Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gerhard Kramm


 * 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. Fram (talk) 09:00, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I was asked to give the reasons for my "delete" closure. Basically, the !votecount is 7 vs. 2, so in that regard the consensus is clear. As for the opinions being policy based or not (lending them more weight than the pure votecount), it basically boils down to "he is notable enough" and "no he isn't", which is a personal opinion, not a precise science (in borderline cases). The opinions come from well established editors, not SPAs or socks or other more "dubious" sources, so I see no reason to give any of them more or less weight. This all means that in the end, the consensus is that Kramm is for the moment not notable enough to have an article here. Fram (talk) 06:59, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Gerhard Kramm

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

So there's been an informal deletion discussion on the talk page of the article for about the past week or so. Based on a thorough examination of the article and the arguments on the talk page, I've come to the conclusion that the article should be deleted and thus I'll make the formal nomination.

First, the article does not, I feel, pass the general notability critera. I can only find two good secondary sources: Senate Report News article on research. Both sources are independent of the subject, but neither is "significant coverage": the latter is only tangentially about the subject of the article and the former merely quotes from his writing, so again, not directly about the subject of the article. Of course, the other notability criterion is professors and academics. Let's go through these individually: With all of the above evidence, my inclination is to delete, but I welcome the input of better sources I and others may have missed that would save the article from deletion. Sailsbystars (talk) 20:26, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
 * 2-4,6,8,9: Not relevant based on the information I can find.
 * 1:"significant impact in their scholarly discipline" - as Arthur Smith pointed out on the talk page, the subject's publication record is pretty middling: ranked 1666 of 3000-ish for citations
 * 5:"named chair appointment or "Distinguished Professor" appointment at a major institution of higher education and research" - Not passed: his own CV lists him as an associate professor, so not even a full-prof, much less "distingushed professor"
 * 7: "The person has made substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity." - Dr. Kramm has written a few letters to the editor and has been quoted in a Congressional report as mentioned above. However, this criterion somewhat duplicates the WP:GNG, and as such, is insufficiently supported as described above.
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Sailsbystars (talk) 20:33, 13 October 2012 (UTC)


 * weak delete - google h-index of 12, for a current scientist, is pretty low. One paper in google scholar is cited by 100+ (see scholar.google).  My inclination is delete also. --Lquilter (talk) 00:47, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 12:54, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

[Arbitrary break]
In there paper "Scrutinizing the atmospheric greenhouse effect and its climatic impact" Kramm and Dlugi (2011) stated:

"The example 2.1 of Halpern et al., for instance, which is dealing with two heat reservoirs at different temperatures that exchange energy and entropy by radiation is falsified because the magnitude of the entropy flux emitted by a black body is given by Js = 4/3 σ T3 [5], where T is the actual surface temperature and σ = 5.67 • 10-8 W·m–2·K–4 is Stefan’s constant. Halpern et al. not only ignored Planck’s [5] results, but also those of many peer-reviewed papers published during the past four decades (e.g., [6-9]). In addition, even the wrong units for irradiances and entropy fluxes used in their 2009-version and already criticized by, at least, one of the reviewers were not replaced in their printed version by the correct ones. If it is possible to publish such a physically inadequate comment, we have to acknowledge that the discipline of climatology has lost its rational basis."

Arthur Smith was a co-author of Halpern et al. (2010). Thus, it is not surprising to me that especially Halpern tries to attack Kramm under the belt line.

On the talk page, Smith argued in a manner that is typical for him. He cited Prall's work even though it is rather senseless. Kramm is a theoretical meteorologist. His work is mainly related to the physics and chemistry of the atmospheric boundary layer and atmospheric energetics, but not to climate. From this point of view it plays no role whether he is listed by Prall or not. Prall claimed that Kramm has written 29 papers to climate. This is highly incorrect. To my best knowledge, his first peer-reviewed paper on climate was published in 2010.

According to Google Scholar, Kramm's h index is 19, but not 12 as reported here. In his PNAS paper J.E. Hirsch (2005), a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego and the father of the h index, argued:

"Based on typical h and m values found, I suggest (with large error bars) that for faculty at major research universities, h ≈ 12 might be a typical value for advancement to tenure (associate professor) and that h ≈ 18 might be a typical value for advancement to full professor. Fellowship in the American Physical Society might occur typically for h ≈ 15–20. ........ Scientists working in nonmainstream areas will not achieve the same very high h values as the top echelon of those working in highly topical areas."

