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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Andrej Bauer (2nd nomination)

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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 delete. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:15, 20 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Andrej Bauer

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AfDs for this article:
Andrej Bauer (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Subject is a Professor. He appears to fail WP:NACADEMICS, but it is a fairly narrow fail. I would go with a very weak delete at this time. I declined PROD as no valid reason was given on the PROD template and because I feel this warrants a discussion. Safiel (talk) 15:52, 24 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment Article was previously deleted at AfD, but that was ten years ago and he was a newly minted PhD at the time, making deletion the obvious choice. That is no longer the situation so the reasoning at the first AfD no longer applies. Safiel (talk) 15:55, 24 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: The deleting editor referred at one point to "self-promotion". So I checked the edit history and sure enough Bauer himself twice edited the page:
once to correct the town and date of his birth
once to change the field of study list from category theory and homotopy theory to constructive mathematics and 3 other fields
If this counts as self-promotion then we are all subject to deletion.
Bauer was a principal researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study during their seminar on Homotopy Theory. In fact, he apparently wrote most of the report summarizing that major initiative in mathematical theory of higher categories. He has worked with Steve Awodey, Michael Shulman, Thierry Coquand, and other major figures. How is he not notable?--Toploftical (talk) 21:03, 24 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have now made a major revision to the article with emphasis on notability.--Toploftical (talk) 23:42, 1 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. Class455 (talk) 12:55, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Class455 (talk) 12:55, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Slovenia-related deletion discussions. Class455 (talk) 12:55, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. The fact that he was a visiting scholar at a special semester at IAS does not make him notable -- that kind of thing is standard and happens to every moderately successful mathematician, usually on multiple occasions during their career. His mathematical footprint appears to have been fairly light thus far; MathSciNet gives him a grand total of only 105 citations, which is quite low. Presumably most of his work is in Computer Science, and GScholar give an h-index of 13; that's still pretty low, especially given that GScholar's h-index is an over-estimate as it includes citations to arXiv preprints and such. I looked at his webpage for more details, but I am not seeing anything else there to indicate notability per WP:PROF, such as journal editorships, named lectures, prizes/awards, etc. Just not seeing much here to hang one's hat on in terms of passing WP:PROF. Nsk92 (talk) 13:21, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - I am Andrej Bauer. I have now been told by Class455 (on his talk page) that even adding my own date of birth to my page is a Conflict of Interest. This is completely absurd and it makes a travesty of Wikipeida. Wikipedia once again demonstrates that they care more about their bureaucracy than attracting well-meaning contributors who have better things to do in life than to memorize a thousand Wikipedia policies. Go ahead, delete the page. I'll be proud to have been deleted twice. And don't forget to delete the Slovenian version, too. Oh wait, perhaps there is a Wikipedia policy which states that I cannot vote about myself? AndrejBauer (talk) 13:48, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You need to climb down off your high horse. Yes, even an innocuous edit of the type you describe by definition constitutes WP:COI, but that is not a significant reason to delete the article. When properly disclosed and managed, and confined to minor non-promotional edits, COI is perfectly fine and is no reason for deletion. There are thousands of pages on Wikipedia of that kind and they exist with no significant problems. If you notice, neither of the Delete voters above (myself, Class455 and the nominator) brought up the COI issue as a reason to delete the article here in this AfD discussion. The real issue is notability, in the sense of satisfying WP:PROF or WP:BIO or WP:GNG. If you can make the case for satisfying the requirements of one of these notability guidelines, then by all means, please do so. But if you just want to feel like a martyr on the pyre of righteousness, then indeed you should head for the exit sign. Nsk92 (talk) 15:13, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
So let me see if I understand this correctly. Providing my date of birth and field of work is a conflict of interest and/or self-promotion, but making a case for my own notability is not? Honestly? Just delete the page, please, and let this end. I made my opinion clear by casting my vote. I am not notable enough and I think you made a reasonable assessment. AndrejBauer (talk) 15:37, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
