Talk:List of members of the National Academy of Sciences

Red links
The red links don't mean the people's articles don't exist, just that the link is wrong. I made all the links just by putting brackets around all the names, and some ended up blue, some ended up red. -- brian0918 &#153;  28 June 2005 13:32 (UTC)


 * Yep, middle initials may be responsible for many red links. &mdash;Lowellian (reply) 10:00, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Explanation of my recent edit
I've changed lots of capital letters to lower-case in section headings. If they're proper names, then they should be capital. But what I found was that at least the first section used lower case. So it is possible that someone capitalized them out of a mistaken idea of Wikipedia conventions (see Manual of Style concerning section headings). If they should be capital, could someone (1) revert my edit, and (2) capitalize the one[s] that was[were] lower case, and (3) insert a commented-out explanation that they're capitalized because they're proper names (maybe also saying that in the edit summary)? Thanks. Michael Hardy 00:25, 13 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, the section headings should not be capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word. &mdash;Lowellian (reply) 10:00, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Grace Wahba was omitted from the applied mathematical sciences section

Michael Powell
Is the Michael Powell listed here under Applied mathematical sciences, the son of Colin Powell? If so, he should be linked as Michael Powell (politician). If not, he should be given a different designation like Michael Powell (mathematician). I'm fairly certain he isn't any of the other people listed at Michael Powell. SteveCrook 03:21, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I renamed him Michael Powell (mathematician) and added him to the list eventhough there is no article about him. Kjaergaard 04:35, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks. SteveCrook 05:18, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Splitting it up
The page is unwieldy in length. I propose splitting it into its constituent sub-sections. Thoughts? --LQ 03:45, 30 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Let's split it up by alphabet and put TOC links to it. Chris 22:02, 11 February 2007 (UTC)


 * A year alter I come back to this ... It's currently organized by subdiscipline, so it would make more sense to do it that way, don't you think? --lquilter 17:05, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

All right, I'm doing it. To retain consistency I have created two subpage templates for references and standard top-page text. These are at
 * List of members of the National Academy of Sciences/Intro
 * List of members of the National Academy of Sciences/refcats

We should probably also develop a subject infobox}} that can be transcluded onto each page as internal navigation. --[[User:Lquilter|Lquilter (talk) 18:03, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
 * so how is one to see if any given person is included? We need an alphabetic list, instead of this, or in addition to it.DGG (talk) 15:27, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

2 questions:
2 salient questions: why exclude deceased members? And why aren't the lists sortable? Both changes would make the information more complete and accessible to readers. Excluding deceased members minimizes the member's achievements, and necessitates constant gardening as current members die. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:40, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know why we need to remove deceased members. Perhaps we could mark them with an asterisk instead? The only rationale I can think of is to avoid the lists getting too long, but that doesn't seem like it needs to be an issue, since it's already broken up into several pages. Natureium (talk) 21:34, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Rename
The name of this article seems to originate from the times when English wikipedia only dealt with the United States. The name should definitely be adapted now to e.g. "List of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences". The same applies to Category:Lists of members of the National Academy of Sciences itself, and all the pages below it. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 08:57, 29 January 2019 (UTC)