Wikipedia talk:Notability (scholars)

Why a new guideline

Watchers of WT:PROF may have noticed the recent trend of proposals for even minor changes to the guideline to quickly evolve into discussions of major overhauls that go nowhere. This points to an underlying dissatisfaction in the community. I believe that's because, although PROF is a "good" guideline in the sense that it is regularly cited and has stood the test of time, it is not good at producing the biographical coverage of academics that most of us want to see.

Unfortunately, at this point it has become nearly impossible to make significant changes to policies and guidelines. Deference to consensus is the price of entry into our community for good reasons, but it can sometimes have the side effect of unwarranted conservatism. I think previous attempts to overhaul PROF have petered out for this reason, not because they were bad ideas or didn't carry a lot of support.

Starting afresh with a page that is not marked as carrying consensus allows us to explore with new approaches without having to hold lengthy discussions on every change. The idea here is not to quickly write a replacement for PROF and then hold an RfC. That wouldn't work. But if we can come up with a persuasive arguments here, they can be cited in AfDs and other notability discussions. This goes back to how WP:PROF and other guidelines were written in the first place: an organic process of consensus-building. Eventually, if the alternatives here do get that consensus, we could think about promoting it to a guideline, or just using it as a basis for modifying PROF. – Joe (talk) 16:38, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

@David Eppstein, DGG, SusunW, Megalibrarygirl, Rosiestep, and TonyBallioni: I'm wary of inviting comment from the whole community at such an early stage, but since you've all been interested in reforming PROF in the past, I'd welcome your thoughts on this approach. – Joe (talk) 16:47, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

My standard has always been moving towards something easily measurable and objective. I’m aware that there are criticisms of this, but one of the main advantages of PROF as it currently stands is that it is a relatively straightforward criteria. One of the disadvantages is that it was written primarily using the academic terminology of the United States and Canada, which leads to confusion both on the side of people from these regions not recognizing significant scholars from outside of North America, and as some of the recent conflict has shown, non-North Americans not understanding the academic hierarchy of North America and making claims in AfDs that are false, but understandable (i.e. claiming a post doc with an assistant professor offer was tenured...)

I don’t think we can achieve consensus for a major reform, especially in the current climate, but we can work to globalize some of the language, which would help everyone’s objectives here. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:01, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

One size fits all (a strict numeric cutoff) for citations is definitely the wrong way to go. Different fields have different citation patterns. And in many parts of the humanities, citations are not even relevant. It's book reviews that you want to look at. But taking a step back, your proposal looks like a slimmed-down version of our existing academic notability guidelines — it uses criteria that are qualitatively similar but removes some and simplifies some. Which problem cases would this work better for, and why? And how do you imagine you could get such a proposal agreed to by the more general Wikipedia notability fanatics who will only accept GNG-style notability? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:03, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Broadly speaking, I agree with David here, though, I do think the last attempt to get rid of PROF for the GNG failed remarkably quickly, so there is more support for the SNG than I think many realize. That being said, defeating a proposal to make PROF subject to the GNG is quite different than getting a new criteria passed. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:10, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Please don't get hung up on the individual criteria. I'm not attached to any of them, they were just to get the ball rolling, and I'm sure you all have better ideas than I do.

What I want to do is develop a simplified set of criteria that are more inclusive and easier to apply than the current ones. By not explicitly seeking prior consensus, we can see what arguments actually work at AfD and avoid lengthy discussions over the details.

The GNG-fanatacism is a problem. I was planning to try to articulate an argument along the lines of academic biography being an area like WP:NGEO or WP:NSPORT, where Wikipedia also functions as an almanac/gazetteer and not just an encyclopaedia. But I realise that might be controversial to the point of being unworkable. – Joe (talk) 17:15, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: My idea is not to get it passed. At least not any time in the near future. I think the everything-requires-an-RfC mentality is stifling us in some key areas, when in fact all our best policies were written as advice and then gradually obtained consensus. – Joe (talk) 17:18, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree 100% that the everything needs an RfC mentality is harmful and affects our guidelines and practices in a negative way. My view on policy reform generally is that it happens slowly in these type of conversations, in AfDs, and as practice changes, so should guidelines. I'm about to go much less active for the next few weeks because of some professional exams, but thank you for starting it. I think you having this discussion is a step in the right direction. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:22, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Actually part of the reason I thought of this was reading you saying something similar elsewhere and thinking that, yes, actually, discontent with PROF has been building for quite a long time. It just hasn't been translating into change as it should. Good luck with the exams! – Joe (talk) 17:24, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

