Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Arno Tausch

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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. Pigman☿ 18:36, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Arno Tausch

AfDs for this article:
Articles for deletion/Arno Tausch
Arno Tausch (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

This article gives a lengthy account of the subject's academic career, but nowhere does it mention other sources writing about the subject, as required by WP:N. I'm sure he is an important scholar in his field, but important is not the same thing as notable.

The article was written almost entirely by near-SPA User:RafaGS, whom the subject (as User:Arno.tausch) acknowledges is a personal colleague. I put a {{notable}} tag on the article a month ago, and the only response has been a long list of the subject's academic publications, which is not relevant to the WP:Notability issue. BlueMoonlet (t/c) 12:22, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Keep. Provided information including positions held and published books is more than sufficient to justify his notability.Biophys (talk) 00:01, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete. I disagree, should all scholars who published books and held similar positions have their own article in Wikipedia for that merit alone? Rsazevedo msg 01:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Weak Keep Notability for an academic is the notability of his work, as judged by his colleagues. All scholars who have published enough academic books --books from reputable academic publishers that are published on the basis of peer-review by experts-- and that have thus have attained high academic positions should have articles in WP. That's like the criteria for authors, who become notable by publishing books; & athletes, who become notable by being judged by those in their field capable of competing at the highest level.
In this case, the bulk of his career has not been in the academic world, and it's a little harder to judge. There will need to be a check for reviews. But what this article needs is a careful check for copyvio--the style is that of PR. Almost everything seems to be said twice at least. There's a lot of name dropping, now partly removed, including the names of the universities everyone he copublished with has been associated with. This extends to a sentence about a particularly distinguished figure he did not co-author anything with, and another about a really distinguished person who contributed an article to a book he edited. And a sentence with links to each of the countries his books have been published in. This linkfarm seems too slick to be the work of an amateur-- but not slick enough that we can't catch it: "22 countries around the globe " is a characteristic phase, familiar from many articles on corporations. But that's a matter of editing, which is being done. I can't really blame anyone who took a look at the article and immediately thought to delete it. DGG (talk) 03:49, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, JERRY talk contribs 05:11, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep Just one quick glance at Google Books makes notability clear http://books.google.com/books?q=%22Arno+Tausch%22&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=np. (Mind meal (talk) 14:42, 7 February 2008 (UTC))
  • Keep The endless debate about Arno Tausch is really absurd. Look at one of his most recent publications: Dutch University Press & Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies, Arun Muralidhar & Serge Allegrezza (eds.) Reforming European Pension Systems, Rozenberg and Dutch University Press, Amsterdam, 2007. With contributions from: Jacques Drèze, Paul A. Samuelson (Nobel laureate in economics), Robert M. Solow (Nobel laureate in economics), Arun Muralidhar, Elsa Fornero, Onorato Castellino, Sergi Jiménex-Martín, Pedro Sainz de Baranda, Franco Modigliani (Nobel laureate in economics), Stéphane Hamayon, Florence Legros, Pierre Pestieau, Arno Tausch & Muriel Bouchet.
You might have perhaps other criteria of notability. But rest assured. DGG says: "This extends to a sentence about a particularly distinguished figure he did not co-author anything with, and another about a really distinguished person who contributed an article to a book he edited".
But Arno Tausch's contributions indeed are to be found in the company of such authors as Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Kimmo Kiljunen, Andre Gunder Frank, all well-known from the pages of Wikipedia. In the book "Globalization: critical perspectives" Gernot Kohler and Emilio Jose Chaves (editors). Huntington, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, voila - you find these very articles by Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Kimmo Kiljunen, Andre Gunder Frank, and - Arno Tausch and many others, a fact which DGG implicitly or explicitly denies.
In Dar al Islam (2005), Tausch published contribitions by Pat Cox, the then President of the European Parliament, by Samir Amin, Johan Galtung, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Andre Gunder Frank, and Bruce Russett, the Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations at Yale University, all included and documented in Wikipedia's English language pages.
To continue our journey into academic absurdistan. DGG says: "In this case, the bulk of his career has not been in the academic world, and it's a little harder to judge".
But as the very Wikipedia article on "habilitation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habilitation explains (habilitation, please note, is a peculiarity of the academic system in many European countries), Tausch is under the Austrian University system a LIFELONG associate of the Institute of Political Science at Innsbruck University. He thus never left the academic world.
