Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Steven Kerckhoff

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep. Sjakkalle (Check!) 11:26, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Steven Kerckhoff

Someone asked me to undo this speedy as in their view being a professor was a claim to notability. Not in mine, but a little VfD never hurt:

• Not notable, delete. --fvw* 22:11, September 4, 2005 (UTC)
• Okay, I'll bite. Rewritten. A professor may be notable and this one (not the original, apparently mythical Kerckhoff of Michigan) seems to have gotten himself mixed up in state-level politics. Keep or merge to a suitable article about the California mathematics curriculum controversy. Move there and refactor if there isn't one. Include in Category: Education in California. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 22:43, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Wow, we sure have different world views. If this person is notable, it is surely due to his alleged proof of an important outstanding conjecture in mathematics.---CH (talk) 07:48, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
  • No, if I'd known about the proof of Nielsen's conjecture I would have gone with that. The information about that didn't turn up until a good week into the debate--which nominally only lasts five days. When someone passes you the ball, you don't drop it and wait until a less muddy one comes along. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 08:01, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
• Seems notable enough for at least a mention, but unless there's something more to say about him, merge or move as above. —Cryptic (talk) 22:54, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
• Merge the present contents per Tony Sidaway. However, the original speedy was ok, I reckon, since being a prof isn't an assertion of notability any more than asserting that you have a job is. Also note the article ended by saying (INCORRECT!!!). -Splash 23:58, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it was arguably a good speedy. It was about a completely different guy, who doesn't in fact seem to exist. As an assertion of notability, professor (despite it's being the classic example of an assertion of notability in the original CSD A7 example) seems to be pretty weak in the US context. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 00:08, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Good point about the examples. We should get around to either removing them or improving them. Bakers?? -Splash 00:27, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep. My interpretation of the 'average professor' rule is that while an average professor isn't notable, they're very close to notable, and it doesn't take very much to push them over the bar. The fact that he helped design state curricula might be enough on its own to take him over, and the contributions being controversial take him further over. Plus, being a professor from a top-5 university means he'd hardly be an average professor even if he did nothing else. He couldn't have achieved that if he hadn't made significant contributions to his field, even though those contributions aren't documented here. (I think that's the point of the 'average professor' rule -- we're trusting the academic community as a proxy to determine who has made a contribution to their field.) --Arcadian 02:24, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with Arcadian; I'd put the bar much higher.---CH (talk) 07:48, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep per Arcadian. Note that "more notable than the average professor" means we keep 50% of all articles on college professors. Sdedeo 02:54, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, and that would be absurd. Wikipedia is not a faculty directory or a professional directory. For heaven's sake! I am a mathematician--- trust me, guys, American mathematicians have a professional organization and you can search their database if you need to verify someone's employment status or whatever.---CH (talk) 07:48, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Actually, that would be "more notable than the median professor". —Cryptic (talk) 03:59, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Argh! Yes, sorry. I was assuming a Gaussian distribution of professors. Sdedeo 04:19, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Heh ---CH (talk) 07:48, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep. A (full) professor at Stanford is more notable than the average (or median) professor. More importantly, Kerckhoff solved a 50-year old problem. This resulted in a publication in the Annals of Mathematics, one of the most presitgious journals in pure maths. I expanded the article to include this, though I hardly know the field. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 10:07, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. I save my vfd's for poorly written crap. linas 21:49, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per Niesen; the result establishes notability. Septentrionalis 21:47, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
• Keep I might disagree with Jitse here; I feel that professors at Stanford or wherever are not notable on that ground alone. There are nobodies in every math department in the world, as I am sure we both know. But clearly resolving a decades old named problem is automatically notable.---CH (talk) 07:48, 12 September 2005 (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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.