In my opinion, theoretical meteorology is such a non-mainstream area. Although the scientific impact cannot easily be assessed by such measures like h and g indices, these measures are, by far, more objective than the highly subjective meaning of Halpern and Smith. I must assume that Halpern and friends try to re-establish "Deutsche Physik" (it means Aryan physics). Mmarque (talk) 17:35, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
 * The h-index is 12 on isi-web of science (no link, since subscription required), which is more reliable than google scholar, as google scholar is known to overcount citatations (it's not restricted to peer-reviewed literature), so it's nothing too special for a tenure-track professor. Sailsbystars (talk) 18:01, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Note that there was some discussion on the above-quoted talk page which has been (I expect accidentally) deleted in the discussion there. If you go through the history of the talk page you'll note a couple of additional comments - one suggested that wikipedia ought to err on the side of including this along with the thousands of other well-cited climate scientists. I'm certainly sympathetic to that view, but I can understand with limited editing resources it might be best to have stricter notability criteria. Either way I don't think this page should be kept without some effort to balance with a good fraction of the many much more notable climate scientists who are currently missing from wikipedia. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:24, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Um, when did it become acceptable to come this close to calling another editor a Nazi on an AfD discussion? --JBL (talk) 20:21, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete quibbling over h-index is silly if we don't have verifiable material to write a biography. I don't like that there seems to be a recent targeting of scientists that have challenged mainstream science on climate change at AfD, but there's not much for keeping this one. Gigs (talk) 18:34, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete with feelings similar to those of the nominator. It seems unlikely to me that Kramm satisfies the notability criteria as either an academic or under GNG, but I thought it was possible that discussion on the talk page would lead to some useful reliable source that could justify a keep.  Unfortunately the arguments in favor of keeping seem mostly to be driven by an ideological insistence that climate science denialists not be removed from Wikipedia, rather than a desire to write a good article.  (There seems to be a lot of silly focus on the subject's not-unusually-impressive citation record; e.g., after the question of notability was raised the article was edited to refer to Kramm's "commendable citation index ranking".)  Since there seems to be no verifiable RS material from which to write a biography, we probably shouldn't have a biography.  --JBL (talk) 20:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I fixed the citation-index peacock bits, and started ID of Kramm's most-cited papers. Curiously, the "Selected Pub" list excludes (at least) #3 & #4, so this should be fixed too -- but deep enough for tonite! Cheers, Pete Tillman (talk) 02:26, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

[Arbitrary break, as editing is getting clumsy]

 * Delete. Kramm's citation record is not strong enough to pass WP:PROF criterion 1, and theoretical meteorology is very much a mainstream discipline, so the get-out-clause claim above is spurious. For an associate professor to be considered notable we would need extraordinary evidence to claim that Kramm has made significant impact in his scholarly discipline in contradiction to his employer's failure to grant a full professorship. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:49, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Phil Bridger, you are completely wrong. Theoretical meteorology is, by far, not a mainstream discipline. The only journal, for instance, dealing with dynamical meteorology is Tellus Series A, a Swedish journal. This journal also publishes papers in dynamical oceanography. What theoretical meteorology means is reflected by the textbooks of Riegel (1992), Dutton (1995) and Zdunkowsky & Bott (2003). I do not believe that you have an adequate education to understand these textbooks. Thus, what is your motivation to make false claims? Mmarque (talk) 22:43, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Oh good, we've graduated from vague Nazi comparisons to direct personal attacks on other users. Please read WP:NPA and WP:AGF, and knock it off.  --JBL (talk) 23:22, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
 * According to Thomas Foken, Professor of Micrometeorology at the University of Bayreuth, "Meteorology is subdivided into branches. The main branches are theoretical meteorology, observational meteorology and applied meteorology." It doesn't take much education, or questionable motivation, to understand that one of the three main branches of meteorology is not an obscure field. Phil Bridger (talk) 07:05, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Criticizing someone's wrong claim is not a personal attack.Mmarque (talk) 01:44, 16 October 2012 (UTC)