Anton Pelinka, his long-time institute head and habilitation promotor, by the way is one of the most well-known political scientists in Europe, and was among others, the Joseph Alois Schumpeter professor at Harvard University. You find enough information about him, by the way, on the German page of Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Pelinka), not yet translated into English. Justice for the Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch also would imply to state here that Dieter Senghaas, one of the doyens of German political science (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Senghaas), drew from the works of Arno Tausch in his classics, which developed dependency theory in Germany:
1. 1977. edition suhrkamp, Frankfurt (Dieter Senghaas 'Weltwirtschaftsordnung und Entwicklungspolitik' 1977, on "Die Grenzen der Wachstumstheorie")
2. 1986. edition suhrkamp, Frankfurt (Dieter Senghaas and Ulrich Menzel 'Europas Entwicklung und die Dritte Welt' 1986, on "Jenseits der Weltgesellschaftstheorien")
3. 1988. edition suhrkamp, Frankfurt (Dieter Senghaas 'Konfliktformationen im internationalen System' 1988, on "Jenseits der Weltgesellschaftstheorien")
It is also simply wrong to say that "[Tausch's] bulk of his career has not been in the academic world". Arno Tausch taught at the University of Hawaii and continues his teaching comittments at Austrian Universities, from 1977 right through to 2008. Tausch began his publishing as a student at the beginning of the 1970s, and earned is habilitation degree at Innsbruck University in 1988.
That he joined the Austrian diplomatic service in 1992 and that he was the Counsellor for Labour and Migration at the Austrian Embassy in Warsaw, should not be an argument AGAINST his notability, in fact, it would be an argument in favour, just as his top-level ministerial career as statistician and foreign country analyst in in the European Union and International Affairs department of an Austrian Ministry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_government) since his return to Austria in 1999, now in the rank of a Ministerial Counsellor. It is precisely his involvement in the analysis and publication programs of well-known foreign policy think tanks in countries like Luxembourg (the LIEIS Institute, see: http://www.ieis.lu/frames/outer.htm), Poland (PISM Institute - see http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISM) , and Turkey (the Ankam Institute and INSIGHT TURKEY http://www.insightturkey.com/is0603.htm), which even is an additional argument in favor of having a Wikipedia article about him. 4814 downloads for his book «Why Europe has to offer a better deal towards its Muslim communities. A quantitative analysis of open international data» at the jornal Entelequia, and his recent ranking among the top 5% authors of the RePEc Services over the past 12 months (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repec), should caution those who say that the article lacks justification. --RafaGS (talk) 18:41, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment People expressing positions regarding this article should please address their comments specifically to the criteria listed at Wikipedia:Notability (academics). I will have time to say more tomorrow. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 02:01, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
  • As I said, the article was spammy listing everyone he had copublished with, complete with a link, and the people who had written chapters in books he edited and so on. that's not good article content. Of course, it doesnt necessarily make you non-notable, just causes people to look rather critically at the article. Being the professor of a student who is very notable can bring notability; being the student of a very notable professor does not. Every advisor has disappointing students. In the very nature of things, most students are less notable than their doctoral advisor. Being published by people who also publish good books is not necessarily notable--every publisher has better and worse titles. Teaching stints as an adjunct lecturer are not an academic career. We know what habilitation is -- it's the rough equivalent of a post-doc, except it applies in continental Europe in the humanities and social sciences as well as the sciences--its the intermediate step between a PhD and a job as an untenured assistant professor (or the various European equivalents). it's not a guarantee of a job, let alone tenure. I say what I said before: in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to exaggerate his importance to impress us, we will be objective and not reject it out of hand as would be a natural reaction, but recognize that he is after all sufficiently notable. Sufficient citations by colleagues does make you notable. That much is true--it shows you are regarded as a significant figure in the profession, and thats the criterion. Sufficiently, but just sufficiently.DGG (talk) 03:46, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
I said weak keep, and i wouldn't think anyone wrong who came to the opposite conclusion. That a weak keep was challenged as not being strong enough does, frankly, not impress me with the strength of the case for the article. DGG (talk) 03:59, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete as nom (hadn't actually said that yet). I don't care who he knows or how many books he has published. What I care about is the impact (i.e., notability) of his work upon his field. Arguments that would convince me include how widely his work has been cited, and whether he has been granted tenure at a major university (primarily the former). For his work that is political rather than academic, you need to show significant discussion of it by independent sources. RafaGS has had plenty of opportunity to provide such information, and has not done so. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 04:35, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep as per DGG. Minos P. Dautrieve (talk) 00:23, 14 February 2008 (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.