Talk:Daniel Biss

Untitled

This article was deleted at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Daniel Biss on August 8th 2010. I don't know if it has changed significantly since last time, but it's up for speedy based on that reasoning. Dylanfromthenorth (talk) 21:12, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

I do intend to build this page up. This is a newly elected politician and he will be joining the Illinois state house or representatives. All other state house members do have pages that describe them. I was not involved in the previous pages discussion but I can see that, simply running for an office may not warrant a page. Since this is a representative elect I though it would warrant a page. I am in no way attempting to deviate from the standard page format nor am I attempting to deviate from any other Wikipedia standards.(Aaron045 (talk) 23:34, 4 November 2010 (UTC))

Of course it's OK now that he has been elected. The article will not be deleted, for that makes him automatically notable. (I think the ed. placing the deletion tag had not noticed this.) DGG ( talk ) 02:50, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Selected works

As was concluded here, his math work is not notable. His political work is. This is why I removed the section. Please discuss before restoring. Mhym (talk) 00:59, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Just because his mathematical work does not merit notability if seen individually, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be mentioned at all. Angela Merkel isn't a notable physicist either, but still we mention her scientific works. --bender235 (talk) 02:57, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

This is a typical WP:OSE argument. Please do not compare the head of the most populous Western European Country with an obscure IL state rep. Please follow WP:RS and WP:DUE to make sure you are not overemphasizing his mathematical contribution and that the list of his papers that is "selected" is taken from a reliable source. Finally, please read [1], [2] and do some google search for a well known controversy over validity of some of Biss's papers. Until then, I will rv the restored list of paper. Mhym (talk) 08:47, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Wow, so you believe an obscure unpublished working paper negates works published in journals like The Annals of Mathematics? As if those guys don't have a clue what they publish? Have you ever read WP:OR and WP:V? If anything, we should mention both the original papers and Mnev's comment. And, by the way, there are numerous other examples than Merkel (she was just the first and most obvious one that came to my mind).

Anyway, I requested a third opinion. Until we have some responses, the list of papers should appear on the article. --bender235 (talk) 12:30, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Did you even read [3]? The part about the eventual retraction of both papers, etc. Third opinion is fine. Mhym (talk) 20:45, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

That's a good source. Why not add the same information to the article? That is, that Biss' works were both highly praised and then found to be containing errors. Instead of concealing that they ever existed. --bender235 (talk) 23:18, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Because Biss is barely notable as a mathematician, and the above linked AfD discussion concluded his mistakes make him non-notable. It's not like he made the maliciously, but even people like Danut Marcu are barely notable. If you feel like adding a section to the article discussing his math contrubutions, go for it, but leaving his "selected papers" hanging is not a good idea. Mhym (talk) 03:25, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

It's not like his flawed doctoral thesis was Biss' only contribution, but okay. I say add both the thesis and the criticism, you say add neither. Let's wait for some third opinion. --bender235 (talk) 10:25, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

• Publications should stay. It is a biography and a biography discusses an entire life, not just what made them notable. If we only discussed what made someone notable we would exclude their birth, parents, schooling, marriage and children, and death and just have a lede paragraph. A biographical dictionary would just discuss what made them notable because of space limitations. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 13:25, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

• My opinion is that publications in math, and descriptions of his work in mathematics, should be deleted. This was already debated and decided on in depth at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Daniel Biss. I do not see a compelling reason to change the conclusion of a decision weighed in on by a number of people. I do not see why an election to the Illinois house changes that previous (thoughtful, I think) decision. As previously decided, Biss's mathematical work is not notable. Biss has produced no new math, and the status of his mathematical work has not changed in any way. Material deleted after discussion cannot be instantly resurrected based on the decision of one person. 21:31, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

24.39.139.99 / 209.2.220.179, I'm assuming you're the same person on a dynamic IP, and I apologize if wrong.

The AfD was before the November 2010 election which Biss won, after which his notability immediately became uncontested. The April discussion was specifically about the Selected works section and not about the discussion of his works which was added in the last 8 months. WP:NCC states that "The notability guidelines do not apply to article or list content (with the exception that some lists restrict inclusion to notable items or people)." once the article's notability has been established. This provision is necessary so that biographies can include details of personal lives that are not related to their primary notability.

