Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gavin Nicol


 * 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. Star  Mississippi  12:53, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Gavin Nicol

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

While certainly accomplished, not enough in-depth coverage to meet WP:GNG, and can't see how they meet WP:NSCHOLAR.  Onel 5969  TT me 12:36, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Academics and educators and Internet.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 12:42, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

And WP:NACADEMIC says if research has had a significant impact then it should be fine. Thanks TechMak (talk) 20:36, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete Falls considerably short of WP:NACADEMIC and not evident what other notability there might be. Jeppiz (talk) 22:02, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. GS h-index of only 4 in very high cited field fails WP:Prof. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:51, 18 February 2023 (UTC).
 * Delete, clearly doesn't pass NSCHOLAR. I also checked for possible GNG, but the newspaper coverage out there is for other individuals with the same name. -- Mvqr (talk) 12:13, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment Would this person meet WP:ANYBIO #2: "The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in a specific field"? From the write-up it seems that could be true. I don't know if that overcomes the lack of biographical sources, however. Lamona (talk) 05:03, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
 * If his role was truly pivotal in the history of the internet, there would be significant online sources recognizing his specific contributions. Not everyone who was in the WWW consortium is notable. JoelleJay (talk) 18:14, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
 * comment If you look through the W3C archives and also at the IETF you can see that he made significant contributions to the DOM, I18N, XML, XSL and other specifications. For example, he was responsible for developing the first version of the DOM specification, as noted in the specification: https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/production-notes.html, and is also responsible for driving HTML internationalization. (Not having a lot of press coverage doesn’t mean people didn’t have an impact... many pre-internet people have less coverage on the web) if you look at the archives, many of the people that contributed are not widely covered. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-sgml-wg/1996Sep/author.html - that group ultimately created XML. Rick Jelliffe noted his contributions in http://xml.coverpages.org/jelliffeERCSRetro.html and noting citations in Google Scholar, and the original XSL proposal https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XSL-970910


 * The key part of NPROF you're missing is that the person's role has been recognized as significant by independent researchers: In this case it is necessary to explicitly demonstrate, by a substantial number of references to academic publications of researchers other than the person in question, that this contribution is indeed widely considered to be significant and is widely attributed to the person in question. You cannot assess someone's impact based on the content they publish or what non-independent organizations say about them. JoelleJay (talk) 21:20, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Going through the first 6 pages of G-Scholar I rack up at least 610 cites to his works. I also find his works cited in at least 2 dozen books (I quit scrolling at that point), and mentions of him outside of cites, like this. He seems to also have his name on at least one patent. It's very hard to judge this because a tech standards developer is not the same as an academic (no 'publish or perish' push). I'm remaining neutral. Lamona (talk) 01:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * 610 cites is very small for this high cited field and h-index is tiny: far WP:Too soon. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC).
 * What is the field to which you refer? And where do you see what cite numbers it normally has? As for "too soon" - this person is nearing retirement from what I can tell. He was giving talks at web-related conferences in 1995: Nicol, G. T. (1995, December). DYNA WEB Integrating Large SGML Repositories and the WWW. In Fourth International World Wide Web Conference (pp. 549-558). Lamona (talk) 04:28, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The field is computer science. gives nearly 22,000 cites for a person known to some of us. Such numbers are not uncommon. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:37, 21 February 2023 (UTC).
 * I don't think that a standards developer should be compared to a professor. Those are very different activities. That is why the second bullet of NACADEMIC fits this case. If you develop standards that become used by millions of web sites and thousands of developers, you have had an impact that is not measured by cites. Lamona (talk) 16:32, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The impact still has to be noted and attributed to the subject in secondary, independent scholarly sources. JoelleJay (talk) 03:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
 * He may have done stuff but few have noted it. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:27, 22 February 2023 (UTC).

