Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shahid Hussain Bokhari (2)


 * 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 no consensus. WjBscribe 17:00, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Shahid Hussain Bokhari

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

This article was nominated a while ago and kept based on ghits and citation rate, which are weak indicators of WP:N. Considering WP standards have evolved since then and this article hasn't, please discuss. Potatoswatter 05:23, 12 April 2007 (UTC) BTW: See WP:PROF for the guidelines. Potatoswatter 07:12, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I withdraw my nomination - notability is clearly established. Potatoswatter 06:29, 14 April 2007 (UTC) Votes keep coming in, so whatever. Arguments are stated. Potatoswatter 17:43, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep. Frivolous nomination. Obviously an expert in his field. Plenty of tenured professors in the US would kill for something like |this. Stammer 06:06, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That profile isn't particularly notable because he hasn't done anything of note. The website I've never heard of and their profiles are apparently all circa 2003. They don't explain their process at all, and the whole site is rife with broken links & formatting.
 * We're WP:NOT a list of experts, even very good ones. The list of papers seem to imply he mainly tries different methods of implementing biotech algorithms on different kinds of computers. That's the kind of thing done by most CS academics just making a living.
 * This is the first researcher at my university I found on their list. It's MUCH LONGER, yet of dubious encyclopedic notability. Potatoswatter 07:12, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Moreover, the guy is an IEEE fellow, a title "conferred only by invitation of the Board of Directors upon a person of outstanding and extraordinary qualifications and experience in IEEE-designated fields, and who has made important individual contributions to one or more of these fields." . Stammer 08:08, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Very good - that's what the IEEE thinks of itself. So then what has Bokhari done? Potatoswatter 09:22, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See IEEE. Potatoswatter 09:28, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * We are not here to assess his work, but his notability. See WP:PROF. Beside being widely cited, his IEEE and ACM fellowships are significant independent acknowlegements. Stammer 10:03, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Given this article, what can we say about him besides his titles and list of publications? There is not enough here for a worthwhile encyclopedia article, and we still don't have enough on him. We have some independent sources that say he's competent, but little else. Competence != notability if we have nothing substantive to note. Potatoswatter 15:43, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I edited the article to add information about why he was awarded his awards. I'm sure an expert in his area could write at much greater length about his accomplishments. But my overall feeling is that you're making up standards that simply don't exist for other parts of Wikipedia. The article for Mathieu Turcotte, for instance, doesn't explain why he won his olympic bronze medal; it is sufficient that he won them, it is a significant award sufficient to make him stand out among other skaters, and the sources documenting that award are enough to justify his WP entry. Similarly, although it would add depth to the WP article and would in general be worthwhile to add, I don't see that we need to explain why Bokhari was awarded his ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow awards in order to use them to justify his WP article: it is sufficient to state that he won them. They are notable awards the possession of which makes him stand out above the vast majority of professional computer scientists and electrical engineers. These societies don't award these fellowships except for good reason, and I think the article should explain what those reasons are (as I have now attempted) but an insufficiently detailed article on a notable subject is not to my mind a valid reason for deletion. —David Eppstein 22:51, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Awards highlight notable accomplishments. Turcotte won his medal in speed skating in 2002; that is absolutely essential information.
 * Why do you assume I don't know about Bokhari's field? I arrived at this page because I am working on parallelizing graph algorithms. Maybe I'll even read one or two of his papers. However the page appeared when I searched for "Tera MTA" and so far it's irrelevant. What's there right now amounts to copy-and-pasted cruft, not the sort of summarized information I expect from an encyclopedia, and I consider it pollution. As an expert, this page is confusing and just doesn't belong.
 * To answer your other question on notability, there are millions of electrical engineers and, although they're the top 1%, thousands of IEEE fellows. The award is notable but giving it to a specific person is not. The order of magnitude of recipients is larger than Wikipedia can keep up with. But that's not my point so much as the importance of content, and the unlikelihood of finding anything generally interesting to say about the guy. His research is relatively unfocused. The notability guidelines aren't to be interpreted to mean he "deserves" a WP entry to go with his awards. Potatoswatter 23:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete - where are the sources that explain why this person is notable? Lots of cited works is impressive, but we need multiple independent reliable sources that explain why someone is notable. Otherwise they go. - Chardish 06:59, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - lots of other Fellows of the IEEE who don't have articles, and few sources. Rgds, - Trident13 10:08, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Then someone should go through and make articles for all those other IEEE Fellows. They're all sufficiently notable. —David Eppstein 14:42, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Someone should write a script to import the list into one article. What is your rationale for saying all these people could ever have more than a one-line stub? IEEE fellows are elected faster than we could make useful articles on them. Potatoswatter 15:43, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * All of those people have a highly successful academic career, multiple non-trivial and highly-cited research papers, often research monographs, etc. Also the fellow awards come with a citation that describes what they are particularly known for, which is more than we get for a lot of other articles on academics. IEEE authors generally include mini-biographies in their papers, which leads to more sourcable biographic information than for many other subjects of articles. And more than in many other fields, their papers are likely to be available online, at least via public-access terminals in university libraries if not without a subscription to most editors. Why do you think it would be difficult to write a real article about any one of them? —David Eppstein 23:24, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Point me to an article on an academic that doesn't say what they're known for, and I'll prod it.