 * You're right -- that's why you should have stopped writing before you got to your last two sentences. As a show of good faith, you could always go strike them out.  --JBL (talk) 03:43, 16 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep. A few matters should be clarified. First, this debate is strictly about whether to keep the article based on the subject's notability, not whether there's enough material supported by biographical sources to write an article. If there aren't many of latter, the article can always be stubbed using minimal information from published papers, like history of employment and areas of expertise. Second, there's no precedent of limiting notability to one kind of ranking, as implied above using this list. The overwhelming majority of academics pass on WP:PROF #1 and there are many accepted ways of demonstrating this, including h-index, book holdings, total number of citations to published work, etc. Here, WoS shows that the subject has an h-index of 12, which is in our historically "borderline" region of 10-15, but the citation list is more telling, e.g. 45, 42, 36, 34, 32, ... (total >350) and Kramm is the first or corresponding author on most of the well-cited papers. As one would expect, these citation numbers are somewhat higher on GS. Agricola44 (talk) 14:41, 16 October 2012 (UTC).
 * BTW, I'm always uncomfortable trying to divine why someone may or may not have been promoted within the academic ranks, as my esteemed colleague Phil Bridger has done above, because these matters are usually fraught with internal politics that cannot easily be known by folks outside of that institution. Agricola44 (talk) 14:46, 16 October 2012 (UTC).
 * I'm not trying to divine why, but merely noticing the fact. Wherever possible we make decisions on notability by reference to what the outside world considers notable rather than by our own subjective judgement. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:16, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Phil, my point exactly. As I see it, what the "outside world considers notable" is the checkable objective statistic of >350 citations and what I think would be more "subjective judgement" is speculating on the internal and presumably confidential personnel affairs at an institution where someone was passed over for promotion. By itself, 350 citations is a sufficient clincher here. Agricola44 (talk) 18:52, 16 October 2012 (UTC).
 * Hey, I have a Google scholar h-index of 14, 885 citations total, 7 papers with over 50 citations (according to Google, don't know what WoS says). And I was only an active researcher for 10 years, over 16 years ago. I have certainly never thought my work in physics justified a wikipedia page for myself. If that's the justification, as I noted above, I'd like to see a commitment to adding pages for the thousands of similar or better qualified people currently missing... ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:05, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * You probably should have an article then:) As for commitment, that obviously falls to us, the editors. I've created 8 new bios in roughly the past month and am gathering background on about a dozen more right now. You're urged to do the same...there are many more deserving bios than there are editors, so please carry on. Agricola44 (talk) 18:52, 16 October 2012 (UTC).
 * Arthur: you forgot to mention that you were once audited at Climate Audit: Arthur Smith's Trick. In a juster world, you'd be halfway to meeting GNG! . Cheers, Pete Tillman (talk) 19:33, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Agricola44, I think your main point is just wrong. The first general note at WP:ACADEMICS says in part, "It is possible for an academic to be notable according to this standard, and yet not be an appropriate topic for coverage in Wikipedia because of a lack of reliable, independent sources on the subject."  In other words, some actual biographical information is required.  Similarly, your mentions of Kramm's citation counts do not address the "Average Professor Test": "when judged against the average impact of a researcher in his or her field, does this researcher stand out as clearly more notable or more accomplished than others in the field?"  There's evidence above that Kramm's citation count is not clearly more accomplished than others in his field; do you have contrary evidence?  --JBL (talk) 21:16, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Please see my comment below. Agricola44 (talk) 15:18, 17 October 2012 (UTC).