"Providing my date of birth and field of work is a conflict of interest and/or self-promotion, but making a case for my own notability is not?" In a strictly formal sense, that's correct. WP:COI makes it clear that COI editing refers to editing of Wikipedia articles. Edits in project space, such as editing of talk pages of articles, AfD discussions etc, are not considered to be COI edits (provided, of course, the relation to subject of the article is properly disclosed). So, you can make a case in an AfD that you are notable; or you can make a case at the talk page of an article about yourself that some favorable piece of information about you should be included in the article. Doing that would be perfectly fine, although, of course, it won't guarantee that your argument will carry the day. Nsk92 (talk) 16:10, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I would not dream of making a case for myself that I am notable. That would violate AndrejBauer:NOSLFPRMTN policy. AndrejBauer (talk) 16:27, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:09, 25 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete. Mathematics is a low-citation field so his citations on Google scholar don't give a convincing pass of WP:PROF#C1, but neither do they indicate any problem. And I think Bauer's own edits to the article can be discounted as an issue: they're the sort of thing anyone new to Wikipedia seeing an article about themself would do, and he's become aware of our autobiography policy and backed out the edits. The problem is, we don't have anything more than his position (full professor at a decent university) and citation record (good for pure mathematics but not enough to base a case for notability here) to go on. He's clearly a successful academic, and I think more accomplished than the median academic biography here on Wikipedia, but without verifiable evidence of notability I don't see how to argue to keep this article. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:22, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it may be cool computer art, but that's not a valid argument for keeping the article, it's basically a WP:ILIKEIT kind of argument. You need to argue on the basis of WP:PROF or WP:BIO or WP:GNG. Nsk92 (talk) 23:48, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree. I do not think WP:ILIKEIT applies here. I am not arguing about the article. I was just pointing out a source. The idea behind Random Art algorithm is extremely powerful. The program has been around for about 20 years and still attracts a lot of attention and produces remarkable effects by using a collection of simple rules. Very early it has been spotted as a prime example of hash visualization and user authentication through image recognition.Tomo (talk) 02:11, 2 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Brianga (talk) 16:03, 2 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, —UY Scuti Talk 20:16, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete (although a weak one)
  1. The subject's field is Computational Mathematics which is one of the low cited fields in Computer Science. For this, I usually tend to look for an h-index > 20 as opposed to the > 30 in other fields like security and computer vision. The current h-index of 13 is a bit on the low side unfortunately, but will probably increase.
  2. I don't see significant coverage, so WP:PROF needs to be satisfied. Unfortunately, I'm unable to see the chair/distinguished professor requirement being fulfilled or significant coverage of any other research work. Neither are any of the other requirements satisfied.
I feel this is WP:TOOSOON right now but the subject may be notable in the future. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 06:48, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • This deletion was originally proposed by User 50.252.116.51 who is apparently the same person as User:William Of Orange–see "I have proposed this article for deletion William Of Orange 14:21, 24 August 2016" on Talk:Andrej Bauer. Both these user identities are throwaway user pages and were apparently created solely for making this single deletion nomination. I must admit, I am curious as to who this person is.
  • I am truly baffled as to why some people think this article should be deleted. If this guy is deleted for not being notable, then at least half of the mathematician articles in Wikipedia also qualify for deletion. I will be glad to provide a list.--Toploftical (talk) 19:42, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • You need to offer something more than angry recriminations as a reason to keep the article. Specifically, you need to indicate how and why it satisfies some specific criteria of WP:PROF. In your post above you explained that Bauer has worked in several important modern fields. But you need to show that Bauer's contributions to those fields are widely regarded as important. In his case all we seem to have to go by at the moment is the citability data in GScholar (which gives him a fairly low h-index of 13), and in MathSciNet, which gives him a total of 107 citations. That's it, there is nothing else that I can see in terms of indicating passing WP:PROF: no prestigious awards, no journal editorships, no named or particularly prestigious lectures (like ICM talks), no named chair/professor appointments, no being elected fellow/member of scholarly societies, no publications in particularly prestigious journals (for Math things like Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae and the like), or anything of the sort. Compare that to some of the other names you mention above. Lets put aside someone as obviously famous as Vladimir Voevodsky and look at Thierry Coquand. GScholar gives him an h-index of 27, with top cited publications of 1425, 436, 305, 285, 249, 219. That alone would easily make him pass WP:PROF#C1. Then, according to his CV, he won a Wallmarska prize from the Swedish Royal Academy of Science in 2001, gave the Skolem Lecture in Oslo in November 2005, and was elected a member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg in 2011. Plus he is an editorial board member of two journals, and was a guest editor of two special issues of journals. Perhaps that's an extreme case, but this is a very different picture from what we have in the case if Andrej Bauer, where, at least for the moment, nothing of the sort has been brought to light. Nsk92 (talk) 20:41, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
