Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Elinor Gadon


 * 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   no consensus. The subject's notability is borderline, no clear consensus seemed to arise one way or the other. ‑Scottywong | talk _ 01:48, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Elinor Gadon

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This article fails general notability guidelines. Articles are supposed to have multiple, indepth, independent sources. We have one, in-depth source that comes from Gadon's employer and is not clearly independent. She also seems to not meet any of the guidelines for inclusion of academics. John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:11, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Little to no coverage in independent reliable sources. Jinkinson   talk to me  17:18, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:45, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:45, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:45, 11 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep article did fail notability guidelines but has since been improved with numerous reliable references. Subject is a notable art history scholar who is widely quoted by other historians and easily meets the GNG.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:52, 13 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep Jim-Siduri (talk) 04:44, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Your reasons? Xxanthippe (talk) 06:54, 1 August 2014 (UTC).


 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 06:59, 17 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, – Davey 2010 •  (talk)  10:23, 25 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete pending other improvements to the article. At the moment, these are not significant, in-depth coverage, just evidence that she's published some articles and is an art historian - not that she's a notable one. AdventurousMe (talk) 15:13, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete. GS h-index of 4. Not there yet. Xxanthippe (talk) 06:20, 28 July 2014 (UTC).
 * Keep Obviously of interest in academia considering the various refs. Put a "more refs needed" tag on it. If she was a male historian with that many refs I doubt she'd be considered for AfD at all. Let's be inclusionist here. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 16:38, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete. According to her employer's profile of her, she has a single book to her name, The Once and Future Goddess. It is quite well-cited on Google scholar (over 250 citations) but I could not find enough (or any) reliably published mainstream-media reviews to convince me of a pass of WP:AUTHOR, I don't think the one publication is enough for WP:PROF, and no other sign of notability is evident. I think all of the references in the article are actually citations to her book, and are passing mentions rather than being in-depth reviews of the book. In addition, with all notability being through the book, WP:BIO1E is also relevant. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:26, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep - impressive resume, seems like someone I'd like to know more about. Personal interest isn't reason to keep, but it seems like there should be references available to show her notability at least within her particular field. --Scalhotrod - Just your average banjo playing, drag racing, cowboy... (Talk) Face-smile.svg 18:03, 1 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment. I did more exploring and I think there are other aspects here that possibly might be brought out. First, Gadon is a western scholar who is into Eastern religion, which generally is not well understood by western thinkers and not much respected by the academic establishment; to some extent, Gadon links two continents, West and East, and the mix is sometimes difficult. Hinduism is somewhat related to astrology which causes some of us western-oriented science-types (like myself) to not give much credence or respect. This is somewhat the case with feminism (a related area: Gadon's work is related to feminist-oriented takes on Eastern religion and she is somewhat of an activist) too, and it can get kind of weird, when Stonehenge is sometimes interpreted as being symbolic of a vagina, that Eastern-type mysticism is not well understood, and Wikipedian contributors tend (90%+) to be male (like myself). So I think we need to be open-minded. Her book The Once and Future Goddess has had a big impact in the feminist/spiritualist/Eastern-oriented religion communities. She is acknowledged as an authority in lectures, in programming, and she was a prominent speaker at the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts in 2005. The Los Angeles Times thinks she is wise but what do they know. Gadon is the type of person who I would love to find myself sitting next to on a long train ride, and to query her about all of her travels and beliefs, and discuss deep metaphysics and philosophy with, and maybe even debate about what life is all about. Not that that is a Wikipedia requirement for notability; just a-sayin'.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 19:48, 1 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep. The Forbes magazine mention makes her notable. --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 21:03, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * More than mentions are needed for notability. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:49, 1 August 2014 (UTC).
 * Many sources are more than mere mentions such as this review of her book, and this article in Forbes discusses Gadon's thinking at length. Plus there is a full review in the Examiner which one can find by copy-pasting the following string in the browser bar: "The book mixes facts, quotes and stories, and the opinions of the author. The facts are interesting but tend toward dry. Obviously, Ms. Gadon has made a huge effort to get every historical reference scrupulously correct." And the other sources which are a line or two suggest that EG is respected academically, with her works cited.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 01:13, 2 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep The sources now added to the article constitute significant coverage per WP:BASIC. 24.151.10.165 (talk) 21:44, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * In depth treatment is required. Not present here. A Wikipedia BLP requires substantial career achievement. Not apparent here. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:44, 2 August 2014 (UTC).
 * As Tomwulcer has noted above, sources such as the Environmental Ethics book review and The Forbes article demonstrate far more than "trivial" coverage. See WP:BASIC: "A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources which are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject. If the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined to demonstrate notability; trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may not be sufficient to establish notability." There is no mention of "career achievement" in WP:BASIC 24.151.10.165 (talk) 16:12, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks to those who beefed it up. I'm unwatching this discussion but watching the article so can get a chance to read it and follow interest links, just for fun :-) Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 16:34, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * 24.151.10.165 Do you happen to know if there is a mirror of the Forbes article anywhere else? Every time I try to read it (to evaluate the claims made here that its coverage of the subject is nontrivial) I get redirected to Forbes' front page. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:19, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I am not experiencing the redirection problem myself (Browser: Firefox) and do not know of a mirror site. As a stopgap, I'll post a slightly long excerpt from the two page article, outdented for readability. 24.151.10.165 (talk) 07:29, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

(slimmed down per Tomwsulcer's advice re COPYVIO below) "I was recently introduced to Elinor Gadon’s spectacular treatise The Once and Future Goddess. It sits at my bedside table with an accompanying journal filled with notes.  Goddess synthesizes archeological and anthropological research of the last half century to track the evolution of the feminine identity over the last 12,000 years, from the very earliest hunter-gatherers, to today’s still patriarchal society."
 * An additional source is this newspaper article Images Of Women In Art, Religion which draws on Gadon's work and travel in India to analyze developments in the study of female religious imagery. 24.151.10.165 (talk) 10:26, 3 August 2014 (UTC) I think this Women's Studies Quarterly article The Once and Future Heroine: Paleolithic Goddesses and Popular Imagination might be a very good reference but JSTOR only displays the first page. I believe we have some Wikipedians with JSTOR access, but I do not know how to contact them to ask if they can retrieve this. 24.151.10.165 (talk) 10:59, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Added the Toledo Blade source to article, thanks. The Forbes citation I can read, but first there is an advertisement to skip. Last, we probably should not copy swaths of the Forbes article here on the talk page because of WP:COPYVIO maybe we should trim it substantially.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 12:09, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Keep It does seem to me that similar coverage for a male scholar, or for a scholar in a different field, would have been a definite keep by this point. The various reviews of The Once and Future Goddess, surely count as solid coverage, as well as the Hindu article (The Hindu is one of India's oldest and best known newspapers). The nomination may have been warranted at the time; it has since been improved more than enough to keep. Vanamonde93 (talk) 06:38, 4 August 2014 (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.