Phil Bridger, Professor Dr. Foken is engaged in micrometeorology, but not in theoretical meteorology. This means that he is engaged in the field of applied meteorology. Theoretical meteorology is based on theoretical Physics. Please take a look into the textbook of Zdunkowski and Bott (2003), Dynamics of the Atmosphere. This textbook stands for theoretical meteorology. By the way, Kramm and Foken published several papers together. I found that these papers are listed in the References of Foken's textbook. Mmarque (talk) 01:11, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * A book written by professor of micrometeorology and published by a major academic publisher is a perfectly reliable source for that fact that theoretical meteorology is one of the major branches of meteorology. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:24, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Joel B. Lewis, I wonder what your qualification is. If you are this post-doc at the UMN, then it would be better for you to be quiet. According to MathSciNet, the number of papers published by a Joel B. Lewis is six. His field is number theory. Kramm is also mentioned in MathSciNet because he published some papers in the Journal of the Calcutta Mathematical Society. Kramm's fields are also listed in MathSciNet: Fluid mechanics, geophysics, quantum theory, statistical mechanics, and structure of matter. Kramm and Herbert (2006), for instance, derived various blackbody radiation laws using principles of dimensional analysis. One of them is Planck's radiation law. If you are this UMN guy, do you really believe that you are able to assess Kramm's work or his scientific reputation? Thus, tell me what your motivation is? Your behavior is that of an aisle sitter who only had assessed a nativity play of a middle school long time ago. Mmarque (talk) 01:11, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

[3rd arbitrary break]

 * Weak Keep: I just added another 3rd-party cite, to a report and testimony Kramm prepared for the Alaska state legislature in 2007. For me, this tips the balnce to meeting the WP:GNG. --Pete Tillman (talk) 19:04, 16 October 2012 (UTC)


 * In what sense is a report written by Kramm a 3rd party cite? (Am I missing something?  It looks like the page you've linked has no information about Kramm other than a PDF of his slides.)  --JBL (talk) 19:11, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Please see Anchorage Presentations (third item), which documents Kramm's appearance at the Alaska state legislature (with a link to his report, published by the State). Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 19:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Uh, Pete T..... GNG requires "significant coverage," and the document you list is inescapably trivial coverage rather than significant, since the only thing written by the 3rd party is his name and talk title.... I mean I appreciate your effort to find more sources, but that source doesn't really help to establish notability..... Sailsbystars (talk) 20:29, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, presumably several such things taken together could be significant, even if each one had only a tiny bit of information. But it would be nice if there were, say, a newspaper account of this talk or something.  --JBL (talk) 20:33, 16 October 2012 (UTC)


 * The State of Alaska found Kramm to be Notable enough to testify to one of the legislature's committees, and published his report. Now, I'm not saying this is equivalent to a profile at a RS newspaper ormagazine, but these things do add up. Hence my Weak Keep !vote. Best, Pete Tillman (talk) 20:43, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but "the State of Alaska found" is not supported by your source. It confirms that Kramm gave some sort of talk; it is not clear (at least to me) how he came to be invited to give this talk, and it's certainly not clear that "the State of Alaska" (or anyone who plausibly could be so-described) found anything about him at all, nor why they invited him.  (Totally agree about "these things add up" in principle; still not convinced that they do in this particular instance, though.)  --JBL (talk) 20:50, 16 October 2012 (UTC)


 * You're right, excess puffery, my bad. I'd hoped to find a news mention of this, but failed. Nevertheless, someone at the Alaska legislature did pick Kramm to testify, and the Commission did publish his report..... Thanks for the "these things add up" agreement; I do think this adds at least a bit to Kramm's GNG "score".   --Pete Tillman (talk) 21:50, 16 October 2012 (UTC), revised Pete Tillman (talk) 02:33, 17 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't think GNG is relevant anymore because >350 citations is sufficient under PROF 1. What Pete added is supplemental, but not necessary for the notability pass. News and other such would be supplemental too, but again, not necessary. Agricola44 (talk) 20:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC).


 * On another topic, I would draw your attention to Talk:Gerhard Kramm as another potential (small) evidence for Kramm's wiki-Notability. Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 21:49, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I get about 5 invitation for that per year. It's a vanity press, and very much non-selective about who to include. It does not help to establish notability. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:28, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Stephan. I respectfully disagree -- please see the discussion at Talk:Gerhard Kramm. In my opinion, Kramm's "Who's Who" listings (there are 3, he says) should make a small contrib to his GNG notability. --Pete Tillman (talk) 18:41, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Over there you point to this edit by User:Kestenbaum for support. But Kestenbaum, while defending the reliability of Who's Who, explicitly rejects the idea that it confers notability: "Listing in Who's Who ought not be taken as proof of notability, since the inclusion threshold is lower than it is for Wikipedia." --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:16, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * IB Kastenbaum is referring to the academic notability guidelines. As you probably know, the WP:GNG are less specific. So I think we could use his Who's Who listings to partially satisfy GNG -- he says he's also listed in "Who's Who in America" and "Who's Who in the World", which arguably could be better for partly meeting GNG. Again, I'm only suggesting we use this as a small "leg up" towards demonstrating Kramm's wiki-Notability. --Pete Tillman (talk) 21:26, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, but the discussion you pointed to is at Talk:Marquis Who's Who, and there is no mentioning of WP:ACADEMIC, or even academics, anywhere on that page. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:34, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. I think my point stands: we can consider using his Who's Who listings to meet GNG. Best, Pete Tillman (talk) 21:47, 17 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I've also added a small section to the article on Kramm's signing of a 2009 climate-change advertisement sponsored by the Cato Institute. Cato's ad campaign drew notice from the New York Times and elsewhere. Another small add to Kramms notability, I think.  Pete Tillman (talk) 01:52, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