continued His name is on 2 standards that are used by every browser, and the work established the technical foundation for I18N on the web... so it's incorporated into things people use every day. Mentioned here by Francois as seminal: https://www.w3.org/International/francois.yergeau.html Mentioned as being seminal by Rick: http://xml.coverpages.org/jelliffeERCSRetro.html IETF draft that led to rfc2070: https://www.w3.org/International/draft-ietf-html-i18n-05.txt RFC7303 attribution: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7303 (standard) Rfc2110 attribution: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2110 (standard) Attributed here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-cda Attribution in this presentation: https://slideplayer.com/slide/4709286/ Referenced here: https://www.w3.org/International/geo/html-tech/html-authoring.html Referenced here: https://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#Nicol (standard) Referenced here: https://www.w3.org/International/tomas.carrasco.benitez.html Referenced in this thesis: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=cs_etds Referenced in this thesis: http://people.hum.aau.dk/~ulrikp/PhD/Sandborg-Petersen-PhD.pdf Referenced in this thesis: https://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/handle/10481/48333/26785195.pdf?sequence=1 Referenced in this thesis: https://theses.hal.science/tel-00006373/document Referenced in X.1141 : Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0) (standard) https://www.itu.int/itu-t/workprog/wp_a5_td.aspx?i...https://www.itu.int › itu-t › workprog › wp_a5_td Bio/attribution: https://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc16/b040.html Notes on standards: https://www.xml.com/pub/2000/10/18/standards/index.html Quote: https://www.w3.org/Press/DOM-core.html XSL History: https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/xslfaq/xsl/sect1/history.html Elastos: https://medium.com/@CyberRepublic/elastos-rights-management-platform-suggestion-6b44f4e0182 WWW 2005 conference: https://www2005.org/tutorials.html Examplotron: http://examplotron.org/0/4/ LMNL mention: https://www.xmlhack.com/read.php_item=1790 XTND: http://xml.coverpages.org/xtnd.html Referenced in Foundations of markup languages https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110224948.83/pdf Basilage: https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Johnsen01/BalisageVol7-Johnsen01.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by TechMak (talk • contribs) 16:31, 22 February 2023 (UTC)


 * None of these are all of independent, reliable, secondary, and substantial. Bare citations, his name being in documentation, accolades from companies he worked for/colleagues, etc. do not count towards NPROF. JoelleJay (talk) 17:14, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Continued I am sending these things because the field is different and I hope someone would look in to it. A reference from Tim Bray https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/03/11/Lights-Going-Out Similar people on Wikipedia Rick_Jelliffe,Steven_DeRose,Dan_Connolly_(computer_scientist),Dave_Raggett,James_Clark_(programmer),Bert_Bos,Jon_Bosak. Something a bit more recent: https://open-music.org/our-api and https://open-music.org/blog/2016/10/3/deploy-deploy-deploy-dispatch-from-the-omi-tech-meeting - and this project most recently https://www.commoditygenomeproject.org/resources He wrote the ontology for this, which is available at: https://github.com/commoditygenome/CGP-core-description-framework  — Preceding unsigned comment added by TechMak (talk • contribs) 20:12, 22 February 2023 (UTC) continued comment As noted by Lamona, holding standards developers to the citation requirements of academics is inappropriate. Better measures of impact are inclusion of the standards into other standards, and adoption of the standards into everyday life. In the case of this person, their work on I18N directly led to standards that were included into the HTML and XML standards, and they made significant contributions to the DOM standard, and XSL among others. Those contributions are credited in the standards themselves, and those standards are some of the most widely adopted and influential standards on the web. It would be fair to say that if you are using Wikipedia, you are benefitting from the fruits of this labor.
 * Delete, per above. JoelleJay (talk) 02:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

That this should suffice is evidenced by the pages referenced above, and many others like them, where the primary notability of the individuals is in their standards work. Some of those people have more citations because they are more academic, or were more widely promoted, but few can claim to have their names on more than a single standard in use every day by every participant on the web. Note that some of those people - themselves experts in the field, directly credit this persons work.

Wikipedia is at least partly about capturing the historical record - the people, events and technologies that have influenced society. Obviously it needs to be protected from garbage and this is far from the case here. Being included and credited by name in multiple international standards (which are about the most independent and reliable documents you can get) is notable and these standards are universally adopted. In terms of citations - it’s like every application on the web citing the work.TechMak (talk) 20:59, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * If you want to change policy you should do that on a policy page, not on an AfD. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:49, 23 February 2023 (UTC).


 * Delete. It's clear from the article, from Google Scholar, and from the discussion above, that Nicol is not an academic and does not meet our standards for academic notability. That's not itself proof that he is non-notable; it only means we must use another standard. The only plausible standard to use is WP:NBIO, which demands in-depth coverage of the subject in multiple independent reliable secondary sources. But we don't have that, either; all we have is primary sources about the technology he developed. One might hope for some articles about the history of WWW standards that might go into detail about the role he played in developing those standards, but I didn't find any. So unfortunately, he doesn't appear to pass NBIO either. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:56, 23 February 2023 (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.