Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of women linguists


 * 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 no consensus. There is no consensus about the notability of the list as such, given that opinions disagree about this, and no consensus about whether it should be moved to draft space for the duration of any clean-up. To the extent that the issue of auto-generating the list from Wikidata has been discussed, people are mostly opposed to it, so I see consensus here to stop that (see also Articles for deletion/List of female Egyptologists for a similar case).  Sandstein  10:21, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

List of women linguists

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

No identified criteria for inclusion. Many of the individuals on this list are not linguists, and it is not possible to determine why they are here - a random sampling of 20 of the entries showed none of them in a "linguist" category. As importantly, this article is not under local control, edits here are not kept and are overwritten by bots using an external source (Wikidata). Risker (talk) 21:23, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Noting in addition that spot checks of 15 entries into this list on the Wikidata database indicate that, although all of them had a datapoint saying they were linguists, not one of them had any reference source indicating such. It is unacceptable to classify someone as a "linguist" when there is no reference source anywhere indicating that they are a linguist.  I have no idea why Wikidata would allow it, but it's clearly not meeting the requirements of this project. Risker (talk) 00:42, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete The article lacks any citations showing that women in linguistics is a coherent topic.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:26, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 00:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 00:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 00:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 00:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete, unless some sort of explanation is provided not currently present. In addition to the Wikidata-related issues referred to above, another problem is that it is unclear what definition of the term "linguist" is being used. The Wiktionary definition of "linguist" is "(1) One who studies linguistics. (2) A person skilled in languages. (3) A human translator; an interpreter, especially in the armed forces." If definition (1), which in my mind is the conventional definition, is being used, then only a fraction of the people on this list are or were linguists. If definition (2) is being used, then the term is probably too vague to be the basis of any list; a professor of literature would probably not define herself as a linguist, nor vice versa; and every published author is "skilled with language" in some sense. If definition (3) is being used, then again, most of the people listed do not qualify for inclusion, and the skill is probably not notable enough to form a category anyway. If, as is most likely, no specific definition is being used, then the situation speaks for itself. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:03, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep and clean up. By providing dates and descriptions, this adds significant information to what a category would provide. And the subject of women in linguistics is clearly a notable one, good enough for WP:LISTN, as it and closely related topics are the subject of multiple books:
 * Women, Language and Linguistics
 * Women in the linguistics profession
 * The Role of Women in Linguistic Tradition and Innovation in a Chicano Community in New Mexico
 * Women and Language in Transition
 * Feminist Linguistics in Literary Criticism
 * (as well as shorter publications that I have not listed). The indiscriminate nature of the list as currently constituted is a problem, but AfD is not for cleanup. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:26, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * David, could I suggest you try and cleanup a small part of the list and then say whether you think the cleanup will take so long that it should take place in mainspace or in a draft space somewhere? A good start would be to add the publications you suggest to the article as references. Could you try and do that? Carcharoth (talk) 02:36, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * FWIW, I just removed a large number of people who don't appear to be linguists, and that took an hour - I expect going through the rest of the list, removing more and adding sources for those who are actually linguists would take considerably longer. Particularly if you want to cite facts other than "X = linguist", such as nationality, birth date, and death date. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:16, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * , as long as the list is driven by Wikidata bots, it's just going to completely undo all of the work has done to clean up the list; Wikidata's inclusion of all of these people as "linguists" is what is determining who is and is not on the list. I could live with a list of women who are actually linguists (although there has been considerable debate about having gender-based lists, categories and articles in the past, and I can already hear the rage if someone was to create a List of men linguists), but this isn't going to stay that way unless it is divorced from Wikidata. It should not require an editor to know how to prevent bot editing of an article in order to have an article. Risker (talk) 03:56, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The way to clean it up would either be to first disconnect it from wikidata (my preference, because wikidata has too different sourcing standards than here) or to do the cleanup entirely on the wikidata side. Fighting with the bots is obviously not going to work. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:10, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I hadn't noticed that had already disconnected it from Wikidata with this edit (which was before the AfD was started). People may have missed it because the edit summary was "ce" ('copyedit'). I think this means that any attempt to request a bot update will fail (not 100% sure of that, but I think that is the case). Hmm. I wonder. I am going to try an experiment. It probably won't work, but let's see. I'll not give full details, as it is a bit WP:BEANS. Carcharoth (talk) 11:56, 27 December 2016 (UTC) OK, I tried to do an update, but the bot said "Status: No template match", so removing the Wikidata list template does disconnect such lists from Wikipedia. This means that any updates to Wikidata will no longer get imported across. Maybe the Wikidata list should be recreated on the talk page? Carcharoth (talk) 12:01, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * My changes have been reverted - see discussion below. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:47, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Start from scratch. I agree with David that the subject is possibly notable, if firmer inclusion criteria can be agreed upon. However, I do think we're past "cleanup" to where it would be a better use of time to blank and build from the ground up. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:16, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep – the topic is inherently notable. There are major problems with the current state of the article, including a lack of clear inclusion criteria, insufficient lead section, and some questionable inclusions. These seem WP:SURMOUNTABLE, though. It's true that clean up will require time and effort, but it's equally true that rebuilding after deletion, presumably with some of the same content there now, will require time and effort, plus entail loss of edit history. (And if more evidence is needed that women linguists is a notable topic, see Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics and links therein.) Cnilep (talk) 06:03, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep. It is important to provide a list of notable women linguists along with all the other lists of women who have made important contributions to important areas of interest. I agree however that the list needs to be improved, initially by work on Wikidata, for example by deleting "linguist" where it is not appropriate. If that proves too difficult or time-consuming, then the best option would indeed be to compile a new list drawing on some of the info from Wikidata as well as by more traditional work on Wikipedia itself.--Ipigott (talk) 11:41, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep the topic passes WP:LISTN, per the evidence supplied by David Eppstein. The issue of how it is maintained is a separate one.  Such bots should not be automatic as they will edit war and so we should have a general policy forbidding them to work in this way.  Andrew D. (talk) 13:18, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * User:ListeriaBot does do automatic updates, but this can be set to various values or even turned off. A link is provided by Wikidata list for people to click and force an update by the bot. The 'freq' (frequency) parameter allows the update frequency to be set. For those wanting references, see User:Magnus Manske/listeria test4 for an example. Carcharoth (talk) 13:34, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep clearly passes WP:LISTN. If you're going to start a crusade against Wikidata lists, please do it in an RfC or something rather than sniping individual articles one by one. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 13:48, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * There already has been an RfC that found no consensus to allow this use of Wikidata. Has there been a subsequent RfC on a similar scale that found otherwise? If not, the burden is on those who want to create Wikidata lists to start one. You're quite right that it shouldn't be done article by article, though. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:14, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * FYI, Joe, I've just undone your reinstatement of the Wikidata template, on the basis that even if an article-by-article consensus were found, it couldn't override the larger RfC per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. I'm now going to do some work cleaning up those lists, which wouldn't be possible with the bot override in place. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:17, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Joe: you've stated in the context of a similar article that we "can always disable bot-updating (and keep the list) if it becomes problematic". You've also stated that a decision about Wikidata lists should be made in an RfC rather than at individual articles. However, although we have explained to you why bot-updating is problematic here, you have restored bot-updating here, and with it dozens of entries of non-linguists, claiming that the RfC that already occurred does not hold sway. Please explain why you feel it necessary to make such a point. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:42, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I see you have also restored bot-updating on a number of similar lists, and in several cases with that have removed improvements to those lists, because "no consensus is not consensus against these lists". Where have you found consensus for these lists? What happened to your expressed desire not to do this on an article-by-article basis, or does that only apply when it supports your position? Nikkimaria (talk) 14:45, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, that RfC was about the use of Wikidata in infoboxes and article text and explicitly reserved its use in lists for a "phase 3" discussion (which has not taken place yet). The closing statement mentions Wikidata-generated tables as a promising future use but states that there was "no consensus" on it. Again, correct me if I'm wrong but I read "no consensus" as "no consensus", not "consensus not to allow". So no, there has not been an RfC on this use of Wikidata, nor a community-wide consensus against it, so WP:LOCALCONSENSUS does not apply.
 * In the absence of a clear consensus otherwise a number of editors have done exactly what they're supposed to do and boldly created these lists using the functionality provided by 's bot. I would welcome a wider discussion in whether we want this kind of list but I don't think unilaterally de-Wikidataing them one by one (with terse and borderline misleading edit summaries) is the way to go. As such, I have re-reverted to the stable version per WP:BRD.
