Talk:Luke Pebody

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Discussion moved from Wikipedia:Votes for deletion because it was getting too long:

  • David Essex (II), Luke Pebody, Neil Hamer. University staff. Added by User:Doctorbozzball. Angela 23:53, 13 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • Delete x 3. --Menchi 00:36, Aug 14, 2003 (UTC)
      • Delete Smith03 00:47, 14 Aug 2003 (UTC)
        • Do not delete Luke Pebody, he is a respected combinatorist, director, actor and game inventor: The Bozzball 23:32, 14 Aug 2003 (GWZ)
          • Only 69 Google hits. Nothing notable about this character - article just lists some lectures he has presented. Written about by someone at the same university as Luke Pebody if not by Luke Pebody himself. See Wikipedia:Autobiography. Angela
          • Not written by Luke Pebody, but indeed written by someone who went to the same university, aiming in time to give details of most of the people working on the Combinatorics of Finite Sets, by going through the medium of collaborators. He also invented the game InterSect, which is very heavily played amongst user's of Richard's PBeM server and is in the process of being sold. The Bozzball 01:54, 15 Aug 2003 (ARP)
          • We simply have no way to evaluate his achievement. Is he the leading mathematician in his field? Who can prove it? How much hits for him in MathSciNet? (Well, I don't have access to MathSciNet right now)wshun 03:06, 15 Aug 2003 (UTC)
            • Three hits in MathSciNet, published in European J. Combin. (2002), Bolyai Soc. Math. Stud. (2002), and J. Combin. Theory Ser. B (2000). -- Jitse Niesen 13:40, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
          • He is not the leading mathematician in his field. Not even one of the leading mathematicians in his field. He did solve an important problem in his field. The Bozzball 11:23, 15 Aug 2003 (GWF)
    • Not significant enough. Delete. If this person is important enough to list I'd be listing at least half my friends and colleagues..--Robert Merkel 13:34, 15 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • If the problem is significant on its own, write an article on it and redirect Luke Pebody to the redirect. Otherwise, if the problem is REALLY important but not that significant, then mention it on Combinatorics of finite sets and redirect Luck Pebody. Otherwise delete. Hey! There is no even an article on his subject area! wshun 21:57, 15 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • Luke Pebody! I remember that name. He came top in some Mathematical Olympiad thing, if I recall correctly. One that I did not quite so well in. ;) He sounds an impressive chap. And of course he should have an article. He's a professional mathematician with several published papers, and he solved an important problem in his field. Someone doesn't have to be the leader in their field to get an article. I can't believe this is even up for discussion. I don't know about the other two, but if they've been made Fellows at the University of Cambridge, they must have done something significant. -- Oliver P. 12:22, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
        • He is a 3-time International Mathematical Olympiad participant, having won Honorary mention and two Silvers (google). That by itself makes him likely to become one of the best 100 mathematicians of his generation, if he stays in the field, although that by itself is not a reason to be included in an encyclopedia.
The fact that at age 26 he has solved a long-outstanding combinatorial problem makes him deserve a page. Any 16-year old who wins some sporting event is going to get a page here.
There are not so many combinatorists, really, so he probably is important in the field, at least in the UK.
Keep. -- Miguel
      • I disagree, the information is not verifiable. See Wikipedia:Criteria_for_Inclusion_of_Biographies - the person needs to have done something more than have solved a problem in their field. You could mention the person in an article about the field, but you don't need an article on someone not famous just because they did well in some maths Olympiad. Angela
        • The Wikipedia:Criteria_for_Inclusion_of_Biographies explicitly includes those "who have written ... in periodicals with a circulation of 5,000 or more." There are two direct bibliographic references to well-respected mathematical journals in which he has published papers, and even a direct link to a PDF of one of his papers. Nobody is suggesting that he should be included purely because he did well in a maths olympiad: he solved the necklace problem, and if you ask me that justifies the other biographical details. In fact, I notice that the maths olympiad isn't even mentioned in the article. NB I've no idea who Hamer & Essex are. Dogbert 20:36, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
          • As I've stated in the talk page to that article, that criteria is far too lenient. Just publishing a couple of papers doesn't make you worthy of entry here, otherwise every academic in the world can have an entry. --Robert Merkel 23:28, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
            • And that would be bad because...? Dogbert 08:57, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
          • Additionallym If millions of pages about various non-prominent academics get added by their friends, it's going to be impossible to ensure that the articles end up NPOV. --Robert Merkel 02:20, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