      • I should qualify my comments by saying that Tomo's post above might actually have been onto something. Part of Bauer's work seems to do with computer visualization and computer art. If he produced some program/software that is widely used and is influential, that fact wouldn't necessarily up in standard citability searches, because people often cite the use of software in weird ways (e.g. in the form of footnotes rather than as bibliography items; I must admit that I have been guilty of doing that myself until some colleagues taught me that the proper way to cite the use of computer software package is to reference the user manual as a bibliography item.) However, if that is indeed the case here, and if Bauer has developed some widely influential computer art/visualization software, this fact still needs to be clearly demonstrated in convincing some way by sufficiently many references to independent WP:RS. Then I would be happy to change my vote to 'keep'. Nsk92 (talk) 00:03, 14 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        • Some of Bauer's work involves computer visualization, computer art, and authentication schemes based on visual recall of random images. It is a rather technical field and a bit above my pay grade. But if you think if would help, I know how to to find the appropriate sources and could document that material. It will take a bit of work. Will I have any warning if the article was about to be deleted? I am quite sincere that I do not understand why his notability is in question. When I look at User profiles for "Andrej Bauer" I see Cited by 701. I am not sure exactly what that number means but it seemed impressive to me. It is true that Bauer has apparently not published anything in Annals of Mathematics. But that is not the appropriate venue for the field that he is in. He has published lots of stuff in Annals of Pure and Applied Logic and the Journal of Logic and Computation and other journals in his several fields of interest. Moreover, a lot of Bauer's work is in online forums like GitHub and I am not sure Wikipedia fully recognizes work published in such forums. BTW, I am amazed that nobody has written an article for Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. It is cited in over 70 Wikipedia articles. You mentioned the h-index of Thierry Coquand in GScholar. I could not find this number. Could you tell me how to link to this information and also to the corresponding info for Bauer.--Toploftical (talk) 03:37, 15 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
            • 701 is the total number of citations in GScholar. When you click on the blue link with his name there, it takes you to his Scholar profile page where you can also see more detailed data, including his h-index (according to GScholar) of 13. Regarding 701 as a total number of citations, and h-index of 13 as the GScholar h-index: these are respectable numbers but no more than that. For pure math these are fairly average numbers for an active mathematician at Bauer's career stage, and for someone a part of whose work is in Computer Science, where publication and citation rates are higher, these numbers are kind of low. Compare these results with those of Thierry Coquand, where the top cited paper alone nets 1426 citations, more than twice 701 grand total of Bauer. About the journals. Annals of Mathematics is the premier mathematical journal for the entire Mathematics. Every mathematician, regardless of his/her area, be it logic, model theory, homotopy theory, differential equations, graph theory, number theory or whatever, dreams of publishing a paper there, and having done so is viewed as the signature achievement of one's career. So if a logician or a model theorist or a homotopy theorist has not published a paper in the Annals of Mathematics, it is certainly not because it is not "the appropriate venue" for their field. The two journals that you mentioned Annals of Pure and Applied Logic and "Journal of Logic and Computation" are OK journals, but they certainly don't have the same standing (either in math or in CS or as interdisciplinary journals) as Annals of Mathematics. For comparison, Journal Citation Reports gives Annals of Mathematics the impact factor of 3.116, while APAL gets 0.582 and JLC gets 0.585. Now, I am in pure math myself, but my colleagues tell me that in theoretical CS the most prestigious publications are actually not journals but conference proceedings of two premier conference series called FOCS and STOC. I did not see anything like that in Bauer's record either (although perhaps for computer visualization these venues do not really apply). To answer your last question about how I computed the h-index for Thierry Coquand in Scholar. I had to do this manually, using the definition of h-index and the results of GScholar search for his name [1]. I took the page with those results and counted down to find the latest n such the the n-th publication on the list has at least n citation. If I did not miscount, if was n=27. For some people, like Bauer, who have created their GScholar profile pages, the job is easier, because the h-index is already displayed there. But Coquand did not do that, and so his h-index had to be computed manually, from the results of the Scholar search. Nsk92 (talk) 13:17, 15 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
              • It is correct that STOC and FOCS are the top conferences in theoretical computer science, but they're both much more Theory A than Theory B, and Bauer's work fits Theory B better. Looking through Bauer's CS pubs in DBLP I see one 2002 paper in ICALP (the top European theory conference, and much more friendly to Theory B), and other than that only more specialized conferences. For visualization the top conferences would be SIGGRAPH or InfoVis. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:10, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Reply to Nsk92: I did some checking of the metrics that you are applying. I agree that some of them, the h-level of 13 for Bauer, is low compared with many mathematician articles in WP (although I did find a couple lower than that). But before I throw in the towel, I want to make a couple of points. First, the field that Bauer is in only comprises twenty or thirty people at most. One has to know higher category theory, computer science, type theory, homotopy theory and other things to even participate. Homotopy type theory, in particular, is very new. It is unfamiliar to most mathematicians and they would have little reason to cite papers in that field. To some extent, these people mostly talk to each other–on GitHub and the n-Category Cafe– for instance. That does not mean that type theory, for example, is not important–far from it.
