Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gilbert Chu

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. W.marsh 16:28, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gilbert Chu

Gilbert Chu (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

No sign of passing WP:PROF. (Has been de-prodded, so can't go that route.) Pan Dan 22:44, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete; would be willing to change to keep if evidence of notability were presented. --ElKevbo 22:48, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep as notability has been established via newly added material in article. --ElKevbo 03:06, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep; He is a Stanford professor. "Publish or Perish" is the rule in those schools. So I bet other people in his field of expertise should know him. Who draws the line to decide he is notable or not? Kowloonese 22:57, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

People need to come up with references demonstrating how this subject passes WP:PROF, rather than make assumptions. Just being a professor at a prestigious school is not automatically an indicator of sufficient encyclopedic notability. "Publish or Perish" - in addition to being a vague simplified generalization as an observation - could be said to be apply in general to all research-driven universities or university departments, and it says nothing about the quality of the work being published. Bwithh 05:07, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete unless notability can be established. Comment it doesn't matter if people within the field know him. and if you want to see who draws the line please see Wikipedia:Notability, that's who.--Tainter 03:53, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletions. -- Pete.Hurd 06:45, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
• Weak Delete. I can only see one book (1998 without an ISBN) in OCLC, none in Amazon, and while google scholar results indicate his work is recognised in the field, I cant see that has translated into notability in the real world. Profile at med.stanford.edu shows two awards, Clinical Scientist Award for Translational Research from Burroughs-Wellcome Fund[1] (Wellcome Trust) and Rita Allen Award. John Vandenberg 07:20, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
• Very strong keep The above comment admits his work is recognized in his field, per GS, but oddly says "not in the wider world." That is not the standard. Notability in the field is the standard. Read WP:N, there is no reference to the wider world, or to people in general, and for good reason: Almost every single game article in WP is not notable to he wider world. almost every single school article is not notable to the wider world. almost every single highway article, almost every railroad station, etc etc . Almost every article about specific plant or animal or chemical or mathematical theory or historical figure is not notable to the world in general. Most music articles are notable only to those who listen to that particular kind of music. Almost all towns and villages in the US and elsewhere are notable only regionally, and the wider world knows of their existence only thru WP and directories. Very few counties in the US are notable to the wider world, and very few radio stations, and rivers, and mountains, and even automobiles. N is judged by notability amongthose of its kind. (Incidentally PROF is a proposal, not a policy or even a guideline, but anyway he does indeed meet it. All tenured faculty at major universities meet it, having passed several external reviews by experts for their notability in the profession. We dont establish notability, we see if the profession has established notability. That's what Koowloonese meant. It doesn't apply to every college, but it does to major research universities. DGG 01:19, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

• Note that I merely thought he was recognised, but in the absence of notable awards, I dont understand the field well enough to wade through the G Chu google scholar hits (and with a short name like that many results may be for a different person) and work out what would make the man notable, and the article doesnt make this clear. His research in cancer treatment is mentioned, but there is no claim that the research is primarily his (most of what I have read list many names, and his name isnt first), or that it is ground breaking (I see little press besides standford web pages). My guess is that the patents for instrumentation are to do with the "microarrays"; if those two facts can be linked by evidence (a patent number), then it shows that he is leading the way. At the moment, the article fails WP:V. John Vandenberg 01:53, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

