Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Denise Stephens


 * 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 keep. T. Canens (talk) 00:03, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Denise Stephens

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This article has come to some prominence at Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know. As a US associate professor, this likely fails WP:NACADEMIC. I am also struggling to find independent in-depth coverage in reliable sources about her (after all, it was her student(s) who found the planet) - lack of WP:SIGCOV. Edwardx (talk) 20:13, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Every Morning (there's a halo...) 00:31, 31 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Strong Keep She passes WP:NPROF and subsequently WP:BIO, with a citation number of 1806 and an H-index of 22. WP:SNOW keep close. scope_creep (talk) 01:19, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Question I rarely nominate academics for deletion, so am unclear from reading WP:NPROF whether those numbers are adequate to meet criterion #1; noting from h-index, that "physics has the second most citations after space science". Edwardx (talk) 12:19, 31 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep. This is an interesting, well-researched article which presents the achievements of an enthusiastic university teacher. She is certainly sufficiently notable.--Ipigott (talk) 07:54, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep, and boggle. Passes WP:GNG (just) per article about her leading undergraduate students to discover a planet. And note the massive systemic bias underpinning this nomination. If Stephens was a male professional footballer, then her notability would be automatic per WP:NFOOTY even if her only professional appearance was a few minutes as a substitute in a single game.  If she was a porn star, then she'd be an automatic keep per WP:PORNBIO#2 for her unique contribution. In this case, Stephens has been employed as a professional academic in major university for over ten years, which is way more than the notability threshold for footballers. Yet we still have a call to delete the article. Boggle. Are we here to build an encyclopedia? Or to run a fanzine for football fans and porn users? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:53, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment You state that it just passes WP:GNG because of that article, yet GNG states, "multiple sources are generally expected". And as it is a local newspaper, it seems reasonable to expect more than just that one article. As for any bias, it is not my bias, so cannot underpin this nomination. With nearly 4,000 article creations, none of "mine" are footballer players or porn stars, and I started over 100 articles for notable women in November alone. Edwardx (talk) 12:28, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Reply It's odd to call The Salt Lake Tribune a local newspaper, when List of newspapers in Utah shows it to be the biggest-circulation newspaper in Utah. "Regional and local" papers are listed below, and The Salt Lake Tribune isn't one of them. And I note you don't actually dispute disagree that if she was a footballer, then she'd be an automatic keep. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:51, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Reply I accept that the SLT is technically a regional paper, albeit one with a small and shrinking circulation. It's still not "multiple sources". And other stuff exists is never a persuasive AfD argument. Not sure if she was ever a football player, but I have started "the most remarkable referee in England". Edwardx (talk) 18:16, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree with : the Salt Lake Tribune isn't just a "local" paper and even if it was, it wouldn't cease to be a reliable source that helps establish notability. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:23, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Reply The circulation number may be similar, but those Irish and Danish papers are read by the country's leaders; not the case for the SLT, barring Mitt Romney and the heads of the LDS. Edwardx (talk) 13:19, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Note - The leaders of the United States likely do read the Salt Lake Tribune. For example the six senators listed here are certainly within it's target demographic, my understanding is that members of the LDS are well represented in American politics, and that this is their main publication. Ilyina Olya Yakovna (talk) 13:59, 1 February 2018 (UTC) — WP:SOCKSTRIKE
 * my point has nothing to do with the size of the SLT's readership. It simply doesn't matter. A local source is still a reliable source. It still helps show notability. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 21:04, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
 * (ec) Reply shrinking circulation is an issue for nearly every newspaper worldwide, as news goes online. SLT's circulation remains similar to that of the major newspapers of smaller, highly-developed countries such as Ireland and Denmark (Irish Times, Politiken, Berlingske).
