Talk:Malcolm Perry (physicist)

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[edit] Notability

This stub was created anonymously by someone using an IP addy at Cambridge University. Can anyone provide a better description? I happen to know some papers coauthored by Perry, but I am not sure well-known is entirely accurate (I didn't remember this name until I searched the arXiv and recognized two papers I have read).

The anonymous edit and its origin once again raise troubling questions about WP:NPOV wrt biographies of living individuals. As a rule, I tend to frown upon people declaring themselves notable , but to agree that valuable information not otherwise available can sometimes be supplied by the subject of a biography. There is a wide divergence of opinion about these issues, of course.

Needless to say, am not accusing our anon of being M. J. Perry, just pointing out that making an anonymous edit from Cambridge creating a biostub of someone who apparently works at Cambridge inevitably raises troubling questions.---CH (talk) 19:59, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it does it seem a little fishy to say the least. Regarding the issue of notability, I agree it's tricky and I sympathise with the view that valuable information can sometimes only be gained through a biography. However, I think there comes a point when we have to put our foot down and only include bios of people we know have made a 'noteworthy contribution'. How do we decide who's made a 'noteworthy contribution' ? Here are a few criteria:

• Experienced researchers who have published high-quality papers that have survived scrutiny or people who have contributed a lot in their field.
• People who have had something named after them (like Tullio Levi-Civita).
• People who we call 'cranks', 'nuts' etc... (some of them are noteworthy, albeit in a negative sense).

IMHO, anyone not satisfying any one of these criteria should not have a bio. Don't worry, CH, I think JB fits into one of them ! :). ---Mpatel (talk) 10:54, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Our anon has added something about the Myers-Perry metric, the name he gives to a higher dimensional generalization of the Kerr solution, but a name which does not seem to appear in the arXiv. I think that at present the latter is a zillion times more notable than the former, and I wish our anon (who evidently has expert knowlege of physics) would create an account and contribute to improving existing articles on the classical background for notions like higher-dimensional gravity, rather than making anonymous edits which raise troubling issues.---CH (talk) 18:03, 12 November 2005 (UTC)