Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kimberley Curtis

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. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:49, 1 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Kimberley Curtis

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Sources 1 and 2 are her own works. Source 3 is a letter to which she is a signatory. Sources 4 and 5 mention her, but not in detail. Her primary "fame" comes from her association with the Duke lacrosse case, though she did not play a major role in the scandal (being but one of 88 signatories to the Group of 88 letter). She was related to a lawsuit, but that suit was settled out of court, was against the university not her, and received no lasting coverage. There is no indication that she meets WP:PROF, nor could I find any. While she might barely scrape by on WP:GNG, in this case, coverage on her falls under WP:BLP1E. Since she has no demonstrated lasting notability per our crtieria, and since BLP policy says we specifically need to not have articles on people with fleeting fame for only a single event, this article should be deleted. Qwyrxian (talk) 02:39, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000^(talk) 05:40, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Fails WP:AUTHOR and WP:BK. Qworty (talk) 08:02, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. First of all, thanks Qwyrxian for a thorough BLP analysis. Having said that, I believe that the subject meets WP:PROF criterion #1 (significant impact in scholarly discipline, broadly construed). The subject at least one book, Our sense of the real: Aesthetic experience and Arendtian politic, published by Cornell University Press, currently in more than 300 major libraries worldwide according to WorldCat.--Eric Yurken (talk) 15:19, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. If the only case that can be made for WP:PROF is that she turned her Ph.D. dissertation into a published book, that's not good enough — it's true of almost all academics in the humanities, so does nothing useful to distinguish the notable from non-notable ones. The book is reasonably well cited, but Google scholar only shows one other publication with a nontrivial citation record, not strong enough to convince me of a case of WP:PROF#C1, and what else is there? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:12, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I concur that Curtis' academic record of basically a single book having reasonable holdings is remarkably average. (Others having comparable records have been deleted in recent AfDs, e.g. here.) NAU lists her as an "instructor" (checkable in the directory here), so she seems no longer to be a tenure(track) academic. Her notoriety does seem to stem from secondary events in the wake of the Duke lacrosse case, but all I can readily find are some angry blog posts, e.g. here and here. The picture I ultimately come away with is of an average academic who had some fleeting WP:BLP1E notoriety. Agricola44 (talk) 13:52, 25 July 2012 (UTC).[reply]
Comment. Valid points above by David Eppstein and Agricola44. Assessment of notability based on books is not always easy, and is contingent on the area and topic – an issue that we have discussed before in other AfDs. Still, I don’t think it is very common for a book derived from a doctoral dissertation in the humanities (assuming that this is the case here) to be published by a major university press. It is certainly not “true of almost all academics in the humanities”, as David Eppstein said, but perhaps true for many WP-notable academics in the humanities. Also, the previous AfD linked by Agricola44 as a precedent, for Christine Mallinson, has one key difference – quoting from DGG in the previous discussion: “The book is a significant positive factor for notability since it's by a very good publisher and is found in over 300 libraries. But its joint authored …”--Eric Yurken (talk) 14:14, 25 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Professor Curtis clearly seems to be engaged in high profile activities at NAU, as we can see here.--Eric Yurken (talk) 14:33, 25 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That appears to be a run-of-the-mill speech that lots of professors give. Do you have any evidence that anyone other than the promoters themselves consider that speech to be notable? Qwyrxian (talk) 21:41, 25 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The talk was sponsored by the New York Times. But the point of this comment is not to present the talk as an indication of notability. The point of this comment is to bring forth an activity that is not typically carried out by instructors.--Eric Yurken (talk) 14:13, 26 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Group of 88. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 16:41, 1 August 2012 (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.