So what we have here is a situation where that AfD is no longer relevant, because the article's notability no longer rests on that mathematical work. WP:NCC makes it pretty clear that there is no reason not to have a discussion mathematical work as part of his biography. We can argue about the selected works section, because his primary notability is not as an academic (although it's certainly an interesting part of the article, and one or two of the papers could be integrated into the discussion.) But that discussion is not a mere academic list; it is biographical and relevant, and it is somewhat rude to remove a major section of an article in that manner without discussion.

I will accept the selected works being removed; however, if I can find one a link to a complete listing of his papers (if available) would be a reasonable external link. (Speaking of which, I need to clean up the current EL list...). But the discussion of his work was totally separate from the strictly academic listing, and the removal of that discussion has never been discussed here until your comment. Unless you can come up with a WP-policy-based reason why the prose description of his mathematical works should be forfeited - and based on WP:NCC I find it highly unlikely that such a reason exists - then I will re-add it (with some edits for better readability) tomorrow.

Also: a few technical notes. In the event that you must legitimately delete a section of an article, make sure that you don't orphan references by deleting the primary citation when other dependent citations exist elsewhere in the text. It's also considered customary to sign your posts on talk pages with four tildes (~~~~). Pi.1415926535 (talk) 02:09, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Is this a consensus to remove the "Selected works" section? Do people support removing it now? Power~enwiki (talk) 03:46, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Get rid of it. I came to this talk page after reading the article and thinking it seemed incredibly out of place. I actually thought it might be political vandalism trying to stuff negative info (since the only papers mentioned were retracted) into an otherwise brief article about a candidate for governor....but it seems the controversy predates the current race.65.118.222.116 (talk) 01:31, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Mnev

A minor technical issue: should Nikolai Mnev link to

1. Mnev's universality theorem (a short article)
2. Nikolai Mnev (a redlink), or
3. nothing?

By WP:BLP1E, I don't think Mnev is going to get an article anytime soon; the theorem is his only notable work, and there's not even enough information to write a more than 3-sentence stub about him. So that's not a situation in which we want to have a redlink to him; redlinks should only be for articles expected to be written.

My personal preference is to link to the theorem, but Bender235 seems to disagree (for equally legitimate reasons). Perhaps we should just kill the link altogether, or rewrite it has something like "Nikolai Mnev (author of Mnev's universality theorem)..." ? Pi.1415926535 (talk) 20:12, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't see why Mnev won't get an article in the near future. I don't see WP:BLP1E applying here (what would be the "single event", anyway?). --bender235 (talk) 20:20, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Mnev hasn't produced anything major since the universality theorem in 1988 - 23 years ago - and it doesn't look like he's to too much these days. So the "single event" is that single major work, which definitely gets its own article. If you want to create an article for Mnev, or add his bio to the theorem article, go ahead. But unless there's plans to create the article, it's probably not worth redlinking to.

Basically the options are red link or no link, because that article on Mnev's universality theorem has nothing to do with him as a person. It's like redirecting "Steve Jobs" to iPhone.

I don't plan to add an article for Mnev, but that's no even a problem. There is no guideline that says "links should only be set if you want to create that article soon". There are millions of redlinks on Wikipedia. Some might turn blue in the near future, some never will. What's the problem? --bender235 (talk) 22:08, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Alright, fair enough. I'll leave it. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 23:17, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

BLP matters

This article is a biography of a living person, and is thus subject to our WP:BLP policies, which have a higher standard for inclusion and sourcing than for most other articles. As of yesterday, it included a paragraph of negative content that relied in part on this stackexchange page. Stackexchange appears to be a site of user-generated content, and "Content from websites whose content is largely user-generated is also generally unacceptable." It also relied on this blog post, and we are told "Never use self-published sources—including but not limited to books, zines, websites, blogs, and tweets—as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject of the article." Once the parts of the post that relied on that were removed, the only sourced material remaining in that paragraph was a statement about where Mnev teaches (which holds no meaning with the rest of the paragraph shorn) and a sentence about there having been a retraction which, shorn of context, would at most be shorn down to stating that the subject had once published a retraction.