            • Forgive my bluntness, but I have a couple of problems with this argument. Firstly, whether or not your prediction is correct, I think the question here is simply whether or not the page before us meets the criteria for inclusion - and I should say it self-evidently does. If the criteria are wrong then this isn't a useful place to debate them. Secondly, you seem to be arguing that allowing this guy to have his own entry will open the floodgates to other pages about "non-prominent" mathematicians. This argument seems to presuppose that Pebody himself isn't prominent enough to warrant his own page (because otherwise it would be an objection against carrying any entries at all) - in other words, it assumes the proposition under debate! Thirdly, even if Pebody isn't yet the most accomplished mathematician in the world, he is clearly in a different league to most postdoctoral students, let alone undergraduates. I don't see that an article on him invites people to add frivolous entries, any more than the absence of one would dissuade them from doing so. And finally, even if all these putative future pages were added by their subjects' friends, this would be wholly permissible within Wikipedia's policies; the alternative would be the unhelpful assumption that an entry written by someone personally known to the subject were ipso facto unworthy of inclusion. It seems to me far more in keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia to assess submissions on their own merits. 62.253.133.57 14:33, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • We still need opinions from other mathematicians on combinatorics. Keep Luke Pebody for now but delete the other two. wshun 21:27, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
      • I'm not a mathematician on combinatorics but from what I've been able to find his contributions aren't yet widely cited. A search on "Web of Science" revealed this guy has published three papers in its index: nobody else has cited the papers yet in a paper in that database. Whilst he should be pleased with his achievements so far, it's not yet so noteworthy that it deserves a Wikipedia entry. I'm still in favour of deletion. --Robert Merkel 10:20, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • I'm changing my mind. It is too subjective to decide who and who is not worthy of an entry. As Cgs just pointed out on the village pump, having an article on the used ship salesman in Monkey Island does not prevent us from having an article on physics. Angela 22:20, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • Just to clarify - the bit about him doing well in "some Mathematical Olympiad" (I think I meant the National Mathematics Contest, in fact) was purely an outburst of nostalgia, and not meant as a serious contribution to the debate. I shouldn't have brought it up. However, my objection to the page's deletion remains. Wiki is not paper, so there is no reason that I can think of (and so far no-one has provided one that makes sense to me) to worry about restricting inclusion to only the most well-known mathematicians. I see no reason why we can't include anyone who has published anything, as long as the publication remains accessible and therefore can be checked to verify any information about it. With all these people claiming that we should restrict inclusion only to particularly well-known people, surely at least one of you can come up with a convincing reason for doing so? That is, if there is one... -- Oliver P. 10:32, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • "Anyone who has published anything"? That sounds a bit extreme. The last thing I wrote had an initial print run of 600,000 but that doesn't make me worthy of an encyclopedia article. Despite what I said above, we can't add everyone. Angela 11:03, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
      • I'm not saying give everyone a page (though I'd be willing to argue for much laxer criteria for inclusion). But it seems to me that having a sober, informative page about Pebody can only possibly enhance the Wikipedia. What's the argument against it? I don't see that it would open any particularly troublesome floodgates, which is really the only case I can see for excluding anything. Dogbert 08:57, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
        • As I've said to Oliver, it gives a misleading impression of his significance, the biographical details are unverifiable and likely to remain so - heck, it's hard enough to verify biographical details for Robert Tarjan, to give an example of a Turing Award winner. For most academics, the only thing that is of significance is their publication record, and Wikipedia is not the most suitable tool for tracking that. There is the proprietary Web of Science citation index, or even Citeseer. If you want to argue that a free citation index would be a good project, that's fair enough, but I don't think that Wikipedia makes a particularly good one. --Robert Merkel 12:23, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • It might sound extreme. But I have still not seen a convincing argument against the idea. If there is one lurking on a talk page somewhere that I've just overlooked, please could you point me to it? Thanks... -- Oliver P. 12:55, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
      • I think Angela's initial print run of 600,000 makes it likely that she is worthy of an encyclopedia article. 14:32, 19 Aug 2003 (PZN)
    • So he won't make it into '1.0'. I see no good reason for deletion. -- Jake 02:10, 2003 Aug 20 (UTC)
      • What's '1.0'? Does that deserve an entry? Bozzball 16:44, 20 Aug 2003 (WZP)
    • I'd say keep. If we can have hundreds of articles about every minute detail of Middle Earth, we can certainly have a few hundred articles about academic researchers. --Delirium 03:19, Aug 20, 2003 (UTC)
    • I agree with Delirium. If we list every small town in the US, or every actor or actress working in Hollywood, we may pay attention to academic people to some extent, even if they do not appear in the mass media Jmartinezot 13:19, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • KEEEP! BL 19:13, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Reply to Robert Merkel

