Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Panos Papasoglu


 * 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.  So Why  15:08, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Panos Papasoglu

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Contested CSD, notability is not asserted, not 3rd party references. Rtphokie (talk) 11:46, 19 March 2009 (UTC) *Delete I agree with Nyttend that being an assistant professor is not really an assertion for notability. DGG's citation data clearly show that WP:ACADEMIC is not met. --Crusio (talk) 18:18, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete: I disagree with the contestor, who says that notability is asserted; but regardless of which one of us is right, notability clearly isn't proven. Nyttend (talk) 12:55, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  —David Eppstein (talk) 16:20, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Only one of his papers is cited it citebase,, and that by 4 other papers only (http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai:arXiv.org:math/0201312). DGG (talk) 18:09, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. For this area, MathSciNet is the more appropriate tool to use. He has 14 papers listed there, five of which have numbers of citations in the 10-20 range (not exceptional, but not bad for mathematics papers — my experience is that mathematics citation numbers tend to be smaller than some other subjects and that MathSciNet numbers of citations tend to be less than half of the Google scholar numbers for the same papers). Several of the reviews are unusually long and thorough: a typical review there is just a one-paragraph abstract, often copied from the original paper's abstract, but, , and are signed reviews (by three different reviewers) that are considerably longer than that. I'm not convinced this is enough to show a pass of WP:PROF #1, but it at least demonstrates that he is a successful working research mathematician. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:52, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 00:00, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete per above.Broadweighbabe (talk) 03:09, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak keep. I agree with David Eppstein on this one. Based on these citations, I am leaning toward a weak keep. He seems to be the sole author in the third most cited paper in the list. Having gotten his PhD in 1993, with these pubs he could be a senior faculty, possibly a full professor, in a pretty good (possibly not very research intensive) American university. So I would not place too much weight on the assistant professor designation. I’d say the subject either meets WP:PROF criterion #1 (significant impact in scholarly discipline, broadly construed), or is very close to meeting it.--Eric Yurken (talk) 21:36, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree with the assessment that the "assistant professor" designation is misleading to Americans. I suspect Greece's academic ladder just works differently.  I would expect someone like this to be tenured at a major research university in the US (although maybe not full, as Eric says).--C S (talk) 07:40, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * He's an associate, not assistant prof; I cited it and changed the article.John Z (talk) 08:45, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep per David Eppstein and Erik Yurken. Passes WP:PROF. This professor's research papers have been cited a significant number of times, so he has had much impact on his scholarly discipline. Cunard (talk) 01:08, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Passes WP:PROF under criterion 1. This is not just a citation count, and more of an examination of his publications as listed on MathSciNet. Journals in which he has published include Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae, and Crelle's journal, which are more influential than the norm. Ray  Talk 04:16, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Crelle's Journal has a link too. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:00, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comments (1) Sometimes when notability is not asserted, the remedy is not to delete for lack of such assertion, but to add the assertion. Could someone who knows this material edit the article accordingly?  (2) The bot that would normally notify the mathematics WikiProject of this nomination has had issues for several days and the notice did not appear.  David Eppstein finally notified the project in recent hours.  Could admins please refrain from closing this before more people who know about this weigh in? Michael Hardy (talk) 07:16, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. Probably if we delete Papasoglu we should delete all of the marginal researchers we keep every day.  His 2005 Annals paper alone is a "significant impact in scholarly discipline".  Instead of counting citations (although all his papers show good numbers on Google Scholar including this one), let's look at the quality of his papers and citations.  The Annals paper is cited in introductory lectures on geometric group theory by Michael Kapovich, one of the big figures in the subject.  Also, in Kapovich's problem list from an AIM workshop in 2005, we see this paper is the basis for section 7 of the list.  The Annals is also the undisputed number one pure mathematics journal.  If it were just this paper, maybe you could make a case for deletion (doubtful).  But his overall body of work is substantial (journals like GAFA may not have the brand name recognition of Inventiones but are not to be sneezed at either).  User:Nsk92 is an SME in this very topic.  If further details are needed, he would be a good person to consult.  --C S (talk) 07:35, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. Panos Papasoglu has made great contributions in his field, geometric group theory, especialy with his paper in Annals of Mathematics, the biggest journal of mathematics. I have been told that from the next academic year he will be a professor in the University of Oxford. -- Arthur art (talk) 23:22, 20 March 2009 (UTC) (moved from talk page; this comment by creator of article seems to be "keep" so I have prefixed his remarks accordingly --C S (talk))
 * Comment I am not too familiar with this fiueld so I am refraining from !voting. However, I am worried a bit by some of the arguments brought forward here. As far as I see, whether or not a researcher is notable does not depend at all on our evaluation of the quality or lack thereof of his work, nor of the quality and standing of the journals that he has published in. We are not the right people to judge those things and that is not what Wikipedia is for. Notability means that someone or someone's work has been noted and has made a notabe impact on the work of others. This can be sourced by showing citation counts or reviews or interviews. Bad researchers can be very notable (e.g. WP:FRINGE) and excellent researchers can be non-notable, according to WP's standards. That's how it should be, because we can judge notability, but should stay away from judging the works quality. By the way, I note that David Eppstein has not yet voted himself and remarked "not exceptional, but not bad " and " I'm not convinced this is enough to show a pass of WP:PROF #1", which is less than a ringing endorsement. I am a bit surprised, therefore, to see some "keep per David" votes... :-) --Crusio (talk) 08:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Your comments reflect a big misunderstanding of AFD. As your opening comment implies, having familiarity with the field is relevant, in addition to citation counts and reviews.  While commenters are discouraged from directly evaluating someone's work, certainly the quality of publication is important and indeed, regular AFD-ers like DGG often use knowledge of impact factors and other metrics to assert notability.  Oftentimes, commenters are not knowledgable enough to make assessment of journals, but when there are actually experts available, it would be foolish to not use that additional info.  In particular, knowing who's important and knowing what it means if such important people often cite a paper (even if the overall count is low) and in this case devote an entire chunk of his problem list based on the paper, this indicates significance, and does so in a way that is really more reliable than numerical scores.  Also, as explicitly listed in WP:PROF, knowledge of an area is important in evaluating what the usual citation numbers are.  In this case, Papasoglu's citations are well within the norm for an established researcher. --C S (talk) 08:38, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * By the way, what on earth do you mean by "refraining from !voting"? You already !voted delete once before this comment.  In addition, both comments in your delete !vote are based on false information.  Perhaps you should strike it out then.  --C S (talk) 08:50, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak keep. Ok, fine, I was avoiding expressing a clear opinion because I didn't have one, but with the comment above from Crusio I think I should take a side. I think the papers in Crelle and Inventiones and Annals (journals famous enough that I can abbreviate them like this, with Crelle not even being part of the official title of the journal, and still any working mathematician will know which ones I mean) are not themselves notability, but are a strong sign that he is on the track of notability. These are the kind of journals that many mathematicians have dreams about someday publishing in, and he has three. I think the fact that one of his papers has 150+ citations in Google scholar is starting to show the impact needed to pass WP:PROF #1. I think that we shouldn't be here to evaluate the quality of his work, but on the other hand we shouldn't be setting our standards so strictly that we eliminate people who are clearly doing top-quality work merely because they are doing it in a low-key style. And most importantly for my opinion on this particular case, I think it's important to notice that his name appears in several others of our articles on technical mathematics: Bass-Serre theory, Geometric group theory, Dehn function and also on another biography, Zlil Sela. If someone's name is dropped once or twice, that's not enough for me to use it as an argument in this way, but I think this is starting to rise to the level where Build the web comes into play. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:07, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete. Even though we do not have a very clear policy on inclusion of biographies of living mathematicians, both experience and common sense dictate that an article should only be created if meaningful content can be put into it consistently with other wikipedia policies, especially, BLP and the use of secondary sources. I disagree that being an active research mathematician in itself is sufficient (for the record: I certainly think that he is). Are we seriously suggesting that anyone who published a paper in Annals or Inventiones or Crelle's should get an article in Wikipedia? Please, be real: that would be a hard to maintain and largely useless mess consisting of hundreds or possibly thousands of stubs liable to BLP issues and vandalism (and hence potentially annoying to the subjects). I see more and more instances of people creating a red link for every name of a mathematician whose paper is quoted on Wikipedia, and this cannot be a good thing. Is Wikipedia going to become "Who is who in mathematics", supported by quotes from Math Reviews?


