Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Norbert M. Samuelson


 * 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. Owen&times; &#9742;  21:11, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Norbert M. Samuelson

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Notability not asserted. The article says he is a professor and author. It then tells where he works and lists some of the books he has written. I checked him out on Google and this seems to be true, or actually is certainly true. However I could not find any source that tells much more about him than that. Jaque Hammer (talk) 21:10, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete - Notability is not established. Fails WP:ACADEMIC. BelloWello (talk) 21:21, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Speedy Keep explicitly meets WP:PROF criterion 5. "The person holds or has held a named chair appointment or "Distinguished Professor" appointment at a major institution of higher education and research." According to the article "He holds the Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University," a leading US research university. Furthermore, notable as author. I added the rest of his major books,  2 were published by Cambridge University Press, a leading academic publisher,. His books have  multiple reviews--as is invariably the case for books from such publishers. I added a few of them. Several dozen articles--I added some, but have not yet added the rest, nor  the conference procedings he edited.  I enquire of the nominator whether he is aware of WP:PROF? I inquire it also of the person who made the delete comment above.  The necessary material to meet it was in the article at the time it was submitted, --at which point, it was actually nominated for A7 speedy!    DGG ( talk ) 22:24, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I was canvassed to come participate here by the nominator. After thinking that I should probably close this AFD as Snow Keep, I decided to look at why I was actually informed of this AFD in the first place. It seems that I was the one who originally nominated this page for speedy deletion in August 2008. Irony <3 NW ( Talk ) 02:26, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I was following the advice on WP:AfD in the section "Notifying interested people." I wrote to 3 of the 4 people who had made more than one edit to the article at that time (the fourth was a banned user), and also posted a note on the Biography Project talk page since that was the only project listed for the article. I hope that is not against the no canvassing policy.Jaque Hammer (talk) 03:21, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Next time, limit that only to people who have made very significant contributions to the article please.