 * Autobiographies are poor sources... not secondary.
 * You're talking about writing lots of articles on lots of people. If you did that, you would realize that the purpose is better served by a few articles on their subjects with references to the people. Which is actually a little like parallelism and clustering :v) . Actually if a paper has more than one author, it's next to impossible to really assign credit. Did he come up with all these ideas himself, or does he have an eye for good students and a nurturing manner? No way for us, or the IEEE, to know. Maybe if there were a newspaper article we could get a feel. Potatoswatter 23:41, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * But this article has for a long time said what he is known for: his expertise in parallel and distributed computing. The ACM and IEEE citations are more specific. Autobiographies as primary sources, are ok as sources for unlikely-to-be-disputed facts, it is only for interpretation of those facts that secondary sources are preferred. The articles on the subjects' research are preferred but that doesn't mean they are the only thing that can be written about. And if you would look at the article again (as I've edited it to remove the low-citation papers and leave only the highly cited ones) many of them are single-author, so your generalities about being unable to assign credit do not apply in this case. —David Eppstein 23:57, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Indeed, the article goes a step further and shows that much of his work is in implementing and evaluating algorithms on specific computers. I remain unconvinced.
 * Actually I suspect the degree of notability that led to the article getting written in the first place was his nationality. This is more legitimate than his academic credentials alone, although now we don't have enough sources to write anything. The page was vandalized by a presumable former student/coworker, who felt he forgot his roots. It was created by a fellow Pakistani engineer. We could go with that aspect, but a list of "citations" containing any papers which aren't somehow actually cited by the article doesn't belong. If his work can't get summarized even in his own WP article, beyond stating a broad category, then it's not notable! Potatoswatter 00:19, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletions.  -- Pete.Hurd 14:02, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Strong Keep. ACM Fellow is a significant honor. Also Fellow IEEE, listed by ISI as highly cited. What more could one ask for? Each of these three is an independent reliable indication of notability as requested by WP:N. —David Eppstein 14:39, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, conditional on the link verifying him being an IEEE fellow can be shown to work; I could not get it to . Only a small number of professionals get recognized as fellows by their professional organizations.  That is enough notability if the link can demonstrate it .  Baccyak4H (Yak!) 17:42, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Here, courtesy of Potatoswatter above. Stammer 18:26, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Update. Thanks, I missed that. I struck out my conditionals in my above comments.  Baccyak4H (Yak!) 18:32, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete Doesn't meet criteria WP:PROF. A list of articles doesn't demonstrate notability.  --Minderbinder 22:00, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Please explain how you justify your claim that he doesn't meet WP:PROF #6 "The person has received a notable award or honor". —David Eppstein 22:28, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * While he has received two awards, I wouldn't consider either "notable". --Minderbinder 22:47, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * On the basis of what knowledge do you make that judgment? —David Eppstein 23:03, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. A comment in the first discussion states "there are a total of 320 computer scientists in the world on the ISI Highly Cited list". That and the fellowships indicate clearly to me that he does satisfy WP:PROF. --Bduke 22:37, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Extremely Strong Keep It is the purpose of WP to record the notability the outside world has established. the IEEE fellow is a demonstration that those in his profession regard him as one of the most notable, and that alone would be enough. The place in ISI highly cited is enough to shown that way more than the average number of people have thought the work, and that by itself makes him notable.
 * the objections raised are specious: that one Palestinian scientist writes an art. about another means the same as if one US scientist writes an article about another--such a comment shows POV, the probably not realized as such.
