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Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD

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Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

This article is not about scientists but instead purports to be about a book. It is a little known book, originally published in 1999 by a small British publishing house and now out of print in the UK at least, though possibly still in print in India. The article offers no commentary whatever from third party sources: hardly surprising, as a Google search brings up a mere 32 unique hits ; and they are only Misplaced Pages mirrors, automated listings at a few online bookshops and a couple of passing references from people who are happy about their own inclusion. The article can never conform to WP:BK, because (i) it contains nothing which is not apparently sourced from the book itself, and (ii) as a minor work published nine years ago (and out of print in most of the world) it is most unlikely ever to attract further independent commentary or reviews.

An AfD eighteen months ago closed as no consensus. Three main arguments were made for keeping the article; all are erroneous or else no longer relevant.

The first argument for keeping the article was that it served as a useful list of scientists, many of whom were still in need of articles. But since then, the vast majority of the redlinks have turned blue. And the article was always a poor to-do list, for reasons I'll come on to.

Another argument made for keeping was based on the incorrect belief, which had found its way into the article, that the list was the result of an important, authoritative survey of many academics, rather than the view of a single author, and was important because of this. However, the book itself (of which I have acquired a copy) makes no such claim. It makes it clear that this is a personal selection; commenting "While relying heavily on , the author has has attempted to extract the top 1000 names in science that should be known to everyone with a serious interest in the role of science in society" (Preface, page vii, emphasis mine). While it does add that "In this task, the author was assisted enormously by a survey he conducted in eighty university departments around the world" (emphasis mine again), this is all it says about the survey. There is no information at all on who was surveyed, what the response rate was, how many votes each scientist received, or even how much weight the author attached to the results in making his selection. This is in spite of suggestions to the contrary on the talk page. I will provide scans of the relevant pages on request by Email to confirm the book's actual contents.

I will add that, as others have pointed out on the talk page, the book's selection is quite bizarre. To list just a few of the missing names, there is no mention of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Christiaan Huygens, Leonardo da Vinci or Werner Heisenberg. Perhaps most astonishingly, on pages 88 and 89 the (alphabetical) entries jump straight from Paul Ehrlich to Willem Einthoven, without pausing to mention the German fellow with the funny hair and the famous equation. It's inconceivable that any well conducted survey could have missed so many greats from the history of science; a more likely explanation is that the book was completed in a hurry to cash in on the millennium (release date: December 1999). The haphazard selection further reduces the book's value as a to-do list.

Finally, it was suggested that the list of scientists was endorsed by the President of the British Society for History of Science, and gained notability from this fact. While it is true that there is a short introduction written by Ludmilla Jordanova, it is just a bland essay about scientific biographies. It makes no specific mention of Barker or this book, certainly does not endorse the selection, and seems likely to have been commissioned by the publisher before the content was available. It is unlikely that Barker collaborated closely with Jordanova, because he thanks her "for his (sic) helpful comments", apparently having failed to notice that she is a woman.

The list of scientists (essentially a contents page for the book) is therefore inherently unencyclopaedic; by including this list we give massively undue weight to a single non-notable person's view of who the most important scientists throughout history have been; and this POV cannot be fixed since names cannot be added or removed without traducing the book. The remainder of the article can never be much more than publisher's blurb and should be deleted.

In short the book fails Misplaced Pages's inclusion criteria on many levels; W:N, WP:BK, WP:V and WP:NPOV to name just four. As an article about a book it is irredeemable due to the book's lack of notability, as a list of scientists it is something we have no need of. Iain99 20:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Wow, I don't think you really needed to write a book of your own, but your point got across. This book definitely does not have any individual notability, outside references, or a need to clutter our site. Reywas92 21:02, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete We have plenty better lists of scientists that our readers would benefit from examining. As a book article, it fails the threshold by quite a margin. As a list of important scientists, it is only notable in its incompetence. Sorry to those who have spent time fixing wikilinks or dates of birth and death, but I believe your time will be better spent elsewhere. BTW: I'm not familiar with W:N. These new guidelines keep popping up all the time, it is hard to keep up-to-date with them all :-) Colin° 21:21, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep, if for no other reason than that it was extremely useful in creating cross-links between various forms of the names of these scientists. In addition, it serves the very same purposes as most other lists on Misplaced Pages. Actually, I thought this was long-gone ancient history. Was it deleted and re-created again? In fact, it must have been. It looks like I created the article; mine is listed after the first entry. But in fact, that was one of my last edits there; I only edited it one other day since then, but I probably had a hundred edits before the first one listed in the history. It was originally put here by someone else, not by me. If I did re-create it, it was inadvertent. Prehaps I was editing it at the time someone else deleted it, and my edit then started it all over again; that's the only thing I can think of. Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:24, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Who is going to benefit from the "cross-links between various forms of the names of these scientists"? If some science wikiproject want to keep the list as a tool for naming/linking, then it can go into project space. We write articles in WP namespace for the benefit of our readers, not the editors. I'm sorry you've spent time on this but I rather think we were mislead on the importance or worth of this list and book. Now that a copy has been found, its shortcomings as anything useful to WP are apparent. To have editors waste more time on this would be a crime. BTW: the article was deleted due to copyright concerns and the history incompletely restored when those concerns were addressed. Colin° 21:31, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

