non-accredited or non-degree granting institutions are generally not covered by Criterion 6; they may still be notable under other criteria of this guideline or under the general WP:BIOorWP:N guidelines.
Understood and noted. I actually would prefer to get rid of altogether myself (consider that my vote, I suppose), but I assumed that refining the criterion would be preferable to the group...perhaps I'm mistaken, though, and it's just better to get rid of it completely! nf utvol (talk) 00:42, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
The guideline is clear that it's only the top level that is likely to count for "inherent" notability, but I'm wondering what people think about someone who has held multiple one-step-from-top positions, like a dean (in a school where that is equivalent to something greater than "department chair"), a VP, a VC (where the top is "chancellor"), etc.
For the curious, this question was prompted by Draft:Muhammadou M. O. Kah. I haven't gone through the sources for him yet and expect he meets WP:GNG in any case. But I'm wondering if "multiple high-level academic positions" ought to count for "notable enough to deserve a full AfD rather than an AfC decline", even if it isn't an inherently watertight AfD argument. -- asilvering (talk) 19:26, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
NPROF is a special sort of favoritism because Wikipedians are over-educated. Full professors, who aren't really notable outside their niche field, are presumed notable just on the say-so of their employer. This is a bad practice because it takes a subject passing GNG to write a sufficient article. Expanding that presumption as you mention is something many Wikipedians would foolishly support but the idea remains unwise. Regarding the draft which brought you here, ambassadors are not presumed notable either, and we don't simply take the say-so of their employers for notability's sake. Chris Troutman (talk)19:39, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
I am highly skeptical that a proposal along these lines would be accepted by a significant number of editors. My read on the situation is that we largely assume that college and university presidents/chancellors/whatever are notable because they almost certainly have had enough things published about them to satisfy WP:GNG. I don't think that one can make the same argument about deans, provosts, etc. ElKevbo (talk) 22:37, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Persons at the dean/vice- level are commonly appointed based upon their administrative abilities within the institution, not their work having achieved notice beyond the institution. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:23, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I am totally cool with that. A president of a major institution is likely going to be notable via the GNG anyway. Deans can make no special claim to notability, and neither can heads or chairs. But I got another one for you, for a later discussion perhaps--that "named chair" thing. My buddy is a named chair, but he's just as non-notable as me--he just got lucky. And if we're talking named chair at Harvard or whatever, that's most likely someone who's already notable either via other criteria of PROF or via the GNG. Drmies (talk) 02:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
I think that no, having held multiple low level administrative positions does not satisfy the requirement. It just means that they are good administrators, not necessarily notable academic leaders. Qflib (talk) 02:36, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
Well, maybe they're just administrators, not necessarily good ones. It doesn't take much to keep that kind of job once you have it. Drmies (talk) 02:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
I agree with the general consensus here; most who are WP:NPROF already have more than enough academic awards etc to qualify if they are going to. For certain Dean is not notable by itself. Similarly vice- level except when the top is titular (which is common). I am not sure about Provost, as they are often the top of the academic ladder, second only to the President. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:54, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
A provost at an American school is often synonymous with a vice president of academic affairs. In my experience they are virtually the same thing. Qflib (talk) 04:48, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
All in all, these examples show that serving as a provost does not automatically mean that the subject is academically notable. However, I would expect that someone who becomes a provost might satisfy other notability criteria... Qflib (talk) 19:41, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Would this academic pass?
I'm looking at historian Sally Marks. She has this obituary but it's the only obituary I could find so I'm not sure I can easily argue a WP:BASIC pass - I'd need one more. Her resume looks like it should be a pass somewhere (prize winning author, widely cited on Versailles etc. etc.) but I'm not so familiar with the WP:NACADEMIC standard and would like some feedback before I write an article on this. FOARP (talk) 12:17, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
I didn't find much else about her in a cursory search but you can argue she passes NPROF/ANYBIO for her George Louis Beer Prize, or passes NAUTHOR for Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference for which she won said prize. Chris Troutman (talk)16:14, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks folks. I'm not one to reference WP:CSB too much but this appears to be a case - the male historians I've worked on in the 1918 Armistice/Versailles Treaty space all have articles and plentiful biography/obituary data, but not this female one whose work does not appear less impactful. FOARP (talk) 16:35, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
Ah! It seems I spoke too soon - Sally Marks requested that her article be deleted back in 2016 because they thought having a Wikipedia article was damaging and anyway the article wasn't up to snuff (looking at the corresponding FR wiki article, it appears the problems may originate on PRABOOK). I think the obituaries, and the fact that the Marks is now deceased, provides a decent reason to reverse the WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE and create a new article without at least the accuracy problems. FOARP (talk) 17:02, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
I think she does pass WP:PROF#C1 but I'm less convinced by #C2 because the award is for only one book, and authors with only one notable book (not her) tend not to be notable themselves. The clearer case is WP:AUTHOR. JSTOR has plenty of reviews of multiple books by her. So anyway, yes, she is notable. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:11, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks everyone, you can see the article here: Sally Marks. Probably I should add a bibliography but, to be brutally honest, I never read the things and they are tiresome to write. FOARP (talk) 08:37, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
David and Youknowwhoistheman contributed also. I know this kind of article is not so far from a stub but I like getting something that still tells you something about the subject, and that to me makes all the difference. FOARP (talk) 23:09, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Point b mentions that fringe and pseudo-science journals should not be included, but there are by some measure over 45000 academic journals, most of which have editors, most of whom are not notable. I think there should be some more clarity on what counts as a major well-established journal. Perhaps some combination of age, impact factor or association with important works, authors or events (though the last is a little circular). WikiNukalito (talk) 20:12, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
Notable?
Just came across a page about an academic publisher, Jan_Velterop. It was flagged in 2016, saying "The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for academics." I tend to agree. The Scopus link on the article says that his work's been cited over 8,000 times but I can't tell whether that's high or low, and other criteria don't seem to apply at all. I can't see how to make a case for GNG either - I see one interview with him on someone's blog, but that's it for independent sources. And yet it hasn't been acted on for all this time (more than 8 years). Can anyone shed any light, or offer an opinion? Or should I just nominate it for deletion? I can't see how to improve it. All advice appreciated. Qflib (talk) 04:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
After a quick look, I have a couple of thoughts, but I'm not sure what the ultimate answer to your question would be. It looks to me like his notability would not be judged by most of the criteria here, but in terms of his possible influence on the business side of scientific publishing. The page claims that he played a significant role in the origin of open access which, if true, should mean that there would be significant coverage of his role in the history of open access. I think that notability would rest upon whether or not there is significant secondary source notice of that. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:12, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Thank you very much, that's helpful. I did have a look at this area for just a bit, but I think I'll take some more time and dig deeper to see if I can find some sources. Qflib (talk) 03:00, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
He's not an academic, but a publisher, so I've removed the "academic" tag (after 9 years). He looks notable to me, as a publisher. Johnbod (talk) 04:19, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
I thought about doing that too, but was unsure. Thank you for boldly editing. I don't have enough experience with notability of publishers to tell whether he is notable or not. Would that be assessed under GNG? Qflib (talk) 17:38, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Curbon7 (talk) 22:21, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
