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. Since this was a contentious AfD, let me expand on my rationale a little bit. The fact that the subject meets the threshold set by WP:PROF is not in dispute: additionally, several editors have examined the citation record in more detail, and argued that this person has had a significant impact in their field. The delete arguments center on the lack of reliably cited information, and on the promotional nature of the article. The promotional aspect is a legitimate concern, but it has been addressed during the AfD, largely thanks to the work of Jytdog. There is clearly enough information for a neutral stub, and since notability has been established, there remains no policy-based argument for deletion. Vanamonde ( talk) 05:51, 15 March 2017 (UTC) reply

Ali Montazeri

Ali Montazeri (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)

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Fails WP:NBIO. The sources in the article are written by the subject, and searching mostly gives sources for the unrelated person Hussein-Ali Montazeri. GeoffreyT2000 ( talk, contribs) 17:41, 15 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Delete a non-notable public health figure. John Pack Lambert ( talk) 04:42, 18 February 2017 (UTC) reply

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Iran-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple ( talk) 08:59, 18 February 2017 (UTC) reply

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple ( talk) 08:59, 18 February 2017 (UTC) reply

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple ( talk) 08:59, 18 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Keep. Google Scholar shows a h-index of 54 and a dozen highly cited papers, suggesting the subject passes WP:PROF#C1. Does need additional independent sources but these are likely to be available, in Persian if not in English. –  Joe ( talk) 09:26, 18 February 2017 (UTC) reply
• Keep. Stunning pass of WP:Prof#C1 on GS. Xxanthippe ( talk) 21:39, 18 February 2017 (UTC). reply
• Keep -- Prof#C1 must be there for a reason, and this article passes. K.e.coffman ( talk) 01:37, 19 February 2017 (UTC) reply
• delete yes he has published, but there is a paucity of sources about him with which to craft an NPOV article. To folks making !votes that just cite " WP:Prof#C1 and the like, please actually read the guideline. None of those are automatic "passes" to N and there are no independent RS for the basic facts here. The current aritcle is just a puff piece advertising how great he is, created by a SPA ( contribs). Jytdog ( talk) 04:52, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

there are 11466 sources about his work on GS. Xxanthippe ( talk) 08:08, 20 February 2017 (UTC). reply

by "GS" I assume you mean "Google scholar" and if so, what you wrote is meaningless and i am sorry to say incompetent. Jytdog ( talk) 08:23, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

Thank you. Xxanthippe ( talk) 09:26, 20 February 2017 (UTC). reply

( edit conflict) That's uncalled for. Maybe you misunderstood what Xxanthippe was saying? Each of the papers that cite Montazeri are independent reliable sources that discuss his work, at least in a small way. Google Scholar (GS) gives us a good estimate of how many there are: 11466. Clearly then, there are plenty of sources for writing about Montazeri's work, even if we don't have many sources about him. Making this assessment is exactly why WP:PROF exists – and I can assure you that everybody in this discussion, being regulars at academic AfDs, has "actually read" the guideline. There is also the fact that it would be very unusual for an academic of Montazeri's standing not to have been the subject of biographical publications in his own country, although unfortunately nobody with the language skills to verify that is available. In other words, the current article may not be well written or well sourced, but sources are definitely available, so we can get there eventually. –  Joe ( talk) 09:27, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

No, Google scholar does not separately count citations. Also incompetent. Please read Wikipedia:Google searches and numbers and also Google_Scholar#Limitations_and_criticism. It includes lots of garbage and dupes and is game-able. The raw number is meaningless. Jytdog ( talk) 23:14, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

The more conservative citation metrics reported by Scopus (5484, h-index 41) and Web of Science (1776, h-index 20) also show that the subject is a highly-cited researcher. In my mind there's no doubt that he has made a significant impact in his field, passing WP:PROF#C1, and you haven't really offered an argument to the contrary, only repeatedly attacked our competence. –  Joe ( talk) 23:45, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

