User:Markus Pössel/Notability criteria for scientists

I have been involved in a number of discussions about the notability of (mostly: living) academics WP:PROF here on Wikipedia – some pleasantly constructive like the one on notability criteria, others quite frustrating, bordering on the absurd, like this discussion here. In the end, the decision comes down to community consensus. Policies and guidelines, as well as the discussions about their adoption, are one way of exploring consensus. While I want to explore those, as well, I am also interested to go a bit further and look at AfDs a bit more systematically.


 * WP:PROF itself
 * Notability_(academics)/Precedents - an earlier collection of precedents, mostly from 2005/2006

History of WP:PROF
Going through the talk archives of WP:PROF, which begin in 2005 when this was a mere proposal for a guideline, it is interesting to see how the notion of academic notability evolved.

Archive 1
Early proposals included all tenured professors, or all Ivy league professors, or anyone who has published in an internationally recognized journal. Such proposals were inevitably followed by discussions of whether this was setting the bar too low; proponents arguing that there was no "Great Wikipedia Paper Shortage," after all, critics pointing out the problems of maintaining and keeping up to date thousands of pages. The question of verifiability (as complementing notability) was also raised early on. A milestone is the proposal of User:Uppland, who proposed to let academia itself decide by its internal criteria; the list which follows already contains the key criteria still valid at present, such as prestigious prizes, fellowships and editorships. Other of his criteria, such as being a doctoral adviser, did not make it into the current version. Proposals to re-merge the academic criteria into WP:BIO were rejected. An initial vote on the proposal was quickly withdrawn for procedural reasons. Discussions ensue about whether having WP:PROF amounts to "rulecruft" (that is, needless red-tape type complications), and even whether WP:N itself might fall under that category. An explicit point system (various criteria given points, points added up) is rejected, but can be seen as symptomatic of a wider struggle with the vagueness of academic notability – how many articles, in which journals, how well cited, where do we draw the line?

Verifiability
Verifiability is mentioned in several places within the discussion, beginning at the start in 2005/2006 when the first talk page was created, with the criterion being that articles about academics should be encyclopedic and verifiable. While vanity pages are named as a negative example (not sufficiently verifiable), here, and the comparison with e.g. the "average doctor" is made (no verifiable information, all information provided by the person themselves), the counter-argument is that the existence of the academic is proved by their published articles (which contain the name and contact information), while the university, if e-mailed, can provide reliable information about the basic facts. In the context of more modern debates, I find it notable that, in these earlier discussions, verifiability is taken as such, and not split into formalized criteria such as sources being secondary or independent: "Ultimately WP:V is the final determiner of whether an article should be included". The contrast in those discussions is Autobiography, which is what the participating editors want to avoid: biographies should not be based only, or primarily, on information from the person themselves. Later (bottom of here), a user mentions academics' self-written webpages as a negative example, pointing to WP:RS.