Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Massimo Villata


 * 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. There has been a lot of discussion, but the most popular opinion when weighed against the deletion policies and guidelines is that there are not sufficient sources about Villata to be able to produce a neutral and fully verifiable article at this time. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  20:52, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Massimo Villata

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Lack of notability - this seems to be an autobiographical page created by the subject. There are claims of notability but no reliable secondary sources for substantiating them. Klaun (talk) 15:31, 4 July2017 (UTC)
 * Hi Klaun. I am the author of the page you have proposed for deletion (please see the history). I'm not Massimo Villata, so the page is not autobiographical. If this is the only reason for deletion, I propose to keep the page. If there are other reasons please specify.Massimozanardi (talk) 14:20, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Regarding, on the other hand, the secondary sources mentioned, Why "Phys.org", "Universe Today", "MEDIA INAF", and "NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC" (all clearly cited in the References) are considered as "unreliable"? Moreover, M. Villata has a huge scientific production: about 350 scientific papers with 8000 citations and an H-index of 53. (For comparison, a certain Albert Einstein has 15500 citations with an H-index of 36.)Just to cite one paper, "CPT symmetry and antimatter gravity in general relativity", it got more than 7000 downloads at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/94/20001, and is "in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric" as can be seen at https://iop.altmetric.com/details/1043305. He is extensively mentioned in recent textbooks of Physics and Astronomy, e.g. "Introduction to Cosmology" by Matts Ross and "Variational Approach to Gravity Field Theories" by Alberto Vecchiato. Last but not least, he is the President of the International Consortium of optical and radio telescopes (WEBT - Whole Earth Blazar Telescope) since the year 2000. It's really hard to understand the claimed "lack of notability".Massimozanardi (talk) 14:48, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The reason to delete the article is that its subject doesn't meet the notability requirements, WP:NPROF. The sources cited in the article are not necessarily all unreliable, but the sources are not about Massimo Villata with the exception of his personal website.  They are either articles he has co-authored, which doesn't really belong in a source about him, because if he wrote it, it's not a secondary source, or they mention him only incidentally as the National Geographic reference or Phys.org reference does.  Just because someone is mentioned by a journalist does not make them notable.  As an academic, he doesn't seemto meet the criteria.  I don't have access to all of "Introduction to Cosmology" by Matts Roos, but Villata isn't mentioned in the index.  The latest edition was published in 2003, so I wouldn't call itrecent.  It seems Vecchiato mentions him three times in his text, but they seem to be colleagues at INAF in Italy, so is that a demonstration of notability?  Finally, I don't think his leadership of Whole_Earth_Blazar_Telescope makes hm necessarily noteworthy as that subject doesn't really seem all that noteworthy either.  (To wit, the first result of a Google search for it is the Wikipedia article and the second the project's own website and Google news only has one article on it from 2006.)  In any case, given WP:NOR to have an article we must find a reliable sources where others have written about Massimo Villata, not just his research.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Klaun (talk • contribs) 16:11, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi Klaun. Sorry for delay, but According to "Notability (academics)", at least the first criterion is met: The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources. Since "The most typical way of satisfying Criterion 1 is to show that the academic has been an author of highly cited academic work – either several extremely highly cited scholarly publications or a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates.". And this is clearly established for Villata (8,000 citations with H-index of 53!). As for reviews, see e.g. The extragalactic gamma-ray sky in the Fermi era, where, even if the review is on a different topic, both Villata's papers and the WEBT are extensively cited. Thus, it is not correct to say that "The reason to delete the article is that its subject doesn't meet the notability requirements". Another your imprecision is "they mention him only incidentally as the National Geographic reference or Phys.org reference does", since the cited articles are all dedicated to Villata's research, and DO NOT "mention him only incidentally". Another mistake: "The latest edition was published in 2003". The latest, fourth edition (2015) of Introduction to Cosmology is at Introduction to Cosmology, 4th