 * I am not making a Other stuff exists argument. I am arguing against the way in which we are asked to assess the notability of this article against a set of guidelines which have been captured by the pop culture interests of en.wp's dominant demographic of editors, contrary to the basic principle that (per WP:ABOUT) this is an encyclopedia. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:44, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions.  Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:56, 31 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep as already explained by others, clearly meets WP:NPROF criteria. Ilyina Olya Yakovna (talk) 11:47, 31 January 2018 (UTC) — WP:SOCKSTRIKE
 * Maybe Discovering planets is important but it's clear that it is happening all the time and the only source that discusses her work in detail is the Salt Lake Tribune but that is in the context of her training her students to do it. The Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall but appears to be about how they have a lot of PhDs on the university football team. The Daily Herald discusses in a few sentences how she runs Astrofest, an annual public outreach event that introduces children to science, worthwhile but hardly significant coverage. The other sources are even weaker being extracts from her own CV or course details. Sorry, but there is no "boggle" about it, the current article is very borderline as BrownHairedGirl noted and does not make her individual significance clear. Perhaps it can be rectified with additional sources, but right now the case for her notability is not proven. Philafrenzy (talk) 13:52, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Do you disagree that if she was a footballer, then she'd be an automatic keep? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:54, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I take your word for it, I never create articles on sport, but have often had to defend professors at AFD who would probably be automatic keeps if they were sportspeople, but this is not the place to try to change policies, however perverse or unjust they may be. (check my user page for the probably 100s of notable women I have created articles about) The fact remains that this is weak article about a person on the borderline of notability. I note that despite everyone saying above how obvious it is that she is notable, the article has only had one minor edit since this discussion started. Prove it! Add the sources and then it will be kept. Philafrenzy (talk) 17:47, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * WP:NFOOTY and WP:NPROF are not policies. They are guidelines, which are intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.  Stephens would be an automatic keep if she was a male footballer, and I see no basis in policy for imposing a higher bar on a knowledge creator than is applied to an entertainer. If one professional gig is enough to keep an article on someone who kicks a piece of inflated leather and received zero GNG-qualifying secondary coverage, then it's enough to keep someone who has made an enduring (albeit minor) contrib to the sum of human knowledge. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:00, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Who claimed she is less notable than a footballer? Not me. I am calling for evidence of her scholarly impact to be added to the article to prove her notability. Philafrenzy (talk) 19:18, 31 January 2018 (UTC)4
 * Your initial !vote said right now the case for her notability is not proven. If she was a footballer, it would be taken as proven. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:43, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Not proven per the GNG or as an academic. I never mentioned football. Enough already with the football comparisons BrownHairedGirl please. Philafrenzy (talk) 20:19, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * When the double standard goes, I'll drop the comparison. But while ball-kickers get a free pass on GNG, I'll apply the same to academics. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:38, 31 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep passes PROF, as per . Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:26, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment Edwardx, an H-index of 22 is reasonable, any citation count above 500 would be very respectable. 1806, means that she is at the top of her field and/or brilliant, or both. There is a guide on WP that will tell you. A H-index below 10, and a citation count, below a 100-200 is low, below 100 is very low and would need WP:SIGCOV to support. I saw this BLP in WP:AFC last month that was being continually rejected, but was an academic who had a citation count of about 69000. Some kind of primary brain, psycho nutter type. The NProf standard is the only non subjective notabilty measure that we have on WP, so it is very easy to tell at a glance. Snow Keep. scope_creep (talk) 18:52, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep I think we have a notable academic.  Hawkeye7   (discuss)  19:04, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep per scope_creep's numbers. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 21:32, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep Passes WP:PROF at the very least. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 01:41, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete Basically this is a case of WP:BLP1E, i.e., the planet discovery (mostly because it was discovered when she was an undergrad; there are thousands of known exoplanets). I won't challenge the numerical veracity of ScopeCreep's data but I will challenge the inference he draws. Assuming GS numbers were used, an h-index of 22 and a citation count of 1800 are unremarkable for an associate prof working in the sciences at a research oriented institution. She's a solid, productive mid-career scientist but I'm not seeing that the criteria of WP:NPROF are satisfied. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:01, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Weak keep per scope_creep. I do not agree with BrownHairedGirl's football/pornstar analogies – though certainly Wikipedia and the media in general have systematic biases favouring men, the arguments made seem to be more in favour of policy changes than relevant to this particular discussion. However, I think Stephens has just about received significant coverage in the Salt Lake Tribune, Daily Herald and Wall Street Journal articles (though I can't read the paywalled WSJ source) and I understand her citation count makes her notable (though WP:NPROF says "Citation measures such as the h-index, g-index, etc., are of limited usefulness" so I'm not sure whether the h-index of 22 is particularly relevant). — Bilorv(talk)(c)(e) 14:39, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep The SL Tribune article is not a local article. The Provo Daily Herald is local, Salt Lake City is not local. What next will we have people saying an article in the Detroit News on someone in Lansing is "local coverage"? Here is an article from Salt Lake based KSL on the planet discovery. I guess, knowing past arguments, some will argue that since BYU and KSL are both owned by the LDS Church, this somehow is not an indepdent article, but this ignores the actual way news gathering