Thanks for looking at a more reasonable citation source. With regard to the putative lack of reason from my side, I said that there are insufficient sources about this person to create a well-sourced NPOV article about him. Which you have not addressed. Instead of actually working on the article you think is keep-able, you are wasting time making checkbox arguments that really don't mean anything, exactly per PROF. Jytdog ( talk) 00:12, 21 February 2017 (UTC) reply

And as I and others have mentioned multiple times above and below, WP:PROF does not require sources about a person. Sources about their work are sufficient to write a basic academic biography. –  Joe ( talk) 10:30, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Keep. Very clear pass of WP:PROF#C1. I know too little about Iranian academia to find other aspects of notability for him (for instance I don't know whether his being editor-in-chief of IJPHSD should count for #C8), and searches are made more difficult by the similarity of names to Hussein-Ali Montazeri, but it seems likely that they also exist for those who can read Farsi. — David Eppstein ( talk) 08:28, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply
• comment - I encourage folks who are !voting keep to spend some time and try to make an NPOV, well-sourced article about this person, instead of making abstract claims. Jytdog ( talk) 08:40, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

WP:Prof gives a useful guide to evaluating the notability of academics/scholars/researchers. Xxanthippe ( talk) 21:55, 20 February 2017 (UTC). reply

That has nothing to do with what I wrote, and additionally no guideline including PROF offers an automatic green light. We need to be able to write an NPOV, well sourced encyclopedia article. Jytdog ( talk) 22:37, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

@ Jytdog Your approach to Wikipedia editing can be seen on your user page. Xxanthippe ( talk) 23:04, 20 February 2017 (UTC). reply

Yes, I describe it there: User:Jytdog. Jytdog ( talk) 23:10, 20 February 2017 (UTC) reply

It seems that your views on Wikipedia editing are outside consensus. It might be better get your views agreed to on policy pages before attempting to impose them on individual AfDs. Xxanthippe ( talk) 06:24, 21 February 2017 (UTC). reply

• I went over the article carefully and removed a boatload of unsourced promotional content like:
  • "Since his graduation from University of Glasgow, he has introduced the topic to the Iranian academic community and developed several internationally known instruments for measuring health and patient-reported outcome in Iran. He is the pioneer of this topic in Iran and is a well-recognized scientist internationally for his works in this field."
  • "Montazeri is among few investigators who for the first time proved that health-related quality of life is a prognostic factor for cancer survival."
  • "Montazeri made a substantial contribution to breast cancer prevention in Iran."
  • "(his publications) are considered an asset for the country. He has published more than any investigator on breast cancer in Iran."
    • Let me just repeat that one again: "(his publications) are considered an asset for the country. " (????)
  • "His bibliographic review of the literature on the quality of life in breast cancer patients from 1974 to 2007 is one of the most comprehensive existing piece of evidence that covers all aspects of breast cancer treatment and quality of life."

I looked for independent sources about him and found none - i used his linkedin profile and CV to be able to write something but these are both SPS. I did find that someone posted an identical article on another wiki, here. There appears to be a full-court promotional press going on for this guy.

The article as it stands is SPS + a description of a few of his papers. This is completely invalid; a pubmed search shows he has 308 papers. The papers that are described in the article now appear to be randomly chosen; shall we describe all 308? If not, what is the basis for choosing these? ack.