Edition. Moreover, Matts Roos is Emeritus Professor in Particle Physics at the University of Helsinki, and is not a colleague of Villata. As for "I don't think his leadership of Whole Earth Blazar Telescope makes him necessarily noteworthy as that subject doesn't really seem all that noteworthy either.", this sentence sounds a bit peculiar. A Google search for "villata blazar" gives about 39,000 results, and "whole earth blazar telescope" yields 28,000 results. It is quite obvious that the first results are the Wikipedia articles, because this is the Google policy. In any case, the WEBT has 182 scientific publications (see References in the article), all written or at least checked and scrutinized by Villata, as the President of the collaboration, which counts more than a hundred of astronomers from several dozens of Institutes all around the world (see e.g. part of them in the last paper: Synchrotron emission from the blazar PG 1553+113. An analysis of its flux and polarization variability). Finally, your reference to WP:NOR is not appropriate, because "The phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist.". Thus, it does not refer to people... It has been clearly demonstrated that all the research material presented in the article comes from reliable sources; with the words of WP:NOR: In general, the most reliable sources are:
 * Peer-reviewed journals
 * Books published by university presses
 * University-level textbooks
 * Magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing houses
 * Mainstream newspapers
 * The only point that does not come from reliable sources is in the first two lines of the article: "From 1968 to 1973 he attends the Technical Institute for surveyors, he takes part in student movements and graduates with the highest marks; later, he enrolls at the University of Turin, graduating with honors in physics.". If Klaun does not believe in this brief biography (which hardly can be considered as OR), he can delete these two lines. But all the rest is clearly established, demonstrated by reliable sources and most notable and noteworthy.Massimozanardi (talk) 11:04, 11 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom.  Callmemirela   &#127809; talk 16:34, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Italy-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 17:59, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete As per the nomination. Kind Tennis Fan (talk) 20:59, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 07:23, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 07:23, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Astronomy-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 07:23, 7 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete. Contrary to above claim, I see only h-index of 6 in GS. Agricola44 (talk) 15:23, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete. See amended explanation below. Agricola44 (talk) 18:02, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete. Changed back to full delete based on new digging. Please see below. Agricola44 (talk) 15:00, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
 * To be reliable, an H-index should be calculated on a database as complete as possible. For Astronomy and Astrophysics (or even for Physics), the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is one of the most complete. As can be seen at NASA ADS author:"Villata, M." year:1990-2016, this database gives (click on Citations) 8,087 citations and an H-index of 53 for Villata M. in the years 1990-2016. Just out of curiosity, I looked for the results of the other Italian astrophysicists (see Category:Italian astrophysicists) who have a dedicated page on Wikipedia. In 1990-2016, I got the following H-indices: 33, 98, 60, 7, 4, 15, 23, 40, 51, 8, 41, 1. Thus, if Villata were to be deleted, according to this criterion only 2 Italian astrophysicists should be kept... I looked also for a very famous astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking. In the same 1990-2016 period he has H-index = 39, which however rises to 82 when considering all papers. To avoid something like a possible "Italian bias", I checked the first 10 living American astrophysicists (see Category: American astrophysicists) in the Wikipedia list, their H-indices are: 15, 50, 44, 39, 72, 5, 55, 21, 98, 36. That is not significantly different from the Italian situation: also here about 7-8 out of 10 astrophysicists should be deleted.Massimozanardi (talk) 12:43, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The gold-standard for any area of physics is the WOS database, especially since you can differentiate people having the same name. "M Villata" is pretty common, but it turns out that most of the journal papers attributed to this name come from people at ISTITUTO NAZIONALE ASTROFISICA ITALY (105), UNIVERSITY OF PERUGIA (67), etc. The article says that this particular "M Villata" has been at the Observatory of Turin for his entire career. Cross-checking this info with WOS returns a total of 27 papers, which is presumably the main corpus of his research output. Here, it looks like H-index = 19, which I would say is borderline in such a high-citation area. Almost all the