Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gustavo Stolovitzky

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 keep. There is a consensus that the subject meets NPROF. (non-admin closure) ——Serial^# 12:02, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Gustavo Stolovitzky[edit]

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The subject of this article is a researcher who does not hold a senior academic position and whose fellowships are all in non-selective organisations. Does not seem to be notable. Mccapra (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Mccapra (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. Mccapra (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Mccapra (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Argentina-related deletion discussions. Mccapra (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. Mccapra (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per WP:SOAP as having a fellowship is not (by itself) criteria for notability. --MewMeowth (talk) 21:51, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy keep as the nominator and MewMeowth are both blatantly incorrect in their deletion rationales. Having a fellowship in a selective society is, by itself, a criterion for notability; see WP:PROF#C3. His fellowship in the American Physical Society and in the American Association for the Advancement of Science both clearly qualify for that criterion, and his IBM Fellowship arguably does as well. (The redlinked fellowships and awards, not so much.) He also has highly-cited publications as listed in a Google scholar search, easily enough for WP:PROF#C1, which the nominator does not even seem to have considered or read. The nomination rationale that his position is not senior is both irrelevant and false — he appears to hold a somewhat high-level position within the type of employement he holds, as a researcher at an industrial lab. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:41, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how any of those are highly selective, and an IBM fellowship does not imply any significant impact outside of that company. In fact, most IBM fellows do not have Wikipedia articles. Having a highly cited publication in Google Scholar is hardly a high achievement as you can easily fool Google's algorithm and create lots of backlinks to artificially inflate a paper's importance. I honestly think this article reeks of self-promotion and is better suited for an about.me page. --MewMeowth (talk) 01:30, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@MewMeowth: are you aware that personal attacks, both against article subjects and article creators, are as forbidden in AfDs as they are anywhere else in Wikipedia? If not, you should be. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:44, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

How is *anything* I've said a personal attack? Since when is treating a spammy article as such considered a personal attack, especially in a place meant for these type of discussions like AfD? Aw, will someone get personally offended if I think their article is spam? Ridiculous. In fact, if anything, when you say I am blatantly incorrect, that is a personal attack. --MewMeowth (talk) 13:11, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You accused the article subject, without evidence, of artificially inflating his citation counts, and you accused the article creator, without evidence, of being the same person as the article subject and of creating this article as self-promotion. Those are personal attacks. On the contrary, when I say you are incorrect, I am merely stating a fact about your contribution to the discussion. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:22, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That's what you're inferring. I have never accused anyone, I was simply stating a fact which is that Google Scholar is not a good metric for notability. In fact, I haven't even had a look at the article's history or creator up until now, but it's even clearer to me when I see now that it was single-handedly created by one individual (and a quick Google search would suggest they are an IBM employee as well) with no other edit history besides this article (that would at least merit a COI tag), and which was even more boastful in its original version before it was subsequently toned down by other editors. --MewMeowth (talk) 18:52, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Google Scholar is flawed but adequate for many purposes, when used judiciously. That the article was boastful in a prior form before getting cleaned up is not grounds for deletion; it just shows the Wikipedia process at work. XOR'easter (talk) 19:22, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Thank you David Eppstein I am indeed blatantly wrong about the APS Fellowship. If there is an established consensus at AfD that Fellowship of the AAAS weighs heavily in favour of notability I’m not aware of it. Since membership of the AAAS is open to all and its Fellowships are quite common, I would think not, but may be wrong about that too. I will wait and see what others’ views are on this and on the article as a whole. Mccapra (talk) 03:35, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You were not wrong about APS. There are over 10,900 fellows (Source - warning: your browser will struggle opening this), of which only 862 have Wikipedia articles (14%). That's hardly selective. --MewMeowth (talk) 13:11, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No, there are not over 10,900 fellows. That number of fellowships has been awarded since 1921, an average of about 110 per year. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:33, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You are factually wrong. Please do open the website and see for yourself. It's a list of APS fellows, not members. There are 10,900+ fellows and 55,000 members. --MewMeowth (talk) 18:52, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The very first sentence of the source that you linked says, "The APS Fellow Archive is a historical record of APS Fellows, from 1921 to the present", which is exactly what I said above. Or do you really believe that all of those awarded fellowships 99 years ago are still fellows today? And who said anything about members? Please withdraw your accusation of lying. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:16, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