 * the comment by someone here in a related field, that he doesn't think him notable, is a good illustration of why we use outside criteria, the acknowledgment by the profession as a whole . We do not judge scientific notability by what we think personally of the quality of the work, no matter how expert we maybe. This is personal POV, & I cannot account for the reason. DGG 00:27, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The purpose of Wikipedia is to provide useful info to its readers, not to assign credit. I concede that he may be notable, but this article needs work to explain what he's notable for. I want to see: Bokhari invented X. Every engineer, particularly academics, invents things constantly. I have not evaluated his work and cannot judge it, but the person who posted the article should've. Potatoswatter 01:18, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep but trim. nom withdrawn Fine, I give up. Recognition by a professional organization means he must be notable for something, but Wikipedia doesn't have the resources to explain what it is. It's telling that the sentence describing his field isn't even WP:LINKed. I've learned a bit from this. Just one thing... Eppstein's edits cut out the keywords which brought this article's cruft to my attention, and I think that was a great improvement. Since the short list of articles doesn't appear to show any selectivity, and it's redundant with the ISI credit, I'm just going to condense it to a summary of research topics... tomorrow... Potatoswatter 01:18, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the only thing you can infer from the lack of wikilinks in the description of his field is that the people who have been editing this page have been lazy about making wikilinks; I don't see how it reflects on the subject of the article. Anyway, I just added a longer research summary. Turns out (and I didn't know this before I started looking more carefully just now) that his research connects peripherally to some of mine: the application for a recent graph visualization paper I published was a distributed partitioning system close to what he describes in his paper with Berger, and some of the Berger-Bokhari paper's ~300 cites are from the research group of one of my coauthors who does that sort of thing. Anyway. I think the list of frequently-cited papers is important, for three reasons: first, for helping the reader get a better idea of the breadth of subjects considered in the subject's research; second, so that someone trying to find more about Bokhari's research can get a better idea of which are the important papers, and third, because citation data from ISI is not easily available to everyone without a university IP address. An indiscriminate list of 50 papers is obviously not helpful, but that's not what's there any more and I don't see what would be gained by cutting it further. —David Eppstein 03:10, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete, and add HESREALLYSMART and HEWRITESALOT to WP:ATA. To write about a subject, we need things written about them, not by them. I'm sure he's a brilliant computer scientist and has done some great work, but some name-drops in an editorial and having won a couple awards are not sufficient for an article. They are trivial mentions. Seraphimblade Talk to me 06:20, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I am puzzled how you decide that the two Fellowships are trivial. I take it that you do not think a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal is trivial. What about Fellowship of the Royal Society? My two Fellowships of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute are trivial as a notability criteria as a large proportion of the membership has that grade. Where do you draw the line. To me drawing that line is subjective, not objective as you have stated elsewhere. What is trivial to one person is important to another. This guy clearly meets WP:PROF. --Bduke 01:15, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The line is not subjective, and we don't even have to judge a line for ourselves. Wikipedia articles are composed of condensed secondary sources, which are lacking for this prof. Nobel and Fields medal recipients get articles written by the popular media, on the strength of having won that prize alone. Lesser awards carry a lower probability of getting written up, but anyone who gets "noticed" has a chance in WP, whatever the prize is. Bokhari is not the subject of an article or story outside Wikipedia, and only successive AfDs are spurring the effort it takes to write the first article on him. He meets WP:PROF but not WP:N. People forget that these are the laws of how to make an encyclopedia work, not mere guidelines or practical rules. It's less evident now that the article is getting cleaned up, but this article (and the expenditure of effort on it) is a sign of the rules being mis-formulated and Wikipedians going beyond being encyclopedists... even if that's a good thing, it's untenable. Potatoswatter 04:50, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I still don't understand how you fail to see the article in its current state as lacking secondary sources. My enumeration of the references, by number: (1) ISI highly cited page: secondary, reliable, nontrivial. (2) Google scholar search: somewhat but not entirely reliable secondary source for cite counts in this field, which are an indicator of notability. More useful as a way to find sources than as a source itself, though. (3) list of IEEE fellows: trivial mention. (4,5) ACM and IEEE fellow citation text: secondary, reliable, nontrivial. (By nontrivial I refer not to their length, which is short, but the fact that the citations are entirely about Bokhari and reliably attest that scholars have found his work significant.) (6) Letters to the editor, printed in major Pakistani newspapers: secondary, nontrivial, reliable for testing notability (the editors of the newspapers agreed they were on a notable enough subject to print them) though less reliable for factual information about Bokhari. But since notability is what we're trying to ascertain here... (7,8) Biosketches at places he visited. Secondary, reliable for factual information, nontrivial, but don't in themselves support notability. (9) Simon paper, reliable secondary source for the technical material it supports, but a single research paper is unlikely to support notability. (10) DBLP. Reliable and secondary but only supports the factual information, not notability. So of these I see (1), (4), (5), (6) as clear secondary sources for notability, easily satisfying WP:N's requirement that there be "multiple" sources. Where do we disagree? I am genuinely baffled to see you and so many other people like you in this discussion look at an article like this and blithely assert "no sources, clearly not notable" when my reading of the article is that he is someone who was (in the 1980s and 1990s, and once notable always notable) at the peak of his profession. —David Eppstein 05:32, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * You have fixed the article, and I've put in my vote to keep. The point is that the fellowships and citation stats are not sources in the sense of providing material for an article, they are rather one-dimensional evidence of notability. You took that evidence and used it as motivation to do the research to find real secondary sources.
