Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive June 2024
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Hello everyone, I have submitted the Virgo interferometer article to FAC recently, and it has not attracted too much attention yet (perhaps due to the technicality ?). I would be happy if anyone was willing to take a look; you can find the candidacy page here. Thanks! Thuiop (talk) 07:17, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
Nomination of GRSI model for deletion
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/GRSI model until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.- The discussion is over. "The result was merge to Alternatives to general relativity.". JRSpriggs (talk) 02:01, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Academic notability
Hi everyone! I usually write articles on physics topics, but I've been thinking about starting to write a bit more about people as well. For this reason I'm trying to get a feel for crierion 1 on Wikipedia:Notability (academics). What exactly qualifies as "highly cited". I've asked this question in the Teahouse, but I think its better to ask here since this community would have a better feel towards this physics niche case. The cases presented here are not obviously super stars since I'm also interested in what the lower bound is on this criterion.
For example, consider the following Professors at the University of Oxford:
- Andrei Olegovich Starinets: He has a MASSIVE impact on AdS/CFT hydrodynamics with his top cited papers have 2.9k, 1.7k, 1.6k, 1.2k citations each, which is pretty insane, so I'm baffled how he doesn't already have a page.
- Subir Sarkar: Cosmologist who is now Emiratus Professor at Oxford with a non-collaboration paper with 1.3k citations. His impact is however more due to his fundamental contributions to various collaborations such as IceCube and the Particle Theory Group and his most cited papers are from there. This is exemplified by the fact that his retirement had the department hold a 2-day conference called Subirfest https://subirfest.web.ox.ac.uk/home.
- John March-Russell: Discovered the axiverse (1.8k citations) (this is a very big thing due to the increadible popularity of axions to string theory), and has another important paper on FIMP thermal freeze with 1.1k citations.
- Joseph P. Conlon: He discovered the Large Volume Scenario with over 1k citations (this is the second most important mechanism for stabilising moduli in string theory, with the first most famous one being KKLT. These mechanisms are genuinely vital in constructing realistic string theory models and so are super important and comes up in standard string theory textbooks for example) and is a prominent string phenomenologists.
I'm not necessarily aiming to create articles for all (or even most or any) of them, cause, well, effort. But understanding if they are all indeed notable would help me in the future. Any thoughts? Thanks!!! OpenScience709 (talk) 10:06, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
- In my personal opinion, the notability criteria adopted for biographies is far below common sense. A large number of citations is a sign that the work itself is notable and we should invest articles about that work. The citations do not make the author notable. A notable author will have a biography written by someone other than a wikipedia editor, eg a historian or a scientist writing about history. The remaining criteria are even weaker, leading to many many Wikipedia vanity "resumes". I don't think these are interesting or knowledge, sorry. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:28, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
- I can agree with the sentiment that "The citations do not make the author notable" per se. But the issue with making the bar so high that every wikipedia biography needs to have a whole biography by a historian or scientist writing about history may be too strict. Mainly because these biographies usually only come about when someone retires, or when they die (or later), despite them being notable for a while beforehand. There is utility in these more contemporary figures which are notable in their respective fields, but no one yet bothered to write their history (since its still being written). On the other hand, using Wikipedia as "vanity resumes" is indeed annoying. Exactly why I'm trying to figure out the bar for genuine notability. OpenScience709 (talk) 00:17, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
- Just to be clear: I am not advocating that the bar be changed (see Don Quixote). Rather I am suggesting a way to make choices on which articles to invest in. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:06, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
- I can agree with the sentiment that "The citations do not make the author notable" per se. But the issue with making the bar so high that every wikipedia biography needs to have a whole biography by a historian or scientist writing about history may be too strict. Mainly because these biographies usually only come about when someone retires, or when they die (or later), despite them being notable for a while beforehand. There is utility in these more contemporary figures which are notable in their respective fields, but no one yet bothered to write their history (since its still being written). On the other hand, using Wikipedia as "vanity resumes" is indeed annoying. Exactly why I'm trying to figure out the bar for genuine notability. OpenScience709 (talk) 00:17, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
- It's really not possible to say anything based on citation counts alone, without at the very least comparing to typical profiles for the field. XOR'easter (talk) 02:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)