It must have been your copyvio deletion and the subsequent restoration that lost all the prior history and mistakenly made it look like I created the article. See the logs for the page, and User talk:Gene Nygaard/2005Jul-2006Jan#Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD. Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The IP-address you mentioned there on my talk page was probably the original creator, though I don't see anything about it on User talk:202.138.112.252 before your copyvio notice. It had been discussed somewhere, most likely on the article's talk page, in more stuff that has vanished into the ether.

Curiously, if you go to the history of the talk page for the article, it shows 17 talk page entries which predate my supposed creation of the article on 31 December 2005. What is going on here, anyway? Can you figure it out? Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:48, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore, even that first entry on the talk page is a pretty clear indication that the article had been in existence for some time before then (and it is likely before then that most of the editing I did too place). THat first talk page entry says:

This page was made into a redirect to List of scientists but I reverted it because this article references one particular book and so the content of the redirect and the content of the article would not be the same. Qaz (talk) 02:58, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:59, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The log shows that the article was deleted by User:Quadell on 20 Feb 2006 as a copyvio, then restored two days later by User:David.Monniaux when the author apparently released the list under the GFDL. However, for some reason David only restored the most recent revision (yours) rather than all the revisions, making it look like you created the page. Admins do have the option of selectively restoring revisions; it allows them to remove libel and whatnot from page histories without the need for oversight. Why David did it in this case I don't know - it might have been to do with the permission, or it might have been a simple mistake. You'd have to ask him.

On the main point though I agree with Colin; with the article's many inadequacies which I've outlined, I don't see that "useful cross-links" is a good enough reason to overcome WP:V, WP:N, WP:BK and WP:UNDUE. I'm sorry that the good work you put into cleaning up this page was in vain, but there really is nothing here to merit an article. Iain99 22:06, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. —Iain99 22:25, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete very simply as a non-notable book. Someguy1221 (talk) 22:42, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Per the nominator, the book's not notable. I see the argument for keeping as a reference list of top-scientists, but no Gauss?! Heisenberg?! Einstein?!? It's a bit too controversial to be useful, bearing in mind that it's ultimately just one man's informed opinion. The Zig (talk) 22:43, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep/merge There are still some redlinks. I'm not seeing a good list to merge these into and don't think the list should be deleted until we've got them all. Colonel Warden (talk) 23:10, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
  • A quick flick through some of the redlinks suggests that many or most are already redlinked from other lists; for example Thomas Lewis (cardiologist) is redlinked from these articles, Saul Winstein is redlinked from here; others only seem to be redlinks only because they point to uncommon variants of the person's name which nobody's bothered to redirect yet; for example I've just redirected Gerald Mayer Rubin to Gerald M. Rubin. Others might just not be very notable - after all, the author's selection is idiosyncratic at best, and a hundred word biographical sketch in an obscure book does not in itself confer notability, however grand the book's title. However, if anyone thinks the redlinks retain value as a to do list, it would be better to keep them on a Wikiproject's subpage than in article space, as the list has no inherent value as an article. In fact, the redlinks are already preserved at User:Lambiam/RedlinkedScientists, so the information would not be lost by removing this from article space. Iain99 23:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
    • I'm pretty sure it started out with over 900 redlinks. A good number of them were just red because appropriate redirects hadn't been made; Misplaced Pages already had the articles, but the names were originally just blindly linked as they appeared in the book. OTOH, there were also blue links to inappropriate articles. But even with that, much fewer than half of them on the list had articles (whether they had been found or not) when this article started. This article ws one impetus for athe initial creation of a good number of articles, and for cleaning up a lot of the existing ones. Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:58, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. The multiple reasons for deletion have been amply explained. I note that Gene Nygaard says the article was extremely useful in creating cross-links between various forms of the names of these scientists. Pardon the personal note, but my room is full of things that at one time or other were extremely useful; plenty of them are now worn out, boring, mouldy or otherwise of no more than curiosity value, and the entire room is an unsightly mess. I'm surprised to hear that this article was useful, but if it was then let's be grateful for this as we put it out of its misery. ¶ Immediately above, the Colonel points out that there are still some redlinks, and is not seeing a good list to merge these into. A few seconds ago (and before reading Iain99's comment) I plonked a list of all these redlinks on the talk page of this AfD, so they'll survive the richly deserved deletion of this sixty-two kilobyte "article"; anyone is free thereafter to do anything with them. -- Hoary (talk) 00:04, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete as per nominator and my own arguments on the article's talk page. One bias-revealing stat I once worked out is the mean number of wikipedia articles in different languages, a decent indicator of someone's international fame, for different groups of scientists on the list. In November, for British scientists this was 3.5, for the rest of the world this was 13... There is no need for a list like this to artificially boost the UK's superiority complex with respect to science, though it is fun to compare the greater merits of listed people like Herbert Brereton Baker and the delightfully named Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland with notable absentees like Avicenna and Heinrich Hertz. Afasmit (talk) 00:39, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • To claim your original research here as evidence of bias is more just evidence of your own bias than anything else. Have you actually looked at the scope of most of the Wikipedias? Over 70% of them don't even have 1,000 articles. That "3.5" is about the total number who make any kind of a stab a comprehensiveness, isn't it?
  • Or are you just complaining because Chemical Ali didn't make the list, when he has links to articles in 19 other Wikipedias? Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:45, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Gene, don't get upset about this. I've probably put at least as much time in cleaning up this list as you. I'll just save a copy for myself now. Other much, much larger projects have been deleted in the past, like the index of people by last name.