 * I was in favor of junking the article and you were in favor of fixing it. I'd still say the same thing coming across a similar article, because there are too many IEEE and ACM fellows out there to assume they have all had the same social impact. I believe that WP:PROF is a test of whether someone is notable as an academic given that they've had the impact to meet WP:N, to filter out the quacks. There's no chance this guy's an impostor. But without sources such as the letter-writing campaign, some human interest or impact on the world, there's no notability... Yes he might be among the top 300 cited computer scientists, but do we have articles on the 300 fastest speed skaters?
 * So anyway, you set out to write a proper article, and you did it. Furthermore you summarized his research, which must have taken some effort... hats off, WP would be cooler if we all sat down and credited academics we're familiar with. Potatoswatter 06:27, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * WP:N is a guideline, not a law, and a strongly disputed guideline currently. I really do not know what you are on about. Fellows of the ACM and IEEE are notable. We then write an article if there are sources and there are. There does not have to be an article or story outside Wikipedia about him. There has to be sources for the information that appears in the article. From your comment below, why does "mention from the IEEE" "disgrace their own award"? That mention is the source that he has been honoured with a Fellowship of IEEE. What evidence do you have for "no other profession has the same tendency to grandeur"? Most academics have the opposite. Do you have a problem with academics? They are underrepresented on Wikipedia. For example, we still have not got articles on all Fellows of the Royal Society. We should be strengthening articles on people who are notable academics. --Bduke 06:02, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * An encyclopedia is based on secondary sources. The requirement of WP:N is reliable primary sources so it follows from the definition of encyclopedia. This AfD started before good sources had been found so it's moot now. That the IEEE barely wrote a full sentence that I could find on their site I thought reflected badly on what the fellowship is supposed to be. I suppose the Nobel commission also writes little actually when they bestow honors, but it would've been nice to see more specifics. True honest academics are modest like all other good people, but what I meant was that academia also attracts delusioned quacks, for whom we have WP:PROF. We should strengthen articles by specifying and clarifying and linking what academics do and whom they've affected, but bending backwards to point at awards and paper titles and criteria in WP:PROF is a step backwards because it's uninteresting, uninformative, and it "polluted" my search results. Potatoswatter 06:27, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The ACM and IEEE Fellow citations are about but not by him. Both are not trivial mentions: they are not just names on a list, they come with a (brief) description of what he did and why he was so honored. Without having checked them, I'm nevertheless pretty confident that plenty of the hundreds of academic citations to his work are not trivial mentions either (though the majority may well be). But that is WP:BIO. Why are you so ready to throw out the more specific criteria in WP:PROF, which he clearly satisfies? —David Eppstein 07:32, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * My thought is to exclude computer-generated or statistical sources. Ghits are useful when you can click and read something someone wrote, but all we have on this guy are copies of his own CV, auto-generated citation compilations, and a minimalist mention from the IEEE which disgraces their own award. This is an issue for WP:PROF more than WP:ATA because academics constantly seek to bend the rules of notability... no other profession has the same tendency to grandeur. The applicable Rule of Life here is that if nobody takes the time to write about ya, history has not been made. We can make machines and even bureaucratic processes to bend it, but there it is.
 * Many articles get cited because they provide a convenient formulation or review rather than invent something, and we'd have to read his articles to sort the situation out, which is the very definition of WP:OR. So that's full circle to the fact there are no secondary sources available. It's not about being "pretty confident" he's had some influence among those thousands of citations, it's entirely about communicating something that he did, and pointing to someone outside WP who took note enough to write more than ten words. Potatoswatter 07:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete unless better sources can be found. I'm not seeing anything that really passes the "average professor" test.  Rossami (talk) 02:03, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh, he's definitely not average according to the ACM Fellow award guidelines: to meet the criteria for that award, he should have accomplishments placing him in the top 1% of ACM members. But could you explain why you think that means he doesn't pass the test? —David Eppstein 02:14, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep clearly establishes notability through society memberships, fellowships, and publications. Consider also that "Average Professor" does not mean "Average at a Tier 1 Research Institution" -- are you comparing professors' achievements to those at the top, to create an average, or across a broad range of colleges and universities? --Myke Cuthbert 21:30, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That's a moot point. If all you can say about someone is that they're average in the most elite professional group in their field, that does not make them a notable individual. We're here to write informative articles, not to hand out brownie points. Potatoswatter 23:45, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep he appears to meet WP:PROF and also appears to be a noteable person within Pakistan Nil Einne 14:33, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete Failed to establish notability. If WP:PROF allows an article without multiple non-trivial sources then its directly contradicts established policy, not guidelines, and is obsolete. If it doesn't, then this article fails to meet that as well, and should be deleted pending more sources. - M  ask?  16:16, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep highly published, appears to pass WP:BIO in my opinion.  ALKIVAR &trade; &#x2622; 05:42, 18 April 2007 (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.