Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alfred de Grazia

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 no consensus. Luna Santin 03:09, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Alfred de Grazia

This is a vanity article.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ers00 (talk • contribs) .

• Delete - unverifiable and is a vanity page. It would have been an idea to engage the user before coming to AFD though. Yomangani^talk 23:25, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Fair enough. My first nomination for deletion and I didn't read the instructions carefully enough. Thanks for letting the contributor know. Ers00 23:46, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. He sounds like a really interesting scholar. Published reviews of his books are one way to demonstrate an author's notability, and I added three reviews as references at the end of the article. If there are POV problems, they can be edited out. While the main author of the article was Amideg (talk • contribs • count) (possibly Ami de Grazia), other editors have worked on the article, which makes WP:VANITY less of an issue. Verification of his prolific work as an author can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ , which lists 55 works under his name. --TruthbringerToronto (Talk | contribs) 02:03, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Look a little closer at the other editors. They're bots.70.184.72.38 18:08, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
• Seems like a pretty obvious keep. I get 30 hits on his name as author in the Swedish National Library Catalogue. Some parts of the article need verification or cleanup, but I see no valid reason why the subject wouldn't be notable enough. up+land 05:19, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. The nominator's only contributions relate to this AfD. --TruthbringerToronto (Talk | contribs) 18:53, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment. Well, if you're implying that I'm only out to get Alfred de Grazia's goat, please let me assure you that I'm not. I agree that he's an interesting (if rather obscure) figure, and it's because I wanted to know a little bit more about him (from a more or less NPOV source) that I came to find Wikipedia's article on him. But I was disappointed, because the article just parrots (or plagiarizes?) Mr. de Grazia's own biography on his own site: http://www.grazian-archive.com/autobiography/DeGrazia/degrazia.htm. Besides that, the phrasing and the inclusion of irrelevant minutiae strikes me as vain. So I took it to be a vanity article, based on Wikipedia's vanity guidelines:
    

"Vanity information is considered to be any information...that might create an apparent conflict of interest, meaning any material that presents the appearance of being intended to in any way promote the personal notoriety of the author, or one of the close family members or associates of the author."

"...if [the vanity information constitutes] an entire article, the article is then usually submitted for deletion. ... Those that offer some claim of notability, however remote, are usually sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion."

"Even in the cases of decidedly famous people, these people's unrealized aspirations, thoughts, and hobbies are seldom included in Wikipedia, unless they are directly salient, and, more importantly, verifiable. Wikipedia's policy on verifiability prohibits the inclusion of things that are not verifiable from independent sources."

"...the best rule of thumb while determining whether or not any such edits may contain vanity materials, is to ask oneself, "Would this same type of material normally be found in a print encyclopedia?""

Do you still disagree that this is a vanity article? Ers00 22:52, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

It is written a bit vanity-like, but de Grazia is (was, as of Aug. 31) a thinker who was published in scholarly magazines, and who published his own journal, backed by no less an authority than SAGE Publications. Besides, he's fascinating. Keep it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Susan Stanich (talk • contribs) 16:32, 28 September 2006

• Keep. I disagree that it is a vanity article. De Grazia's scholarly accomplishments are serious; while much of his thinking is outside the mainstream, that is part of what makes this entry interesting and relevant. The man has often been way ahead of his time; to give just two examples, he proposed using computers to study social networks in the early 1950s, and developed ideas for scholarly citation indices (and why they were forces for conservatism) in the 1960s. JeffUbois 13:37, 2 October 2006 (UTC) JeffUbois

• Keep. I am the author of this article. 55 books officially listed, published by the likes of Alfred Knopf (Public and Republic), Doubleday (Eight Bads, Eight Goods), Wiley, Scotts Foresman etc. should qualify anyone. Alfred de Grazia is the founder of the AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, still in existence, and one of the most respected magazines in political science. He has been listed in past editions of Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World (no less...) He has taught at prestigious universities like U. of Minnesota, Brown, Stanford, NYU and others, yet his activities have reached far beyond academia. He is a prime example of a very rich and productive American life of the XX century. At 86, he is still fully active. Including, in the past three years, two fiction movies and one book... (But the article speaks for itself...)24.149.255.225 16:31, 4 October 2006 (UTC)amideg 24.149.255.225 16:32, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

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.