I agree with Tony and David. A numerical citation cutofff even as one of three options is inappropriate, because of the differences between fields. (though in practice in the biomed science we use something approximating one or two papers with over 100 citations, is many other fields it is much harder to determine--and it increases over time as more journals come into existence. But if we used this as a general number, almost noone in mathematics would be notable, and if we used a number suitable for mathematics, we'd get a great many totally non notable physicians--a field where people publish many very minor papers partly as PR for their practice ) As I mentioned in the general discussion, I would support David's proposal for all tenured associate professors or equivalent in a major research university or equivalent status college, or my suggestion of all full professors or equivalent in a research university or equivalent status college, but there is no realistic chance that it would pass. (and Tony, more UK universities are adopting the US system--altho it is not likely to change in France. But we in practice do know the equivalents. and could put that into the guideline as a note). As a minimum 4th criterion: national level award, elected membership/fellowship in the most important professional societies, and president of a national society. These deal with those fields where publication history is typically sparse, or notability is by being a truly distinguished teacher, or a person is not in the traditional career pattern.

A more general reason for not starting over is that we have an extensive history of interpetation of the current rules, and are able to predict on that basis. It would take years to do the same for a different standard --this, in fact, is why a lot of the notability rules (and some others) read the way they do.

As for proposing it to start people thinking, yes, I like to do things that way also. But if done now, would it jus confuse the issue? What might make sense is to develop it as an alternative if there seems to develop a consensus to make the sort of changes suggested at the main discussion.

BTW, I'm going to start arguing "presumed" means , no realistic chance of finding evidence that the subject is not notable, not just "I couldnt find the citations" . DGG ( talk ) 17:34, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

But I want to think if there are any redundant ones that we could remove. DGG ( talk ) 17:34, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Joe for starting this discussion. I have read with both dismay and hope the recent discussions on Notability in general and PROF. Hope because some people are recognizing the issues our guidelines have in promoting institutionalized bias. Dismay in that statements like "I suppose if you're a man you may have never noticed that notable men have outnumbered notable women for all of history"[1] and the whole idea that the size of a publication's circulation can in any way determine its reliability show how entrenched biases are. The second is laughable, as clearly the circulation of the Daily Mail outweighs Baton Rouge's The Advocate, a Pulitzer Prize winning local paper. Our reliable sources guides would be far more "reliable" if we focused on the most reliable sources of any community/group. If the most reliable newspaper in their town, a feminist journal, an ethnic studies journal, etc. indicates that a person is notable in say Bolivia, why would we question that?

We have zero way of knowing if notable men outnumbered notable women over time. More men were noted in the historic record but that does not mean more men were notable, because women were not the focus of academic study until the 1970s, nor were the authentic histories of ethnic groups, indigenous people, or colonized civilizations. From Plato, academics focused on power relationships, but women scholars in the 1970s realized that images of women appeared throughout history and reasoned that it was probable that their images were preserved because they were indeed notable. From that observation, they formed a new field of study and began adding women back into the historic record. We've had about 50 years (the first women's study program in the US was launched in 1970) to scratch the surface of communities and diverse society. Obviously not long enough to compete with thousands of years of academic study focused on brilliant heroes single-handedly discovering new things and impacting the world.

As the Foundation has clearly stated that our objectives are to be a global encyclopedia, we cannot continue with guidelines that are both US centric and reinforce biases. In one of the discussions it was pointed out that in the Netherlands most academics complete their careers as associate professors. This is certainly true in Latin America and the Caribbean and is indicated in studies I have read of the Pacific and Southeast Asia. (I admit I have little knowledge of Africa.) In that regard, I think David's proposal to change to all "tenured associate professors" makes far more sense. I also think we cannot choose a number of citations (those are inapplicable for the most part to the social sciences and law), as they vary from place to place, and certainly are not equal for places like Latin America where few scholars' publications are listed in aggregator's statistics. We should be writing guidelines which allow the most notable of the most disadvantaged groups to be included. Look at what constitutes a notable professor in Bolivia, Bulgaria, Fiji, Haiti, Laos, and Niger and build from there. Were we to do that, it would be rare that a notable person in the most advantaged countries would ever be excluded. SusunW (talk) 15:26, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Although "all tenured associate professors" would be a simpler limit, I'm not sure it would actually be a good idea. For one thing, even many other English-speaking countries use other ranks (is associate professor = reader or = senior reader?). For another, there are plenty of associate professors about whom we can say approximately nothing and plenty of people at lower levels or outside the regular-ranks faculty of universities who have made much more significant scholarly accomplishments.

