User:Alvonruff

Al von Ruff is the founder and editor of the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

=Notes on the Submission of Genre-Related Author Articles= One of the current reference shortfalls in the SF genre is the lack of a current version of Contemporary Authors. A Contemporary Author reference focuses on biographical information, not bibliographic information, and the last version produced in the field was Reginald's Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II, published in 1979. The ISFDB is a bibliographic resource, and previous attempts to add biographical information via its associated wiki have been sparse and unstructured. Efforts to improve the biographical support in the ISFDB are typically met with the question: "Why are we not using Wikipedia? It is specifically designed for this kind of work." And the answer to this question is a simple one: Wikipedia is a hostile environment for the creation of genre author biographies for all but the most elite authors. Only 8% of ISFDB authors have a Wikipedia article, and attempts to add articles for the most notable of the missing authors is met with fierce resistance. Wikipedia, in its early days, was a relatively nerdy place, and most of those elite 8% authors were introduced during that time, and have been "grandfathered" with respect to adherence to more modern guidelines for notability and references.

If you are interested in the creation of genre-related author articles on Wikipedia, this page documents details on how to determine the relative notability of an SF author, and whether it will be a waste of time to attempt to create an article for a particular author. It also contains advice on dealing with the most common strategies employed by Wikipedia editors to kill your article.

=Notability= Wikipedia notability has been fairly subjective with respect to SF authors, with numerous authors (and the ISFDB itself) nominated for elimination due to lack of notability. Even though Wikipedia specifically states that notability is subjective, it is desirable to make the initial evaluation process more objective, which allows one to make a notability determination before investing time in writing an article.

Historical Perspective on Wikipedia Notability
Wikipedia's definition of notability has moved significantly since the inception of the concept in mid-2003. Prior to that date, there were no notability requirements, and numerous articles on genre-related authors were introduced prior to that date. The definitions that followed were:
 * August 2003: Published authors, editors, and photographers who have written books with an audience of 10,000 or more or periodicals with a circulation of 10,000 or more. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have documented circulation requirements for both novels and shortfiction, such that qualification for SFWA membership would fulfill the notability requirement. The notability definition includes the word book implying that qualifying works for Wikipedia should be novels or collections. Nonetheless, this requirement is highly objective.
 * January 2004: Published authors, editors, and photographers who have written books with an audience of 5,000 or more or in periodicals with a circulation of 5,000 or more. This halved the circulation requirement.
 * January 2007: Published authors, editors and photographers who received multiple independent reviews of or awards for their work. This is also entirely objective, and makes it quite easy to generate lists of qualified authors. It does imply that the qualification for an award is a win, not necessarily a nomination.
 * March 2007: Wikipedia moves to a more abstract definition of notability, with wording very close to the modern definition, in particular:
 * The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them. This wording opened the door for award nominations.
 * The person is regarded as an important figure or significant expert by peers. This wording opened the door for genre-related encyclopedias.
 * The person has created a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, which has been the subject of multiple independent works, reviews, or documentaries. This wording opened the door to authors with lengthy bibliographies.

The above shifting criteria has contributed to the precedent of reliance on award nominations, award wins, reviews, reliable encyclopedias, and SFWA membership eligibility, even though that criteria may have been superseded by modern guidelines for notability.

Practical Application of Notability Guidelines
Here are some annotated guidelines for "Authors, editors, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, architects, and other creative professionals":

Genre-Specific Levels of Notability
A preliminary look at the statistics generates the following categories of likely notability for the SF field:

I'll update these as I acquire more data. I'm starting with the Hugo awards, as they are readily accepted as the "Academy Awards" of the SF world, but that doesn't preclude the future inclusion of other awards. In particular, the Hugos provide three of the five tenets for Wikipedia notability: Reliable, Sources, and Independence. It does not provide Significant coverage, and only contributes to Presumed. An award win, combined with an entry in Encyclopedia of Science Fiction & Fantasy would contribute greatly to Significant coverage.