papers were written by large groups (not unusual in astrophysics) but Villata is only lead/primary on some of them, none of which are the really highly-cited (>100) papers. On balance, I still think notability is not demonstrated, but I've amended my !vote to "weak delete" above. Agricola44 (talk) 18:02, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi, Agricola44. There is only one "M. Villata" in Astrophysics and ALL the 332 papers resulting from the ADS link above are from him (as it is evident from the affiliation in each paper).Comparing this to the results given by WOS is the demonstration that WOS is by far incomplete and consequently inappropriate, so that all astronomers and astrophysicists uses ADS. Villata is first or second author in about 130 papers with about 2,900 citations. Nine of those papers have more than 100 citations each. Thus, it is not correct that "Villata is only lead/primary on some of them, none of which are the really highly-cited (>100) papers.". Almost all the papers where he is not in the very first author positions are from large collaborations which uses alphabetical order for the authorship. In these papers he represents the WEBT contribution into the larger collaboration, so that his importance is always well established and would correspond to the very first positions if the alphabetical order were not adopted (see e.g. the Nature paper at A change in the optical polarization associated with a γ-ray flare in the blazar 3C 279, where in the "Author Contributions" it is stated that "M. Villata organized the optical-radio observations by GASP-WEBT as the president of the collaboration."). Adding these papers to the ones above (i.e. considering all the papers where Villata has a dominant position), there are 19 papers with more than 100 citations each (easy to check by sorting the ADS list by "Citation count desc"). In conclusion, the H-index=53 is well established and fully deserved.Massimozanardi (talk) 10:59, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I've changed my !vote back to full "delete" based on further examination of WOS. You're correct that he's listed on more papers that do not show up if you limit the query to his home institution. This is unusual in WOS and it seems to stem partially from the fact that these other papers have even larger author lists. For example, I looked at the top cited paper, Astrophys J 716(1) 30-70 (320 citations), but this paper has about 300 authors listed across 96 different institutions. Because Villata is not the corresponding author, it would appear very difficult to ascribe any particular degree of credit to him for the purposes we are discussing here. I concede that I did not check all papers in this fashion, but, taken with a similar trend that I observed above when the query was limited to his home institution, I would say that this person has indeed been a member of projects that have published notable results, but that particular credit and importance of his parts in these projects is difficult to discern. Agricola44 (talk) 15:00, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi, Agricola44. So, please consider the GS database, which you are more familiar with. If you search for "authored by M Villata" (thus excluding other Villatas - you cannot search for Massimo Villata because "Massimo" does not appear in the author lists), you get 699 results. Even excluding all the papers where Villata is not in the 3-4 first authors (which is strongly incorrect due to the alphabetical order), there are 40 papers with more than 40 citations each, i.e. an H-index of 40. Do you really think that this is not enough? This modified H-index (even if it is strongly penalizing) still places him at the top of the astrophysicists' lists. You should not base your judgment on a single article (out of hundreds) where Villata's importance may not be clear due to alphabetical order. If you go to see inside ALL the 20 papers with alphabetical authorship which have been excluded from the H-index calculation above, you can see that Villata's contribution is fundamental: in some cases, when the 2-3 sub-groups are distinguished, he is the first author of the WEBT sub-list (obviously); in other cases(like the Nature paper mentioned above) his fundamental contribution is clearly stated, as the manager of the radio-to-optical observing campaigns; otherwise, you can look at the reference lists inside the papers: how many of the "300" co-authors have a similar number of citations? As an example, search for "Villata" inside the paper you mention at THE SPECTRAL ENERGY DISTRIBUTION OF FERMI BRIGHT BLAZARS. Please, don't be lazy... and try to be more accurate.
 * By the way, Villata's affiliations have been:
 * Istituto di Fisica Generale, Università di Torino
 * Istituto di Fisica Generale dell'Università
 * Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino
 * Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino
 * INAF, Torino Astronomical Observatory
 * INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino
 * INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino
 * INAF, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino
 * and similar... Did you check any of them?