 * It is perfectly possible to cleanup the list within the framework that the list already uses (i.e. by updating Wikidata entries and the Wikidata list template call as required), and I would suggest that is a more collaborative approach than tearing it down and doing it your own way. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 14:45, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) A quick addendum to respond to your accusation that I am being pointy and/or hypocritical: in content disputes, we fall back on the last stable version until a consensus is reached. I'm simply applying that logic here. You very boldly "converted" half a dozen articles even though the use of Wikidata was being actively discussed in this AfD elsewhere, I can't imagine that encountering some resistance to that action is surprising to you. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 14:54, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Joe, are you going to put in the hours necessary to do so? It was very time-consuming to go through a long list like this to try to salvage it; making changes to dozens of individual Wikidata entries will be more so. Your "collaborative" approach has undone multiple unambiguous improvements, simply because you feel - with no community consensus - that Wikidata lists are A Good Thing. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:51, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I'll do what I can, of course, but the beauty of Wikipedia is that we have no deadline and don't have to foist tasks on the shoulders of individual volunteers. There is indeed, no consensus, so could you explain why you feel justified in negating the improvements that continue to be made by ListeriaBot and multiple Wikidata editors because you feel Wikidata lists are A Bad Thing, but it's objectionable for me to revert to the status quo and ask for more discussion? –&#8239;Joe (talk) 14:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * You'll "do what you can" to restore the multiple useful edits that you've decided shouldn't stand just because they were done locally? We've already explained why overriding local edits is not an "improvement", and many of those who support keeping these lists as topics agree that the bot should be stopped or curtailed. Per your own words, the implementation of Wikidata in this way was "bold" - well, in that case, not using Wikidata in this way is the status quo, undoing it by removing the template is BRD, and the discussion should take place before the bold use of Wikidata is restored. So again, the burden is on those who want to do this to initiate a wider RfC. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:09, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Wow, Joe. What an absolutely classical misinterpretation of consensus. Are you really suggesting that what ListeriaBot is doing is not modifying article text? Are you really suggesting that that RFC gave leeway to create articles that are essentially uneditable on English Wikipedia? It was pretty clear that there was not enough faith in Wikidata to use it for anything in articles other than perhaps some parameters in infoboxes. The article was created by a human, and ListeriaBot is now editing it and automatically reverting every single edit made by anyone else; it is, essentially, edit-warring. I should note that bots modifying actual article text (as opposed to infobox text) had no consensus, and thus is not an uncontroversial use of a bot. Doing controversial things is how bots get deflagged. Risker (talk) 16:05, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I do understand why you object to the bot and this kind of list. But at the same time: the bot has approval; the previous RfC was at least, shall we say, ambiguous about whether this kind of thing is supported by the community; none of these articles were converted from existing manually curated lists, they were all produced by the bot; and at least some editors feel that this kind of list is a positive contribution to the encyclopaedia. Wouldn't it be better to seek a wider consensus on this kind of thing (e.g. start an RfC, try to get the bot de-flagged), rather than deleting or unilaterally removing the Wikidata list template from individual articles? –&#8239;Joe (talk) 17:48, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, I looked up the bot flag approval, which is here, when it was stated that it was focused on a bunch of talk pages. I'm not certain that anyone at BAG realized the intention was to create standalone articles that would automatically delete editing by anyone other than the bot. ListeriaBot does other useful things and having it deflagged is the equivalent of amputating the leg at the hip when there's only gangrene in one toe, but if you think that's better maybe that might be necessary. In this case, however, we are dealing with a single article; call it triage. The subject's notability is borderline {see Ealdyth's dissection of potential resources below), and the content is not within the control of this project. Risker (talk) 18:14, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

--Thnidu (talk) 18:06, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - no evidence that women linguists are considered a coherent topic, also per NYB and Risker. This is totally aside from the issue of the bot creating and overwriting the list's improvements. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:49, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Do you not consider the five books listed above evidence? –&#8239;Joe (talk) 17:38, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The first appears to be a discussion of three life stories of women linguistics, not a study of women in the linguistics profession, so I'm not sure how it makes a case for covering this topic as a coherent topic. I can't find a good view of the second book, but I'm guessing it's a listing of women in the linguistics profession considering one of the publishers appears to be "Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics of the Linguistic Society of America". The third one is here at WorldCat and appears to be a thesis/dissertation about Chicano culture, not women in the linguistics profession (note the subjects given at WorldCat). The fourth one is described on GoogleBooks as "This collection of essays deals with the interplay of language and social change, asking the question: How can language and society be made gender equal? The contributors examine the critical role of language in the lives of white women and women of color in the United States. Since language pervades many dimensions of women’s lives, this study takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the issues considered." Not a discussion of women in the profession of linguistics, it appears. The last one has a description on GoogleBooks of, in part, " The seven essays in the collection analyse widely varying literary texts, using the framework of linguistic theory to address feminist issues. The texts range from Shakespeare's As You Like It to present-day pop songs, and also cover poetry and contemporary fiction. The feminist critics whose approach is under examination include Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Showalter, Woolf and a number of British feminists; and the linguistic models employed cover discourse analysis, politeness theory, lexicalisation and transitivity." - again not a discussion of women in the linguistics profession, but rather feminist literary criticism. So ... maybe one of the books is relevant to the topic, and it's hard to judge whether it is just a listing of women linguists (dating from 1990, no less) or if it actually covers women in the linguistic profession. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:48, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. The sorting and filtering issues are the subject of an ongoing discussion in, with no less than fifteen entries today (27 December 2016). Definition: That discussion included the following:
 * Entirely apart from the above comment, this list includes many women who are translators but not linguists, i.e., practitioners of the scientific study of language. This conflates two entirely different professions. As expressed in List of linguists,
 * A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies natural language (an academic discipline known as linguistics). Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows several languages), or a grammarian (a scholar of grammar), but these two uses of the word are distinct (and one does not have to be a polyglot in order to be an academic linguist). The following is a list of linguists in the academic sense.
