Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of plant scientists


 * 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 merge to List of botanists. There is clear consensus that "List of plant scientists" should not be a separate article. There is much discussion, for reasons not immediately transparent to laypeople, about whether which list is a subset of which other list or not. But this can, I trust, all be resolved by editing by subject matter experts, who can make clear any distinctions which may be necessary in the merged list. To the extent it was discussed, there is also consensus to include List of plant pathologists in the merger.  Sandstein  09:19, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

List of plant scientists

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

I'm seeing multiple problems with this list. As stated, the ambit (not that it's clearly defined in the article) is too broad. Plant scientist redirects to Botany, as does Botanist, and indeed about 3/4 of the entries in this list are identified as botanists in their respective lede. That makes it look like "list of botanists who have been left out of List of botanists", for which the solution is obvious. Of the remainder, some are in mycology, which is not a science of plants, and the remainder are plant pathologists. So it appears that the natural scope of this list, cleaned of what does not belong, would be "List of plant pathologists". Fair enough, but that feels like it may be getting a tad over-specific? -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 14:42, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Lists of people, Science,  and Biology. Elmidae (talk · contribs) 14:42, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Redirect to List of botanists. Fork. small jars 15:04, 28 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Redirect to List of botanists ImperialMajority (talk) 15:08, 28 March 2023 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE. ✗ plicit  03:52, 6 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Redirect per previous two participants + nom. --Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 15:20, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment. We've been discussing this over at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Plants. I'm not sure if a redirect is really valid since not all plant scientists are botanists in the contemporary sense. Plant science (or a such named degree) is often used as a broader term that botanist, so you're going to get other disciplines like plant pathology, agronomy, sometimes entomology, etc. in a plant scientist list. That said, a list of plant scientists is a bit too broad and would be better split up into those more specific groups limited to if someone identifies as a botanist, agronomist, etc. Not really sure what the best action is yet, but I see some potential hiccups with a redirect at least. KoA (talk) 16:43, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Even if the difference is there, the notability of this list would be hard to argue for. small jars 23:11, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Eh, in terms of WP:SALAT it would be too broad to really be a coherent or relevant list, Lists that are too general or too broad in scope have little value, unless they are split into sections. It basically suggests splitting into narrower categories instead of having a broad list like that. KoA (talk) 22:17, 29 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Merge to list of botanists. I have a degree in plant sciences, and people never know what I mean, so I just have to say that it's a botany degree. Because it is. Having two lists is confusing and not helpful to readers, and is based on a classification that is basically meaningless. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 17:48, 28 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi Elmidae! I think you have a point - the list of plant scientists is probably a bit irrelevant as the difference between botany and plant science is debatable. It could be argued that plant science is the study of plants with a focus on their molecular biology and physiology. Botany also studies plants, but more from the perspective of plant anatomy and taxonomy. I'm adding this link to the John Innes Centre website which touches on this, but I do agree the differences are debatable and not clearly defined.  Nolanna (talk) 19:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Merge as suggested above. While it may be true that not all plant scientists are botanists, and vice versa, it's still confusing to have two lists, as the merged list can explain this. As it stands the article is very unsatisfactory. (I realize that that can be fixed, if the article is kept). There are two people who are not notable (by the usual criteria of having articles about them). There is no information at all about most of the entries, the one exception being Richard L. Kiesling, where there is a far longer description than is needed, even if he is as "prominent" as claimed. If he is so prominent someone needs to write an article about him. In general the choice of people seems to be pretty arbitrary: where is Roland Douce, for example? Where is Buffon? Athel cb (talk) 09:06, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. per my comments above after trying to juggle a few concepts. A redirect has technical issues in that not all plant scientists are botanists, and WP:SALAT generally discourages us from something this broad for a list. Instead, the more pragmatic approach is delete and put BLPs into respective lists such as botanist, agronomist, etc. they identify as instead of having a near indiscriminate list of plant scientists exist even as a redirect. Yes redirects are cheap, but they need to be accurate in their target. If the categories were a bit less nebulous with a better defined hierarchy, then a redirect of some sort would be more feasible. KoA (talk) 22:17, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Should we also unredirect plant scientist then? small jars 09:09, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd take the WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS guidance and focus on this AfD first. Ideally things would be sorted out at the articles you link first, and then we figure out orders and hierarchy on list articles, but that's not how it happened. There does need to be some work done on the more nebulous title of plant science, but for now dealing with the list articles is lower hanging fruit. KoA (talk) 14:40, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
