Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bryan Caplan (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was speedy keep. per WP:SKCRIT as no one but nominator wanted the article deleted (non-admin closure) -KAP03(Talk &bull;&#32;Contributions &bull;&#32;Email) 23:51, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Bryan Caplan
AfDs for this article: 
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I have been cleaning up a large amount of refspam related to the paid editing ring of user:Vipul. Among his edits were dozens of additions of primary-sourced opinions by Bryan Caplan on various sundry topics, all primary sourced to Caplan's blog posts. Vipul is also a writer on the same blog. Vipul extensively rewrote this article. But, you know, Caplan teaches at George Mason, so I dind't think much about it, but I just checked Google and while "Bryan Caplan" (quoted) scores a fair number of hits, as you page through you get a total unique hit count of 172, which is staggeringly low given the extent to which he's been promoted on Wikipedia.

It's astonishing how often when you find Caplan mentioned in a Wikipedia article, the mention was added by his friend and co-blogger Vipul. As in: virtually every mention I have found to date.

Looking at the sources, there are a few book reviews, here are some namechecks, but the evidence of passing WP:PROF looks, on reflection, rather thin.

And I have to say I am always suspicious when "X has been reviewed in Y sources" is sourced to the reviews themselves. Where are the reliable independent analyitcal sources about the subject? Guy (Help!) 00:31, 26 March 2017 (UTC)


 * First of all thank you for you for your clean up, I came across this page by looking up Caplan after seeing this edit of yours. That being said I believe there is more than sufficient notability for this page. As can be found in it, there are whole articles about the subject's opinions or interviews with him about parenting: in The Wall Street Journal   (I can only access one, the other having a paywall) and the The Guardian  . His books received wider coverage: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal  (?, paywalled), NPR , etc. His opinions on politics seem to have been picked up by The New Yorker  (article dedicated to him), and in lesser extent (but more than just a mention) by Time  and The Huffington Post . I think rewriting the lead to reflect the notability of what opinions of him get picked up would be a good idea; for instance, his opinions on parenting seem to be picked up as much as his political opinions (even though there is some overlap), and currently the lead portraits him solely as a political/economy author. That being said I strongly oppose to the deletion of the article based on lack of notability, per WP:BIO. Concerning your accusations of spam perhaps you should initiate a formal process against that/those users, I'm not familiar with the case. Saturnalia0 (talk) 12:51, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. -KAP03(Talk &bull;&#32;Contributions &bull;&#32;Email) 21:52, 26 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep: I'll concentrate on the academic work, in particular The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources. from WP:PROF. Look at the Google scholar profile page here. This is a widely cited scholar, for instance, his book The myth of the rational voter by Princeton University Press has 879 citations. He has been widely published in many econ journals as well, including Public Choice, Journal of Law and Economics, The American Economic Review. His h-index is 26, which is quite high, if one looks at the h-index WP page, The London School of Economics found that full professors in the social sciences had average h-indices ranging from 2.8 (in law), through 3.4 (in political science), 3.7 (in sociology), 6.5 (in geography) and 7.6 (in economics).. See this list of economists by h-index. The list is incomplete; Caplan doesn't show up on it, but he would be in the top 400 based on the h-index. Other parts of WP:PROF also apply, but this should be enough to demonstrate notability, in my opinion. If people think that Caplan is too widely quoted on Wikipedia, even in places which aren't appropriate, by all means remove or replace their mentions. Deleting a BLP page is inappropriate. Kingsindian &#9821; &#9818; 01:55, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep: Most probably passes PROF (from a quick google-scholar search + his position at George Mason which would be difficult to achieve without research). He also possibly passes GNG (he is covered on "open borders" and a bunch of other stuff in MSM). I agree that the article itself does seem a tad promotional - take a hacksaw and chop it down.Icewhiz (talk) 06:06, 27 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Comment The evidence that x has been reviewed by x,y,and z, should be documented by links to the reviews, though there are possible shortcuts-- I normally use a WorldCat reference if the reviews have a separate item on WorldCat (as they are if published in JSTOR or Project Muse journals) ; a third party source for this is very rare and unnecessary. The entire concept of WP:PROF is built around the use of citations and reviews as the third party evidence for notability, not as requiring third party evidence themselves. To do so is equivalent of not accepting a NYTimes news story as a reference unless it had itself been referred to by some other publication.  That's a research technique appropriate for analytical history and historiography, not part of mere encyclopedia writing.   DGG ( talk ) 06:31, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep. Clearly meets WP PROf. When the pertson is important enough,promotionalism becomes a little less relevant. It's the people who are borderline notable whose promotional articles are not worth fixing.   DGG ( talk ) 00:41, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep - last time this was up for AfD, JzG (the nom this time) !voted keep, what is different this time? Smmurphy(Talk) 17:41, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Even more ironically, he voted keep as per WP:POINT.  K . Bog  18:16, 28 March 2017 (UTC) Edit: though this is WP:NOTPOINTy.  K . Bog  18:25, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I would like to state that I do believe JzG's efforts to deal with libertarian articles related to Vipul, Caplan, GMU, etc are very impressive and good for the encyclopedia, and I don't have any problem with their changing an opinion here, but Caplan is a fairly notable public academic in my opinion, and I would !vote keep even without the previous AfD result. Smmurphy(Talk) 18:21, 28 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Speedy Keep - Sufficient RS supporting academic notability. (A little more care should have been taken before simply shotgun-AFD'ing everything that Vipul ever looked sideways at.)--Froglich (talk) 17:55, 29 March 2017 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.