Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David Stack


 * 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   delete. Discussion indicates that there is a possibility of the book being notable, but the notability of th individual is not established. Given disagreement over the notability of the book, WP:PRESERVE cannot be applied by me for a move or merge result - this discussion therefore lends itself to deletion Fritzpoll (talk) 17:47, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

David Stack

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Delete: minor academic who meets none of the criteria of WP:ACADEMIC. No WP:RS coverage forthcoming to date, and none adducible from a find. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 14:18, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
 * KEEP ( Note: I am the original editor of this article. ) David Stack is a leading scholar on Evolutionary theory and the political left (See Review of The First Darwinian Left) as well as victorian figures such as George Combe and Thomas Hodgskin. --Firefly322 (talk) 14:49, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: the source for the review, The Human Nature Review, is not a particularly reliable source (see WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 19 & WP:Fringe theories/Noticeboard/Archive 1), and so it gives negligible support to notability. Further WP:INHERITED diminishes the extent to which a review on a book supports the author's notability, and it does not offer any biographical information for this biographical article. The George Combe article makes no mention of Stack, the Evolutionary theory and the political left &Thomas Hodgskin articles merely cite him as a source. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 15:20, 29 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 15:30, 29 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete Fails WP:PROF Hipocrite (talk) 21:06, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete unless the article can be resued. As it stands it is completly inadequate. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:53, 30 May 2009 (UTC).
 * Weak delete. He seems to be a successful academic, but the article presents no evidence that he passes WP:PROF and it's not clear how to find such evidence if it exists. I tried searching for "social darwinism" in Google scholar to see whether his book ranked highly among scholarly publications on that subject, but it doesn't, and other searches also failed to turn up anything that could be used to show a pass of WP:PROF #1 (academic impact, usually the easiest to satisfy). He may have appeared in a documentary on atheism but his role in it is apparently sufficiently minor that he isn't mentioned in the seven paragraphs of our article on that documentary. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * (interposing Comment) Are you not overlooking criteria 6 of WP:PROF, since someone had to have appointed him or elected as the departmental director of Teaching and Learning at Reading University? --Firefly322 (talk) 03:28, 5 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Not sure if that is significant. Departmental chairs are not appointed because of their notability and, at least in the US, are rotating posts that many tenured profs occupy at some time or the other. --RegentsPark (My narrowboat) 13:24, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: Doesn't his appearance in the show The Trouble with Atheism also give some weight to noteablity? (The Trouble with Atheism. First appearance in part 5 of 7 at timestamp: 6 minutes, 48 seconds of 8min09sec. Trouble with Atheism. Second appearance in part 6 of 7 from begining.)--Firefly322 (talk) 16:39, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * 2nd Comment: I've added material, somewhat better explaining the importance of his work. Could you please review the article again?.  ty. --Firefly322 (talk) 18:46, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The article quotes a review saying that his book represents a quantum leap. A quantum leap is the smallest possible measurable change in some quantity, not unlike a least publishable unit, right? More seriously, I think the writing and balance within the article is improved but it doesn't really convince me to change my opinion, and I have the vague feeling that this is a bit problematic according to WP:CANVASS. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:58, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep I had little difficulty adding a source and there seems to be good alternatives to deletion. Colonel Warden (talk) 08:37, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: you cite the source (which is bibliographic, not biographic) only for minimal content (no "depth of coverage" per WP:BIO), nor articulate what these "good alternatives" are. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 09:06, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Moving this to an article about the book is one possibility as there seem to be several reviews and context within which to set them. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:51, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Only a single WP:RS review has been discovered to date -- insufficient to meet WP:BK. And it's not as though this article provides any substantive coverage of the book in any case (only its title and the title of the book it was in response to). HrafnTalkStalk(P) 10:09, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There's another review in Albion (history journal): 10.2307/4054413. But two reviews is low for a humanities book, and I don't think either review satisfies the "at least some of these works serving a general audience" clause of WP:BK. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:29, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep and help to improve (finding sources) to this meritorious figure. PTorg (talk) 14:28, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete "Senior lecturer" is scarcely a major title in academia. The "reference" from "HighBeam,com" shows only that the book was reviewed by someone (quite unfavorably indeed), and nought else.  As for the book being "scholarly" the review states " This is a politically engaged work (Stack uses, for example, "our predecessors" to refer to earlier generations of leftists)" which, to me, suggests that is it more a tract than a scholarly work.   A minor left theorist, without any actual faculty position. Does not meet minimum notability at all. Collect (talk) 17:31, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. Niteshift36 (talk) 22:52, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak delete Delete - persons below the rank of Associate professor rarely meet WP:PROF. Bearian (talk) 18:26, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Senior Lecturer in the UK is very much the equivalent of Associate Professor in the US. This also means that Collect is incorrect in stating he has no faculty position.  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 20:45, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * em..er.. that's not a very good comprasion - the title itself doesn't mean much about the impact of someone's work and if they meet WP:PROF. In my first position after finishing my PhD, I was an SL and that's because it was old poly that has become a university and they can be pretty slack about such things. --Cameron Scott (talk) 17:28, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * O.K. What does "Departmental Director of Teaching and Learning" mean?  Is it akin to a department chair or program coordinator? Bearian (talk) 17:37, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep. Meets WP:PROF criterion #1 (significant impact in scholarly discipline, broadly construed). Has at least one book, Nature and artifice the life and thought of Thomas Hodgskin, currently in more than 750 major libraries worldwide according to WorldCat.--Eric Yurken (talk) 01:58, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: WorldCat holdings provide no direct (i.e. without improper, and highly suspect, WP:SYNTHESIS) indication of "significant impact". This therefore devolves to merely a WP:BIGNUMBER argument. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 04:38, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I support your deletion nomination here Hrafn, but I think you should be careful not to make specious arguments. Synthesis and original research are not forbidden when we are attempting to determine notability.  If it were, we'd have to find a source that specifically stated each subject was notable... an impossible standard. Gigs (talk) 15:38, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I would disagree that the argument is specious. The relationship between the criteria and the stated evidence is extremely tenuous (hence "highly suspect" synthesis). Allowing the substitution would allow all manner of WP:BIGNUMBER arguments. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 17:38, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. A scholarly book would not be in this many major libraries (> 750 WorldCat-listed libraries) if it had not had a significant impact in its scholarly discipline. Also (addressing a previous comment), many scholarly books reflect one or more political views, which do not make them non-scholarly.--Eric Yurken (talk) 13:14, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * For a book with "significant impact in its scholarly discipline" it seems to have remarkably few citations to it turn up on Google Scholar. I remain skeptical that WorldCat holdings are indicative of anything beyond the simple facts they state. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 17:38, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * So the book might be notable. That doesn't particularly establish notability of the author. Gigs (talk) 15:43, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete Weak Delete I do not see the exceptional impact that is the spirit of WP:PROF being met here. Gigs (talk) 15:39, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: Again, doesn't his appearance in the show The Trouble with Atheism also give some additional weight to noteablity besides just the books he wrote? (See the links in earlier comments to view his appearance in documentary.)--Firefly322 (talk) 16:39, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * 2nd Comment: Again, I've added material, somewhat better explaining the importance of his work. Could you please review the article again?.  ty. --Firefly322 (talk) 18:46, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Our standards for professors are superficially higher than general notability standards, because professors, even run of the mill ones, by nature of their profession, publish lots of work that gets archived in reliable sources or published as books. Nearly every professor is the "leading scholar" on some very specific and often obscure topic.  When they are the leading scholar on a wide ranging or important topic, we generally always include them.  I will amend my opinion to "weak delete".  Gigs (talk) 22:53, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Academic of uncertain notability. A book published in the area that has been reviewed by peers does not establish notability since many academics publish books that are have little, if any impact. No honors or awards have been mentioned. Does not hold a named chair. Senior lecturer is not the highest post in academia. No evidence of significance in the field. No evidence of being highly cited is provided (and I could not find mention of the person in either Scopus or Web of Knowledge). --RegentsPark (My narrowboat) 02:23, 4 June 2009 (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.