First, being factually wrong is not lying, it is simply stating something that is untrue. I'm making no assumptions as to what your intention is. Secondly, why is it that you are only counting alive individuals to make your point? And even then my argument stands as the list of 10,900 is only from 1921 onwards, so the majority of them are probably alive. In any case, I don't see how fellowships would be withdrawn or how is that in any way relevant to the discussion. The reality is that 10,900 fellowships were awarded by the APS since 1921 which compared to the examples in WP:PROF#C3 does not make it selective. Nevertheless, it could pass but it says it can only partially do so if the subject has had a significant impact, which is not clear in this case. --MewMeowth (talk) 19:38, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Long-standing community consensus has established that Fellowship in the APS qualifies per WP:PROF#C3, and for good reason: it represents being in the top half-percent of American physicists [1]. The IEEE, which is a specific example listed in WP:PROF#C3, has elevated an average of 283 people to Fellow status each year since 1999. That's almost 3 times more than the APS. If the IEEE is selective, the APS is selective. XOR'easter (talk) 19:47, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are only 5,887 IEEE fellows elected since at least 1934. That's almost half as many as APS. Provide a link where this long-established consensus regarding APS can be found and I'll shut up. --MewMeowth (talk) 20:01, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there's [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], at which point I stopped looking. XOR'easter (talk) 20:31, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Alas, I was hoping for something other than AfD comments but I suppose that'll do. I find it interesting that some of the people commenting on those examples are regulars on APS-related discussions. Maybe they're fellows, too? --MewMeowth (talk) 20:46, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Archived discussions from the WP:PROF talk page also use the APS as an example of a scholarly society that meets C3 [17][18][19]. XOR'easter (talk) 20:53, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Couldn't find more than a couple of mentions of APS there, and nothing that could be remotely considered established consensus. But, I think you've done enough to prove your point. I myself have gone to the length of installing a program to handle large text files (and look up its documentation as its regular expression syntax is not standard) in order to extract the number of APS fellows from that list. I guess it's not in their interest to show the actual number in plain sight? --MewMeowth (talk) 21:05, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Learned societies are large organizations that work by committee and not known for having useful websites, much like universities. Plus, the total count is not actually a very interesting number — as mentioned above, it includes dead people. The annual reports give the current membership and the number of new Fellows elected each year, because that's what gives a sense of how the organization is operating now. And if some professor happens to care about the total number of APS Fellows who have ever existed, they'll just turn to their student and tell them to find out. And the student will download the HTML, open it in Emacs, trim out the preamble and the epilogue, run grep "<strong>" APS\ Fellow\ Archive.html | wc, wait an hour to make it seem like the task was difficult, and then tell their professor "10,904". XOR'easter (talk) 04:19, 20 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Dead people are not fellows of anything, unless they are in a story by Nikolai Gogol. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:54, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. WP:NPROF C3 per several of the fellowships. I think the New York Academy of Science is also fairly weighty; it also has a small number of honorees for a large membership. WP:NPROF C1 also looks fairly solid, with several highly-cited paper, including some first/last author (in a field where I think that matters). Comment that WP:NPROF explicitly does not require working at a university, although we do consider title in marginal cases (which this is not). Russ Woodroofe (talk) 14:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy keep He passes WP:PROF#C3; yes, Fellowship in the APS is very selective (the number of Fellows is a small percentage of everyone who has worked in physics over the past century, which is a lot of people). Most APS Fellows don't have Wikipedia articles because nobody has taken the time to write them yet, but in principle, all of them merit articles. Likewise, Fellowship in the AAAS is much more exclusive than membership, and Stolovitzky is a Fellow, not just a member. He also passes WP:PROF#C1 with an ISI Web of Science h-index of 48, which is more than high enough to qualify in any field. (Google Scholar, which is more relaxed about what it includes, gives him an h-index of 61, which is in line with how it typically gives somewhat larger figures. It is perhaps a little too relaxed, and ISI a little too strict. Either way, he passes WP:PROF#C1.) XOR'easter (talk) 16:34, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, meets WP:NPROF as a fellow of APS (note to MewMeowth, i am not). Coolabahapple (talk) 14:03, 23 May 2020 (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.