is done at KSL among other things. I'm not sure this link adds much, but it provides more information than we have on some football players. I would argue we need to make the notability guidelines for football players a bit more stringent. The attempt to hold being an assistant professor against her seems to be a misunderstanding of the American academic system. Assistant Professors, Associate Professors and Full Professors, at least at BYU, are all full-time positions. I was going to say "tenure track" but BYU does not technically grant tenure, but it does grant continuing status that is similar in most respects to tenure. Considering that Stephens is the mother of 7 children, her still being an Assistant Professor may in part be a result of taking maternity leave, but this has not prevented her from publishing and making significant community and university impact. Assistant professors are in all sense professors, very different from adjunctnt professors, who are "part time" in pay, but not always in work load. At heart the deletion nomination may reflect the systemic difficulties of married mothers advancing in academia, but Stephens has clearly made a notable impact. The claim "it was her students who discovered the planet" is misleading in the extreme. Most discoveries are done by groups, and she was the leader of the group. I won't claim to fully understand h-index and citation counts, but if 22 is not high enough as an h-index and 1800 is not high enough as a google scholar specific citation count, we should just scrap academic notability criteria #1 and instead made academics rise or fall on GNG alone, with possible exceptions for more specified academic criteria, which will be much easier for academics who do not have to spend over 5 cumulative years pregnant, and who instead of choosing a high impact to future learning activity like sponsoring BYU's astrofest, spend their time in activities that more fully fit in some rigid definition of major academic activity. If we are to keep academic notability criteria 1, than we will keep the article on Stephens.John Pack Lambert (talk) 14:44, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment The Wall Street Journal article is about a intramural flag-football team that she is the captain of. It plays against other women's flag football teams at BYU, the other ones are all made up of students. It is the only intramural team that is made up of female faculty at the university. BYU has a fairly active, broad, and large system of intramural sports. Many of the teams are fielded by student wards, which are religious congregations of about 150 students. I was in multiple student wards that fielded intramural teams, although I myself never participated. The Deseret News ran this article that should make it so everyone can understand what is going on with the Wall Street Journal article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 14:56, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment The new source you added John is directly about her but its not very in depth nor is it independent. I see you added it at the end under "Sources", presumably because you knew it wasn't independent? I changed it to External Links. It might also qualify as Further Reading. The stuff about her children and tenure progression and being a victim of her gender etc is all completely irrelevant here, however valid those points might be elsewhere. We still lack reliable independent sources that discuss her in depth apart from the SLT which I agree is sound. If you follow the link to the paper in Nature about the discovery of the planet, which I was optimistic might help, in fact one sees she is one of around 50 authors credited. I know that's not unusual in scientific papers but it hardly helps here. Frankly, the article and some of the sources, the fact that it was created by a student at her university, are all beginning to look promotional of the subject. Philafrenzy (talk) 15:06, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * P.S. In case anyone has forgotten, the student who created the article was paid and then put it forward at DYK, where it would have reached the front page if the reviewer (who has not voted here) had not noticed the problems with it. Philafrenzy (talk) 15:29, 3 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Comment The previous comments on the Salt Lake Tribune are very misleading. The Salt Lake Tribune is if anything an anti-Mormon paper. It as often disparages the LDS Church and its leadership as anything else, and is a key player in attempts to weaponize suicide rates. The lead publication of the LDS Church is the Deseret News. The Deseret News has especially through its Church News and related supplamant wide circulation far beyond the most broad regional interpretation of the Utah/Mormon cultural zone. It is without question the provider of the most indepth articles we get in a physical newspaper at my house in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and the newspaper I most often go to to get quick reads on broad US news, and even outside Michigan coverage of Michigan events, in its online form. Yet my sister-in-law is a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. I would guess that all four members of the US house and 2 members of the US senate from Utah subscribe to both papers, and Love and Curtis probably also subscribe to the Provo Daily Herald. The Salt Lake Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize last year for its reporting on issues about BYU policies, although some of us would argue that the reporting was far less than balanced. One thing that has become clear in the previous discussions is that people are willing to comment on things they know almost nothing about. The reason I added the source under "sources" is because I actually only used it to source her maiden name, and did not think linking a source to her name was worth doing.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:12, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I think there is consensus the SLT is a sound source, the trouble is it is the only good one here and it discusses her in a context of a collective effort as confirmed by the numerous authors in the Nature paper. Where are the other sources that discuss her in depth? We need more than one. Philafrenzy (talk) 15:17, 3 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete There simply are not enough published sources.104.163.148.25 (talk) 21:22, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * meh. This person is marginally notable (barely.. and probably on the side of failing); the article was created by an employee of the school and this thing was very PR-y in a very classic and depressing university BOOSTER PR kind of way. However, it is OK now, there is some notability, and we want more articles about women in STEM. I doubt that Stephens is going to fall off the face of the earth so it is likely that the notability argument will only get stronger with time, so let it be.  I don't at all like the "footy" argument. If the whole encyclopedia got dragged down to the level of our pages (which I will not call "articles") about sports people and pop culture topics I would quit. Please do not argue to make WP more shitty by drawing analogies to the shittiest parts of it. Jytdog (talk) 22:44, 4 February 2018 (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.