Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was removed by PresN via FACBot (talk) 00:28, 17 October 2021 (UTC).

List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania

 * Notified: Joffle, Sephiroth BCR, Ryan Vesey, WikiProject University of Pennsylvania, WikiProject Sweden

I am nominating this for featured list removal because this was article was made an FL in 2008, and no longer meets the requirements for it today. Most notably, there are no sources that verify the affiliation that some of these individuals had to UPenn. The general source at the bottom article does not cover several of the entries on the list, and notably excludes Martin Luther King Jr., who has a tenuous relationship to the institution at best. The list claims that he was a "Graduate Student, 1950–1951", but even UPenn itself only claims that he audited three philosophy courses while studying at the Crozer Theological Seminary. MLK's article does not mention UPenn in any way. The lede contains little information on the list itself (I would hardly consider the exact size of the cash prize of the award over time useful for this sort of article), and leaves the criteria for inclusion on the list incredibly vague. Punctuation of degrees is inconsistent (the style guide indicates that there shouldn't be any). The article does not the accessibility requirements for FL, and none of the sources are archived. Most egregious, however, is the fact that the number of entries on the list and count presented in the article match neither the number of laureates stated in List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation or by the university itself; every other article on a specific school's Nobel laureates is presented as an offshoot of the "official" List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation page, which makes me think that this list is nowhere near comprehensive enough. Josefaught (talkM) 19:34, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * The list needs fixing up on these issues, but it's very salvageable. The relation column, which at first glance seemed unreferenced, is actually covered by the general source at the bottom; all that needs to be done is for it to be moved to the column header. The MLK entry can be removed or modified to clarify his relationship. The lead needs some updating (Inflation is there for a reason), but generally the info is relevant enough, and I like that it doesn't try too much to repeat the list itself. The inclusion criteria are stated in the sentence The University of Pennsylvania considers laureates who attended the university as undergraduate students, graduate students or were members of the faculty as affiliated laureates. Degree punctuation and alt text are trivial fixes, and archiving can be handled by IABot, which I have now run. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:56, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Delist besides the issues raised above, the text portion of the article seems unbalanced, devoting less than half of its space to the actual topic (nobel laureates at the specific institution). I also doubt the notability of the topic. Practically all the sources are primary sources and many are affiliated with UPenn. If this intersection has not gained attention in secondary sources, why have a list of it? (t &#183; c)  buidhe  03:28, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Delist and consider bringing to AfD. There is a much deeper problem at play here: Nobel Prizes are not awarded to universities, but to individuals. Universities have an interest in claiming Nobel laureates and Prizes as "theirs"—it's a matter of prestige—but that's simply not how the Nobel Prizes work. This is not like the Olympics where the athletes formally represent their countries, and there is no generally agreed-upon way to assign credit for Nobel Prizes/laureates to universities. That is to say that there is no consensus external to Wikipedia that the specific collection of criteria used to construct this list is a meaningful way to define a set of individuals. This is not a trivial issue, this is a fundamental scope problem. The university itself has a list that uses different criteria: unlike ours, their list does not include Semenza, Shirakawa, or Kuhn, but it does include Robert J. Shiller who is not on our list. TompaDompa (talk) 02:05, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and close this as delisted. There hasn't been any movement on this after 2 months with multiple editors agreeing to delist; additionally, I agree that the entire subject is questionable. "Associated with" is suspect, as UPenn had nothing to do with the prize itself, and in most cases nothing to do with the research beyond being somewhere that the researcher once went to school. It's an arbitrary slicing of the data to give unearned prestige to a school. -- Pres N  14:49, 16 October 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.