Again there are insufficient secondary sources about him with which to generate an NPOV, well-sourced article. This is Wikipedia 101 stuff. Jytdog ( talk) 07:14, 21 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• I'm sorry but this is all FUD. Deletion is not cleanup: promotional content can be salvaged, which you have just shown yourself. 99% of academics don't have enough sources about them to pass the WP:GNG, because sadly we live in a society that prefers to spend its ink on chronicling the lives of "celebrities" of varying levels of achievement and not people who make an enduring, historically significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge. This is why we have WP:PROF as an alternative to the GNG: it allows us to assess whether a person is notable on the basis of what people have written about their work. In my experience, if someone passes WP:PROF it is always possible to write a decent article based on a combination of things like faculty profiles (which are not independent, but are widely accepted to be reliable sources for uncontroversial biographical details like where a person went to school) and citations to scholarly papers that cite/discuss their work. You may not like that WP:PROF is an alternative to the GNG, but that is very clearly the long-standing consensus, which isn't going to be overturned in a single AfD. –  Joe ( talk) 10:30, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Delete on second thoughts; Jytdog's arguments are convincing, while a promotional campaign is a concern. Overall, this appears to be the case of WP:TOOSOON. No prejudice to recreation if can be done with reliable sources. K.e.coffman ( talk) 19:47, 21 February 2017 (UTC) reply

How can you say that a BLP with a GS h-index of 54 is "Too soon"? How big would it have to be to satisfy you that it was not "Too soon"? I note that promotional material has been removed. Xxanthippe ( talk) 21:52, 21 February 2017 (UTC). reply

WP is not some directory where meeting some criteria gets you "in". (see WP:NOTDIRECTORY) In other words, there is no such thing as automatic notability; there have to actually be independent reliable sources with which to build an actual article. We have to write articles. Jytdog ( talk) 22:51, 21 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Comment the raw number of citations does not show influence on the profession, and neither does the h index. What shows an influence in the subject is highly cited papers, not the total, not the average. No amount of low quality or mediocre work gives influence,only really important work will do it. And even an isolated single highly cited paper does not necessarily show influential work, because the person might have been a junior author as a student. There is no mechanical way of judging citations. And as far as absolute numbers go, it's entirely field dependent. a paper with 50 citations is important in mathematics, and trivial in biomedicine. It's also chronology-dependent: a paper with 100 citations in biomedicine was very significant indeed 40 years ago, but considerably less significant now. The only way an argument based on them can be valid is if it represents an intelligent summary of the citation record.

there have, btw, been several studies of the relation of GS counts to WOS and Scopus, and they have all shown that in most fields, the GS figure is twice the others, but the pattern is otherwise the same. WOS remains the gold standard in fields where it applies, but GS is an adequate surrogate. DGG ( talk ) 04:23, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Keep In this particular case, examining the citation and the papers, he is the senior author of several important surveys which have been widely cited: 714, 515, 375, 299, 247, 263, 256, (25 papers with over 100 citations each) This is enough to show that he is an expert in his primary field, which is cancer epidemiology in Iran, and to a considerable extent the broader field of Iran epidemiology. The current version, thanks to the excellent editing of Jytdog, is no longer promotional -- it was a matter of removing adjectives and evaluative statements--the facts speak for themselves in showing notability , as they ought to. Thew point of WP:PROF is that secondary information about his work is unnecessary as long as the properly analyzed statistics show the notability . WP:PROF is not a supplement to the GNG, and not a matter of presumed notability -- it's explictly an alternative. True, among the many papers cited it we could find 3rd party evaluations of the work--this would add to the article, but it isn't necessary in order to keep it. DGG ( talk ) 04:31, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

So interesting. This "article" is a piece of shit even after my efforts; all i did was polish a turd. There is nothing we can say about this person, as we have no sources about him to summarize. I do not understand the !keep votes, at all. Jytdog ( talk) 05:03, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

[1] Xxanthippe ( talk) 05:44, 22 February 2017 (UTC). reply

I understand the arguments being made to !keep; I think they are the corrupt product of a walled garden. They are out of sync with how WP works, overall. Jytdog ( talk) 05:53, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

What walled garden is this? Who or what is corrupt? Xxanthippe ( talk) 08:15, 22 February 2017 (UTC). reply

You aren't listening and I am not going to clutter this up further. Other folks will weigh in with time. Jytdog ( talk) 08:18, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

You're selling yourself short, the current article is a perfectly acceptable start-class biography that can hopefully be expanded in the future with access to Farsi sources. –  Joe ( talk) 10:30, 22 February 2017 (UTC) reply