 * I propose ... adding a note to this article similar to the note quoted above from List of linguists.
 * I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Thnidu. However, adding the note doesn't control in any way what the bot keeps adding to or removing from the article. That requires programming of the bot, and modifications to Wikidata to add or remove parameters there. There's no reason to believe that the changes made there will remain, and nobody here will know unless they watch the Wikidata queries for every single person on the list, plus constantly checking for new additions to the list to make sure that they are correct.  Risker (talk) 18:18, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Watchlisting the list in the normal way is no different to watchlisting a normal list under local control. The problem is that you only see a bot edit (and some people ignore those) and it is difficult to work out where the change ultimately came from. I believe there are various ways to have changes made to Wikidata show up in watchlists here, but I can't remember exactly what they are (I know, the effort made by Wikidata to teach Wikipedians how it all works has been remarkably poor - I get the impression sometimes that the most active Wikidata people are so caught up in expanding Wikidata that they don't look up to see what is going on elsewhere). I picked things up fairly easily after the initial effort, but that initial effort of learning how things work over there is a bit too much at the moment. Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * This is a very good point. Wikidata edits show up in my watchlist (I can't remember what I did for that to happen), but only for pages I'm watching. I wouldn't want to watch the >500 articles on this list! It would be nice if could summarise changes in its edit summary (e.g. "2 entries removed, 1 added, 5 changed"), and also if we could add a custom edit summary when manually forcing an update (. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 19:14, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment I've attempted to update the list to address the content/inclusion concerns raised here, particularly the inclusion of people who aren't linguists in the strict sense of the word (though there's still a lot of work to be done on that). Essentially the reason that's the case is that we include a host of related disciplines (philologists, translators, grammarians, etymologists, lexicographers, epigraphers, Latin scholars) in our "Linguists" category tree here on enwiki. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 19:46, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Move to draft deleting redirect. The topic is notable but the present article is not ready for main space. I have also commented at Talk:List of women linguists. Thincat (talk) 11:20, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Move to Draft talk:List of women linguists/Bot list (a Draft talk subpage), then use it as the starting point to manually create Draft:List of women linguists. That way the bot can happily do its thing, and everyone else can curate the bot's output in a more appropriate manual list.  When that list is in decent shape, it can be moved back to mainspace, and the bot list will become a talk subpage.  ~  ONUnicorn (Talk&#124;Contribs) problem solving 19:33, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is so obviously notable a topic, based on the number of notable women linguists, that discussing it any further is like a fish riding a bicycle. It is not so bad as to be deleted and started form scratch. Nor is AfD a place to discuss fixing problems that could be improved through ordinary editing processes or bot-assisted mechanism. Not leaving it in mainspace because it needs improvement reeks of Ambivalent sexism, because we would never do that for a list of linguists. Deleting it now will make us look bad at the wrong time. Bearian (talk) 19:08, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
 * If List of linguists was built in the same way and had the same problems, my argument would be the same and I would absolutely support moving it to draftspace. Please don't assume everyone who doesn't just say "keep" is sexist. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:47, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Sorry, that was not my intent. In fact, I think it's not intentionally sexist to want to userfy it, but the effect of moving this out of main space could look sexist to our critics. Think of the optics. Or the kittens. Bearian (talk) 19:52, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Maybe try growing a set rather than worrying about optics or kittens?--Malerooster (talk) 14:40, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It is not appropriate to discuss male genitalia in this context. Unscintillating (talk) 15:54, 2 January 2017 (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.