User:Geo Swan/Evaluating notability for lesser prizes and awards

This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Evaluating notability for lesser prizes and awards

This essay suggests that when the highest level award, medal or honor in a field can make the recipient notable all by itself, being the recipient of a lesser award, medal or honor confers a lesser level of notabity, that added to other factors that confer notability, can add up to making that individual notable.

It is rare for an individual to meet the wikipedia's notability criteria for a single event, but the wikipedia's topic specific notability guidelines lay out areas where, by long tradition, exceptions are made. Here is a partial list of single events that make an individual notable, all by themselves:

1. WP:POLITICIAN says having held a national office is sufficient to establish an individual's notability, all by itself;
2. WP:Notability (academics) says having held a named professorship establishes notability, all by itself;
3. WP:Notability (academics) says having winning: "... major academic awards, such as the Nobel Prize, MacArthur Fellowship, the Fields Medal, the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History, etc., always" establishes notability;
4. WP:Notability (sports) says winning an Olympic medal is sufficient to establish an individual's notability, all by itself;
5. The WP:SOLDIER essay, while not an accepted guideline itself, is often treated as one, and it says winning a nation's highest award for courage is sufficient to establish an individual's notability, all by itself.

However, while Wikipedia:Notability (academics) is clear, that academic recognition not sufficient to establish notability all by itself can nevertheless be a factor that adds to an individual's notability, WP:SOLDIER leaves this issue unaddressed.

WP:BLP1E and WP:BIO1E make clear that single events are rarely sufficient to establish notabilty all by themselves. So the notability of almost all of the individuals for whom we carry biographical articles was established by considering multiple factors.

Some members of the military wikiproject treat medals, awards, and other signs of recognition, as if the notabilty they conferred was binary. The way they treat medals and awards is as if they either satisfied the criteria to confer total notability, or they conferred zero notability.

I suggest that both common sense and consistency with WP:Notability (academics) would require require recognizing that significant awards, medals and recognition that do not rise to the highest level nevertheless are a factor that -- combined with other factors -- can help establish the awardee's notability.

How significant should an award be before we should consider it a factor that confers meaningful notability? I suggest that any award that is worth mentioning is a factor that conveys some notability.

Wikipedia:Notability (academics) says, for instance, that awards and prizes, at the high school level, do not confer notability. WP:Notability (sports)#High school and pre-high school athletes says "High school and pre-high school athletes are notable only if they have received, as individuals, substantial and prolonged coverage that is (1) independent of the subject and (2) clearly goes beyond WP:ROUTINE coverage." Some high school athletes are so skilled that it is widely anticipated that they will soon be a prize new hire for a professional sports team. That would be non-routine coverage, worthy of mention. Similarly, some individuals who entered high school science fairs, entered experiments related to their highly admired later work. In that case their high school science fair participation would confer notability. Or if Carl Sagan was a guest judge, and went on record that Josephine Blow's experiment was the best he had ever seen, that too would make her participation notability. Finally, consider John Kerry's Purple Hearts -- we have a category for biographies of recipients of the purple heart, which only contains about 1300 entries. The Purple Heart is widely distributed. Does this this relatively low number reflect that those drafting the BLP articles often don't think being awarded a Purple Heart is worth mentioning? If so it is worth mentioning in Kerry's article as critics of Kerry suggested Kerry received relatively trivial wounds a stronger man would have laughed off without treatment, and exploited them to get out of combat after only a few months. And I suggest that this, in turn, would make Kerry's Purple Hearts confer more notability than if there had been no controversy.

I suggest that any honor or award that would be worthy of mention if the individual's notability was not in question confers some notability -- that "worth of mention" == "some notability".

I suggest that medals below the level of the highest of the individual's nation, but which are still worth mentioning, confer some notability.

I think those of the military history project have decided to only pay attention to the formal stated criteria for awarding medals, and aren't recognizing how arbitrary and how vulnerable to political influence the decision as to which level of medal an individual should receive can be. Note the Pat Tillman example.

Pat Tillman was an American athlete, whose patriotism lead him to volunteer for active military service, instead of earning a huge payday in professional sports. That alone should make us recognize he was a hero. Volunteering made him a hero, just as heroic as any other volunteer. Sadly Tillman died early in his deployment to Afghanistan, early in the Afghan war. Initially, he was described as dying while heroically saving the rest of his unit, when they were ambushed, and he was posthumously awarded a Silver Star. In fact Tillman's green unit were not ambushed. His green unit got spooked, thought they were being ambushed, and Tillman was killed by paniced comrades who fired on his position. According to PBS the highly decorated David Hackworth wrote:

"The word is that Tillman did his best to turn off the friendly fire, that he reportedly exposed himself while yelling for it to stop and then was cut down. Under these circumstances a Soldier's Medal for noncombat-related heroism would have been the appropriate award. But someone with pull pushed for a Silver Star..."

I suggest the lesson of the Pat Tillman example is that some lesser awards are more notable than others, due to the surrounding circumstances, and that wise and non-partisan judgment call is required to reach a subjective conclusion as to how much notability each award confers.

I suggest being a cross-over polymath should make a lesser award or honor confer more notability. Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman was appointed to serve as a commissioner on the 1986 Space Shuttle Inquiry. Since he was not an aeronautical engineer this appointment conferred more notability than if he was appointed to the commission because it was his field. Similarly, he was an amateur artist, and had a gallery show where his drawing were sold to art patrons. That too would be an event that would convey some notability, if Feynman were an artist, and conferred more notability as evidence he was a cross-over polymath.