 * After discussion on redirects below, I do want to reiterate that redirecting this to botanist or plant pathologist is not a valid option here in terms of article naming policy. It would be like redirecting mammal to just bear or cat in terms of nomenclature. Without viable redirect options and WP:SALAT mentioned above, comments really are pointing to delete without redirects being viable. KoA (talk) 14:41, 10 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Update - There was created List of plant pathologists not tagged for deletion. I posted notice of this delete discussion at WikiProject Plants where there was some prior discussion. JoeNMLC (talk) 13:07, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Relisting comment: I'd like to see more discussion of whether this article should be redirected/merged (not really mutually exclusive alternatives) or deleted, since some of the participants are arguing that plant scientists are not necessarily botanists and, so, a redirect would be inappropriate Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Salvio giuliano 09:26, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment: I'm not a fan of plant scientist redirecting to botanist, since to me botany has a strong taxonomic/systematic/ecological undertone. Ideally it would be Plant science -> Botany / Pathologists / Physiologists etc. However I have to acknowledge that if Botany <-> Plant Science is the way Wikipedia tends to write about plant scientists, then leaving this list active is unhelpful. There's very little point having a duplication of a list that only exists for a narrow definitional reason. Irrespective of WP:OTHERSTUFF. NeverRainsButPours (talk) 18:49, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Merge and Redirect to List of botanists, as this is de facto a synonym, resulting in substantial overlap. Obviously the mycologists need to go elsewhere, and they aren't plant scientists anyway. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:09, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete - I'm not a fan of these kinds of lists anyway, but this one appears to be almost entirely populated with white, mostly American, men. Possibly Plant Scientist is a better term than Botanist for the reasons people have put forward above, but until there is a good amount of recognition of the scientists who are not white American men, this kind of list just perpetuates bias. Who decides who deserves to be on this list? JMWt (talk) 12:13, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * – list of botanists is no different in this respect. small jars 13:21, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Well that's not good either. JMWt (talk) 13:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Indeed. But the search term "List of plant scientists" is a reasonable one if someone is looking for a list of botanists, so it should at least be a redirect. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:03, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems from the above that it would make more sense to merge the list of botanists to the list of plant scientists, given (from what I can understand of the above discussion) Botany is a subset of Plant Science. I've nothing against either (and indeed I've met a fair few beautiful people who are of that persuasion), but if they can't in short order ensure that the list contains people that are not just white, mostly American, men then neither list deserves to survive. JMWt (talk) 14:35, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, as the author of a BLP article about a self-described "Queer Atheist Feminist Autist", I do rather sympathise. On the other hand, editors can only list people who already have articles, and those are limited both by editorial effort and earlier constraints on who was able to become a scientist, however wrong those may look with 20/20 hindsight. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:42, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't really see why this list can only list people who already have articles. I appreciate that listing absolutely every Plant Scientist who has ever existed would make a long page, but is there a policy to read about redlinks in list pages of people? JMWt (talk) 14:49, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Lists should always be of bluelinks. I personally think those should also be individually cited, but I know that many editors are happy with flakily-cited lists. PS: It should be clear to everyone that any item with neither a bluelink nor a citation must be forbidden, or anyone could propose any sort of nonsense as a valid list. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:54, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, whilst strictly speaking this is getting into the weeds in an AfD debate, it doesn't seem like those working on the page are trying very hard to be more inclusive even of plant scientists with WP pages. For example Alison Gail Smith isn't listed. Just one example of a person who doesn't meet the bias of the page as it stands. JMWt (talk) 14:55, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Good point, but AfD is not the forum for improvement, that's normal editing. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:57, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Botanists are a subset of plant scientists, most of whom would not regard themselves as botanists, so don't redirect. The term botanist conveys a very restricted image nowadays, and rather old-fashioned; note that the department of plant sciences in Cambridge university, for example, was once called the Botany School, but changed its name for this very reason. The lists of botanists not only fails to include the Cambridge Alison Smith as per, but also ignores her Norwich name-sake Alison Mary Smith, and AM Smith's colleague Cathie Martin and for that matter their joint colleague Caroline Dean whose article does call her a botanist, and in fact fails to contain any female plant scientist that I've ever met. If you want lists of scientists, then keep and maintain. If you don't want lists of scientists, delete. It's a global question of whether all such lists are useful and sensible, or whether they're better handled by categories. Elemimele (talk) 16:46, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Would you agree with me that all of these lists should be deleted - and if there really needs to be a way to navigate all possible permutations of Plant Scientist, the way to do that would be to have a category which included all the other existing categories - such as Category:South African women botanists and everything else - then we don't have the (immediate) problem of bias nor of whether any specific person is a Botanist/Plant Scientist/Cladistician/Whatever? From my POV this kind of list of people serves no purpose and creates an unnecessary headache.
