Talk:Anne H. Charity Hudley

Notability Tag

I have removed the flag for notability; Charity Hudley has received more accolades than many of the linguists on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists; she has been a keynote speaker at the LSA (an honor usually given to full professors; she was associate at the time; she has numerous books and articles and now an endowed chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of three books. She is known outside her subfield in linguistics, as is also attested by her nomination to the executive committee of the LSA. Claire (talk) 19:00, 19 July 2017 (UTC)--Claire Bowern

This page was deleted a few years ago and a quick check suggests not much has changed. Specifically, she has only 1 book that has reasonable holdings and her work has only been cited a limited number of times (GS h-index 3). Consequently, it is difficult to distinguish this person from the "average professor". Agricola44 (talk) 03:05, 7 June 2015 (UTC).

Gretchenmcc, do you have any response to this? Best wishes, Boleyn (talk) 06:06, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Boleyn! Agricola44, I notice there was a page that was deleted in 2010, but I originally went to create this page because this person gave one of the Forum Lectures at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in 2013. This is a big deal - the LSA Summer Institute is a "who's who" of linguists in North America that happens every two years and, and there are only four forum lectures, which are long invited talks given to the entire institute by prominent scholars representative of their subfield. (Yes, one of the lectures was by Noam Chomsky, who obviously is far more famous than this professor, but the fact that she was selected by the organizers to give the one representative sociolinguistics lecture in 2013 suggests to me that she's more notable than the average professor or than she was in 2010.) If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to let me know! --Gretchenmcc (talk) 19:52, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Gretchenmcc Yes, sorry, but there is concern. Plenary lectures of any kind are still "part and parcel" of academic work and have been held here at WP to not be a distinguishing indicator of notability. The academically-related notability guidelines are specified by WP:PROF. Dr. Hudley still does not seem to satisfy any of them, but it may just be WP:TOOSOON. (For example, it may be that in the future her employer sees fit to confer an endowed chair for her accomplishments, at which point she would be demonstrably notable.) As I said, I did a quick check against the last AfD, but it does not seem that much has changed. I think the notability tag is appropriate for now, because it flags the article as lacking, but will give some time for more evidence to be found. I did not find any, but maybe you can. Please do not remove the tag absent any new material that would satisfy any of the (many) possible passing criteria described in WP:PROF. Thanks, Agricola44 (talk) 20:39, 12 June 2015 (UTC).

Agricola44 WP:PROF also says that "invited lectures at meetings of national or international scholarly societies, where giving such an invited lecture is considered considerably more prestigious than giving an invited lecture at typical national and international conferences in that discipline; named lectures or named lecture series" can count as partial credit towards satisfying Criterion 1, which the LSA Summer Institute forum lectureship counts as (the LSA being the Linguistic Society of America aka a national society, and its invited lectureships significantly more prestigious than average - about half of them are named lectureships and the remainder about equally prestigious, since the named lectureships are specific to certain subdisciplines so professors from subdisciplines that don't fall under a named lectureship could only be eligible for an unnamed forum lecture). It also says that "service on editorial boards of scholarly publications" counts as partially satisfying Criterion 1, and this professor is on the editorial board of Language, which is a major journal in linguistics (the LSA's "flagship" journal), as well as a few other journals (American Speech, Language and Linguistic Compass) - note that the description does not say how prestigious the scholarly publication needs to be but Language is very notable. (The editorial boards are new information that I've come across and added to the article since it first went up; the lectureship is a clarification of existing material.) I don't know if there's a formal metric of how many "partials" counts as fully satisfying Criterion 1, but I can keep looking if need be. --Gretchenmcc (talk) 18:09, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I think "partials" is a good way to put this. Editor of a major journal is an automatic pass (#8) because those are typically people chosen for their prestige. However, being an associate ed., "on the board", etc. is different because those are competent folks chosen primarily because they're willing to do the daily-work of the journal (and for them it's a career-building position). This is part-and-parcel of being an academic and is why it is listed in the notes for WP:PROF #1 as being a contributing factor, but not sufficient by itself. My honest opinion is that Charity-Hudley is very borderline. I would say something like 90% of WP academics fall clearly into WP:PROF #1, with the other criteria being special cases. As far as #1 goes, Charity-Hudley has 1 book with reasonable WorldCat holdings (>400), but her second has pretty low holdings (<100). Granted the second book is newer, but it could be that this book will, in the future, have good holdings. This would represent a much stronger argument for notability. I think this probably will happen in the future, but could be WP:TOOSOON at the moment. Agricola44 (talk) 20:01, 20 August 2015 (UTC).

Replacement of Notability Tag

Tag had been removed on the assertion that she holds a named professorship, which automatically confers notability via WP:PROF c5. The issue here is that this chair, the William and Mary Professor for Community Studies does not appear to be a permanent conferral in the "distinguished professor" sense. Rather the institution describes it as "a three-year rotating appointment for which all tenured and tenure-eligible faculty members may apply". Her CV says that she has held this title since 2009, but the William and Mary directory lists a different title, so there seem to be conflicting signals here. Given that this case is still very borderline in terms of PROF c1, tag is probably still appropriate. Agricola44 (talk) 14:58, 8 January 2017 (UTC).

The William and Mary Professor for Community Studies isn't the named professorship that was the basis for this assertion. The subject of this article has recently been appointed the North Hall professor at University of California Santa Barbara [1], a position which in its job description calls for "national or international stature within their field and a distinguished record of scholarship and publication" [2]. (For an already-tenured professor to be "poached" and immediately appointed at the tenure level at a new institution is in any case a significant marker of institutional recognition, even without having been appointed as an named professor). Apologies for not also updating the talk page but I did include this information in the edit of the article. --Gretchenmcc (talk) 18:13, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I did notice all of that, but it apparently has not happened yet and the only documentation that asserts it is from her own web page. I agree that once it happens and there is conclusive documentation, that would satisfy N. Agricola44 (talk) 14:28, 11 January 2017 (UTC)