 * Massimozanardi (talk) 09:29, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * H-index is a great shortcut if most/all of the works in a publication list are attributable primarily to the person in question. The real problem we have here and the reason I went back to "delete" from "weak delete" is that Villata's papers, especially the highly cited ones, have many many authors and it's not easy, in fact it's not really even feasible from our vantage point, to determine how much of a role he played, especially since, as you said, author lists are often alphabetical. What is clear is that he's not the corresponding author on the papers I sampled and there are none of the other usual signals of such papers being attributable primarily to one individual. It is for these reasons that I think I'll stick with "delete", not because of laziness, as you've accused. Thanks. Agricola44 (talk) 13:14, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * BTW, WOS is the right database to use here, not GS, because it counts journal article citations. Agricola44 (talk) 13:16, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep.Please see my answers & comments above Massimozanardi (talk) 13:01, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete for the present, but could change. The claims for notability in the BLP are poorly presented, and I still don't see why GS cites are so low. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:49, 11 July 2017 (UTC).
 * Hi,Xxanthippe. The problem of low GS cites comes from the fact that the search done by Agricola44 was for "Massimo Villata" as a phrase (64 results) and not for "Villata" as an author (1,260 results). Then one can check that the first 27 papers are really authored by M Villata (like following several hundreds) and have at least 100 citations each.
 * Comment. Seems to be an autobiography WP:Yourself. Xxanthippe (talk) 10:13, 12 July 2017 (UTC).
 * The claims for notability, as well as the matter of the autobiography, have been widely discussed above (see my first answers to Klaun (talk). In addition, when calculating the H-index on GS (correctly searched for Villata as an author), we get 60, i.e. even higher than the ADS result.Massimozanardi (talk) 11:37, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: To address later comments by page's creator

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  So Why  11:53, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
 * That remains to be demonstrated. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:26, 12 July 2017 (UTC).
 * I repeat: I AM NOT MASSIMO VILLATA, I am a contributor to wikipedia in Italian for more than 10 years (please see my contributions in Italian and my reputation on Wikipedia in Italian), and sometimes I can translate my articles from Italian to English or to make it new ones.Massimozanardi (talk) 11:25, 14 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep. Although the doubts raised by Klaun were motivated, the arguments in favor of Villata's notability presented by Massimozanardi are convincing and fully substantiated by ironclad data and numbers. In particular, the ADS H-index of 53 (or 60 from GS), placing Villata at the 2nd-3rd position among Italian astrophysicists should be determinant. Even when excluding all the papers with alphabetical authorship (as incorrectly suggested by Agricola44 - and where however Villata's importance is clearly established inside the papers thenselves), the remaining H-index is 40, that is well above any threshold of notability. With the words of Agricola44 in their talk: "There isn't any specific statement in WP that I'm aware of, but rather a pretty strong consensus built-up over many academic-related AfDs (see archive) that h-index below 10 is not notable, between 10 and 15 is borderline (often going either way), and >15 is solidly notable. Importantly, h-index is not linear. So, for example, 10 is way more than twice-as-good-as 5. To give some outside-WP-perspective: the 15-20 range is typical of full-professors at top-tier research universities and APS fellows and 40-ish is National Academy territory (quoting roughly from the h-index article). Hope that's helpful. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 14:19, 28 June 2010 (UTC)." --Carmen63
 * — 161.72.20.85 (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * So now we have the SPAs starting to weigh-in with very similar arguments, very similar writing style as MZ, and a name not corresponding to an actual account. SOCKing is bad...please stop. Agricola44 (talk) 13:01, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Dear Agricola44, what is more reprehensible than your hypothetical SOCKing is to provide incorrect data, like your H-index of 6, instead of 60. I just reported your words: on one hand you say that an H-index of 15 is more than enough, on the other hand that 60 is not sufficient. Please, reply to this instead of invoking spectra. --Carmen63 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.72.20.85 (talk) 13:40, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Dear SPA/Carmen63/161.72.20.85: First, you should be aware that a textbook sign of socking is a new act whose first edit is a lengthy argument in an esoteric area of WP like AfD. Second, I already addressed this above. Please see the entry starting with "H-index is a great shortcut if...". In summary, the 10-15 range is the usual borderline, but a high-citation area like this can be different. That's not the real problem here though. The real problem is