Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rhawn Joseph


 * 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. Wizardman Operation Big Bear 17:22, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Rhawn Joseph

 * – ( View AfD View log )

As I stated in my WP:PROD, this particular person does not seem to have received the requisite third-party notice that Wikipedia requires for biographies. See WP:BIO and WP:PROF since the claim to notability seems to be one of academic success. The article itself appears to be a puff-piece made to generally praise the subject and I'm wondering if this article was created at the behest of the subject considering: this.

The question to consider here is if there are enough third-party notices in reliable sources for us to write an article on this person. So far, it seems that the passing mention of this individual has occurred to a level that is barely perceptible in the journals and really the most intense notice has occurred on blogs and personal internet pages which we should not be linking to considering WP:BLP. Additionally, much of the information is currently sourced to Rhawn Joseph's personal pages.

Another relevant guideline to consider is WP:FRINGE. I think that there are a number of users who are questioning whether he has the notability that we would require for a fringe promoter. There certainly are far more famous anti-Darwinists, anti-Big Bang-ist, pro-panspermia people that we write about (Chandra Wickramasinghe comes to mind as does the late Fred Hoyle), but I just don't think the subject of this article has risen to the level of fame we would require to write a decent article on the subject. Basically, we have a PR-piece written to promote Joseph at this point, but I don't see how we can satisfy WP:NPOV considering there aren't enough independent third-party evaluations that have occurred reliably. We're in a morass for satisfying WP:BLP, WP:NPOV, WP:GNG and WP:RS all at the same time. Generally, when it is the editorial decision of the Wikipedia community that it is impossible to write an article that follows the pillars of this website, we ask that the article be deleted.

It may be that Rhawn Joseph becomes more famous in the upcoming years. Maybe he will be regarded as the next Deepak Chopra, etc. If that happens, we can recreate the article with third-party evaluation. Until that time, I don't think that there is enough to keep an article.

76.119.90.74 (talk) 20:52, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

''Note made after filing: this discussion may be of relevance. 76.119.90.74 (talk) 00:04, 22 September 2011 (UTC)''


 * Delete - fails to meet our standards of notability, either professionally or as a crackpot. -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  21:08, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

