Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gene Ward Smith

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. Vanamonde (talk) 17:30, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Gene Ward Smith[edit]

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The subject is, I believe, Usenet-famous, and the article was created in 2006 when that might have been enough, but he is not actually notable by our current standards (neither WP:PROF nor WP:GNG and neither for his mathematics research nor for his work on musical tuning systems). In this, I believe I am in agreement with Galassi (talk · contribs), but rather than properly testing notability by an AfD Galassi has instead been attempting to make a permanent shrine to Smith's non-notability by stripping all sources and details from the article and then sticking as many cleanup banners as possible into the corpse that remains. I think we're better off just deleting it, and that the sources we have are not in-depth enough to prove notability, but it would be a mistake to judge this by looking at the stripped-down version of the article as left by Galassi. Instead, the version that we should be judging is this one, before Galassi started stripping it and attaching bogus COI banners to it. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 06:26, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 06:26, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. XOR'easter (talk) 12:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions. XOR'easter (talk) 12:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Leaning delete for reasons pretty much spelled out in the nomination. That said, the stripping-out of content was not helpful, and the edit summaries were misleading. The sources removed in this edit do not mention Smith "only in footnotes", and the one removed here mentions more than "conversations". That source actually says the following:

Though we had worked out many of its details before his appearance in the community, special thanks goes to Gene Ward Smith for applying modern mathematics (namely, the field of Grassmann, or exterior, or multilinear, algebra) to this subject, placing it on a firmer foundation and allowing for many problems to be solved and new results to be obtained.

This edit removed a "dead" link without checking to see if there was a live version. The edit summary also says that the source provides "no notability proof", which is true, but not every source in a biography has to go to proving the subject's wiki-notability: some of them are there to provide details about the subject's work. In this case, the reference was a primary source in a context where that would be unobjectionable (were the subject wiki-notable). Similarly, this edit removed material because it was cited to "usenet refs", when the sources were actually OEIS entries and a collection of Usenet posts gathered together by a mathematician who judged them worth saving. Not great sources, but not as worthless as random posts on a random message board, either. This edit removed content on the grounds that there was "no mention of any Smith" on the cited page, but a page one click away mentions a Gene Smith, who sure looks to be the same Gene Smith. Having gone through all this, I'm still not quite seeing a pass of WP:PROF, but the spurious removal of content made that evaluation significantly more of a hassle than it should have been. XOR'easter (talk) 13:18, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comment He appears to have been friends with Steven Spielberg in high school as described in this book (which is clearly a reliable source). Also, the subject of this article has a Wikipedia account (though he has not edited here at all in almost two years); this may have been related to the COI tags mentioned above. IntoThinAir (talk) 21:18, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- According to the editor who placed the tag, that's not why. XOR'easter (talk) 21:30, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Special thanks" definitely fails any notability guideline.--Galassi (talk) 13:58, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Leaning delete for reasons above. There is virtually nothing about Smith on the web, never mind any testimonial of notability.--Galassi (talk) 14:00, 4 November 2018 (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.