I have recently been serving on a committee on my campus that vets proposed distinguished professor appointments for whether they are really at the distinguished professor level. Early in my service, we were more or less using society fellowships as a proxy for this decision: national academy membership for the higher of two titles, fellow of specialized societies for the lower of the two. More recently, except for two things, the recommendation letters and where we set the thresholds, the criteria are more or less indistinguishable from the ones we currently use in WP:PROF: a combination of highly cited publications or well-reviewed books, major awards or society fellowships, distinguished titles elsewhere, etc. We have the same choice here, of picking something like tenure to use as a proxy, or to judge a combination of criteria ourselves. Judging for ourselves has the advantage that we can tune our preferences to meet our needs, and the disadvantage of making it difficult for Wikipedia editors unfamiliar with academic standards to judge the criteria accurately.

The issue of how to set these criteria to reduce discrimination against women has come up explicitly on the same campus committee. Some discrimination is unavoidable because we reflect how the greater world sees these achievements and the world today has plenty of discrimination. We recently changed how we handle the distinguished professor title for people already on the faculty, from being a separate distinction to something that happens as part of the regular review process (if you are promoted to "above scale", you automatically get the distinguished professor title), and there was some discussion of whether that would help a greater number of women get the title. Ultimately we rejected that rationale because the only differences we could find between the earlier decisions on distinguished vs above scale came down to age (because hiring for women has improved over the years, professors who have been professors longer tend to be men).

As seen in recent discussions, the much bigger issue is how this criterion fits in with GNG. Clearly, there are academics who pass GNG but for whom it is difficult to discern a pass of PROF (a case in point is my most recent article creation, Anna Stafford). And there are academics who pass PROF but not yet GNG (the case of nobelist Donna Strickland may have been that way before her Nobel). So the question is, for people known only as academics, which logical combination of criteria should be used? I prefer a disjunction (you can get by with one or the other), but some people might prefer that one has to pass both. GNG-fanatics over on the talk page for WP:PROF would have it be that you always have to pass GNG, and that PROF itself is completely redundant (if you pass GNG you pass and if you don't pass GNG then your pass on PROF doesn't count for anything). Any suggested change to PROF needs to be seen in that light. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:13, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

To my mind, PROF is a separate criteria that works for BLPs and should remain so, if we can find ways to make it less subject to systemic biases. It rarely is usable for historic figures who were not part of the power elite. If people qualify for an article under GNG there is no need to apply PROF. If they qualify under PROF, there is no need to apply GNG. SusunW (talk) 17:43, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

They should be separate, but both requiring independent sources. Where GNG requires "significant coverage" with no other critera, one can satisfy PROF (and other SNGs) with few sources that report on very specific criteria. -- Netoholic @ 18:24, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

I disagree with this interpretation, as stated above. Numerous sectors of society are routinely still and have clearly in the past not been covered in truly independent sources. Historic representation of blacks was focused in the black press and journals, women in feminist newspapers and journals, Latinos in the latin press and journals, academics in their publications, etc. If an arm of the media is deemed sufficiently notable, their determination of who is notable from within the focus of their community, is sufficiently notable for our purposes. SusunW (talk) 19:04, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

WP:Verifiability#Notability: If no reliable independent sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it. I'm sorry, but without independent sources about an academic, Wikipedia drifts into WP:NOTWHOSWHO. -- Netoholic @ 19:14, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Polarized thinking, i.e. left/right, black/white, my way or the highway are not the way to evaluate complex issues. Your reluctance Netoholic, here and elsewhere to accept that the community by consensus does not accept your interpretation should give you pause. I have no intention of getting into an editing war with you, I simply removed your text and asked you to take it to this talk page. As you added it back, it is clear that you do not intend to discuss or accept an interpretation by the community. SusunW (talk) 20:37, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

It is not charming that you have decided that the same wrong arguments need repeating in yet another venue. --JBL (talk) 19:28, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

And I see another academic (per your User page) has decided that our academic notability guidelines need to be less restrictive. If a bunch of sports people started to push for relaxing WP:NSPORTS beneath the level of core policy requirements, people would become alarmed. -- Netoholic @ 20:22, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

@Netoholic: What I think is that you should stop disrupting this conversation (in which I am not a participant, and about which I do not have any strong feelings), because that is extremely poor behavior. If you would like to continue your campaign of casting insane personal aspersions about quality editors and making the same clueless arguments over and over again, I invite you to do it here instead. --JBL (talk) 21:29, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

I support this idea. As SusunW said, the media in the past and still today does not sufficiently cover people outside of their narrow purview. It's like pulling out teeth to find sources for people that are clearly notable in reality, but not within the made up world of media. I am certainly open to ideas that would further the cause of providing guidance for notability despite a dearth of sources in the media. With that said, we should keep in mind what that Wikipedia is first and foremost, an encyclopedia. While we're fiddling with the notability policy, we should avoid anything that would be inconsistent with Wikipedia:Verifiability. Transcendence (talk) 22:10, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Some thoughts:

1. I think WP:PROF has been a very good thing for the encyclopedia. Being able to write about people because their work is important helps us be a better reference.
2. I have slowly become more convinced that the "WP:PROF is too strict" argument has substantial merit. It does rather come across that, say, an average professional actor is wiki-notable while an average professional scientist is not. (None of the proposals I have seen to address this, like granting wiki-notability to tenured faculty at major institutions, would make me, personally, notable. I'm fine with that.)
3. I'm not yet convinced about the "career trajectory"/"promoting the Great Man of Science trope" argument. We can, and do, write about collaborations. Moreover, by providing an avenue to wiki-notability for individuals not already lauded as Great Men, WP:PROF has quite possibly been diluting that trope. Without it, we'd be worse off: more reliant on systemically biased media, and less able to overcome that bias. Maybe we could use an essay of advice on how to write about scientific organizations and collaborative projects. That sounds like a worthwhile effort, but not exactly the same question that this draft is focused on.
4. I've seen newspapers and magazines mess up a person's title, but I've never seen a press release from a person's own institution do that.
5. I concur with the concerns raised above about setting an exact citation threshold. No one size fits all. A citation metric can open the door, but a low one cannot by itself close it.
6. As I've said elsewhere, I do think that there's a "hard cases make bad law" aspect to all this. Discussions about new guidelines, or making big revisions to existing guidelines, get started when people's emotions are running high and a small number of examples are on everybody's mind, whether or not those examples are remotely representative. Thus, big changes get proposed and debated and dramatized, even if the vast majority of problems are things we already handle routinely. (We semi-protect pages, discard obvious sockpuppets, skip over non-policy-based !votes, etc.) Accordingly, and with the usual end-of-term crunch, I probably won't be participating much here, but I wish everybody luck!

Cheers, XOR'easter (talk) 22:42, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Personally I think we have too many of these attempts to get around GNG already. We should not be weakening notability we should be tightening it so we do not have even more one line stubs.Slatersteven (talk) 09:53, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

@Slatersteven: One of the aims of this draft is to bring notability guidelines for academics in line with the GNG. PROF is currently one of the few (perhaps only?) SNGs that explicitly claims to be "an alternative to the general notability guideline". The idea here is to do what other SNGs do, and give guidance on the application of the GNG to a specialised domain with its own quirks of sourcing, shortcuts, etc.

As for weakening, I think it's widely accepted that PROF is actually stricter than the GNG and, by extension, most of the other SNGs. Worse, it's strict in a highly arbitrary way, meaning some subjects (in certain fields, from certain places, etc.) get a much easier "pass" than others. – Joe (talk) 21:49, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

And I think PROF is over used and in fact too weak, what does cat 1 even mean? lots of cites? a huge amount of cites? 1,000,000,000 "this bloke is a loony" cites? Does it even refer (in truth) to a cite count?). As I said we just end up with one line stubs, little more (in fact no more) that a directory.Slatersteven (talk) 11:07, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Relationship to the GNG

Seeing this, I think it is important to understand, broadly, that there are four states of "notability" for any topic on WP - that is, how the article appears to be notable, not whether it is or not.

1. Appears non-notable at all - This is the completely unsourced article, or for a BLP, one that looks and feels like a CV with no clear sign of any importance. Such articles generally are suspect under CSD criteria.
2. Presumed notable by an SNG - The article may not have secondary or independent or third-party sourced, but it can be shown by some type of reliable source that it meets any of the SNG guidelines. We presume notability of this topic so an article can be created, given time within the open wiki to be developed without a deadline. Such articles can be challenged at AFD if someone does a deep search for sources at relevant research facilities and finds nothing that can substantiate the article further; but that onus is on the one that wants to nominate for deletion.
3. Presumed notable by the GNG - This is where there does appear to be coverage in secondary sources independent of the topic, but still leaves open the presumption of notability due to have few or how questionable the sources are. These will be even more difficult to challenge via AFD as the SNG case, as the presence of some secondary sources likely means there are more, but still, it is possible that a topic can only be documented by a handful of RSes and never can be expanded. More often here, the challenge is whether the sources are sufficient for this type of notability, if the coverage is really "in-depth", and so forth.
4. Clearly notable - We are never ever going to send an article like World War II or Albert Einstein to AFD - the amount of sourcing and importance from those sources is clear. We ideally want all article to get to this point, but the heat death of the universe might happen first. Eg we know this is an unattainable goal, but any topic presumed notable we hope can get there.

