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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. Valid arguments are presented for both keeping and deleting the article. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:45, 7 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ruth Abbey

[edit]
Ruth Abbey (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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Delete. Contested prod. This article was created one year ago and has only primary sources to show for it. JBsupreme (talk) 18:46, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Spartaz Humbug! 17:11, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Her books have been reviewed in the following academic journals: The Review of Metaphysics, The Review of Politics, Political Theory, Mind, and Ethics. These are not freely available online, but it's quite obvious that she is a notable scholar within her field. I added info from one of the reviews of her book on Nietzsche (Absuctive's claims above are simply incorrect—it seems that neither the book on Nietzsche nor the 2000 book on Charles Taylor are edited volumes, and both have reviews written about them). There are obviously reliable sources which discuss Abbey's work, so there's no problem with sourcing the article. I would argue that she passes the first criteria of WP:PROF, and probably passes #5 as well. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:53, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Still no evidence of significant independent coverage in the article itself, but appears to have been reviewed and cited sufficiently. Many professors hold their positions via financial arrangements rather than being at the pinnacle of academia, so being an associate professor isn't a strong indication of notability. The 'Leverhulme Research Fellowship' appears to be simply a research grant, which is something that researchers routinely receive, and I don't see a compelling reason to consider a researcher recieving a grant as evidence of notability. Her book on Charles Taylor, however, appears to be fairly widely cited, so I am inclined to keep. The details of her 'forthcoming publication', however, should be trimmed - if it receives significant coverage it would be worth mentioning, but is currently unsourceable.--Michig (talk) 20:00, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as per abductive. lack of clear cut third party coverage. LibStar (talk) 10:29, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Her books have indeed been reviewed in the five journals I cited above (and I believe more, these were just the ones I noticed on the first search page). Anyone with access to JSTOR or similar databases can view the reviews, which like all academic reviews summarize her work and critique it. They are actually exactly the kind of thing we need to write an article about an academic, and indeed an academic's work might be quite important but covered primarily or even solely in specialized journals that are not so easy to access. I'm confused as to how multiple reviews in peer-reviewed journals does not qualify as "clear cut third party coverage." You can't read them just by doing a google search, but that obviously does not matter. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 23:20, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying Abductive (not surprising for a one word comment). Is your point that one of her books is an edited volume? The other two are not, it seems, and there are multiple reviews for both. Can you clarify what you are getting at? --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 00:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Two are edited. The one she wrote on her advisor Taylor has the least interest. Writing a book on one's own advisor doesn't move me to want to keep this article. Let me be blunt; this is an associate prof. No sources have been provided saying that she is important. There are at least 2 million professors in the world, and they all do stuff. Abductive (reasoning) 01:17, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This is not about my personal opinion. What I am saying is that every author writes books, and WP:AUTHOR says

Scientists, academics, economists, professors, authors, editors, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, architects, engineers, and other creative professionals:

  1. The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by their peers or successors.
  2. The person is known for originating a significant new concept, theory or technique.
  3. The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.
  4. The person's work either (a) has become a significant monument, (b) has been a substantial part of a significant exhibition, (c) has won significant critical attention, or (d) is represented within the permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums.
  5. See Wikipedia:Notability (academics) for guidelines on academics
and I say she fails all these points. Nowhere is she regarded as important. She did not originate a significant theory. She is not widely cited; her citation record is quite low. She did not create a well-known work. Her work is not a significant monument. She fails WP:PROF. Abductive (reasoning) 01:39, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) What two do you think are edited? Neither Nietzsche’s Middle Period nor Charles Taylor (the one from 2000) are edited. The Nietzsche book has multiple reviews in journals (and is probably in a sense the book on that period of Nietzsche's oeuvre), as does the book on Taylor. I'll take your word that Taylor was her adviser (didn't notice that), but that hardly matters since he's obviously a very significant modern philosopher (hence our article on him and indeed on his books Sources of the Self and A Secular Age) and since the book she wrote was basically well received. I'm not sure what makes you decide that it has the "least interest" or somehow doesn't matter just because you think it doesn't, but in any case she did write another unedited book as well. So you're simply wrong on the facts, but you also are completely ignoring the fact that there are multiple reviews of her books which establish that she has done well-regarded work within the field of philosophy. I don't think you're articulating a policy-based rationale for why Abbey does not warrant an article, and I know that the sentence "there are at least 2 million professors in the world, and they all do stuff" is not even close to an argument for deletion (plus the premise is not true—I personally know a number of professors who don't "do stuff"!).