It's sad how "original research" has become a dirty word; the wikipedia rule likely should not be interpreted as "don't check on your facts before writing." If I were to make a wikipedia article entitled "Bias in Philip Barker's Top 1000 Scientists list" you'd have a good point.

Your claim that "since the other language wikipedias are not comprehensive, the numbers have no meaning" doesn't make sense; in fact, if each were indeed comprehensive all listed 1037 scientists would occur in all languages. As it is now (and always will be), all wikipedias contain samples of articles someone somewhere thought was noteworthy enough to include, and this sampling did the statistics for me. Undoubtedly, there is a bias there too (some systematic, like mathematicians around the world seem to have really jumped on wikipedia, countries with multiple languages like Switzerland have a small head start, British historical figures have a wider exposure through the dominance of English-language text books, because of the size of the English wikipedia, lesser known foreign scientists get the English entry "for free", etc.), but it's not my bias and it will never explain why half the British listees had 3 or fewer wikipedia entries, and half of the international had 13 or more. Afasmit (talk) 03:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Mostly, I'm just saying your methodology if flawed. For one thing, having articles in many Wikipedias is anot a reliable indicator that someone is a "top scientist", which is why I mentioned Chemical Ali. Then there is the question of the significance of numbers like "3.5" and "13" when they range from zero to 90, and when they are not by any mans independent, with articles from one often being translated into another; and the more closely related the languages are, the more likely this is to happen. Like from one Norwegian Misplaced Pages to the other Norwegian Misplaced Pages. And the wide discrepancies in the numbers of speakers of each of the various languages. The very limited pool of active editors on some wikipedias will skew the results greatly. The methods you use to determine nationality can skew the results too.

And nowhere is the methodology more flawed than in your talking about a "mean" above, and then talking as if it were a median in your last sentence. We don't even know what you were trying to measure, let alone how accurate the implementation of that determination was. Gene Nygaard (talk) 06:42, 13 February 2008 (UTC) originally posted not logged in, 69.57.91.185 06:32, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, my bad. I meant to type median of course. Darn the nitwits that came up with those easily mixed up names. You could have just said "by the way, you meant to say 'median' " of course.

With respect to Chemical Ali, and I trust you're not implying that most foreign scientists are terrorists, I'm only comparing people on the list, all presumably there because they were noteworthy for their scientific work and not their notoriety.

