Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael Barton (professor)


 * 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   keep. Ron Ritzman (talk) 13:11, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Michael Barton (professor)

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One sentence BLP on non-notable professor. Prodded twice. Abductive (reasoning) 08:13, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 19:39, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 19:39, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete, A remarkably common name among professors apparently (there are at least two others!). Not finding anything remotely capable of satisfying WP:PROF on this one though. Sailsbystars (talk) 22:53, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep per WP:PROF (he holds a named chair) and #C4 (his book appears to be widely used as a textbook). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:08, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Named chair at a college with 1,240 students that doesn't offer anything beyond a bachelor's? And what evidence is there that the 3rd edition of Bond's biology of fishes is a widely used textbook? Abductive  (reasoning) 19:17, 14 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep - scholar.google.com shows that 'Bond's Biology of Fishes' is cited more than 300 times in its previous editions, and 8 times since Michael Barton took over as the editor with the 2006 edition. Michael Barton is a full professor and should thus expect our usual deference to full professors, but Center College does not qualify as a major university, so that counts against. Getting picked as the new editor of a textbook is still hard to deny. I looked at Michael Barton's published articles via Google Scholar and the one which seems most significant was co-authored with some other people. It is available as a PDF as a 2008 publication at his website at the College (Turner, Duvernell, Bunt and Barton 2008: "Reproductive isolation..", published in the Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society). Since he unfortunately has a common name, you need to try different search terms in Google Scholar but overall I think this is on the Keep side.  EdJohnston (talk) 19:41, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
 * How many citations does this allegedly significant Pupfish paper get? I'm seeing 2. Abductive  (reasoning) 20:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Changing to keep... he has few published research publications, but he may be one of those professor types who contributes mainly through textbook writing (as evidenced above, and which I hadn't realized), rather than research, and we shouldn't base a profs notability solely on contributions to research. Sailsbystars (talk) 19:46, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Really? Wouldn't getting selected to edit the 3rd edition of a textbook could as WP:BLP1E? Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on Carl Bond, the original author of the book. Abductive  (reasoning) 20:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep sufficient academic work to show him as an expert in his subject. Abductive  quite correctly points out that we are lacking articles on important earlier scientists, but this is not to be remedied by removing the articles on the later ones. A more productive course than nominating article like this for deletion would be to write the ones needed. Agreed, there are 10s of thousands, but if all the effort wasted at AfD were utilized, we might be getting somewhere.    DGG ( talk ) 01:54, 18 October 2010 (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.