You emphasized that Bauer has no papers published in Annals of Mathematics or Inventiones Mathematicae. Quite honestly, these journals do not have the same prestige they had ten years ago. For one thing, there has been a rebellion among some mathematicians against publishing in such expensive and proprietary journals, John Baez and Timothy Gowers, for example, refuse to publish in Inventiones (owned by Springer Science+Business Media) on principal. They believe that a high-quality math journal can be inexpensively produced outside of the traditional, and extremely profitable, academic publishing industry. This partly explains why the book Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics (in which Bauer is a principal co-author) is absolutely free and why much of the work done in the field is online in the aforementioned GitHub and open access sites such as arXiv. In short, I am just not sure that the usual metrics for estimating notability apply in this case.--Toploftical (talk) 13:16, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As an active professional mathematician myself, I can tell you that the big three, the Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae and Journal of the American Mathematical Society, remain enormously prestigious and influential. Of course, I am aware of Tim Gowers' endeavors and the Forum of Mathematics Pi and Sigma journals. It remains to be seen what the future of those journals will be because a huge portion of the mathematical community considers it an absolute anathema to make the authors pay for publishing their papers. But that is beside my main point. I am not saying that the fact that Baueur did not publish a paper in Annals/Inventiones/JAMS implies that he is not notable. But I am saying that we need some positive tangible evidence supporting the claim that he is notable. It is not enough to say that he works in an important area where some other famous people have done some famous work. It is also not enough to make a vague claim that the usual standards may not apply in this case. You still need to produce convincing positive evidence that this particular academic is in fact notable. Incidentally, regarding the journals: there are other highly prestigious journals, just below Inventiones, that are published by non-commercial publishers and with which people like Gowers and Baez have no problems: Duke, Acta Mathematica, Journal of the European Mathematical Society, for example. Plus Annals of Mathematics itself is quite affordable, as is the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. So people in Math concerned about high journal prices and looking for an elite journal need only avoid submitting to Inventiones. Plus since 2013 the Forum of Mathematics option set up by Gowers is available too. But WP:PROF offers many other ways of showing academic notability: Through prizes/awards, journal editorships, named/highly prestigious lectures, being an elected member/fellow of an academic society, etc. Or evidence of introducing some concept/idea/notion/innovation/theorem that turned out to be important in a particular subject. Etc. Nsk92 (talk) 14:02, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
          • Just to clarify my comment of "low cited field". While I don't have exact stats, my personal experience shows that Computational mathematics is one of the lower cited fields in Computer Science. This is particularly true if you compare it to vision or security where it is much easier to publish papers leading to an inflated h-index. Which is why when I vote on AfDs, I adjust my threshold for h-index. For someone in computational mathematics, an h-index of 20 indicates a pretty good record (while for someone in security I will demand a higher h-index > 30). --Lemongirl942 (talk) 04:00, 15 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Reply to Lemongirl942: You mention circumstances that would cause the h-index to be inflated. So is the h-index reliable or not? I hope the former is the case since so many people are depending on its accuracy. Are you arguing for or against Bauer's notability?--Toploftical (talk) 13:16, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • My own opinion is that the h-index can be ok as a way of comparing people who work on the same research topic but not when comparing people in different topics, even of the same general discipline, because of issues like the one raised by Lemongirl where different topics have different patterns of citation. One should also make sure to use the same citation index because different indexes give different numbers and some of them miss important publication venues (Web of Science is bad for CS for that reason). I would also add that my impression (without much evidence) is that it is much harder for computational topics such as the ones Bauer works on to get into Annals or Inventiones, as it is not the sort of mathematics that the people who run those journals prefer. So (like the h-index) not having a paper in those places is not evidence of any problem. But it is also not evidence of notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:31, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete I'm not sure whether I have a vote here as the person who originally nominated the page for deletion, I'd imagine that I do not. I maintain that the notability criterion here is not satisfied by the material on his page. I am not familiar enough with mathematical computer science to know the overall importance of the field, but the page in question almost certainly does not provide information useful to people interested in either the social or mathematical advancement of the field.
  • To respond to the thinly-veiled allegations above that I have some personal grudge against Professor Bauer, I refer you to my user page wherein it details that I am a graduate student in philosophy. I have no connection to the subject of the page outside of wikipedia edits (of course, I think the numerous other votes toward Delete suggest the irrelevance of this point). In the past I have similarly made suggestions of pages to delete, but since I am a scatterbrain my wikipedia accounts are only accessible via automatic logging associated with my computer. My university recently generously provided me with a new computer, and this page was the first I found after this that didn't seem to pass the notability criterion. Thank you all very much William Of Orange (talk) 20:02, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as still nothing actually confident for WP:PROF or frankly WP:AUTHOR since there's only a 100-limited number of library holdings; simply being a chief coordinator of the international olympiad is still not going to be enough for its own convincing article. SwisterTwister talk 00:50, 18 September 2016 (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.
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