YA arbitrary break #4

 * Comment. A number of the commentators here seem to be acquainted with one another from previous talk regarding Kramm and perhaps other articles related to climate change and, furthermore, there seems to be a thinly veiled theme of taking sides for or against this article based on Kramm's stance on global warming. This stance is irrelevant to his notability. We are only debating whether he satisfies any of the standard notability guidelines, although it's pretty clear that WP:PROF is the most appropriate. There also seems to be confusion on sources. Specifically, it has been argued that unless there are biographical sources, he is not notable. This is patent nonsense and there is an enormous body of precedent that contradicts this assertion. I've already demonstrated above that he has a body of scholarship that has conservatively (per WoS) been cited >350 times, which satisfies WP:PROF #1. Wikilawyering counterclaims that these sources provide no information for the article are false. At the very barest minimum, his published papers (which are, by definition, WP:RS) can be combed for places of employment, research interests, accomplishments, etc. and the article can be a stub with this information. In this case, however, there would also seem to be additional biographical info in the material that Pete Tillman has found. The bottom line is that Kramm is notable and that there is enough WP:RS for an article on him. Agricola44 (talk) 15:18, 17 October 2012 (UTC).


 * Agricola44 - I thought published scholarly papers were not "by definition" WP:RS - read the cautions at WP:SCHOLARSHIP; what you're suggesting sounds like WP:OR if you're trying to extract a biography from articles that are not "directly related" to the subject's personal history. The existing page here cites the person's facebook page as a source for some of the quoted info - are personal facebook pages now reliable sources? There seems to be a lot of parsing here to justify things. What I'd like to see for example on the "> 350 times" citation thing is whether that sort of criterion has been used widely for other scientific authors? The average paper these days cites about 15 prior articles, so even the most average scientist publishing 1 paper a year should accumulate about that much in 25 years work. Do you have a reliable source on the "350" as a criterion, as used in other cases for example? ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:52, 17 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't want to digress into a wikilawyer-saturated debate. Briefly, WP:SCHOLARSHIP says "Material such as ... research paper that has been vetted by the scholarly community is regarded as reliable", consequently his published scholarship is, by definition, WP:RS. Now, as you mentioned the issue is to what degree one synthesizes WP:OR out of a primary source. Again from WP:SCHOLARSHIP: "Wikipedians should never interpret the content of primary sources for themselves", the operative word being interpret (my emphasis). I don't think that any reasonable person would consider obvious information from a scientific research paper, like the author's place of employment listed in the by-line to be "interpreted". As for notability on WP:PROF #1, the general convention has been h-index of 10-15 is borderline and above 15 is generally regarded as notable. In terms of raw number of citations, the convention is at least a "few hundred", which likely comes from the minimum number of citations guaranteed by a 15 h-index of 152 = 225. Of course, there is no "source" for this, only a significant amount of precedent. As for trivialities, like Kramm's favorite dance sourced by Facebook...that material should obviously be deleted. I'm going to try to sit out the rest of this discussion. Thanks, Agricola44 (talk) 17:49, 17 October 2012 (UTC).


 * I certainly agree with Agricola that Kramm's political views should be irrelevant here. In my view, this discussion has been conducted in a reasonably civil fashion -- most of those active in this review, including the AfD nominator, have made clear they welcome new info/refs that would make Kramm clearly wiki-Notable, and I've been trying to fix up his wikibio so it can be retained. Thanks for the kind words re that.