IndianNationalist (talk) 21:16, 21 September 2011 (UTC) — IndianNationalist (talk&#32;• contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * Keep - Rhawn Joseph is a well known academic with 1000s of references for his work on neruropsychology which can found online, he is well spoken of, just look on google books, he is even mentioned in mainstream neuroscience textbooks. How can you say he is fringe when Roger Penrose has peer reviewed some of his neuroscience publications? Dr. Rhawn Joseph PhD has over 120 peer reviewed publications in all kinds of journals. The user 76.119.90.74 is a sock account of a user "headbomb", he has a vendetta against Rhawn Joseph as Rhawn Joseph is in opposition to the Big Bang and this user headbomb is Catholic who does not like an eternal universe he is also a fascist calling anyone who believes in a different idea a "crackpot". Also see how this user has called rhawn joseph and his work "crackpot" on the Journal of Cosmology article, this user is not neutral, six other users have also said this user is not neutral, he has a vendetta against Joseph and anyone working for the JOC. I would also point out, that panspermia apart from Hoyle and Chandra has little advocates on wikipedia, Joseph should be on wikipedia, wikipedia is a free knowledge website, why supress information from it? Joseph is a scholar he should be on wiki.
 * IndianNationalist, please don't make personal comments about other users. That kind of talk just weakens your arguments, and if you make a habit of it, it can get you banned. --MelanieN (talk) 00:41, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Would you care to back that up with reliable sources? The Blade of the Northern Lights ( 話して下さい ) 21:59, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
 * (editorial aside) That Roger Penrose has descended into, to put it charitably, advocacy of highly unorthodox ideas with respect to the study of consciousness is something that is well-known. Having Penrose as a fellow-traveler in that regard isn't very surprising, though I wonder what Penrose would say about Joseph's strident hatred of Big Bang cosmology if he knew about it. Penrose, while questioning the necessity for inflationary cosmology, essentially accepts the facts outlined at Big Bang. This is somewhat off-topic, of course, but suffice to say that having had Roger Penrose read something you wrote is no more a mark of notability than having anyone else read something you wrote. What matters are what the sources themselves are verified to have published, as The Blade of the Northern Lights implies. 76.119.90.74 (talk) 22:05, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: has been blocked as one of a set of POV-pushing sockpuppets, but appears to be the only one of them who commented on this AfD (unless I missed something in my reading). A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:32, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 22:19, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 22:19, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Behavioural science-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 22:20, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 22:20, 21 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment. We are deep in the realms of Californian kookery, but with a GS h-index of 21 in biomed there may be a WP:Prof case for a weak keep. The case is not helped by abuse of other editors. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:47, 21 September 2011 (UTC).
 * Did you eliminate self-citations from that search? He is prolific seeing as how he is well-connected to the Journal of Cosmology, but it does not appear to me that he is widely cited by others. Third-party notice should be the standard, I think, not easily manipulable h-index. Still, if you can find some sources that aren't Joseph himself or obvious associates, that would be a good argument. 76.119.90.74 (talk) 23:50, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It would be valuable if you would give us citation data with self-citations removed. On the first GS hit with 175 cites there do not seem to be any self-citations on the first page at least. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:14, 22 September 2011 (UTC).
 * Hmm, you make a good point in showing that there is another aspect to this fellow's publication history that may warrant further study, but I still come to the conclusion that he is essentially not all that notable. The work to which you are referring is a textbook that is appreciated by certain segments of the psychology and especially the psychoanalytical community, but not the hard neuroscience community. As it is, it doesn't appear referenced in the usual neuroscience journals but rather as one of the pile of references used in the logorrheic citations lists that seem somewhat peculiar to the psychoanalytical world. Let's look at the first page of of GS citations you mention:
 * Four rather famous works on the psychoanalytical idea of affect regulation by Schore, a UCLA neuropsychoanalyst.
 * An exhaustive textbook by Walsh on Neuropsychology that seems to make passing mention as part of the psychoanalysis aspect of the text.
 * A text arguing for a connection between psychotherapy and neuroscience based on some sort of metasynthesis of the subjects by a psychologist at Pepperdine who is an expert on schizophrenia.
 * Saver and Rabin somewhat famous work deconstructing religious experiences as delusions where they cite the book as a basis for their statement that certain kinds of epilepsy share characteristics with religious euphoria.
 * Georg Northoff's investigation of catatonia criticizes Joseph's textbook explicitly: "Other authors (Joseph et al. 1985, Wilcox 1991) observed a cerebellar atrophy in catatonic patients which however was neither investigated systematically nor quantitatively. To my knowledge no study specifically investigating catatonic syndrome (and not only catatonic schizophrenia as a subtype) has been published so far."
 * Devinsky, NYU Medical Center researcher, writes another article on epilepsy making nods to Saver and Rabin as well as many of the people they cite.
 * A Psychoanalysis Journal on emotion and the "Mind-Body connection".
 * I see the borderline-iness of this situation here, but I'm still inclined to be swayed that writing an article about this person may not be possible. That some of his texts and papers are cited by others is interesting, but they don't seem to take enough notice for us to squeeze out a reliable BLP for the guy.
 * 76.119.90.74 (talk) 02:32, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete Fails verifiability from the very first sentence, "Rhawn Joseph is a neuropsychologist at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in California." But the staff listing of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System does not include him. The only clickable links at the article are self-referential. He has a lot of articles and books at Google Scholar; the most cited ones seem to be from the 1980s (perhaps when his ideas were more mainstream?); but overall does not seem to fulfill WP:SCHOLAR. --MelanieN (talk) 01:01, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Plaudits to Melanie for this detective work. The BLP is so favorable to its subject that one wonders about its provenance. There is a darker side to be explored. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:27, 22 September 2011 (UTC).
 * Great find with that link, Xxanthippe - in which a noted skeptic suggests that she was tricked into contributing a chapter to a book of Joseph's. Even more interesting is the publisher of that book, listed as "University Press, California" which is easy to mistake for the highly respectable University of California Press. In fact "University Press California" seems to publish e-books, all of them by Rhawn Joseph - in other words, it's a somewhat deceptively named format for self-publishing. That seals it as far as I am concerned; this article, and this person, do not belong in Wikipedia. --MelanieN (talk) 15:09, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Since the cabal of crazies decided to make things personal, let me just clarify that science doesn't care about the religious background of someone who proposes a theory, and neither do I. I'm not a 60 years old Catholic, I'm a 27 year old atheist, and I couldn't give two shits about the religious background of Georges Lemaître's (who was the original proposer of the Big Bang theory). I'm no more a Catholic because I consider Big Bang-denial prima facie evidence of kookery, than I am a Muslim for believing the basic rules of algebra are sound.

