Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Russell Gmirkin


 * 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. As a BLP we are better starting afresh, especially if the subject espouses fringe views so happy to share the sourcing with anyone wanting to create the book article. Spartaz Humbug! 12:49, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Russell Gmirkin

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

The only sources other than one interview and Gmirkin's works themselves are a bunch of negative reviews of the latter (Anthonioz 2017, Van Seters 2007, Wood 2008). Especially given the fact that Russell Gmirkin's theories are WP:FRINGE, this absence of secondary sourcing is intolerable. In cases like this, we would at least need one or two sources covering the reception of his views in general to be able to characterize them without ourselves engaging in analysis of Gmirkin's work or the reviews of it. Searching Google News I only found this press release, which I take to be a bad sign. He obviously also fails WP:NACADEMIC. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 12:26, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 12:32, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been brought to the attention of editors at Fringe theories/Noticeboard. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 12:49, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Bible-related deletion discussions. ☿  Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 21:56, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Philosophy-related deletion discussions. ☿  Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 21:56, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep: Not sure what the nominator means by "obviously also fails WP:NACADEMIC" - I think he passes it on #1: "The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline". Even if people disagree with him, they still take his thesis seriously (which is what "impact" means). This is demonstrated by GS citations: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus has 136 citations listed, which is very impressive for this field (compare Bart D. Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? which has 167). I'm really not sure why the nom considers the present state of the article intolerable: looking at published book reviews is a normal way of evaluating reception. StAnselm (talk) 02:41, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Notability (academics) explicitly states that GS includes sources that are not peer-reviewed and that the number of citations found there can sometimes be significantly more than the number of actual citations from truly reliable scholarly material. I know this to be true from personal experience, since GS citations for my own academic work are roughly triple the amount of actual citations in RS. Also consider that citations give us nothing to work with to write an article. A more important question is, are there substantial reviews that explicitly tell us something about reception without engaging in OR? ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 17:04, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment In this field, I'd expect influence to be judged more by the presence of book reviews than by citation counts. I'd argue that this review of Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible is too superficial to count, being a summary (in practically "listicle" form) without analysis. There is what at first looked like substantial commentary in this article, but on closer inspection, it appears to be lifted from Wikipedia. Compare, for example, To be sure, Gmirkin has been criticised from various quarters. Van Seters (2007) criticised Gmirkin’s work in a 2007 book review, arguing that Berossus and Genesis is based on a straw man fallacy by attacking the documentary hypothesis without seriously addressing more recent theories of Pentateuchal origins. with John Van Seters criticized Gmirkin's work in a 2007 book review, arguing that Berossus and Genesis engages in a straw man fallacy by attacking the documentary hypothesis without seriously addressing more recent theories of Pentateuchal origins. So, that's no good. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 03:18, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think you're misreading the book review. The link is not full access, and only shows a snippet. The actual review is across three pages. StAnselm (talk) 03:25, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I have library access to the whole thing. It's spread across three pages, but most of it is basically a Table of Contents. Part III discusses ‘Greek and Ancient Near Eastern law collections’. It addresses the following topics: (a) Ancient Near East law collection; (b) Comparison with biblical law collections... There's a two-sentence paragraph at the end which boils down to Further research is needed. I don't think that qualifies as the kind of in-depth, systematic examination that allows a book review to qualify as substantial commentary. We regard authors as passing the wiki-notability guideline for book writers if they have multiple books that received multiple reviews apiece, typically; in order for that to be a viable standard, the reviews in question need to have weight. I'm not weighing in with an overall judgment yet, just saying that that particular review doesn't cut the mustard, in my personal view. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 03:35, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Oh, OK. My mistake. StAnselm (talk) 03:43, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * No worries! And feel free to disagree, of course. I'm sure I've developed some idiosyncratic opinions after 5+ years of these things. :-) XOR&#39;easter (talk) 03:46, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 12:34, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Two Questions - First, do we really evaluate the notability of academics here by looking at citation counts or the existence of book reviews? Because if that is enough, than any semi-accomplished academic would in fact be wiki-notable. Forget about named professorships, academic awards, membership of prestigious scholarly societies, or WP:SIGCOV in non-academic sources: they're cited by their peers (even if only to reject their thesis, which can significantly boost citation counts) and book reviews exist, so they are notable? I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with that (though we would end up with an enormous amount of articles on third-rank scholars), but it would be a lot easier then if WP:NACADEMIC explicitly stated it.A second question I have about this is, are we then supposed to write articles purely based on book reviews? It seems to me that book reviews are a type of primary sources (they are secondary in relation to the individual work they review, but primary in relation to the reception of the author's work as a whole), and that to evaluate them to say something about the author in general would constitute a type of original research. For example, most of an author's theses may be rejected by the academic community at large, or on the contrary very well received, but no individual review would state such a thing, since they are supposed to be strictly about one reviewer's evaluation of one specific reviewed work. Book reviews especially tend to be extremely circumspect about negative evaluations, which creates an additional problem for fringe theories. What source are we to use, also in Gmirkin's case, to qualify an author's work as largely rejected? Can we add to the lead that Gmirkin's theories are largely rejected by the academic community, only citing the book reviews? ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 15:10, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, we really do evaluate academics for wiki-notability based on citation profiles and the existence of book reviews, among the other criteria that the guideline in question lays out. But they have to have a sufficient record to stand out above their field. This works surprisingly well &mdash; better, one might say, in practice than in principle &mdash; and filters out the "semi-accomplished". Why, I'm "semi-accomplished" in my academic career myself, and I'd fail here. There is a legitimate quandary regarding what to do with biographies where all the available documentation is dismissive, disparaging, or otherwise negative. This has happened before with academics on the fringe, who may be completely unremarkable in their own field but known for crankish statements outside of it (an engineer endorsing creationism, say, or a mathematician going in for climate-change denial). Sometimes the best thing to do is just not to have an article. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:24, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, I should have read that more thoroughly the first time around. As usual, WP notability guidelines turn out to be more permissive than I suspected, as well as than what I would personally like (I'm a non-notable 'semi-accomplished' academic too, btw, that was a poor way to state it). The second question remains though: can we use the reviews to make a broad statement about reception in the lead? I believe that if we can't make such a statement somehow, we shouldn't have an article. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 17:04, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * While WP:PROF does get used to argue for notability, I have seen many occasions where this has gone the other way. In this case, the person is notable for one idea, it seems to me. I don't see a need to have a standalone biography and certainly sourcing it entirely to primary sources is going to cause some problems. Wikipedia works on consensus and I've lately seen some rumblings that the WP:PROF consensus may not be as solid as it once was. I am more inclined towards your approach on the matter, TBH. jps (talk) 18:00, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * By the much-vaunted GNG, any paper that has had follow-up in two or three other papers by different authors is technically "notable". I shudder to think of thousands of mini-articles being created on that basis, and then merged to create biographies of their lead authors... Our wiki-notability guidelines for academics are in practice a higher bar than the alternative. As to whether we can make a summary statement based on book reviews, I think we could at least say "His work has been criticized for X, Y, and Z" &mdash; merely giving a summary, rather than drawing the conclusion that his work is completely or largely rejected. But, on the other hand, there's so little to go on that I'm not convinced the wiki-notability standard for academics or authors is met. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 13:59, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Mere follow-up or even reviews are not necessarily significant coverage. WP:GNG requires this, stating specifically so that no original research is needed to extract the content. This seems to be precisely what's missing here. A list of particular criticisms is not enough, we must be able to make a broad analytic statement. If doing that would be deemed OR, the subject is not notable in my view. But maybe we can; hopefully other !voters will weigh in. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 14:36, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't think any wiki-notability guideline requires the existence of a definitive take on a person's work, or a meta-analysis of the original reviews. The absence of such an evaluation in a reliable source rules out our inventing one, of course, but in my view that absence isn't what makes the case for this article dubious. Right now, I'm in a "weak delete" mood, as I don't think the bar for academics publishing in book-oriented fields is quite met. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:58, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Delete or, possibly, refactor to an article about the Berossus and Genesis book. I was unable to substantiate a case that the subject's work has been particularly influential; beyond that one book, it hasn't even been significantly commented upon. One way or another, the wiki-notability guidelines for scholars and for authors ask for a noteworthy body of work — an accomplished career, rather than a single accomplishment. I don't think that standard is met here. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:52, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete on the basis of WP:NOTINHERITED. Just because a person has an idea that has gained notice does not mean the person themself is necessarily notable. We are no longer bound to the Great Man theory of ideas. jps (talk) 21:46, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think the community consensus expressed in Notability (academics) indicates otherwise. StAnselm (talk) 19:27, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree that there is tension. I believe that this case illustrates why WP:NOTINHERITED should win. jps (talk) 23:09, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I believe that this is an edge case that demonstrates very little about general principles. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 13:29, 19 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep. The fringe nature of his research is irrelevant if we have enough neutral sources to describe it neutrally. I found multiple reliably-published book reviews for more than one book, Berossus and Genesis       and Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible , enough to convince me of a pass of WP:AUTHOR. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:22, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The first of those two reviews for Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible is the one that struck (and still strikes) me as basically a Table of Contents with no substantial commentary. Several reviews for one book but only one that I can honestly count for another inclines me to say we should have an article on that first book rather than for the author. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 19:32, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Rename and refactor to Berossus and Genesis. At this stage, sources do not support that WP:NAUTHOR is met. MrsSnoozyTurtle 08:32, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Rename and refactor to Berossus and Genesis. The person of Gmirkin himself is not a notable one, while the only book written by him which has achieved some notability is Berossus and Genesis. I have checked all the other scholarly works and books he has written and what I have found is that said works contain WP:FRINGE theories (he even publishes for the Journal of Higher Criticism, which I take to be a bad sign) and/or have not received any significant scholarly (or media) attention.--Potatín5 (talk) 09:54, 19 August 2022 (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.