take another look now, Notice the number of citations.DGG 02:40, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the research DGG, but still no sign that he passes WP:PROF (or WP:N). Looking at the Google scholar hits, I see that he is rarely listed as the first author; on 8 of the first 10 hits, for example, he's listed last among groups of 2, 3, 4, or even 5 collaborators. The Scientist article you linked to is not about him and the research described there is never described as "his work" as you wrote in the Wikipedia article. The Scientist article suggests that he is knowledgeable about the research being described there (as he was used as a source for the article), but that he was not one of the main develepers and was never a primary investigator of this research. (A complete Wikipedia article about that research would probably not even mention him.) Finally, the other references in the References section of the Wikipedia article are not independent of him. Pan Dan 16:19, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletions. -- John Vandenberg 01:53, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
• first authorship Pan, in biomedicine the first or the last position is the principal authorship. PubMed keeps track of both of those, because it varies. (This is not the case in most other subjects). My advisor always listed himself last. .James Watson went one step further and never listed himself at all--but it was understood who was the main intellectual contributor to work coming form that particular lab. But you do not have to take my word for it:
• to be absolutely objective his most cited paper-- for which he was first author--has been cited 697 times. His next cited paper, for which he was also the first author, was cited 393 times. These are remarkably high values--not all Nobel laureats have papers cited that many times. That is notability. when we look to see the reputation of a novel, we look for the sales of the work. This is the same principle.
• And the evidence is independent of him. It's provided by the journals, the RS in the field They are --all of them, for all his publications, in the highest quality journals .and recorded in the internationally accepted index, which is WoS. Knowing that not everyone has access to it, I copied the results onto the article. These citations are independent documentation of N at a level of independence that many WP subjects outside the academic world can intrinsically not demonstrate. These are the judgements of those qualified. You are substituting your own. I am not using mine, except perhaps rhetorically. He (not I) stands documented by the numbers. DGG 08:32, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Actually, what you say about "last being first" (so to speak) makes sense to me, because it seems unlikely that somebody would be the least valuable contributor to so many papers as in my above interpretation of the Google scholar hits. Also, I looked up his Nobel prize winning brother on Google scholar and I see that he also is listed last many times. So pending further evidence/discussion, I'm happy to concede that point to you (can't speak for others of course). I'm uncomfortable though about relying on number of citations to show notability. Just because work A is cited in work B doesn't mean B relies in a major way on A. The question I'd want answered is, per WP:N, is there enough independent material out there to fill up this Wikipedia article about Chu's work (and is the work identifiable as actually being his)? Pan Dan 18:59, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree with DGG. Many college professors don't do first hand research on their own. All their ideas are worked on by the graduate students under their supervision. The quality of many research projects depend on the mastermind of the supervisor more than those who get their hands dirty. So it is important to find out what comes out under the professor's supervision, not necessarily restrict to those papers written solely by himself. If you really want to trim down the biographies on wikipedia based on notability, you probably end up with a tabloid like publication. Honestly, how can Gilbert Chu ever be more recognized than Michael Jackson? If you ask me, I would rather delete 10 Michael Jackson like articles for each article on college professors that really contributed to science. Traditionally, paper based encyclopedia had to trim down the breadth due to the cost associated with the maintenance and printing of articles. I disagee that wikipedia should follow the same approach. I personally don't agree with the heavy hand trimming policy going on here. One quality of wikipedia I enjoy is the breadth of coverage. The depth is important, but the breadth also guarantee that wikipedia can be used as a starting point for any research in all topics. Even a stub that points to a significant external article is better than a missing entry in my opinion. Some argue that Google gives you a lot of leads to any reseach also, but the relevancy decided by Google is algorithmic vs. any links provided in wikipedia added some human evaluation and filtering that improve the quality of information. That alone is what makes wikepedia stand above Google search. The heavy hand trimmings can only reduce the breadth of the coverage which is hurting one special strength of wikipedia in my opinion. Kowloonese 00:58, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
    • Sounds to me like you would enjoy surfing some university websites more than Wikipedia. The same kinds of links from the Wikipedia article that you find useful are available here, for example. (Please don't take that the wrong way, I'm being serious, not sarcastic or anything.) But Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a directory, which is why stubs do tend to get deleted if they show no promise of growing with multiple reliable sources. I'm not sure what a Wikipedia stub on Gilbert Chu can offer you that you can't find on his Stanford website that I linked to. Pan Dan 01:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

This particular criterion would apply to quite a lot of articles; as it happens, not all of it was from his website because he is apparently a rather modest guy and didnt even list the papers. DGG 01:23, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

However, you are quite right that a being quoted in b is not necessarily enough,depending on the notability nd authority of b. But a being quoted in b1, and b2, and b3, and b4, and b5, and b6,...and b697, is another matter entirely. This is what is characteristic of true recognition by ones peers, the ones who write articles., That's what the academic world is about.

It is very rare for an experimental biologist (this also applies in some but not all sciences) for a person to be the sole author of an experiment primary research paper. Labs don't work that way. Easy example: Watson&Crick. They both won the Nobel prize, and this is true for most Nobel prizes in Biology or Medicine--they go to more than one individual for their separate or joint work. Where you see sole authorship is (sometimes) when a person writes a review article, analyzing other peoples earlier works, or writes a summary of his career in his 60s. There is nothing wrong with not knowing the way science works. It is perfectly honorable to not be a scientist. In evaluating scientists, though, it is useful to know something about this, and you might want to browse a few of the more detailed WP articles and get a better idea of how scientistd publish. I dont contribute to AfDs on video games or many other topics, because I haven't the least idea of how they are to be judged. DGG 01:31, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep - notability has been established and the whole article is well referenced. NCurse _work 19:07, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep. A highly-cited, well-established, award-winning scientist who is widely recognized in his field and also the brother of a Nobel winner is certainly well within WP:PROF. Vassyana 17:10, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
• Keep well known scientist --Abu-Bakr69 11:16, 3 February 2007 (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.