 * Unfortunately, Dr. Kramm appears to be a genuinely marginal case re wiki-Notability. In my opinion his bio should be retained -- there are plenty of weaker ones already in the BLP files -- but (thank heavens) I haven't seen the kinds of rabid partisanship that characterized the deletion reviews for Marcel Leroux and Tim Ball -- both of whose deletions were unjustified, imo. So  -- let's continue to focus on the basics, and let the chips fall where they may. Best regards, Pete Tillman (talk) 18:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Firstly I must deny that I am influenced here by any opinion I may hold about global warming. Everyone should be evaluated by the same standards regardless of whether I agree with them. More importantly I must disagree with Agricola's statistical analysis that equates an h-index of 15 with a total citation count of 225. Yes, this is theoretically possible, but even if the distribution of citations per paper was linear we would expect the total number of citations to be 2h2 (450 for an h-index of 15), and in practise the distribution is more than skewed than this, so someone with an h-index of 15 would be expected to have a total citation count of well over 450. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:03, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Phil. You'll note that I said that 225 is "minimum number of citations guaranteed by a 15 h-index" and that is a fact. What this whole debate boils down to is whether an academic record of scholarship that is cited 350 times (conservatively because this figure comes from WoS) is sufficient for WP:PROF #1. Agricola44 (talk) 19:21, 17 October 2012 (UTC).
 * My point still stands that 350 total citations is no more than would be expected for someone with an h-index of 12. I do not believe that our usual interpretation of WP:PROF is satisfied by this record. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:20, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Point taken. Let the closing admin decide. Best, Agricola44 (talk) 20:29, 17 October 2012 (UTC).
 * I have some problems with the lack of reliable secondary sources. As an example, our article currently lists a B.E., a B.S., an M.S. and a Ph.D. among his qualifications, all from German institutions and sourced to his personal web site. I do not doubt that he has equivalent qualifications, but it is very unlikely that a German university or Fachhochschule would have given exactly these degrees in the time frame listed - Bachelor and Master have only recently introduced into the science and engineering disciplines (previously, there was only one degree, the "Diplom", which came in two variants, one from universities proper, one from "Fachhochschulen", both usually considered to be the equivalent of a Master degree). Similarly, very few doctorates given by German universities are actual PhDs in the literal sense. It's not uncommon to translate German degrees into equivalent English ones in informal settings (like a personal web site), but for encyclopaedic coverage, we really should be able to list the original degrees. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:59, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Stephan: thanks for your comments. Good points. I wonder if you (or another German speaker) could look on the German Google and fill some of this stuff out? I turned up a fair # of German-language hits for Kramm (plus an eponymous soccer player!) but my 50-year back scientific German is too dim (and was rough even then) ;-[ and I didn't bother to machine-translate. TIA, Pete Tillman (talk) 16:35, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments - I had a phone call with Kramm. His doctoral degree correctly reads Dr. rer. nat. (it means doctor of natural science). He earned his doctoral degree in meteorology (Magna cum laude) at the Department of Physics of the Humboldt-University of Berlin, one of Germany's leading universities. He earned a prediploma and diploma in meteorology at the University of Cologne. These degrees are equivalent to the American degrees B.S. and M.S. This means that Kramm is completely educated in meteorology. He has also a diploma in industrial engineering earned at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences. This diploma is ranking higher than a bachelor degree in engineering, but there is no equivalent certificate. The German title reads Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing., see Engineer's degree). Mmarque (talk) 01:48, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that is useful. It would be good if we had a RS for that. As a note: a "Vordiplom" (prediploma) is very much not a Bachelor - indeed, it is not a degree at all, only an intermediate step to a degree. On the other hand, an FH Diploma is usually considered more than a Bachelor, and close to a Master degree (typically, universities require a few additional credits in theoretical subjects for PhD students with FH diplomas, while those with university diplomas need no extra courses). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:01, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

