Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Larry Vardiman


 * 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. Spartaz Humbug! 06:22, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

Larry Vardiman

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WP:FRINGEBLP of a rather obscure creationist who is not notable for being a WP:PROF nor is he particularly notable as a creationist (sources are extremely lacking). jps (talk) 22:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 22:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Christianity-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 22:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 22:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator. &#58;bloodofox: (talk) 22:04, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete there are so many more actual scientists and respectable academics that don't have Wikipedia pages, so the inclusion of this non-notable person is egregious. GPinkerton (talk) 22:34, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete We can write about creationists when they're notable (e.g., Duane Gish or Paul Nelson); this one isn't. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 22:38, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete. It's a CV with a picture; nothing notable here. --Kbabej (talk) 23:49, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete. Sources are unreliable and affiliated, and there's nothing obvious to replace them. Guy (help!) 21:59, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not notable; his "publication list" shows he has never done legitimate scholarship. NightHeron (talk) 21:50, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep I searched his name in Google Scholar. The first entry says "Cited by 147" of these, most are "friendly" citations, but I found three critical ones from American Scientist, the Geological Society, London, and ohiolink.edu . His name rings up 525 entries on Google Scholar, and I have to get to page 6 of the entries to find his articles which were cited only once. I expect most are friendly citations, but I would be surprised if none were critical. On the other hand, Duane Gish gets a whopping 2,490 results, so User:XOR&#39;easter has a point that he is less notable than Duane Gish. (Paul Nelson is a common name so searching is not useful). So in short he is less notable, but still meets GNG.--Epiphyllumlover (talk) 04:37, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Manually adding up his Google Scholar citation counts, I get an h-index of 12, which (a) is too low to make a case for notability even if it were a trustworthy number, and (b) inflated by creationist literature making it untrustworthy. So, while there's not nothing, there also isn't enough. A real scientist who gets all of 3 citations in reliable sources wouldn't be notable, either. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 17:15, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep. Obviously, he's a WP:FRINGE researcher, so we need mainstream coverage of him; citation circles of other creationists aren't going to count towards notability. But I found nontrivial coverage of Vardiman and his creationist work, from what appear to be reliably published sources following the mainstream scientific point of view, in Alters "A Content Analysis of the Institute for Creation Research's Institute on Scientific Creationism", Creation/Evolution, Collins & Collins "Pleistocene continental Glaciers: A single Ice Age Following a Genesis Flood or multiple Ice Ages?", Reports of the NCSE , Heaton "Recent Developments in Young-Earth Creationist Geology", Science & Education, , and Stix et al, "Science versus Antiscience?", Scientific American, . So he appears to have a plausible case for being notable for his fringe beliefs. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:03, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Mere mention of a person, publication, or talk is not much on which to base a biography. I look at the first source you list and it gives nothing more than a report on a talk Vardiman gave about his denial of ice age timescales. This hardly seems relevant to the biography of this person. It may be relevant for some article that details the intricacies of creationist talking points. The other articles are similarly focused not on Vardiman but on creationist ideology for which he is merely a mouthpiece. I just don't see any biographical material that we can include from those sources. jps (talk) 21:10, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
 * If he is to be notable as a creationist-young-earth-ice-age-theorist or whatever, then it is exactly in-depth coverage of his creationist-young-earth-ice-age-theories that we need, not coverage of his breakups with his girlfriends or his favorite places to get his hair done. If we required that of all biographical articles we'd be stuck with an encyclopedia only of vapid celebrities famous for being famous. And it is exactly in-depth coverage of his creationist-young-earth-ice-age-theories that the sources I listed provide. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:16, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I rather think that he himself is not all that notable, but rather his particular young-earth approach was one of many that NCSE and other 90s debunking outfits saw fit to include in their compendiums. There are dozens if not hundreds of similar obscure arguments documented at the Talk.origins archive, for example. I do not think each one deserves a standalone article, let alone a biographical sketch. jps (talk) 12:55, 25 May 2020 (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.