Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/George Olshevsky

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. The strongest argument for keep simply says that his combining his contributions to many fields may lead to sufficient notability, if someone wants the page userfied to them in order work on and establish clearer notability I would be happy to do so. J04n(talk page) 18:38, 26 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

George Olshevsky[edit]

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Nn "freelance editor, writer, publisher, amateur paleontologist, and mathematician" tagged since 2010 Staszek Lem (talk) 23:53, 19 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Happy holidays! ^{Babymissfortune} 02:04, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Happy holidays! ^{Babymissfortune} 02:05, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. Happy holidays! ^{Babymissfortune} 02:05, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

comment

Olshevsky is a stated "freelance editor, writer, publisher, amateur paleontologist, and mathematician", the article has many problems, is perhaps also a platform for a bird-dino-hypotheis, which is, say, not mainstream. I understand the nomination. Things may not be so simple though.

Google Scholar searches are diluted with a physicist, but the search string "George Olshevsky -"A Olszewski"" yields a number of publications, one cited by 35. The folks citing him are themselves highly cited, e.g. S Chatterjee - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of …, 1985 -which is cited by 193. Olshevsky's contribution to name some dinosaur bones are recognized by Smithsonian https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/b-is-for-becklespinax-85813988/ . Olshevsky may an amateur paleontologist, "fan" or whatever, but whose contributions are recognized by the scientific community.

Math lectures at universities cite some of Olshevsky contributions to "polyhedreality", or something, e.g. Yale http://users.math.yale.edu/~is362/Polychores_en.odp , or here https://library.ucmo.edu/faculty/walker/limbonaut_1.htm and here https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/polymodel.html .

And he is a prolific writer of Marvel Comics, at list of 12 books are here. https://www.librarything.com/series/The+Marvel+Comics+Index

I managed to locate some media mention: " At a 1984 conference on polyhedra the Boston Globe reported (29 April 84) "Polyhedra can become as complex as the spectacular 'yog-sothoth' constructed by publisher George Olshevsky and mathematician Bruce Chilton. A yog-sothoth (named for one of the most powerful demons of science fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft) is the most complicated uniform polyhedron. The model displayed by Olshevsky and Chilton consisted of 3060 pieces and took 11 years to build." [1].

In conclusion, Olshevsky doesn't fit easily into standard boxes and labeling, but I wouldn't be surprised if in depth coverage or a bio could be found somewhere in these highly specialized fields/communities where he spends time. I have no interest in the subject myself. FHHedlund (talk) 12:49, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:35, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Olshevsky represents a very strange case, one for which the guidelines do not offer any easy solutions. He does not hold any academic position but has made important contributions to mathematics and paleontology. These contributions are in some fields so crucial that about a hundred of our articles cannot avoid mentioning his name as he is the discoverer of many mathematical objects as well as the naming author of several dinosaur genera and species. Our List of dinosaur genera has as its only comprehensive source Olshevsky's on-line genera list — no other published list is available about genera named since 2004! So, if we are forced to mention much of his work in many places, it seems bizarre that we should be somehow forbidden to provide information about the man himself. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that the reader likely wants to know who this person is and that we have a duty to grant that wish. If you are bound to be noted, you have notability!--MWAK (talk) 21:44, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Having looked through the first dozen polytope articles that show up when I put the name "Olshevsky" into the search bar, I do not think the claim that those articles "cannot avoid mentioning his name" stands up to scrutiny. In 3/4 of the articles I visited, his name appears only as the author of an externally linked webpage (i.e., the article content would be unchanged by deleting mention of him). In the remaining articles (where he is actually mentioned in the body), the only mentions are of the form "Olshevsky has proposed a name for something." None of this has any value; it certainly does not indicate personal notability. --JBL (talk) 02:58, 21 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. My impression is that his inclusion in our mathematics articles (chiefly concerning his own idiosyncratic nomenclature for high-dimensional polytopes, and chiefly consisting of citations to an unpublished and now-offline AOL page) is fancruft and a violation of WP:OR and WP:RS. The page itself viewable in archive states "Many of these terms were recently created ... and do not yet appear in standard geometry texts." i.e. they also violate WP:NEO. Olshevsky is mentioned in 240 or so of our articles on polytopes, but only because of the efforts of a small number of enthusiasts; he has made little or no impact on mathematics research or pedagogy. Searching Google scholar for his works and factoring out similarly named people [2] finds citation counts of 35,16,16, and then single digits for his paleontology (too little for WP:PROF#C1), and nothing for his mathematics. His article asserts that his paleontological work is WP:FRINGE (as it appears to be) but it does not appear to have the mainstream attention needed to source its description as fringe and satisfy both WP:BLP (controversial claims about living people must be sourceed) and WP:NPOV (all material must be treated from a mainstream point of view). And our article is essentially unsourced; if it weren't too old, it could be BLPPRODded. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:26, 20 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per DE. (I would also support removing most of the links to his work from polytope articles, since my perusal of a dozen articles suggests they rarely have encyclopedic value.) --JBL (talk) 02:58, 21 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- @Joel B. Lewis: I've been slowly doing some of this, but encountering pushback from the aforementioned enthusiast: [3] [4]. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:48, 26 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm the pushbacker. Tom Ruen (talk) 03:49, 26 December 2017 (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.