 * Snow Keep - DGG beat me to the punch, and says it better, so I will just say "per DGG", under a named chair. And notability IS asserted, by virtue of the named chair.  Dennis Brown (talk) 22:29, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It would still be nice if the article said something about him that tells us why we should care. Jaque Hammer (talk) 01:01, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * After looking around a lot, I found his curriculum vitae (22 pages long!) and added some of the cogent details to the article. I think that's the real purpose of these AFDs–to spur editors to improve articles rather than trash them. Yoninah (talk) 21:05, 9 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Snow keep This article about an obviously notable professor needs improvement, not an AFD.I.Casaubon (talk) 01:39, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Go ahead and improve it. It's been around since 2008 and nobody seems to have cared. BigJim707 (talk) 01:56, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't know if you noticed, but I think I did improve it: I added the other books and some of the reviews. Other people have worked with it previously, but they seem to have mainly made technical corrections, which are also important. I'd suggest further improvements weeded are getting the basic bio of his education and appointments, adding the title of his thesis and advisor, checking for notable  students,  getting the rest of the reviews while adding some of the comments found there, and adding the other 3/4 of his papers and checking for citations. Often sources give information about family and the like, but I think that's rarely important. And then perhaps some of his books should be given as references or general reading in appropriate articles, and his name added to the notable alumni lists for his UG and Graduate colleges (& his high school, also). There's a lot to do, yes, and of our 3 million articles, about half need this sort of basic improvement. Articles about people in fields with much wider groups of interested people here are among them. Shall we delete the half that we haven't yet gotten to, or shall we work on them? What people here seem to care mostly to do, is write about their hobbies, as if only that were important. If that were enough, Facebook would do fine; we wouldn't need Wikipedia.    DGG ( talk ) 02:19, 9 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep Meets WP standards. No reason to single this article out for deletion.BigJim707 (talk) 02:00, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Agree with BigJim707. WP:ACADEMIC is probably wrong in this case&mdash;if the article cannot be expanded to more than a curriculum vitae, then we're doing something wrong. But that is a fault of the community guidelines at large, not this one particular article. NW ( Talk ) 02:26, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * People at the top of any profession are notable. If the GNG doesnt show it, it's the GNG that is irrelevant.  (in this field, at least, we recognize it doesn't show it, and we did therefore replace it.  )    DGG ( talk ) 14:10, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree and think that it isn't a failure of the GNG at all&mdash;I believe that that if there is no third party coverage of an individual, then it doesn't matter if they are the Chair of the Mathematics Department at MIT or not. But I recognize that enough of the community disagrees with me on that one, and also that it is not a conversation for here. NW ( Talk ) 14:43, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * "Notability" and "sources" are related, but not the same. In this case, the subject is notable per se by the position he holds under WP:PROF #5. There's an official university web page that vouches this fact and that's sufficient. Other tests of notability, like under GNG, rely much more heavily on sources because the person isn't notable per se, but rather only judged to be so because there is sufficient supporting evidence furnished by the sources. Those cases are much more subjective. This one is not. Thx, Agricola44 (talk) 18:56, 9 May 2011 (UTC).
 * Actually WP:ACADEMIC explicitly allows for that situation: "It is possible for an academic to be notable according to this standard, and yet not be an appropriate topic for coverage in Wikipedia because of a lack of reliable, independent sources on the subject." It's just that most commenters on AfDs tend to ignore that caveat. Luckily, this article appears to be (very belatedly) moving beyond the point that this caveat is at issue. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 19:28, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
 * My feeling is that WP:ACADEMIC exists to patch over a dilemma that would otherwise occur in deletion discussions here: most academics, even the boring low-impact ones that we want to keep out, have a high number of low-quality sources about them (e.g. their profile on their employer's web sites, citations to their work in papers of other academics, brief biographies in talk announcements or at the ends of papers, etc) but in-depth biographies of academics are generally reserved for the dead ones so that even the stars of the academic world are difficult to find truly high-quality sources for. By following the guidelines of WP:ACADEMIC, we can forestall debate on whether the lower-quality sources should count, we can keep the non-notable academics out more easily, we can improve our coverage to include significant academics who are still alive, and we can prevent Wikipedia's BLP section from being completely dominated by B-list celebrities. It is very occasionally true an academic who otherwise would seem to pass WP:ACADEMIC has surprisingly little that can be sourced, and in cases like that I've sometimes !voted to delete. But Samuelson's case was never even close to being one of those cases (as the present improvements to the article attest) so I think bringing up this kind of argument is a strawman in this case. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:21, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I want to emphasise along with David E, that the special criterion is needed for exclusion as well as inclusion: for any academic whose work is cited, a careful examination of the citations would probably find in somewhere like 1/4 of the a substantial discussion of their work by a third party, the citing author. Therefore, on the average, all academic with more than 8 or so references to their work would meet the GNG and therefore would be considered notable. This is an extremely wide standard, that in science would include most of the assistant professors at any doctoral level university or research institute.  I don't thing anyone here would really support this kind of inclusion--I know I would certainly not. It would be a farce--even more so than   the excessively broad inclusion some of us see in some other fields.  Notability is intrinsic to what a person has accomplished. We just need to verify it   DGG ( talk ) 04:30, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Judaism-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 02:41, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 02:41, 9 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Weak keep: another of the messes of . Myself and numerous other editors have attempted to clean up this mess (the phrase 'making a silk purse out of sow's ear' comes to mind), but it is still woefully sub-standard. However, the topic does appear to meet WP:PROF criteria #5, and there does seem to be third-party sourcing (reviews) potentially available (but not yet in the article). But either the article needs to be expanded to beyond a thumbnail-sketch-of-a-cv (with a publications-list 'tail wagging the dog'), or it needs to be merged to Arizona State University. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 04:04, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Snow keep per WP:Prof #5. I have encountered many such articles about professors in my work for WP:URBLP and can say that this professor is a prolific and internationally-recognized religious scholar. I formatted all the books and added links. Yoninah (talk) 10:02, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Snow keep this is embarrassing, does WP:before mean nothing to you? will you now afd every bio that you don't "like" the references? firefly cleanup my ass: no, this is not a failure of GNG, this is a failure of editors who put their own "seat of the pants" over policy, consensus, or reason. listen to DGG when he talks to you, or you might look like an idiot. Slowking4 (talk) 18:41, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Concur Snow Keep. As a holder of a named professorship at a major academic institution, Samuelson is notable per se according to WP:PROF #5. Conclusive keep, but let's remember to maintain civility too please. Thx, Agricola44 (talk) 18:47, 9 May 2011 (UTC).
 * Keep Notability is asserted and supported appropriately. Alansohn (talk) 19:03, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep per DGG and others. How on Earth is he not WP:NOTABLE with so many WP:RS yet? IZAK (talk) 08:34, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep per WP:Prof #5. -- Joaquin008 ( talk ) 14:46, 15 May 2011 (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.