Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/William T. Kane


 * 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.  Sandstein  07:48, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

William T. Kane

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He is described here in various capacities (most substantially as a scientist/inventor and secondarily as a member of the military), but I don't see any credible claim that he passes the notability guideline for any of these categories. (The main claim to scientific notability is his patents, which are explicitly excluded as convincing evidence under WP:NPROF.) There are lots of references in the article, but none of them cover him in-depth (except for the obituary in local newspapers). Overall he seems like an interesting person who does not pass any of our notability guidelines. JBL (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. JBL (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions. JBL (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. JBL (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. JBL (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete. In addition to the reasons given by the nominator, the article contains numerous dubious references and some dubious claims, raising significant WP:V issues. For example, for the subject's 1966 PhD from the University of Missouri the article gives two refs. The first, occuring in the leade, is a broken link to celebstrendingnow.com/william-kane-net-worth/. The other ref, occuring in the 'Patents' section is this, which is a link to an August 2008 story in a local Lake Placid newspaper regarding a town-wide bike ride event. The 'Education and Career' section opens with: "He attended the university of Colorado in Boulder where he studied Geology, publishing in 1949 a paper on Sediment Size Analysis which calculated textual parameters using Fortran". The second part of this sentence is both nonsensical and implausible. The programming language Fortran did not exist until 1954 at the earliest and there were certanly no papers published in 1949 about programming something in Fortran. The ref given to support this claim is garbled and unclear. All in all, too little here to indicate notability under WP:GNG, and there are some WP:V issues as well. Nsk92 (talk) 18:56, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete per JBL & Nsk92, this does not meet WP:GNG and has WP:V concerns. --Micky (talk) 03:18, 20 June 2020 (UTC) Blocked sockpuppet Malcolmxl5 (talk) 04:01, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:V and WP:TNT, although it also seems that the subject does not pass WP:GNG or WP:PROF. Is there maybe a WP:COMPETENCE issue here? The article presents a garbled view of things but there seems to be an underlying grain of truth. Someone named William T. Kane, of U. Missouri, really did publish an article about a FORTRAN analysis of sediment grain, but it was in 1963 . The Google Books link for that claim, to the Geological Survey Bulletin, really does mention Kane and a FORTRAN program for sediment analysis, but it's just an index entry, insufficiently in-depth to use as a source for anything. And the metadata page for the Google Books link really does say that it's from 1949, but Google often lists compilations from periodicals by their start date even though many parts of the compilation may be from much later. A competent editor would have noticed the mismatch and dug deeper to find out the real story; this one just spewed back what they read without thinking about whether it made sense. For a similarly garbled-looking story, see another creation by the same editor, Mabel Norris Reese. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:42, 20 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Keep. This is not the original article on Kane, the previous one was similarly deleted and wasn't available for review. The article was written because of the notable persons listed for Jamaica N.Y. his was an article in 'red'. I find that there are editors whose goals leans to making a leaner encyclopedia by simply removing articles, rather than investigating and adding to the narrative, or correcting the failures as they perceive them. Many notables are unrepresented due to there having been no mentions in newpapers or journals of their notability, nor books mentioning them by name. This does not make them any less deserving of having made a difference than the numerous fictional people, cartoon characters or popular images that fill the pages of Wikipedia. Kane led an exemplary life, his service record alone and the medals he gained from his cold war exploits as a spy alone should qualify him as notable. What was missed in this is the nature of his claim to notoriety, namely that had he not while working for corning solved the problem of refraction of signal noise which made fibre optic communication possible, leading to todays FIOS and other digital communication over land and undersea in the cables laid there. Find and restore his original article, his original article was probably better written than mine, but as a son of Jamaica he is notable and deserves editors that can improve the quality of the article, not consign it to the dustheap of bad writing. CaptJayRuffins (talk) 15:25, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete, having a few patents is not sufficient for notability. Vici Vidi (talk) 09:22, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of New York-related deletion discussions. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 21:32, 24 June 2020 (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.