Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Italian geniuses (3rd nomination)


 * 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. postdlf (talk) 23:45, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

List of Italian geniuses
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Per Articles for deletion/List of people who have been called a polymath Dweller (talk) 17:10, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete. The second AFD was a procedural close, but the first AFD mostly resulted in no consensus on the back of the facially high quality of the content here. I can't really dispute that, insofar as it goes. But, regrettably, that's not sufficient for inclusion. "Genius" is an extremely ill-defined term, applied by one writer or another as an honorific as much as anything else. And that means that the inclusion criterion defined by the article's title is inherently a matter of individual opinions, and no set standard (needless to say, extrapolated IQ values for historical figures cannot possibly serve as a neutral inclusion criterion). That means the notion that all such "recipients" of this description are equally comparable represents a novel synthesis. A lot of work was put in here, but, with regret, I simply cannot see how it is compatible with standards and policy. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:51, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions.  Rcsprinter123     (spiel)  @ 20:39, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Italy-related deletion discussions.  Rcsprinter123     (interface)  @ 20:40, 3 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. This list is based on two sources that extrapolate IQ for historical figures, which is ridiculous in so many ways. IQ, even if we accept the questionable proposition that it can be calculated for people who didn't take IQ tests, is not the same as "genius". (Does anyone claim Marilyn vos Savant, the person with allegedly the highest known IQ, is a genius?) Even based on this highly suspect criterion, Columbus and Garibaldi hardly qualify with "IQs" of 140. Anyone can call anyone else a "genius" as an accolade. Alex Ferguson is a genius. So's Bill Belichick, Woody Allen, ten hot women, etc. The definition is whatever you say it is. At what point does somebody stop being outstanding and start being a genius? This list is almost entirely based on two sources, one by non-experts. Columbus and Garibaldi geniuses? I don't think so. It may be possible to construct a list of universally acknowledged geniuses with impeccable sourcing, but this isn't it. At best, blow it up and start over. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:08, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep Figures such as Galileo, Leonardo and Fermi are celebrated for their intellectual accomplishments. There are entire books devoted to this stuff such as Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World and The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance.  The topic therefore passes WP:LISTN and so any nitpicking is a matter of ordinary editing, not deletion. Andrew D. (talk) 00:36, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete Arbitrary terms almost inevitably result in synthesis. Articles like these are a serious problem for the project. Nwlaw63 (talk) 07:29, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment – Gentlemen, we have encountered a dilemma. There are such things as geniuses. Wikipedia has articles on them.  Yet Wikipedia's navigation systems are helpless to link to them due to the subjective nature of genius.  This has resulted in gaps in those systems.  There is no List of geniuses (it's a redirect to a see also section of marginal relevance), no Portal:Geniuses, and no Category:Geniuses.  The search engine doesn't help much either - type in "italian genius" and compare the results to the contents of this soon to be deleted list.  Readers are left flat, forced to go to Google, to seek out names of geniuses so they can then look them up one-by-one on Wikipedia.  But why would users want to identify and read about geniuses?  Well, for role models, for insight into how they think, and for perspective on the potential of human intellectual performance and achievement.  What's the solution?  Point our readers to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their editors aren't shy about calling a genius a genius.  ;)  The Transhumanist 08:50, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete Arbitrary term someone labelled the persons with, bolstered by questionable estimates of the IQs of historical figures. Columbus a genius with IQ 140? Silly. He was a bonehead who ignored scholarship on the size of the Earth and couldn't tell the difference between Cuba and India. Edison (talk) 16:43, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - There are plenty of people from Italy who have had a major influence on style, fashion, and popular culture but a "list of stylish Italians" doesn't make sense either because "stylish," as with "genius," is an unclear/imprecise term subject to a significant variety in measurements. To anyone who would argue that the list is notable because there are other lists of genius Italians, the problem with the word "genius" remains. What we would be left with is a "list of Italians referred to as geniuses". &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 03:06, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment – Makes sense. Nobody could prove that pseudosciences were just that, so after much discussion, they settled on List of topics characterized as pseudoscience. The characterizations were something they could provide citations for.  The Transhumanist 08:45, 10 February 2015 (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.