Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Harris Mayer

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 as another week has suggested nothing else and there is in fact enough substance (NAC). SwisterTwister talk 04:34, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Harris Mayer[edit]

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Notability not asserted, doesn't appear to meet WP:SCHOLAR. Subject seems to get passing mentions only with respect to his work, and all the ELs simply are the instances where he's mentioned once. His Harzing h-index was 6, which seems pretty low for anything. MSJapan (talk) 03:23, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

He is a notable scientist and has been interviewed several times. He is included in two books of George Dyson. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.136.237.48 (talk) 01:27, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - I added the material from Teller's 1955 article in Science which briefly explains his contribution to the H-Bomb. It seems to be a substantial/significant contribution, meeting criteria 1 and 7 in a unique way not described in the notes on the criteria in WP:Scholar.Smmurphy^(Talk) 14:51, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 14:37, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 14:37, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 14:37, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 14:37, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:48, 21 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. There appears to be quite a bit of coverage of the subject in the books found by this search. We need to be very careful about using citation count as a metric here, both because of the era in which the subject worked and the classified nature of his work. I haven't checked, but I doubt that Alan Turing has a particularly high h-index. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 15:36, 21 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

My only quibble is that those books all say "Harris Mayer describes" or similar; he's quoted because he is just about the only one still alive to interview. I can't find any mention of him otherwise, and it's not like the key scientists weren't mentioned - we have articles on most of them. If he's only being interviewed because he was there, that's a WP:NOTINHERITED problem. Turing, by the way, has an h-index of 54. MSJapan (talk) 15:45, 21 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OK then, I stand corrected about Turing, but I'm sure that if he had been able to publish his classified research from WWII his h-index would have been even higher. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 16:51, 21 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Comment@Smmurphy: I have to say I'm not seeing anything useful in that material. It's essentially "Mayer, as a student, continued the work of Teller, which Rosenbluth finished." One, we still have no idea what that work was, and two, if it wasn't finished, I still feel no more enlightened as to Mayer's contributions than I was without it. Is there anything else there? I am having a difficult time asserting notability of an individual who has a serious WP:V issue; nowhere is it stated what Mayer did, and it's only made worse by the fact that whatever he did apparently wasn't finished. This is the problem - if someone does something that's classified and we therefore don't know what it is, I don't think it's appropriate to have a WP article based on a presumption of notability. That's all I'm seeing here. I suppose what concerns me particularly is that almost no one mentions him, and he's hardly published - I looked up Oppenheimer, and he's still got a ton of papers despite probably being one of the most classified people on the project. MSJapan (talk) 17:05, 21 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, I guess. I still think that being a notable Los Alamos lab scientist in that era fits under wp:scholar. Early next week I'll try to add some material about the Mayer-Goody model and bring the page up to gng. Smmurphy^(Talk) 18:03, 21 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MSJapan: I'm sure more could be done, and my writing could always do for some copy-editing, but I've expanded things a bit more. The hardest part is that I wanted to give an understanding of why including line absorption in opacity calculation was important without being too technical, so hopefully that is comprehensible and useful information to the reader.

I think the article is long enough that it could be split into one or two subheadings and the lead paragraph could use one or two more sentences, but I'm not sure. Perhaps the article could be cut a bit as well, but the context and culture bits are fun to learn about, I think.

Other than his frequent mention in textbooks due to the Goody-Mayer Model, references to Mayer is largely based on works by Teller and by Mayer himself, which may struggle to meet the independence clause in the notability guideline. But I think this is a case where independence is a clause in a guideline and not a policy, even as I tried to meet it. I still think Mayer's notability was strong without this expansion. Also, I am not sure that WP:NOTINHERITED fits for high-level scientists involved so closely with something like the Manhattan Project. In any case, With the expansion, hopefully it is clearer why he is notable and what his contribution was. Let me know what you think. Smmurphy^(Talk) 17:36, 22 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's getting there, but as you noted, the sourcing is definitely problematic. I really don't understand why there's almost nothing independent of the subject as far as sources go, but Mayer worked with both Teller and Dyson's father, so their personal writing might be skewed, and I'm pretty sure we can't use Mayer's own book under any circumstances. So the underlying issue is that the importance of the work is being claimed by people involved in it or very close to it, which isn't objective. I'm not entirely sure I want to IAR on independence, as it's pretty fundamental that other people have noticed the subject, no matter the article, and I would think I'd see more in the field overall if that were the case. Simply working at Los Alamos isn't going to meet GNG; if so, the maintenance would qualify, even though that's not the intention. We've got articles on a number of scientists involved in the Manhattan and Orion projects, and AFAICT, Mayer isn't even mentioned in any of them, which just seems very odd. I understand that these are specialist topics, but it shouldn't be this hard to dig up substantive information on supposedly key personnel. I wonder if one of the relevant WikiProjects might be helpful. MSJapan (talk) 19:51, 22 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If you think the article is skewed and have some suggestions, let me know. Beyond that, independence is meant to ensure "we can write a fair and balanced article that complies with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and to ensure that articles are not advertising a product, service, or organization". While the article certainly advertises for Los Alamos and doesn't talk about the human cost of bombs, I don't think that is really so skewed by Teller and Dyson's writings. Both are reputable writers on the history of science and both use reputable publishers.

My thought on "not-inherited" is that being a high-level scientist at Los Alamos in that era might be as notable as being a full professor at a top university. I suppose being support staff at Los Alamos is of similar notability to being support staff at a top university, but I don't think that applies to Mayer.

I don't follow the issue that Mayer isn't mentioned on other scientists' articles. I've added him to Goody's for what it is worth, beyond that it isn't clear adding a mention of him in Maria Mayer, Teller, Rosenbluth, or Dyson's pages would be balanced. A lot of Manhattan project scientists cite each other through the project template and he could be added to that. Most biographies only cite the most important related figures in their text - and many of scientists biographies are stubs, so it isn't surprising that he isn't widely mentioned on wikipedia.

Also, for what it is worth, the Goody-Mayer model (or Mayer-Goody) is well covered by independent sources that don't cite Mayer's paper, per se, which lowers Mayer's citation count.Smmurphy^(Talk) 21:17, 22 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - he is mentioned in Teller's autobiography and other sources like Turing's Cathedral. That said, many sources are interviews with him, and you could argue that by surviving to an old age he could overstate his importance by giving interviews when others couldn't. But I think worth keeping. Blythwood (talk) 23:11, 22 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Books search appears to meet #1 on for the Scholar Criteria. We should be careful to focus the information about Mayer's influence on physics but not overly detail the process (looking at the 1st paragraph of "Problem of opacity"). Tangledupinbleu chs (talk) 09:12, 29 August 2016 (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.