YA arbitrary break #5
Comment - Please recognize that the Facebook references I introduced a couple of months ago are related to Kramm's outside interests. These are ballroom dancing and naval history. Kramm and his wife are excellent ballroom dancers and well known for various dance performances in Interior Alaska. Many manuscripts submitted to journals and eventually published are first uploaded to the arXiv of the Cornell University. Some physics journals use arXiv in their review processes. I assume that during the last couple of days the number of references increased by more than 70 percent. One of the new ones is the reference to the arXiv manuscript of Hansen et al. (2011). This manuscript was obviously published by Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in December 2011. Recently, I realized that one of Kramm's manuscripts uploaded to arXiv is the reply to a comment written by two German climate skeptics with the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), a CFACT organisation. Obviously, Kramm is the target of both the AGW activists and the CFACT-sponsored climate skeptics. Mmarque (talk) 01:00, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment - I was just reviewing the article again to see the extent to which it relies on anything that could be considered a reliable source based on the above discussion. If you take out all the things sourced to the individual's home page, facebook page, or university "list of publications" page, you have exceedingly little left. Note also that many of the references are duplicated (1, 3, 4 are the home page, 23 and 25 are the facebook page) or broken (8, 9, 17). There are also a large number of references to arXiv, which is self-publishing with essentially no editorial oversight, and one to Bentham_Science_Publishers which - well you can read its wiki page to judge that. To me this speaks to the essential reason why the notability criterion is important - if you have too many less-notable people in your encyclopedia, it quickly gets far beyond the capacity of the editors to maintain quality. Do any of those arguing for retention of this article claim it i of higher than median quality for wikipedia? ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:05, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Weak delete. The h-index is promising but not quite enough to convince me of a pass of WP:PROF (searching Google scholar for ozone formation or ozone destruction reveals many better-cited papers on the subject than his top paper), and in any case is not enough by itself to write an article. And despite what seems to have been a lot of effort over the course of the article, the sources are still weak and non-neutral, mostly coming either from Kramm himself or from the Cato Institute. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:21, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Comment - The paper of Stockwell et al. (1997) is a book article. It has been cited by many authors. Meanwhile, their articles are often more cited because they were published in journals. Unfortunately, the SCI lists this paper in nine different ways. It is not included in the computation of the h-index. Measures like h-index and g-index were introduced because the number of citations is a weak measure for the scientific impact. By the way, the paper of Stockwell et al. (1997) is not listed in Kramm's list of his ten favorites among his articles. Several other papers authored or co-authored by Kramm are not considered. The Contribution of Atmospheric Physics, for instance, the leading German journal in the matter of theoretical meteorology, was merged with the Meteorologische Zeitschrift, but the papers published by the Contribution of Atmospheric Physics are completely ignored by SCI. Mmarque (talk) 02:37, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments - I received two nice messages.
 * Your comments about me at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Gerhard_Kramm are unambiguously personal attacks (see WP:NPA: "Comment on content, not on the contributor."). Please strike them out. Thank you. --JBL (talk) 12:27, 17 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Same applies to your comments about me and User:Joshua Halpern on the same article for deletion page - "Aryan Physics" for example seems a clear violation of WP:NPA. The only relevant discussion there should have been about the notability criteria themselves; speculating on various peoples motivations or competency for questioning or defending seem way out of place. ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:37, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

These messages reflect what the goal of these users is. Mmarque (talk) 05:40, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I find these messages completely appropriate, but have a hard time reading the originators goals from them. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:08, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I have created an RfC on Mmarque's behavior here. --JBL (talk) 15:44, 20 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete. Citations too small in a highly cited field. 01:43, 23 October 2012 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xxanthippe (talk • contribs)
 * Delete - The only source I found was the Anchorage Daily News December 10, 2006 article note in the nom, which was reprinted word for word in an Anchorage Daily News July 18, 2010 article (haven't seen that before). The biography topic doesn't meet WP:GNG. To those favoring skepticism about global warming is it more important to have an article on what Kramm says about his skepticism about global warming or an article about his life events? The Kramm topic doesn't qualify as a biography and even Kramm would agree that his life events are less important than his writing and messages on global warming. Maybe instead of a biography, try writing a Writings of Gerhard Kramm article. I think you will get much further in the Wikipedia process. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 03:06, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Once again, the debate has nothing to do with editors' positions that are either skeptical or accepting of global warming. Bio doesn't need to meet GNG because 350 journal citations meets PROF #1. Thx, Agricola44 (talk) 04:52, 24 October 2012 (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.