Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Luboš Motl (4th 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 keep. Time to close this. Consensus is near-unanymous that Motl passes NPROF and NACADEMIC and NWHATEVERELSE. Future nominators are strongly advice to consider all the relevant guidelines for notability; most string theorists rarely get the kind of coverage that GNG may require, but that is precisely why we have all those authors things beginning with N. Drmies (talk) 01:24, 8 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Luboš Motl (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Fails WP:GNG - no significant coverage in reliable, independent sources. PeterTheFourth (talk) 09:57, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Czech Republic-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 10:28, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 10:30, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 10:30, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Passes WP:Prof#C1 on basis of GS citations. Please will nominator explain what steps he took to follow WP:Before? Xxanthippe (talk) 12:14, 1 October 2018 (UTC).[reply]

@Xxanthippe: Hi Xanthippe. Could you elaborate on your technique here? The subject of the article has written what seem to be a large number of papers, but I don't believe google results alone establish notability - not even in the specific page you've linked, which states Simply having authored a large number of published academic works is not considered sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1.. PeterTheFourth (talk) 12:46, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Easily passes WP:NACADEMIC based on citation counts (2,700 according to GS) in a low-citation subfield of physics. Notability further strengthened by substantial coverage in the NYT article (2nd ref) and numerous mentions in first-class popular and scientific journals. Further strengthened by French coverage of the book on Bogdanov brothers, further strengthened by sources in Czech, further strengthened by various controversies (unfortunately not well covered in RSs) surrounding his departure from Harvard and his blog. Rentier (talk) 12:32, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Rentier: Hi Rentier. Do you have any personal connection with the subject of the article? PeterTheFourth (talk) 12:40, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@PeterTheFourth: None whatsoever. Rentier (talk) 12:42, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:PeterTheFourth, really--that line of questioning is unwarranted. Drmies (talk) 00:26, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Rentier: Could you provide links to the sources in Czech? I'd like to check those out before I weigh in here. I JethroBT ^{drop me a line} 13:53, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

1. Týden: [1]
2. Novinky.cz: [2]
3. Some interview: https://technet.idnes.cz/higgsuv-boson-motl-0ao-/tec_vesmir.aspx?c=A120704_203648_tec_vesmir_mla
4. Some interview: https://ekolist.cz/cz/publicistika/rozhovory/lubos-motl-klimaticka-zmena-svet-neohrozuje-alarmiste-ano

These are supplementary, the real reason for keeping this article is WP:PROF. --Rentier (talk) 14:45, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak keep. Xxanthippe's point tips me over the line. I have added the article to the Wikidata item, revealing there are half a dozen articles on other versions of Wikipedia (I presume a bot delinked ours after it was recently deleted as an expired PROD), but regrettably there is a dearth of usable sources there, even plugging in the internet handle he sometimes uses, "Lumo" or "LuMo". I find scads and scads of blog coverage, and he's still being consulted by the press: The Economist, 2016, on Czech name change, РИА Новости (Russian), on mathematics. But I have been unable to find out what he's actually doing to update the article. Yngvadottir (talk) 12:36, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete nn and vanity article.Tip.Stall (talk) 13:35, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• LOL so Sarah Jeong gets an article that doesn't even mention the only thing she is famous for, her racist #cancelwhitepeople, while this guy, with more publications, is threatened for deletion. His point is literally proven correct, men with a higher impact, are discriminated against, even here at AfD. Per nominator, being a professor even at Harvard fails GNG. Keep being sexist/racist wikipedians. 71.197.186.255 (talk) 15:00, 1 October 2018 (UTC) — 71.197.186.255 (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]