It seems you think the English language is some four-fold disadvantageous for scientists to be included in foreign language wikipedias. I suspect it is rather advantage instead (e.g. the texbook issue I mentioned above, most foreigners will look in the English wikipedia to translate biographies from, as this tends to be the second language people know, etc.). Also, for scientists from the US, Australia, South Africa, Canada, etc. the median number of foreign wikipedia articles was 11, not that much different from the 14 for non-English speaking countries. I think Barker just had access to a British biographical dictionary. You seem very interested in this. I can send you the excel file if you like. Afasmit (talk) 09:48, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep Though the content draws from one book expressing one man's opinion, it is a cite to a published source, and it's superior to an original research list of a thousand scientists. It's also the basis for adding other information. Though the author packaged it in a form that would make it more marketable, this isn't a countdown (although Casey Kasem could have sent out a dedication right before introducing #181, Sir Isaac Newton). It's a published list of persons, not all of them well-known, who made notable contributions to science. If someone else has published a similar list of 1,000 persons, merge the articles. It appears that 38 of these names are red-links, which means either that the entry has been misspelled or that there's not an article about that person. If Misplaced Pages has articles about the other 962, then that's pretty good. Perhaps it's not as popular an encylopedia topic as, say, List of SpongeBob SquarePants episodes, season three but there's room for all the disciplines in Misplaced Pages. Mandsford (talk) 02:49, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • It's also the basis for adding other information. Could you elaborate? ¶ If someone else has published a similar list of 1,000 persons, merge the articles. It's highly unlikely that any such book (or web list or whatever) would have precisely the same title. Let's suppose that its title were slightly different but its purpose indisputably identical. We can also assume, I think, that this second person's top thousand would not be the same as the "thousand" (1037) here. Indeed, the union of the two sets would almost certainly exceed 1037. How might one title the resulting article? I can't think of anything neater than "Union of lists of top thousand scientists", but to me that sounds a distinctly strange article. (Actually the very notion of there being a "top scientists" sounds odd to me, but that's another matter.) ¶ It appears that 38 of these names are red-links, which means either that the entry has been misspelled or that there's not an article about that person. If you're looking at my derivative on this AfD's talk page, I didn't count them, and I can't guarantee that I didn't sleepily overlook something. (Simple to check: before the article is deleted, get its HTML source -- I don't mean the editable preprocessor source -- and grep this for the string "action=edit".) But however accurate or inaccurate the list, as it's on this AfD's talk page it will outlive the article and can be used in any way you wish. Indeed, any interested user or project could put it into a "to do" list elsewhere. -- Hoary (talk) 03:28, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • It is not a cite to a published source, it is an article about a published source, and there are different criteria as a result. If someone wants to use this crappy list to prop up the notability of another article as a reference, well, I don't think they'll need to for any of these scientists, but they can give it a go. That doesn't mean that the published source deserves its own article, though. There are no cites for this book to any other published sources at all. --Ig8887 (talk) 03:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Please note: we are discussing the deletion of a book article, not a WP list that happens to cite a book. The creation of such a WP list would either be POV or necessarily involve sythnesis of sources, and fail on that account. Colin° 08:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. No one is debating that the people ON the list are notable or not; what is in question is whether the list and book THEMSELVES are notable. Therefore, we need third-party reliable sources discussing the list or the book and assigning notability to this specific list of 1000 scientists. Was this list debated in any scientific journals? Was it reviewed by the New York Times? Did anyone even notice that the book was published? You would think that if the book itself was notable, the exclusion of key scientists like Einstein would have been the subject of uproar, controversy, or at least simple observation by third-party media. The fact that it was not implies that this work is merely another insignificant book written by one man who happened to be lucky enough to con a publisher into printing it for him. The "useful" redlinks have already been preserved, leaving no reason for this regurgitation of a non-notable book's table of contents to remain in Misplaced Pages. --Ig8887 (talk) 03:16, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Comment: I decided to do a little research into what sort of company WOULD be conned into publishing this. It turns out that "The Book Guild Ltd." offers "partnership publishing" which is a fancy word for vanity press. A Google serch revealed at least one writer's website that indicated that The Book Guild sometimes asked for "contributions" from prospective authors looking to have their book published. So it's likely that this author didn't even have the editorial oversight of a single editor, he simply ponied up some money and put his opinions into print. --Ig8887 (talk) 03:25, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete as before, ZERO external sources. This book fails the fundamental criterion of notability - that external sources of information exist. Even if it passes that criterion, there's no reason in the world for us to have an article that is merely some random person's list of scientists. --B (talk) 03:45, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete unless and until an independent review of the book, published in a notable journal or similar, is cited. dab (𒁳) 08:57, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. Said keep last time, but that was a year and a half ago and there has been no improvement whatsoever since then. Batmanand | Talk 09:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Keep. I am not sure where the worry about a vanity publisher emerges.The book has been published by Orient Lingman ,one of teh biggest and most respected publishing houses in Asia

The publication house has publishes many bestsellers including Wings of Fire by Abdul Kalam.And thsi is not a random list-it has been authored by a noted UK archaelogist

and has a forward by a top UK historian of science .Should that not be a reason enough?

(Delhite (talk) 11:52, 13 February 2008 (UTC))

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