Talk:Florin Abelès

Contested deletion

This article should not be speedily deleted for lack of asserted importance. Just have a look at the French Wikipedia to see how much more could be said about Abelès. --Oisguad (talk) 12:12, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I did look at the French page and that page does not provide any more sources of note. Please note also that each project is independent and just because he passes notability in one project does not automatically mean he passes all notability criteria in all projects. Domdeparis (talk) 12:20, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Notability

The list of his publications is very thin. His thesis and 1 text book of which he was one of a very large number of co-authors. I could find nothing that covers him elsewhere of any note and the French version of this page contains 1 other reference that is a simple list of winners of one of the specialised prizes given every year by the Société Française de Physique. Fails GNG and BASIC. --Domdeparis (talk) 12:18, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't speak Wikipedese. I have no idea what GNG and BASIC means. However, I know how many articles about sportsmen, starlets and fictional characters we have to wonder why we should not have a short concise article about a researcher who has made it into many subject indices. Abeles' matrix method is important. Therefore other colleagues may be interested to find some basic information about the creator of this method. -- Oisguad (talk) 12:22, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Compare also the case of Ernst Ising who never published again after his one noteworthy work. -- Oisguad (talk) 12:24, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Please read general notability guidelines and basic criteria by clicking on the blue links. A subject has to have in-depth secondary sources to prove notability. There is no judgement on Wikipedia about the value of the subjects. Any subject has to be notable, if his important work has been covered by independent publications these are what are needed to prove notability. You might also want to read this essay WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. If you believe that the article on Ernst Ising does not prove his notability you are free to try and improve it, tag it as being potentially non-notable or nominate it for deletion but just because it exists is not a justification to allow this article to stay. Domdeparis (talk) 12:34, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that you understood perfectly well why I was citing Ising: not because the Ising artcile should be deleted, but to demonstrate that a short publication list is not a sufficient argument against notability. Actually, the number of publications is not at all mentioned in WP:NACADEMIC. -- Oisguad (talk) 12:46, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I looked at WP:NACADEMIC. Abelès meets criteria 1, 2, 5, and 8. -- Oisguad (talk) 12:35, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I tried to explain that citing another article does not help to prove notability of this one hence the link to the essay, the deletion remark was just to make a point.

Concerning the Academic criteria;

1 has to be backed by sources which are missing from the article

2 it is questionable that it is "highly prestigious" it is not one of the Grands Prix

5 there is no mention of this in the article

8 there is not mention of this in the article

Domdeparis (talk) 12:57, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Now we are talking about what should be improved in the article, not about whether it should be deleted - right? In the meantime, #8 is mentioned in the article. This alone should be sufficient to close the notability discussion. -- Oisguad (talk) 13:00, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Indeed we are Oisguad, and to that extent I have added a citation to Optics and Photonics News, verifying most of the information in the article, not least his founding of Optics Communications - and removed the speedy deletion tag. As you were. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:05, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

thanks @Ritchie333: I was just in the middle of removing it myself as #8 was added after the nomination, but Oisguad just a remark, the claim of holding a named chair is contradicted by the French version. If you have sources to support this you may want to modify the French version. Domdeparis (talk) 13:12, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Also, this was a discussion about WP:CSD#A7, not notability. All that is required to avoid speedy deletion is a claim that the article can be properly expanded. So pointing links towards WP:GNG etc is not actually helpful in this specific context - they are what is required if the article went to a full AfD debate. User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to A7 has more. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:15, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree but in the original article this is the information given

"Florin Abelès (born 1922 in Galați, Rumania, died April 12, 2005)[1] was a French physicist, specialized in optics.

In his doctoral thesis, Abelès developed a transfer-matrix formalism to compute the transmission and reflection of light by thin dielectric layers."

being a physicist and having a doctorate is not a credible claim to significance there are probably hundreds of thousands of people with the same qualification and A7 applies to articles where there is no CSS and in WP:CSS it says that there is a 2 part test

"Credible claim of significance" is a two-part test: Credible and significant. A good mental test is to consider each part discretely:

a) is this reasonably plausible?

b) assuming this were true, would this (or something that 'this' might plausibly imply) cause a person to be notable? Or, in line with point 6 above, does it give plausible indications that research might well discover notability?

hence my quoting GNG to help explain to the author the rationale. Domdeparis (talk) 13:27, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

But there's an important point in WP:NPP too, which says "Tagging anything other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism or complete nonsense only a few minutes after creation may only serve to annoy the page author." Anyone active in the last 15 years who meets WP:ACADEMIC will generally have at least one online reliable source confirming their post, which can be obtained simply by dropping their name into Google. That's what I did here. Even if I don't think somebody meets the criteria (such as Paola Ramos Villegas), I prefer to refer it to AfD instead. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:45, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Point taken Domdeparis (talk) 14:23, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Not so short publication list

In the above discussion, it was wrongly assumed that Abelès only wrote the few works listed in the BNF bibliography page. This list, however, is only concerned with books, and ignores journal contributions. Simply run Google scholar on "author:f abeles" -"fb abeles" -"hf abeles" to find many journal articles authored or coauthored by our Abelès. -- Oisguad (talk) 07:26, 4 April 2017 (UTC)