LOL indeed. Just compare this with Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Sabine_Hossenfelder Rentier (talk) 15:14, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For those wondering what's going on, this nomination seems to have stemmed (indirectly) from a twitter spat over this talk given at CERN last week. SmartSE (talk) 15:33, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've struck this. This is a deletion discussion, not a platform for editorializing. I JethroBT ^{drop me a line} 19:42, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Eight papers on Google Scholar with 100+ citations, five of which are clearly very highly cited. The comparsion with Sabine Hossenfelder is not completely unreasonable. Still gaining 100 citations per year despite having published nothing new since 2007. He's also fairly regularly mentioned in or quoted by the media, in publications as diverse as The Economist, New Scientist, Wired (magazine), Time (magazine), and BBC News. I get that people don't like him, but that's not a valid deletion argument. Fundamentally nothing has changed since Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Luboš Motl (3rd nomination). Jonathan A Jones (talk) 15:45, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment His citation profile doesn't look that great for a string theorist, honestly. That's a field which can rack up the counts and the h-indices (Ed Witten is the record-holder, after all). Comparing Motl to, say, Barton Zwiebach, the latter has 41 publications that break into the triple-digit range on Google Scholar. Motl has 8. Clifford V. Johnson has 19. Tom Banks has 46. Matthew Kleban and Marika Taylor both have an h-index of 27, versus Motl's 18. (Hossenfelder, mentioned above, works on generally less-cited approaches to quantum gravity that are not string theory and also has an h-index of 27.) Remember, the point of WP:PROF is not to judge whether someone is a respectable academic doing competent work, but to judge whether they stand out from the average. So, while there may well be a #C7 pass here, I'm hesitant to say that there is a #C1. It would help if the various controversies Motl has thrown himself into were documented in reliable sources, not just blogs and wikis. XOR'easter (talk) 16:23, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Other people from Category:String theorists who are roughly contemporaneous with Motl: David Berenstein, h-index 36; Raphael Bousso, 45; Thomas Faulkner, 24; Steven Gubser, 72; Sergei Gukov, 40; Veronika Hubeny, 37; Amer Iqbal, 24; Shamit Kachru, 67; Shiraz Minwalla, 41; Asad Naqvi, 21; Horațiu Năstase, 30; Nikita Nekrasov, 51; Yasunori Nomura, 52; Richard Thomas, 27; Anzhong Wang, 38. XOR'easter (talk) 20:37, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't think comparing h-indexes is the right way to test whether the publications of someone who stopped publishing 11 years ago are of similar impact as the publications of someone who is still publishing. What's relevant is the peaks, not how many more moderately-well-cited papers he has (or in this case hasn't) continued to crank out. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:18, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • Even by the "how high are the peaks" standard, Motl just doesn't seem to stand out to me. Berenstein has 17 papers in the triple-digit range, Bousso has 16, etc. Even Thomas has 10, and he skews more to the math side than the physics. I can see a WP:PROF#C7 pass, but not a WP:PROF#C1. XOR'easter (talk) 14:13, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. In case anyone else was wondering, the "OSVČ" on his Google Scholar profile apparently means self-employed in Czech, and his publication record stops in 2007, the last year our article records him as being an assistant professor. Normally, academics who flame out at that level do so too soon to have achieved academic notability. But the lack of notability in those cases is not caused by their having left, but by not having achieved enough before they left. In his case, he has achieved enough (in highly cited publications) to convince me of a pass of WP:PROF#C1. Once notable, always notable. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:12, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep I agree with XOR'easter that the spirit of special notability criteria for academics is not to include everyone who has a seemingly high number of citations in their publications, it's to recognize people who are notably influential in their field. On its own, the number of citations is of limited use. An important note in the criteria is that Citation measures such as the h-index, g-index, etc., are of limited usefulness in evaluating whether Criterion 1 is satisfied. They should be approached with caution because their validity is not, at present, completely accepted, and they may depend substantially on the citation database used. And yet these very metrics are being used as the basis for retaining this article. XOR's comments also suggest this level of citation is not particularly remarkable in this field. I was concerned that that the NYT article was the only source providing substantive coverage of Motl, but the context around the interviews from Czech sources and pattern of recognition of his expertise between The Econonmist, РИА Новости, and other sources above suggest this should be retained. I JethroBT ^{drop me a line} 19:38, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep- Per all above. The arguments for this being a vanity page, or that he doesn't meet WP:PROF somehow, do not convince me. Reyk _YO! 07:16, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep very well known physicist. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:47, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete honestly the article only describes a good academic curriculum vitae (like other thousands) and only lists the names of his best professors and the main fields of his academic work. Thousands of researchers had good professors and worked on interesting fields of research, but I honestly don't see anything special in just "doing your job well". It seems to me that Mr. Motl wrote this autobiographical article only because he was recently involved in a dispute over gender inequality, and I find nothing special even in this. --Fredericks (msg) 23:37, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article was started in 2004, so the recent Strumia nonsense can't have anything to do with it. Reyk _YO! 08:53, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The thing with academic biographies is that becoming a professor at a top institution is by itself an indication of the person having made a significant impact on the field and thus being notable according to WP:PROF. In most cases, this is confirmed by examining citation counts or library holdings. Here, we have scholarly impact bigger than what is typically (actually, I have never seen an academic with more than a few hundred citations deleted) required to survive an AfD, plus extra coverage related to the subject's blog and other activities. Rentier (talk) 11:16, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Assistant professors, even at top universities, are seldom wiki-notable. (According to the strict letter of WP:PROF, even a full professor at Harvard wouldn't be notable by that title alone, although in practice I figure many full professors at Harvard would have done enough to be notable by other criteria.) XOR'easter (talk) 15:27, 4 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep I think the real question here is notability, and I daresay we are talking about Motl's notability as a physicist rather than as a personality. It is true that he is a notable critic on his blog of all theories that are not products of the String Theory program. I've had the pleasure to talk with Ed Witten and to hear Strominger and Maldacena speak, and I assure you all of them are more open minded and fair than Lubos Motl is. I don't know that LM has written any papers lately or made conference appearances that are notable either. But his contribution to framing the Weak gravity conjecture is a solid accomplishment that is sure to be significant in the coming months. Cumrun Vafa recent published a few papers aimed at collapsing the String Theory landscape, one with Paul Steinhardt a long time critic of that problem. So I would weakly agree with votes to keep this entry.

JonathanD (talk) 18:51, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep passes WP:NPROF. Why are we having this conversation? Is there some sort of political malarkey? —5⁴¹²⁹ 06:25, 4 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • My guess is that there is a political motivation behind this AfD, connected with Motl declaring support for Alessandro Strumia and echoing his claim that men are the victims of discrimination too. The HEP community has just issued a statement [3] decrying that view. JonathanD (talk) 14:20, 5 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep - I am unfamiliar with WP:NPROF but it seems to me by reading the comments and looking at the references in the article that the subject does pass these requirements. Inter&anthro (talk) 18:47, 5 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep because you can get a Wikipedia article by being famous or by being infamous. You'd be hard pressed to attend a large string theory conference without hearing the story of Lubos discussed at least once. There's something romantic about the undergraduate prodigy to Harvard professor to raging asshole journey. Connor Behan (talk) 02:24, 6 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I am a mathematical scientist; I have never met Motl in person, but I am familiar with some of his doings. For me, the proposed deletion makes no sense.  TheSeven (talk) 10:02, 6 October 2018 (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.