To academics and the current NPROF: If the 9 criteria there were treated as any of the other SNGs, that they lead to presumed notability, and noting important that an SNG can be met without independent sourcing, then there's no practical change to any of this. I see no problem with the details of how the 9 criteria should be implemented - I read that section in how NCORP is more about how to consider sources to avoid self-promotion, and knowing that NPROF has been gamed in the past, that's fine too. It's just that right now, the mantra from the other discussion is "it passed the criteria, it is forever notable", which for some of these criteria may simply not be true. The criteria are well chosen to likely assure independent and secondary sourcing, and because that sets these academcis in "Presumed notable by the SNG", they shouldn't be touched unless it is proven additional sourcing cannot be found. (I fully understand the fear that changing NPROF to this could cause a mass AFD of professors, but I really disagree that could happen without being an AN-type of disruption).

I know separately there's a different issue of what "primary/secondary", "independent" and "third-party" is from some academic fields and how WP uses those terms, and particularly as these terms are critical in AFD discussions, I think we need to have all of our PAG emphasize acknowledge these differences, but affirm that WP uses these specific meanings, so that everyone is on the same level when AFD comes around. PSTS, even as part of pillar policy NOR seems to be disagreed on. I would asset NPROF as an presumed-notability SNG would not be affected by how these are defined as the process is still there to protect articles that have a reasonable shot at expansion. --Masem (t) 00:13, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

This is great, Masem – mind if I pinch some of the wording for the project page? It articulates the relationship between SNGs and GNGs really well.

WP:NCORP is good to bring up here because it recently managed to get a fairly major overhaul to make it stricter. Following your logic above, this made no difference to the real notability standard: anything that could be included under the GNG before still can be if people put the effort into sourcing. What it was was a recognition that, in a subject prone to abusive editing, we should be more conservative in presuming notability. I'd argue PROF is in the opposite situation: it is an area where we have a documented problem of under-inclusion and very low risk of abuse, so we should be more liberal in presuming notability. That is where the practical change in a new guideline could be. – Joe (talk) 06:26, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Feel free to work from that.

One thing that I understand is that NPROF was started because there were academics trying to use WP as a CV, so it was necessary to curtail that, so NPROF was developed to make sure academics were exception to be included. But that was back in mid-00s. Today, that's less a problem and we have more tools to catch this, even though it still happens to some degree (primarily from SE asian countries). But otherwise, we're in the case where particularly compared to celebrities and sports, academics seem to be significantly under-represented. So it makes sense to have criteria for presumed notability so that we can have articles and encourage improvements, but still keeping an eye for those that may be trying to game the system. --Masem (t) 15:53, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

It is not our place to make up for the shortcomings of the media. I can think of many professions that are more deserving of not than "professor of alternative chemical use" at the "university of do as you like, California". If someone is not noted they are not notable, we should not reduce out notability to make up for then fact we live in a society where having big tits is seen as more notable than saving a child life. Nor do I want to live in one where giving lectures about "the impact of Westphalian sheep dip use on the lower Saharan fishing industry" is either.Slatersteven (talk) 09:58, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Moved

Hi!

It seems that the presence of this guideline in Wikipedia space was confusing to some editors who don't carefully look at the tags on the top. [2] I WP:BOLDly moved it to userspace so as to avoid further confusion. Hope that's okay!

jps (talk) 13:21, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

@ජපස: I think one person's (possible) misunderstanding is no reason to move this draft, which has had input from several editors other than myself, to a much less visible location in my userspace. {{Draft proposal}} should make it clear to most that this is far from a policy or guideline. – Joe (talk) 17:03, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

How long would you say that drafts should remain in Wikipedia space before they are either promoted or listed as rejected? jps (talk) 17:17, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

I think this proposal is moribund. It never had much support and now also has no momentum. It should be marked as a failed proposal rather than falsely proclaiming it to be something that is likely to become a guideline. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:19, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

From that tag at the top again, this is "a draft working towards a proposal... [it] has not yet reached the process of gathering consensus for adoption". I'd ask that you at least wait until it is proposed before calling it a failed or rejected proposal. Developing new advice on editing is one of the reasons Wikipedia space exists (see Category:Wikipedia draft proposals) and the fact that this page exists in projectspace isn't in itself any claim to acceptance. – Joe (talk) 21:12, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Drafts are not supposed to be left without any discussion or edits in-perpetuity either. WP:STALEDRAFT. So the question is, when do you think this will be ready to become a proposal? If you don't know when, I think it reasonable to put it in a less prominent space just in terms of search results. jps (talk) 15:36, 25 May 2020 (UTC)