 * I really don't like to comment on biographical issues, but after reading some of the comments above, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. For example, CS thinks that the fact that one of Papasoglu's problems was mentioned in a problem list compiled by Misha Kapovich, a noted expert in the field, is significant. Please! Firstly, Misha Kapovich himself does not have an article (nor do I know what, besides a short description of his papers, could go into one), and the list in question is one of many research lists available on the arXiv, not even published as a paper. David says that some of his results are cited elsewhere on Wikipedia: I have looked at these references, and they are (with one exception) just cursory mentions of Papasoglu's work on the JSJ decomposition. I think that it would be a lot more productive to add a precise description of that work to the article on JSJ decomposition if anyone is up to the task. He also seems to suggest that we should turn Wikipedia into some kind of networking resource, and again, this seems to contradict to the basic principle that Wikipedia is not a directory or a similar repository of information (MathSciNet already has an automated tool called "author's profile" which seems to be much better suitable for that). One of the comments is simply a piece of gossip that should never have been mentioned. In summary, I think that we should get rid of the bunker mentality that the rest of the world ("the plebs", those who don't get thrilled by our fine mathematical flagship journals that moderately impress the deans at selected institutions during the tenure review) are out to get us, have a thorough policy debate on the criteria for inclusion, and be pragmatic about the whole thing. Arcfrk (talk) 03:47, 24 March 2009 (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.