Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tara C. Smith

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. Black Kite (t) (c) 00:12, 3 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Tara C. Smith

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I think the suibject fails WP:ACADEMIC and WP:AUTHOR. There are lots of sources given in the article, but most are written by the subject or affiliated with her. I can't find significnat coverage in RSs about the professor that would make this assistant professor and deputy director of a research center notable yet. Her blog seems to be the closest route to meeting WP:N/WP:BIO, but I don't think it gets her there. Novaseminary (talk) 21:57, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:21, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:21, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:21, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Fails all relevant measures of notability, including WP:ACADEMIC and WP:AUTHOR. Writing a blog that was mentioned in another more famous blog is not enough. --Crunch (talk) 04:12, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. This seems like a good example of an article created too early, as the subject is clearly on her way to reaching WP-notability. Does not seem to pass notability requirements under WP:PROF at the moment. A search on GS suggests a total of 185 citations, and a relatively low h-index of 7. Not yet passing WP:BIO either. Her blog seems to be getting some attention, judging based on comments and links (http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/), but not significantly above the thousands of health-related blogs out there.--Eric Yurken (talk) 16:29, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep She may not qualify under WP:ACADEMIC or WP:AUTHOR but she clearly qualifies under WP:GNG. Her activities in the public sphere have garnered a lot of media attention. I added a couple of references to the page from UPI and the New York Times. --MelanieN (talk) 15:49, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment The two sources you added cite her only in passing and are not about her. They are no different than other citations to her work. WP:GNG requires "sources (that) address the subject directly in detail." These do not. Novaseminary (talk) 15:57, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's true. They are citing her work or her activities, rather than writing a full fledged article ABOUT her. However, I suspect most people would think even a one-sentence reference in the New York Times, citing research done by a scientist from Iowa, would be unusual enough to establish some degree of notability. And when you say they are "no different" from the other citations, I would challenge that. A citation from UPI or the New York Times IS different from a citation from a blog or small-town paper. Reliable Sources and all that. --MelanieN (talk) 02:46, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment You're right that the UPI and NYT mentions are totally different than a blog citation (and good work replacing non-RSs with those cites, by the way). What I meant was that those cites in context really are not much different as an indicator of notability in the field than a citation in an academic journal. The brief mentions in the sources you added to my mind are not substantial enough to meet WP:GNG or WP:BIO. But I do think they inform the WP:ACADEMIC discussion since they were essentially citations to partcular work she coauthored. Like the other commentors, though, I don't think her work has been cited enough, NYT and UPIO notwithstanding, to get her over the ACADEMIC hump. She might get there in the future, though. Novaseminary (talk) 03:48, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:00, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I agree she is certainly not notable for being author at the moment, nor an academic, although I suspect that will come in time. She has been in the public gaze both currently and in the past for her activism. I think it is important for these types of articles to be in WP, as they provide a timeline and additional context for historians. scope_creep (talk) 19:19, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Does any WP policy or guideline support the idea of keeping articles of not-yet-notable individuals to "provide a timeline and additional context for historians"? I suggest that WP:CRYSTAL requires the opposite. Novaseminary (talk) 18:23, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment This is exactly what WP:CRYSTAL aims to stop. Wikipedia is not about including people who are on their way to possibly being notable one day in the future. --Crunch (talk) 01:26, 28 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I would also note that her blog, supposedly "ranked" 7th by Nature magazine was not profiled in the Nature article at all. The article profiled the top five. There was really no "ranking" by Nature. Nature used a Technorati list of popular blogs (on which this blog was ranked 4,989) and then picked out those that were written by scientists for the public. I have updated the article to reflct this fact and clarified other information that is actually less noteworthy than the previous versions of the article implied. Novaseminary (talk) 19:24, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Adding to the above observations that her publication record seems very typical of a junior prof (WoS citations 18, 4, 3, 1, ... h-index = 3), it would seem this is a pretty clear case of WP:CRYSTAL. Easy to hit lots of false-positives here for the much-more-cited researcher "Tyler C Smith", who may have been at the same institution at one time. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 13:54, 30 August 2010 (UTC).[reply]
Delete. GS cites 55, 35,24, 14, 9, 7... identification ambiguous as above but in any case not there yet. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:48, 31 August 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Reply to both of you, about her low scores at Google Scholar: we have already agreed that she does not meet WP:ACADEMIC so that's a dead horse. However some of us are arguing that she DOES qualify as notable, not as an academic, but rather for her high-profile public activism. --MelanieN (talk) 23:51, 2 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Have you found any sources in addition to the two you noted above? As I mentioned, I don't think those get her over the WP:GNG threshold because they do not "address the subject (Smith) directly in detail"? And it seems others are not convinced, either. Novaseminary (talk) 00:01, 3 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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.