Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Notable Iranian Mathematicians

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 no consensus. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:06, 16 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Notable Iranian Mathematicians

Notable Iranian Mathematicians (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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I was going to speedy this but it doesn't precisely fit any of the tags. So I'm nominating it for deletion per WP:NOTDIRECTORY. DrStrauss talk 19:33, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:20, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:20, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Iran-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:20, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• There's plenty of such lists by nationality in Category:Lists of mathematicians. Think it needs a rename and clean up rather than deletion. Is it bad enough for WP:TNT? I'd say no. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:23, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment – To me, at the moment, it appears redundant with List of pre-modern Iranian scientists and scholars and List of contemporary Iranian scientists, scholars, and engineers. Note that we already have Category:Iranian mathematicians; a list could provide extra functionality, but that job is already being done by the other two lists just mentioned. The question is whether an additional list, specialized to just the mathematicians, would be useful; arguably it would. XOR'easter (talk) 20:54, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Only the pre-modern list contains mathematicians; the contemporary one only has, from my brief perusal, one, and that one's a redlink. This also brings up the question of whether mathematicians are considered scientists. It's a gray area.[1] Clarityfiend (talk) 11:41, 8 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. XOR'easter's comment is persuasive to me. Having a list of contemporary Iranian mathematicians (as we do, separately) is no different in principle from our other nationality-based lists such as List of American mathematicians, and these lists can certainly be kept. But conflating medieval Persia with modern Iran is problematic, and the nominated list is redundant with the two lists that don't do this conflation. I'm not happy with the name of List of pre-modern Iranian scientists and scholars but that's not a subject for this AfD to decide. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:20, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Addendum – OK, I just overhauled the page pretty thoroughly, basing it on the two lists I linked before, and adding to the mathematicians on those lists the person mentioned in the earlier version for whom we already had an article (Ramin Takloo-Bighash). Now it looks pretty much like the other entries in Category:Lists of mathematicians. That is, it looks nicer, but perhaps it is conflating things that shouldn't be conflated and ought to be deleted anyway. (My own mood went from "tilting delete" to "maybe clean up" to "leaning delete" again.) XOR'easter (talk) 21:25, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • And my version got reverted just now, which is probably a sign that I should take a break. XOR'easter (talk) 21:33, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete As per nomination. WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Kind Tennis Fan (talk) 01:28, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep A valid list of Wikipedia articles. WP:NOTDIRECTORY does not apply as this is type of article is allowed and is totally unproblematic in principle (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists, etc), and citing "as per nomination" is an argument to avoid. You can argue either way about whether it's appropriate to include both old Persian and modern Iranian - certainly there's a strong sense of shared culture and tradition between different civilisations in that region, and History of Iran covers everything from ancient to modern. The remaining question is whether it is a duplicate of List of contemporary Iranian scientists, scholars, and engineers, and since that article does not index by subject or allow sorting by subject, I think it's useful to have both lists. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:50, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete The page is too young for us to judge its popularity or usefulness. From a systems perspective (how a database designer would look at it), the article is simply the composite of Ancient Mathematicians and Modern Mathematicians. That means the same data exists in two places. When a datum exists in two lists, we can assume that one of the two lists is wrong. The addition of a mathematician to any article requires an addition to another article. In the long run, that's not a good design. Rhadow (talk) 12:50, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and rename to List of Iranian mathematicians. List appears to comfortably satisfy WP:LISTN, has many blue-linked entries. Ajf773 (talk) 06:55, 3 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Obviously the initial "m" in "mathematicians" should be in lower case under WP:MOS. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:26, 3 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep and rename per Ajf773 and LISTN. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:34, 8 August 2017 (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.