As to your copy-paste of WP:AUTHOR, what actually matters here in terms of guidelines is the first criteria of WP:PROF: "The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources." You'd have to actually look at some of the reviews in the journals I list out above, but specialized academic journals are indeed the place where it's generally determined whether or not one has made a "significant impact in their scholarly discipline." It's fine if you don't have access to those journals, but don't blithely claim "nowhere is she regarded as important" if you have not looked her up in the journals in which she publishes and in which her books are reviewed. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 01:50, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Here, the Amazon listing shows her as editor. The other book is listed as author, my bad.
As for the first criteria of WP:PROF. I refuse to accept that Abbey is a leader in her scholarly discipline, unless you can show me a "Department of Charles Taylor Studies" or even a "Journal of Charles Taylor Studies". She has not made significant impact in her scholarly disciplines; as the article says, her interests are "political theory, history of political thought and feminist political thought," not Taylor. The low number of citations is evidence of this lack of impact. Abductive (reasoning) 05:07, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Your arguments are trending into the absurd, and frankly I'm not sure you understand how academia works. Forget about "Department of Charles Taylor Studies," there is not even a "Department of Hegel Studies," or "Department of Abraham Lincoln Studies," or a "Department of Colonial American History Studies." Academic departments are generally quite broad, they never focus on individual people or subfields. Journals are more specialized, but "Journal of Charles Taylor Studies" is not something you are going to see. That doesn't mean those topic are not important. Scholars of necessity specialize, and no one would ever criticize another scholar for being a specialist in a certain area, or chide them because there was no journal or department named after their research interests. If their work is respected, they would be considered a leader in their sub-field or specialized area. Furthermore, you seem to be willfully ignoring that Abbey wrote a book about Nietzsche who, you must know, is very much not the same person/thinker that Charles Taylor is. He's also kind of a big deal in the history of philosophy, and based on chronology it seems pretty much impossible that he mentored Abbey.
I'm going to leave off replying now because the statement "I refuse to accept that Abbey is a leader in her scholarly discipline [course that's not what WP:PROF says, but whatever], unless you can show me a "Department of Charles Taylor Studies..." is just a bit too ridiculous for me, and it's obvious you are not interested in listening to counterarguments, thus you're making what Nietzsche famously called "A very popular error -- having the courage of your convictions. Rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions!" --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 05:43, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I know there is not a Dept of Hegel Studies etc, and you know that. My statement was meant to be absurd, and you know that. My argument itself is not absurd. You are the one engaging in truth-obscuring rhetoric in an attempt to save an article on an associate prof.
My point is that every professor is a narrow expert on a particular something. WP:PROF says one has to be well above average. This person is not, based on lack of citations, and on being an associate professor. Abductive (reasoning) 18:48, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Holding a named chair is ordinarily notable. True, the most important major research universities have many such chairs--but they also have many such highly notable professors. That they also tend to be well-endowed is similarly no coincidence. It is their endowment that permits them to have named chairs that will attract distinguished people, and the donors give such chairs for that purpose. Named Associate professorships are quite unusual. They are so unusual that I think they would be given only to the most exceptional people. (except for the fortunately rare case where a university has permitted a donor to support a chair for a particular individual of the donor's selection) . DGG ( talk ) 16:57, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
In particular I have checked Abductive's assertion that " It's harder to find a professor without a named chair at Notre Dame. ". The English Department, one of his examples, has exact 6 chairs, and even as a non-specialist, I recognize some of them, & I think it is fair to say what the University does when it says that they are so designated "In recognition of their world-renowned scholarship and excellent teaching,"[11]. It's harder only in a very technical sense to find those without a named chair, because they are not listed separately but I went through the entire list, and I find there are 12 full professors without named chairs. So his guess is simply wrong--perhaps he should have counted. More to the immediate point, in the Department of Political Science there are 9 endowed and 11 non-endowed full professors; there are 4 endowed and 10 non-endowed Associate Professors. So it seems that even by standards of an absolutely top quality university, she is one of their more distinguished associate professors. We have had some discussion whether Associate professors in major research universities would generally be notable: the opinions are divided, & at present there is not consensus for that in general. (Personally, I have sometimes !voted delete and sometimes keep for associate Professors). But certainly I think the top rank of them, as here, probably would all be notable. DGG ( talk ) 17:28, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that she is one the only associate professor who has a named chair that I found, but I still don't see it as sufficient. As for the named chair thing, I should have said that the proportion of named chairs at ND is unusually high, high enough that one cannot apply it towards notability. Abductive (reasoning) 04:19, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