Notability Derived from Genre Awards and Other Factors
The pages below derive article success rates based on numerous sub-factors within a specific area of possible notability. They also outline a list of outlying target authors who currently do not have a Wikipedia article, and provide an analysis of whether such an article should be pursued or not. An explanation of the column headers:


 * Notabilty - one of the notability levels defined above.
 * SFE - Author has an entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. This is a measure of genre notability.
 * SFWA - Author is eligible for SFWA. This is not an official evaluation of eligibility. SFWA has published the criteria for membership, including acceptable market places for both long and short form fiction. I have a tool which examines an author bibliography, which makes a decision on whether the author could, theoretically, be a member of SFWA. This is a measure of genre notability and critical acceptance.
 * Awards - The number of award nominations and wins the author has (as known by the ISFDB). Does not include preliminary nominations. Another measure of critical acceptance.
 * Reviews - The number of in-print reviews of the author's works, as published in genre publications. This does not include online, or non-genre reviews, such as The New York Times.

Detailed notability analysis pages:


 * User:Alvonruff/Hugo_Award_Notability - Analysis based on the various Hugo Award categories. (Complete - 11 potential author articles)
 * User:Alvonruff/Nebula_Award_Notability - Analysis based on the various Nebula Award categories. (Complete - 5 potential author articles)
 * User:Alvonruff/World_Fantasy_Award_Notability - Analysis based on the various World Fantasy Award categories. (Complete - 5 potential author articles)
 * User:Alvonruff/Astounding_Award_Notability - Analysis based on the various Astounding Award categories. (In progress)
 * User:Alvonruff/Bibliography_Depth_Notability - Analysis based on authors with more than 20 novels in their bibliography. (Complete)
 * User:Alvonruff/SFWA_Notability - Analysis of the success rate of authors who qualify for SFWA membership.
 * User:Alvonruff/Reviewed_Works_Notability - Analysis of authors with the most reviewed works. (In progress)
 * Top 500 Novels. Critically-acclaimed novels which do not have Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia's requirements for novel articles are far more lax than those for authors.

=References= If an article makes it past the notability battle, then the next strategy for article rejection will focus on the topic of references. While there is considerable documentation on Wikipedia references, that documentation tends to be both technical and subjective, making it difficult for a casual submitter to understand the reference requirements. In addition, the application of reference guidelines is entirely random, depending upon the preferences of the editor that happened to stumble across your article. Before we go into the specific types of likely reference attacks, we need to provide some background into the kinds of references that are currently in use with respect to genre authors.

Statistical Background
The ISFDB has a set of pages that score works and authors by the number of awards they have received or been nominated for. This page (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/popular_authors.cgi?1+decade+2010) shows the top 500 authors for the time period of 2010 through 2019. The top 50 authors on that list arguably represent the most "critically acclaimed" authors of that period. All of these authors have Wikipedia articles, and most have numerous references, which make them suitable for some detailed analysis on the type of references which are used on existing articles. A summary of the number of references within specific reference classes are given below:

Summary: The average number of references for these top-tier authors was 52, but this number is extensively padded by authors known outside the genre, such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett. Half of the authors had fewer than 40 references, and 3 authors had fewer than 10. The distribution of various classes of references is shown below:

Reference Attributes
Wikipedia's has a general stance of no original research, which would normally be required to summarize information taken from primary resources. As such, Wikipedia has a desire for secondary sources, and may tolerate tertiary sources (depending on the editor). That said, some information found in primary sources requires no additional analysis or synthesis - for instance, factual biographical information, such as an author's birthplace, date of birth, or alma mater. Additionally, there is a heavy reliance on award and review information to support an author article, and award information is typically taken from a primary source (an awards web site), and while parts of a review may be considered a secondary source (when summarizing the plot of a novel), it will certainly content some amount of original criticism, which could be considered a primary source. Additionally, news sites are generally accepted as a secondary source, but numerous Wikipedia references are derived from press releases ("Film Studio X has optioned the rights to Novel Y by Author Z") and are generally just a slightly simplified version of the original release - which hardly promotes the news article to secondary source status. The four predominate reference attributes, with respect to Wikipedia, are:


 * Primary - These types of references should, according to Wikipedia, be avoided, although they represent about 65% of the references in the top 50 authors above. Examples of primary sources, relevant to genre authors:
 * An official awards website, such as https://nebulas.sfwa.org/, or https://www.thehugoawards.org/.
 * The author's blog or official website, or guest article at another website.
 * An autobiography.
 * Personal information about the author written about within the foreword or introduction to some other work.
 * An interview with the author.
 * Promotional material from the author's publisher.
 * The author's landing page at a site such as amazon.com or goodreads.com.
 * A link to the author's online fiction (or excerpt).
 * The author's Twitter activity.
 * Secondary - This is one of the preferred types of sources. Examples:
 * General news sites: New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR, etc..
 * Book-specific news sites: Locus Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, BookRiot, Publishers Weekly.
 * Tertiary - This is also one of the preferred types of sources (Identifying_and_using_tertiary_sources). Examples:
 * In-print, or online references, such as the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
 * On-line references, such as isfdb.org or sfadb.com
 * Independence - Wikipedia desires sources to be independent, that is, material generated by writers who have no direct relationship with the subject. For authors, this would make autobiographies, blogs, and interviews poor sources for an article, although about 30% of the references in the top 50 authors above include such sources.

Most genre authors will never have an independent biography, nor will they generate the kind of news that attracts the attention of a general news outlet. When we discount information generated by the author, what is left are awards and reviews as secondary sources, along with genre encyclopedias and online bibliographies as tertiary sources, which makes for relatively tepid Wikipedia articles for all but the genre's biggest superstars. The primary focus of an author's wikipedia article should be biographical, as information such as their bibliography or award history is more easily summarized elsewhere (let's be honest, most of those references are included to pad the reference count, much like changing the font size on a term paper, which do not improve the quality of an article). Biographical information is all but impossible to find for most genre authors without resorting to primary, non-independent sources.

Killing Articles via Speedy Deletion
Speedy Deletions (see Criteria_for_speedy_deletion) are rare, but have been employed against articles I have written. The general strategies that are most common are:
 * G4. Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion. This may be used even if a previous article was deleted many years ago (probably due to lack of notability) and the new article made no use at all of the old article. Author articles typically contain a bibliography section, and that section will obviously have a similarity to the previous article, as it consists of hard, unchanging facts. This is best countered with a more extensive biography, which should be the main point of the article. But you will now need to support that biography with references.
 * A7 - No indication of importance (people, animals, organizations, web content, events). This is a subtle form of notability attack, meaning that the author may be notable, but you failed to document why the author is notable. This can be countered with genre encyclopedia, review, and award references.

Killing Articles via Draft Space
There are rules for the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, generally requiring marking, notification, and concensus. There is an alternative that editors are now using to quickly delete articles without the overhead of a notability or deletion discussion: moving the article to draft space "for incubation". When an article (say 'XYZ') is moved to draft space, it is removed from Wikipedia's public viewing space and indexing, and the article name is changed to 'Draft:XYZ'. It will remain there for a period of time, until an automated garbage collector deletes it. This is the least specific kind of feedback you can receive on the quality of an article.

The wikipedia policy on Deletion_policy states:

"Incubation must not be used as a "backdoor to deletion". Because abandoned drafts are deleted after six months, moving articles to draft space should generally be done only for newly created articles (typically as part of new page review) or as the result of a deletion discussion."

However, if you look at the actual editor discussions happening on the talk page for Drafts, you will find remarks like this:

"...most of the time the rules for draftification are used to provide excuses for getting rid of bad content that does not meet speedy deletion criteria, without overwhelming the AfD system, rather than with any serious expectation that draftification will be a step towards making the content mainspace-worthy. "To allow time and space for the draft's improvement" is one of those excuses. Sometimes it even works out that way, but only rarely."

So to be clear, editors are using the draft mechanism to insta-kill articles they don't like. They avoid giving clear criticism of the article, relying on the generic phrase "not suitable as written", because their intention is not to actually improve the article, but to kill it. Since there is extensive documentation on notability above, editors are avoiding notability discussions and simply killing articles by moving them to draft space. So be aware, even if you should be considered notable by the rules above, an editor may arbitrarily remove the article without discussion, by using this mechanism.

Quantity of References
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Quality of References
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