Regarding whether or not Joseph is notable is another thing. It's a known name in Astrobiology circles, but not one you'd know for reasons favourable to Joseph. His astrobiology publications are certainly not taken seriously, and you can really only find them cited in Journal of Cosmology, by authors closely associated with J Cosmology, or by Joseph himself. He's got several books published, but those are mostly self-publications or in the realm of vanity press. I have no idea what his reputation in neurology-related fields is however (I am utterly unimpressed with his treatment of the mind/religion/whatever, however). He made some waves in the blogosphere, but nothing particularly remarkable. All in all it doesn't really matter to me if we have an article on Joseph. It'd be useful to warm people about him, but we could say that about any quack out there. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:16, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Update: Delete, I don't see him pass WP:PROF for his work in neurology, and he doesn't meet WP:GNG for his pseudoscientific work either. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:45, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Weak keep. GS lists a book published by Williams & Wilkins (a respectable publisher) that has been cited 175 times. There are a few articles in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Biology (now: Neurobiology of Learning and Memory), and Child Psychiatry and Human Development that have been cited around 100 times. These are all respectable scientific journals. On the other hand, this is a heavily cited field and these articles are old (so have had a long time to collect citations). In addition, GS is notoriously unreliable regarding citation scores (many double hits, counting stuff that should not be counted, etc; see also Ike Antkare). Unfortunately, the Web of Science lists over 600 authors named "R. Joseph", so that it would take much more time than I have at the moment to get some more reliable data from that database. I have no opinion on whether Joseph meets our notability guidelines as a fringe/pseudo-scientist. --Crusio (talk) 10:32, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment – Take a look at the talk page of the article here, which appears to be an authentic appeal from the person the article is based upon to delete the article. Northamerica1000 (talk) 15:17, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment – The information in the discussion page is about slander concerns. Northamerica1000 (talk) 15:20, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Is there any way to verify the person's claim to be Rhawn Joseph? (And doesn't it seem odd that someone who appears to be so self-promoting in terms of his publications should now claim that he is "not a public figure"?) BTW I notice that the same IP address has also made "slander" allegations with regard to the Journal of Cosmology article - in that case including threats of legal action which could have led to the blocking of the IP. With regard to the article about Joseph himself - the one under discussion here - there is nothing remotely negative or slanderous in the article; if anything it is a puff piece. --MelanieN (talk) 15:35, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It probably is Rhawn Joseph himself who's pissed he can't control what his article say about him and is concerned that mainstream opinions about his non-mainstream cosmology-related work will be given due weight. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:43, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I guess it doesn't matter if it really is him or not - since the article will be kept or deleted based on Wikipedia criteria like notability and verifiability, not on the wishes of the subject. The article as it stands is highly favorable to him, but maybe he is concerned that some of the things in this discussion might make their way into the page if it stays. He is clearly following this discussion; in his comment at the talk page, he responded to my discovery (above) that he is not actually on the staff at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center. --MelanieN (talk) 23:39, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete. As notability is, at best, marginal, there is no harm in acceding to subject's request to delete. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:09, 24 September 2011 (UTC).
 * Delete fails WP:GNG. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:03, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete We can wait until next year and see if Joseph becomes a media darling. We can wait until the year after that or still another year to see if he becomes sufficiently notable.  Meanwhile, there is no harm in not having the article. Fartherred (talk) 03:33, 27 September 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.