It's true that a lot of the information is very likely unverifiable, but that is a matter for Wikipedia:Pages needing attention rather than Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. The solution is to move the information we can't verify to the talk page until it can be verified. (See Wikipedia:Verifiability.) The page should only be considered for deletion if the resulting page, consisting only of verifiable information, would still not be worthy of inclusion. (I'd like to see what the resulting page would be like, but I think The Bozzball is the person in the best position to show us. I've left a request on his talk page.)

Then we have to deal with the objection that people might not be able to tell what the significance of the man is. But there are solutions to that. There have to be! After all, no matter what our policies are about including people, we are always going to include some people who have had more impact upon the world than others. As far as I know, no-one doubts that we should have articles on both William Shakespeare and Barbara Cartland. And as far as I know, no-one doubts that the former is of more historical significance than the latter. So how do we show the distinction? Not by omitting one of the articles altogether, but by what we write in the articles. After all, inclusion or non-inclusion of an article contains only one single bit of information. If we have an article, we can include as many bits of information as we can be bothered to write! We can explain in great detail what their contributions, or lack thereof have been. So I think the latter strategy is much more profitable for imparting knowledge of someone's significance. -- Oliver P. 20:38, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It seems like I've lost the argument on Mr Pebody, but I will try one more time to explain my concerns, firstly on why we have to impose some limits and secondly why this person was outside mine.

  • Every time an article is written, it imposes a certain effort on contributors to get it up to standard. Therefore, if topics fall below a certain threshold of obscurity, it's not worth the effort.
    • This is an argument for or born out of laziness, not an argument relating to Mr. Pebody. --Daniel C. Boyer 12:52, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)
  • Every time an article appears in something purporting to be an encyclopedia, it creates an impression that the person concerned is somehow important. Letting people into the Wikipedia is therefore a chance for self-promotion on a grand scale. We have the rules at Wikipedia:auto-biography, but they are trivial to evade.
  • Most academics don't have verifiable biographical information about them, indeed, anything except their position and research record. The Wikipedia is not the place for listing a publication record in its entirety - there are much better tools for the purpose such as Web of Knowledge or Citeseer.
  • Finally, I personally know many other people who have achieved considerably more (at this point) than Mr Pebody, and it is unlikely that they will ever have articles published about them on the Wikipedia. Why should he be singled out? --Robert Merkel 22:54, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • This is a specious argument. Either those many other people are worthy of being included in Wikipedia, in which case either you are someone else should get to work writing articles about them, or they are not, in which case articles should not be written about them. Arguments should relate to Mr. Pebody, not other possible articles about which no detail is given. --Daniel C. Boyer 12:52, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)
He "is being singled out" because someone decided to write a page about him. People without significant achievements should not be included, and people with outstanding achievement almost certainly will, but for people in between, it really is a matter of chance whether anyone will write about them. Maybe you should reassess the "wikipediaworthyness" of those people you know and, in any case, eventually you might run out of other articles to create and might decide to create a page for one of them.
Are you arguing that the page should never have been written? If I was being asked to do research into an obscure character in order to create the page, I'd probably object, but since someone has already put the effort into creating the page, I have no objection to it staying there, given this person's achievement.
Put differently, nobody is suggesting the deletion of necklace problem, and Dr. Pebody is listed on that page as having solved it. Anyone wikifying that page will make a link to the name Luke Pebody. Then people like me who vaguely recall the name might come across it in necklace problem, see the the link to the empty page and decide to do a little research to see if the name really belongs to that person we met once 10 years ago. And then the article might look a lot like what we are proposing to delete... -- Miguel
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