Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barry Trachtenberg

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. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:53, 12 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Barry Trachtenberg

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This does not appear to be a notable person. The article lists he is a history professor and that he appeared before a Congressional committee (the cited source for the latter is about a completely different person and does not mention him at all, so I am not sure this is correct). He is not a public figure, not well known, nor an especially prominent scholar. SantasLittleHelper123 (talk) 08:04, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not loving that this nomination is the first edit of a brand new account, because that definitely doesn't smack of being an incredibly unusual first edit by anyone actually new to this platform - as opposed to, say, the correction of a minor typo. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:40, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Has the nominator done a WP:BEFORE search? Because that would also be remarkable. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:43, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

One way or another, I'm going to oppose based on the in-depth coverage of this scholar's views since as least as far back as 2018, providing a clear WP:SUSTAINED and WP:GNG case (outside of WP:NACADEMIC). Indeed, the man appears to have been getting in notable scuffles with power and driving people up the wall for absolutely years. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:51, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry yes it is my first post. I am in this field (well history) and saw a link to the page. Perhaps we can focus the discussion on the merits of arguments rather than number of edits.

In terms of academic influence, look at Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0t_itmQAAAAJ&hl=e

A standard metric is an h index equal to number of years since Phd: his is 4 (see cited by tab)!! He only has 115 cites which would not get tenure at an R1 research university.

Now for the points you raise. How does getting into scuffles with power make someone notable? The article you link to simply debunks his work. And the other article is a single mention in Al-Jeezera. Several dozen scholars get far more media attention on this.

If there are more notable aspects related to this entry, please do add them. But I am not seeing them. SantasLittleHelper123 (talk) 16:43, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The subject's academic credentials are only the main concern if WP:NACADEMIC is the metric by which we are measuring it. If the metric is WP:GNG, all forms of WP:SUSTAINED, in-depth coverage in RS contribute. Iskandar323 (talk) 16:56, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok I guess you mean he is a public figure? I do a Google news source and omitting academic or local mentions I do not see much. In Google news I see two mentions in ten years to major media (your article and a la times one). How is this sustained coverage? SantasLittleHelper123 (talk) 17:43, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Academics and educators and History. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 12:37, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The case for WP:PROF#C5 (named chair) is a little unclear because he received the chair as an associate professor and was only promoted to full professor very recently [1]. Nevertheless he has a clear pass of WP:AUTHOR through many published reviews of his books. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:03, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The central measure of notability in academics is citations, and the totals I mentioned are in no way notable. Why is a book review notable (and how many are you referring to?). His books are almost exclusively read by academics so I think think that is the criteria the subject should be judged by. Notable historians and social scientists have hundreds of thousands of votes per book. SantasLittleHelper123 (talk) 19:41, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That should be "cites" not "votes" in .y last sentence. SantasLittleHelper123 (talk) 19:43, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Citation counts have some use in STEM fields whose practitioners generally published articles in journals and cite each others' papers. They work much less well in the humanities, where the major publications are books and the sign of recognition of a book is not its citations but its reviews. Some books are well cited despite that, but it is not usually a good indicator for notability. More, reviews fit much better into Wikipedia's notability ecosystem than citation. A review is an independent, reliably-published source with in-depth coverage of the subject's contributions. We now have 13 of these sources in the article. WP:GNG requires only two. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:07, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

All the reviews referenced on the page are academic book reviews. A book is itself considered notable for 2-3 reviews in reliable sources. Here we that and more (academic ones) for three books - so that's three notable works. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:46, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From a purely practical perspective, an entire "scholarly views" section could almost certainly be built out just based on these book reviews alone. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:47, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops. Oh yeah! Totally missed the sheer volume of reviews there on the page. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:45, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just to comment on David Eppstein's note about the timing of the named chair and full professor: in my experience (at least in the humanities; his might be the same or different) sometimes people get a major award or an offer from a university that would be a step up, and the counter-offer from the university to keep someone who was just recognized as a star is promotion, but this has to go through university systems incuding external review and might take a year or more, so the one thing a university can do is offer a named chair immediately to show their dedication while waiting for the system to play out. I know of a case of a composer at a good college, but not primarily known for music, who won one of the highest prizes for composition while she was an assistant professor, who was promoted over the course of three years to full professor, but was given a named chair immediately as a sort of "we'll keep our word" gesture to retain her. In any case, it still signals notability for WP cases. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 08:00, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's a fair point. (I have also seen cases where the timing was the opposite: it was actually faster to hire someone, despite that process usually being slow at high levels, than to grind through the bureaucracy needed to approve the named chair.) —David Eppstein (talk) 17:45, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Tenured to a named chair and significant reviews passing WP:NAUTHOR. scope_creep^Talk 20:36, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: With the reviews added, this is a pretty clear WP:NAUTHOR pass regardless of whether or not the chair he holds qualifies for WP:NPROF#5. Curbon7 (talk) 20:57, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Book reviews are not a central metric for academic books. If you do not like citations, then you would either look at reviews in important outlets or more so book prizes (at most two of the reviews listed could possibly be considered important outlets). All that as an aside, five or fewer reviews per book would not even stand out in the subject's own department. At a minimum mid-double digits would be considered notable. SantasLittleHelper123 (talk) 22:39, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They literally are. These aren't reviews written by a bookworm on Goodreads, these are academic reviews in published journals. The article currently lists 13 across 3 books. Curbon7 (talk) 22:59, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep -- WP:PROF#C5 -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 02:18, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, the nomination statement that the source about the congressional hearings "does not mention him at all" is false. It mentions him twice. The mention is in the subscriber-only part, not the free-to-the-public part of the source, but that should be irrelevant. Unfortunately both mentions are brief and in passing, so I don't think that source counts for much. It didn't source what it was used for here (a description of a political position taken by the subject) and for that reason I removed it. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:08, 6 May 2024 (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.