• Delete. I don't see public health as a "significant subdiscipline". PROF#C1 states "For the purposes of satisfying Criterion 1, the academic discipline of the person in question needs to be sufficiently broadly construed. Major disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, history, political science, or their significant subdisciplines (e.g., particle physics, algebraic geometry, medieval history, fluid mechanics, Drosophila genetics are valid examples). Overly narrow and highly specialized categories should be avoided. Arguing that someone is an expert in an extremely narrow area of study is, in and of itself, not necessarily sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1, except for the actual leaders in those subjects." Public health is not cancer research but rather the application of medicine to large populations. The titles (e.g., "Does knowledge of cancer diagnosis affect quality of life", "Cancer disclosure", "... communication with cancer patients") cited in the article do not suggest broad significance but do suggest a narrow slice (subsubdiscipline) of public health. The focus is neither epidemiology nor cancer mechanisms. When I read the article I thought the argument would be PROF#C8, but there are no claims here that the journals are major in their field. The person is significant in his field, but the field is too narrow. Glrx ( talk) 01:51, 23 February 2017 (UTC) reply

Public health not a "significant subdiscipline"? I can find at least eleven Wikipedia articles that begin with the words"Public health". It's not a subdiscipline but a major discipline of crucial importance to populations throughout the world. Xxanthippe ( talk) 02:01, 23 February 2017 (UTC). reply

It's always difficult to judge by incoming links, because sometimes they really are put there by a promotional campaign. But in de-orphaning the article today I found that (despite the language barrier) we already had two references to his publications, from General Health Questionnaire and from Cancer (not a significant subdiscipline??!?). The GHQ one appears to have been added as part of the initial creation of the article and the Cancer one was added in 2011 ( diff); neither editor who added them seems to have any connection to Montazeri nor to be anything other than a good-faith Wikipedia contributor. So I think Jytdog owes those two editors an apology. — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:53, 23 February 2017 (UTC) reply

I don't doubt that public health is a subdiscipline of medicine, but it does not seem to meet the notion of PROF#C1. The county public health doctor is the guy who imposes quarantines, makes sure the water supply is good, and shuts down the bad restaurants. The subject of this article seems to focus not on DGG's cancer epidemiology (looking for new cancer agents or genes), but rather questionaires, patient impact, bedside manner, and the merits of self-screening. Yes, those things need study, but the focus is narrow. That's why I quoted some of his paper titles.

The given links do not strengthen the case. Going to General Health Questionnaire (an article of two short paragraphs about a psychiatric evaluation questionaire) shows that he was involved in the Persian translation of the GHQ and its subsequent testing. None of the other cited authors are WL'd. Going to Cancer finds "Montazeri, A (December 2009). "Quality of life data as prognostic indicators of survival in cancer patients: an overview of the literature from 1982 to 2008". Health Qual Life Outcomes. 7: 102. doi:10.1186/1477-7525-7-102. PMC 2805623. PMID  20030832." Neither the paper title nor the journal title instills confidence in WP:N. The reference is used to support the statement that patients who report higher quality of life tend to live longer. Sounds like an expected result. The guy is doing what scientists are supposed to do, but where is the evidence that he has had a significant impact on a significant subdiscipline of medicine? That impact should be more than translating questionnaires and checking the reliability of answers.

Currently, the article says he published some papers and uses citations to those papers as sources. That does not show the significance of the papers. Glrx ( talk) 22:28, 23 February 2017 (UTC) reply

The significance of the papers is indicated by the number of times they have been cited by other scientists. In this case, rather a lot. If a paper is insignificant, it doesn't get cited at all. Xxanthippe ( talk) 23:21, 23 February 2017 (UTC). reply

• Keep per Xxanthippe and GDD, this public health professional (and it's certainly a discipline) has published numerous widely-cited papers, which is certainly sufficient for the GNG. There is no reason for abuse to other editors, either. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 11:23, 6 March 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.