that it is basically impossible to ascertain Villata's contribution on papers that have ~300 authors over ~100 institutions and for which he's not the corresponding author. Signing off. Thanks. Agricola44 (talk) 13:53, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * This is my last comment because it seems you do not want to answer. Evidently you have not seen the MZ response that begins with "Hi, Agricola44. So, please consider the GS database, which you are more familiar with. If you search for "authored by M Villata" (thus excluding other Villatas - you cannot search for Massimo Villata because "Massimo" does not appear in the author lists), you get 699 results. Even excluding all the papers where Villata is not in the 3-4 first authors (which is strongly incorrect due to the alphabetical order), there are 40 papers with more than 40 citations each, i.e. an H-index of 40...". So, when excluding all those papers where you say "it is basically impossible to ascertain Villata's contribution" (which is again incorrect as demontrated by MZ above), the H-index is still 40, again well above any possible threshold for notability. I stop here, because you continue to not respond correctly.--Carmen63

Weak Delete. Clear failure of general notability. Determining notability within academia can be difficult. A large number of citations for 'M Villata' come as part of papers with 100+ minor data contributors (e.g. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/700/1/597/meta, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/715/1/429/meta, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/716/1/30/meta, etc. etc. etc.). These all have hundreds of citations but this is hardly evidence for the notability of this individual. Papers that have been led by him (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1999A%26A...347...30V, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1996A%26A...315..105R, https://aas.aanda.org/articles/aas/ps/1998/11/ds1482.ps.gz, etc. etc.) seem to have been cited around 50-100 times each on average. This seems to just fail |the specifics for criterion 1 of WP:PROF, which requires "a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates".

I'm basing this on a |Times report, which shows average numbers of citations for space science being around 20~ in 2000. Adjusting this back to the mid-90s, 50 citations for a paper doesn't appear to be of note, but normal for this kind of research output. Barring any kind of independent reviews of his work which discuss its notability, I am inclined to a weak delete as non-notable.

The discussion of h-indicies seems largely irrelevant as they are not currently accepted as reliable notability indicators. El Pharao (talk) 18:29, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Dear El Pharao (talk), Searching for "M Villata" as an author in GS, we get the following numbers of citations for the papers where Villata is the FIRST OR SECOND AUTHOR:
 * 196, 172, 174, 166, 154, 141, 139, 141, 125, 103, 97, 92, 91, 91, 89...
 * and more than one hundred of other papers with slowly decreasing citation numbers. Namely 15 papers with at least 89 citations each (or 40 papers with at least 40 citations each, i.e. H-index of 40, as already told above), with an average of 131.4 citations. So, one does not understand why this result should not meet the criterion for notability mentioned by El Pharao: "a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates". Is 15 (or 40) not a "substantial number"? Are citations rates from 196 to 89 (or 196 to 40) not significant enough? Very hard to believe.Massimozanardi (talk) 11:16, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm afraid that my opinion is that this is not notable enough for a wikipedia article. If enough people's opinions differ from my own, as yours evidently does, it will stay. El Pharao (talk) 22:27, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Comment As the originator of this request, I'd just say the problem that made me suggest a delete was that there are not any sources about Massimo Villata apart from his own website (which is now down, apparently) and the INAF source, which is an organization that funds his research and/or he works for(?). How do we write an article without sources? Papers written by Massimo Villata or sources that reference his research are not sources about him. I assert WP:NOR does apply here as it does to every Wikipedia article being one of the 3 pillars. Also WP:BLP demands we remove unsourced material. How do we have an article with no content? I'm an inclusionist, so I'm not eager to see any article deleted. However, I don't see how to maintain this article. Also, I'd like to note that the article asserts two reasons for Massimo Villata being notable, as an academic and as a writer of fiction. I don't know if this decreases or increases the notability requirement, but I think the evidence for notability as a sci-fi writer is even less than as an academic. Massimozanardi - you mention some biographical information about Massimo Villata that I don't see a source for, if you could tell us where to find this info, that would be helpful. A final note, this is hardly the only article about a living academic that has this problem. After requesting deletion on this article, I went to look for other articles on academics for comparison. Many have no references about the subject of the article, only referencing the research by the subject. Klaun (talk) 22:33, 14 July 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.