 * JMWt (talk) 18:28, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * On the issue of having lists like these at all, it strikes me as a bit WP:SOFIXIT on the gender bias in the list but I do agree that if WP does not have a consensus on what appellation it wants to give scientists that work on plants in the broadest possible sense, it definitely should not have lists that label them. FWIW I doubt any of the people Elemimele/JMwt named would call themselves "botanists", and I think that probably holds for the majority of people who work on plants, excepting a very narrow branch as I mentioned previously. EDIT: SOFIXIT was clearly not what I meant to cite, but more generally issues with the current content of the list is generally fixable without deleting the whole list, but the rest of my comment still stands. NeverRainsButPours (talk) 22:57, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Merge, with List of botanists and List of plant pathologists as suggested by the nominator and others as an WP:ATD. SailingInABathTub 🛁 00:32, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * This would still cause issues for redirects because not all plant scientists are botanists or plant pathologists. KoA (talk) 14:15, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Yet plant scientist redirects to botany, and the article states that botany is also called plant science. I don't see any problem with a redirect to List of botanists, but Category:Lists of biologists could be an alternative. SailingInABathTub 🛁 16:05, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * That would be a WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS problem to also be fixed with respect to the actual plant scientist and botany articles as has been discussed earlier and can't be used to justify the redirect. The whole point of most of the discussion so far is that the description you just gave is not accurate and runs into accuracy issues in terms of WP:TITLE policy, especially Ambiguous or inaccurate names for the article subject, as determined in reliable sources, are often avoided even though they may be more frequently used by reliable sources.. Lumping botany as equivalent to plant science can't get around the problem that part of policy has us trying to avoid. KoA (talk) 14:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is about notability, not redirect titles. The point is that treating plant science as a synonym of botany is consistent with how we already use those words on other articles. Whether this is the most common usage is another problem. small jars 15:11, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is part of arguments to avoid at AfD, which is where we are and are discussing. The spirit of that is that we don't perpetuate errors or problems because they exist elsewhere in the encyclopedia. Other parts of the guidance even call out when redirects are misleading.
 * Either way, the redirect to botany just isn't a valid option here for a close unless we want to violate policy. Editors should already be aware of the issues that causes based on previous discussion about variable usage (which should be a red flag), and no amount of WP:!VOTEs avoiding that can circumvent the problems it causes. The other article content can be fixed/updated when others get to them, but we are here now discussing this particular list. KoA (talk) 22:11, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It is only your opinion that the two terms are not virtually synonymous. Do you have a reliable source that defines the two terms separately? I would argue that ‘plant science’ is in fact a neologism, created to avoid the negative connotations of the word ‘botany’. Hence why we do not have a separate article on it. There is an article on this in the peer-reviewed journal Trends in Plant Science. SailingInABathTub</b> <b style="padding:5px;background:#3366cc;color:white">🛁</b> 22:50, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I completely agree that it is a neologism to avoid the negative connotations of the word "botany" - a neologism created because the connotations of botany are, as that paper suggests, morphological and taxonomic (and that these modes of science are seen as outdated). Indeed, the paper you cite contrasts "botany" and "molecular biology" and seems to switch between identifying botany as two things:
 * 1) A thing that encompasses both plant taxonomy/natural history and plant molecular biology
 * 2) The science of plant taxonomy/natural history more generally.
