Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Peter Herrmann (2nd nomination)

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 delete. DGG raises an excellent point below--as laymen, we are uniquely unqualified to evaluate the quality of a given professor's work. However, their relative importance and general notability in the field they work in can be evaluated, and based on the discussion below it is clear that the good professor is not noteworthy by our standards.

It should be noted, though, that a change in status or the coming to light of relevant sources could impart new relevance on the topic and that any creation of an article based on these factors would not be subject to speedy deletion. To that end, if anyone would like the text in order to userfy and work on the article a little more, I will be more than happy to provide it.

Finally, with regard to the renomination of the article, I agree that a month seems to be a sufficient amount of time to improve on the article. --jonny-mt 08:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Peter Herrmann

Peter Herrmann (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (delete) – (View log)

This is little more than a padded resume. The article has been tagged since December as having notability problems, and the first AfD resulted in No Consensus. There's been no subsequent improvement of the article. Let's get rid of this thing now. An editor with a similar name did some work on it, so it may be autobiography, and the sources leave much to be desired. Qworty (talk) 10:27, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

• Delete, does not meet notability, or does not support a claim for notability. BananaFiend (talk) 10:46, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
• Speedy keep on the grounds that the previous AFD was little more than a month ago. Articles should be given at least a few months to allow potential improvement before renomination. I have no personal opinion one way or the other on this particular article; this is a procedural "vote". I'm citing the third paragraph of WP:KEEPLISTINGTILITGETSDELETED that says sufficient time should be allowed for an article to be improved upon after it has survived an AFD challenge. 23skidoo (talk) 13:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Neutral What constitutes "sufficient time"? I've seen some articles listed within hours with little to no dissent, others nearly a year later are met with howls about the previous AfD. DarkAudit (talk) 15:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment As for the argument that "sufficient time should be allowed for an article to be improved upon after it has survived an AFD challenge," allow me to respectfully remind everyone that the previous result was not Keep, but No Consensus. Thus, the article did not really "survive the challenge"--the process was just kept on hold for a while. Since no consensus was reached before, this is our opportunity to reach consensus. That's what Wikipedia is all about, remember?--reaching consensus. Qworty (talk) 18:04, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
• Delete On one hand, 17 books counts for something. On the other hand, I found little evidence, in terms of awards or citations, that his work has substantially influenced others. Google Scholar, WOS and Scopus turn up very little in the way of citations. GoogleScholar did give 25 citations of his book with Tausch, "Globalization and European Integration", but on close inspection most of these citations are by Tausch himself. As DGG wrote in the first AfD discussion, Herrmann's books are not widely carried by the U.S. libraries (although I must say that I give much greater weight to citations, h-index, awards, etc. In most universities the decisions about which books to get are made by librarians, not by the respective academic departments). As a test, I have looked up two random Associate Professors in the Political Science department at my university. They both generated substantial number of citations per GoogleScholar (the first one I checked, had citation hits of 144, 113, 83, 59, 25, 21, etc). The second one had citation rates a little lower but still, by an order of magnitude higher than Herrmann. In both cases they authored some books and their CVs listed a bunch of "mid-level" academic honors and awards, such as best book prizes, top/best paper prizes from various conferences, etc. I have not seen anything of the sort mentioned on Herrmann's web site or in the WP article about him. In my view he does fail WP:PROF, and, absent some new information, the article should be deleted. Nsk92 (talk) 13:02, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
• Comment What is really needed is someone who has at least some vague knowledge of the field, rather than attempting to decide whether this guy has achieved anything based on some pseudo-scientific numerological method of evaluation. Also, there are languages other than English in which people can be well known, especially people who do speak languages other than English, and who have a first language that is not English. Of course, if some journalist in a publication like Time or The Guardian has mentioned him, case closed. The fact that a journalist wrote it is, apparently, what counts for determining notability per WP:N and WP:BIO. What is really needed, then, to clinch it, is a few quotes from the mass media! [1]--203.214.15.223 (talk) 07:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

The AfD discussion you mention, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Denis Dutton is about a person who is primarily notable as a media personality rather than as an academic. Notability as a media personality is established, per WP:BIO, primarily by covergage of that person in the conventional media. Academic notablity is notability primarily for one's academic/scholarly work. In the main, such notability is established by looking at the impact of the person in question in their academic field, see WP:PROF. This means that in most cases to establish academic notability one has to look at things like academic honors and awards and coverage of the work of the person in question in scholarly publications (scholarly journals, conference proceedings, books, etc), looking at citation rates, h-index, etc. Yes, this is harder to do, yes more mistakes are probably made and and yes participation by experts is helpful. However, editing Wikipedia is open to everyone so ultimately anyone can express their opinion. You may not like this aspect of the Wikipedia model (and it is in fact mentioned in Criticism of Wikipedia), but that is the way it is.

Going back to WP:PROF, it does say criterion 1 of WP:PROF can be satisfied if there is a substantial coverage of the person in question, as an academic expert, in conventional media. In practice this happens very rarely since most academic subjects are quite technical. But sometimes there are articles or interviews in mass media about famous scientists, or a journal like Scientific American can honor someone with a SciAm50 award as one of the top scientific innovators, or some biologist is repeatedly quoted in mass media as an expert on some schientific developments in molecular biology etc. One could argue that this is the case for Denis Dutton, but I think that his notability is primarily as a notable media pundit on general cultural and literary matters rather than as a media expert/pundit on some academic subject. Nsk92 (talk) 11:49, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Reply Unless a person has at least some vague knowledge of the field it is certainly not possible to evaluate whether this guy has achieved anything based on some pseudo-scientific numerological method of evaluation, and/or award counting. The citation evaluation methodologies you are quoting and using aren't even the best. And the best are nowhere as valuable as the evaluations of the top scholars in the particular discipline and sub-discipline. Numbers, do, of course, look impressive. They do impress the ignoratti. --203.214.15.223 (talk) 17:01, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

• Delete - fails WP:PROF. Springnuts (talk) 20:47, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
• Weak keep Fundamentally we evaluate scholars by reputation: whether they are considered notable. To judge by what we personally think of the work would be truly foolish, and show ignorance of encyclopedic standards. We are laymen, and we accept the demonstrated judgment of the experts in the field (just as we accept the judgment of reviewers for books, of critics for actors). One does this for academics by looking for what constitutes notability: professional rank, awards, publications. In this case, all of them are borderline. He holds an intermediary academic profession, not a professorship. there are no significant awards. We evaluate publications are seeing how widely they are held, and much they are cited. Other scholars in the field evaluate the publications by citing them. There are many books, not very widely used or cited. What we do not do is evaluate the intrinsic quality of the person's research--we are not qualified for that, so we see how the qualified experts in the field have evaluated it. Those who abandon numbers in this show that they do not recognize how scholarship in science or social science operates. h factors have limitations, but their use as a rough indication between people in the same field is appropriate. If we abandon objectivity, we get hand waving. I evaluated it as keep before; I say weak keep now. If I judged by the arguments used by the promoters of this article, I wouldn't say even that. A month is enough after a no-consensus close to make another try--it of course would not be if it had been a keep. More impressionistically, "With Tausch’s influential work and in cooperation with him " shows rather clearly that he's a junior colleague of Tausch, and thus not as notable. 12 books is however worth considering--Nova is a low grade publisher in science, but respectable in social science. DGG (talk) 23:35, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, User:DGG gives me plenty of reasons why he might be considered notable, plus my threshold of proof of notabilty is very low on topics I know nothing about.Callelinea (talk) 03:22, 3 April 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.