DGG makes excellent points above, but I'd just like to throw in a meta-comment here about professors/scholars and notability. More so than most biographies of living persons (which I generally think we should restrict), in an ideal Wikipedia bios on scholars would be extremely useful. Any notable professor has had their work reviewed (often extensively) by other scholars. Their BLPs (while giving basic info) should function as a place to describe in detail the work they have done and the evaluations of it. We will generally have plenty of (specialized) sources to do this, and these kind of descriptions can usually not be put in more general articles (e.g. we can't talk about every book on Nietzsche in great detail in our main bio of him or indeed in sub articles). For example there are many hundreds of important scholars of the history of Slavery in the United States—it's one of the richest fields of historical inquiry on the planet. Serious students of the subject (either in an "amateur" DIY fashion or at a university) would be well-served by biographies of scholars who made contributions to the field, bios which would discuss not the person so much but rather their work and how it fits in with the overall scholarship. Indeed if this was done properly such a resource would be useful even to senior scholars, as it's not always easy to keep track of who said and wrote what, the other work they did, and how it's been evaluated. Biographical articles on people who have made important (if specialized) intellectual contributions are among the most valuable we can have in an encyclopedia. Probably I should be saying this somewhere else, but it popped out here I guess. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 21:23, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
To me, this sounds like directory-thinking. There is no way that Wikipedia can create an accurate directory of all the professors in the world, or even all the full professors. Page views and other evidence suggests that nobody cares about professors, unless they hit the popular press. Serious scholars would never, ever trust Wikipedia to tell them anything about an obscure topic. The professors I know spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out who is important in their field, who is up-and-coming, and who never amounted to anything. Abductive (reasoning) 04:26, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know what "directory-thinking" is, but I'm not talking about creating a directory, I'm saying having a lot of articles that describe the work notable scholars have done would be useful. I don't care that you think that "nobody cares about professors" based on "page views"—summarizing someone's scholarship is a good task for an encyclopedia, and if you don't think so then you are simply wrong. Professors definitely know about everyone within their area of specialization, but a professor who studies slavery in colonial South Carolina does not know everything about scholars who work primarily on California while it was controlled by the Spanish, or about the people who study medieval prisons in Italy. Our goal should be to make Wikipedia the kind of source that anyone would turn to (as a first stop) for subjects about which they are not an expert, or which are just outside their expertise. This is not even the place to discuss this, but I'm just saying more articles on notable scholars that discuss their work would be a good thing, and you're not going to dissuade me from that view. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 06:42, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I very much agree on "discuss their work". Abductive (reasoning) 07:00, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
for a change, Abductive and I agree on something! We need to do this much more than we have been doing. We've been so pressed for time we have been including the bare facts, and not the actually important content. We need to take existing article,s, and add to their depth. Assuming anyone has cited their published work, or reviewed their book, there should be no great difficulty in selecting an appropriate 3rd party RS discussion. That is, there should be no great difficulty for someone who understands the subject--although we are not doing OR,we do need some knowledge to do a suitable synopsis of this sort, and we have very few people to do it. (except in some of the sciences, where it is sometimes done to a variable extent). When it is present in an article, it's likely to be there as a POV statement trying to promote the work, not discuss it, We need to figure out ways to help people do this--for example, if there is a book, will we accept a list of chapters? We also need to recruit more people who can and will do this in their subjects, by accommodating to some degree their idiosyncrasies and not rushing to delete articles about them. . Where Abductive and I continue to differ, is that I think this is not helped by deleting articles on people of modest importance. It's not wrong to screen out the unimportant, but its better to add to the important. Every time we argue at length over whether someone just passes the bar of notability or does not, its time & energy lost from doing something more useful. DGG ( talk ) 04:43, 5 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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