 * or some mixture of the two.
 * Indeed, here's a paper (open access!) that does the same thing, doing this switch between "botany" and "plant identification/natural history" almost seamlessly. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9019 NeverRainsButPours (talk) 23:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)


 * And that's where the rub is. Sometimes botany is used to talk about all of plant biology/plant science, but you get plenty of cases like above where it is used in the more narrow sense of focusing more on natural history and variable mixtures. There was some earlier discussion mentioned from other scientists too. It's just a term that runs into WP:PRECISE issues. If anything, the source Sailing gave is a good example of how the term plant science has been used over botany in the current day This declaration, written by a committee of 14 internationally renowned botanists, establishes seven strategic action priorities. Despite being the proclamation of the largest botanical congress, the word ‘botany’ cannot be found anywhere in the text of the declaration, having been replaced by ‘plant sciences’, presumably in an effort to avoid any negative connotations of the word ‘botany’.
 * As a side note, it definitely is an issue we don't have enough people going specifically into botany focusing on taxonomy and fundamentals like that. That said, plant science/biology definitely isn't a neologism. It is not an isolated term nor anything particularly new given how widespread it's use is among scientists. We do have to be wary of WP:OR violations that somehow plant science is a new term made up just recently to avoid using the term botany. They are slightly different terms with botany being a bit more ambiguous and that author commenting on one application of the term (or lack of). That problem with the term botany is going to remain in the real world regardless of editor opinion here, and that's what we're supposed to reflect. I have my thoughts on the AfD at hand with respect the validity of listing of broad plant scientists, but we also can't horse things into botany and act like it's clear cut there either. KoA (talk) 03:21, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * That quote just goes to show that whether something is described as botany or plant science says more about the people describing it than the thing being described. small jars 09:16, 12 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Merge & Redirect as virtual synonyms; the distinction is not great enough to warrant separate lists. Pagliaccious (talk) 18:24, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * That would make the redirect situation even worse as this ignores the comments about plant science and botany not being virtual synonyms. It would be an inaccurate redirect and violate our title naming policy to do use inaccurate redirects. KoA (talk) 14:15, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * They don't have to be exact synonyms. It'd be fine if there was a subset marker or table column or whatever (A is a plant pathologist, B is a plant ecologist, C is a botanist and plant ecologist, etc). Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:20, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not any kind of scientist that works with plants, however it seems like a kind of WP:BLUD to dismiss other people's concerns in this way. I accept that it is unintentional, but others here have made a reasoned argument about the undesirability of putting plant scientists into boxes (as it were) and yet here in your latest comment you are reiterating that it would be fine to redirect into a table column.
 * It strikes me that the fairest thing to do here is nothing until these issues are hammered out by a consensus of informed editors. It certainly seems undesirable to continue enabling bias on the basis that a small number of editors apparently think it is too difficult to accept the self-designation of particular scientists. Who decides which column individuals would go into in your suggestion? The only agreement we appear to have here is that all the scientists who study plants are plant scientists, so it seems strange to continue insisting on a synonym those same scientists wouldn't call themselves. JMWt (talk) 17:45, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Certainly not, everyone is free to think and argue as they like; and I'm not the nominator here, nor a person who has posted here 7 times. I've just pointed out a gap in an argument. As to your question, if a table were used, we would use the sources in each scientist's Wikipedia article to place a tick in each column ("plant pathologist", etc) that matched their CV. This exactly does not "put people into boxes" as effectively each row of the table would be tailor-made for that scientist. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * maybe I misunderstood. Are you arguing to !keep this page and separate it into columns or to redirect to a List of Botanists which is then separated into columns? JMWt (talk) 17:57, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * That would make sense in a list of plant scientists article, though it gets back to the WP:SALAT issue of being too broad of a list needing that demarcation. KoA (talk) 22:11, 11 April 2023 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.