I deleted the whole paragraph, an editor undid the deletion saying that this matter had been discussed on the talk page - but I see no discussion of the relevant BLP sourcing concerns, and any local decision to ignore the BLP sourcing rules would not actually be sufficient for ignoring those rules.

I am again deleting the paragraph. Please do not restore until you have alternative and appropriate sourcing for the claims it makes. --Nat Gertler (talk) 13:49, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree the sources are not sufficient for this material. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:36, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

Note: matter is at Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#Daniel_Biss. --Nat Gertler (talk) 18:41, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

I was the editor trying to undo the deletion. I am generally opposed to content removal of negative info about a candidate for important political office based on poor sourcing, but without prior discussion. The issue of poor sourcing is almost always a subject for debate, which is what we are doing on this talk page. A single line in history of the article about possible BLP vio is ok for experienced editors, but "bites newcomers" who added it, see WP:BITE. Further, in this particular case the behavior of Biss was so counter to the prevalent mathematical culture, it seem to have warranted an unusual amount of dissent on these linked rumor mills. Having said all that, I do agree that in this particular case the sources are not reliable and perhaps inappropriate. I did not write the paragraph and if I did I would have done it with RS if there are any. Hopefully, this discussion will help to whoever wrote the paragraph to learn how to go about that. Mhym (talk) 02:34, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Letting poorly-sourced negative material about political candidates sit in the article is an invitation for major candidates pages to be constantly infested with whatever blog rumors and Russian bot lies happen to be around. The issue of poor sourcing has some very bright lines when it comes to BLPs, and this clearly crossed them. The editor who added the material was not a newcomer even then, but had been contributing at a reasonable rate for most of a year at that time.... and has continues to contribute, and thus is less of a newcomer now. --Nat Gertler (talk) 02:47, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

As for who is a newcomer, I bet User:NatGertler didn't check at the time if the editor in question was a newcomer or not, but rather blanked the paragraph sure of being in the right no matter what. So why argue this point?

A for "Russian bots", seriously? You infer some malicious intent happening in the discussion of a math paper rejected at some math journal? I hope you are not accusing anyone in particular. Mhym (talk) 04:24, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

As for "Russian bots", yes, I seriously mean that if we use poor sources for candidates on Wikipedia, that's the sort of crap we'll end up with. Did I say anything about part of this article having that? No. If you want to continue inventing things to attack me, please take it to my Talk page rather than here. --Nat Gertler (talk) 04:54, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

I just found that the article was citing a user-submitted comment on a newspaper article that didn't even mention the issues discussed in the comment. That is not a formal publication or a secondary or tertiary source, and it doesn't even seem clear that it is verified to be from the identified person, so I removed that citation. The article was also using the word "retraction", which seems like it may be too strong a term. I do see that he published a brief "erratum". That is an acknowledgement of an error, but it is not as judgmental a term as "retraction". I do not see the word "retraction" being used in a cited reliable source. The article also continues to included a citation that is not really a citation; instead it is a narrative of events that is partly unsourced and partly only vaguely sourced. It says "<ref>The error was discovered in 2005 (Anderson) and April 2006 (Mnev); Mnev posted September 2007, Biss submitted errata November 2008 (Annals) and December 2008 (Advances), which were published July 2009 (Annals) and March 2009 (Advances)</ref>". That does not cite any actual specific articles. I also notice that we are only discussing his publication of a flawed work. We do not actually cite any publications that say his work was generally all flawed or that the flaw was the most notable work that he produced. It seems possible that this flaw may be receiving an undue amount of attention in the article. It is not unusual for people to have flaws in their work. —BarrelProof (talk) 22:15, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

I just reviewed some Google Scholar information for Biss. I found 14 publications that had been cited 5 times or more. He was the lead author on all of them. He does not have a profile in the system.

The most-cited paper I found was identified as cited 97 times. It has been marked as formally retracted by the publisher. The retraction notice says "This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief after receiving a complaint about anomalies in this paper. The editors solicited further independent reviews which indicated that the definitions in the paper are ambiguous and most results are false. The author was contacted and does not dispute these findings." It is not clear to me whether the reason for retraction of that paper is the same as the flaw pointed out by Mnëv, because this is a different paper than the ones cited by Mnëv. If you download the paper, it has "RETRACTED" written diagonally across it in huge red letters.

A report of an error in Biss' work was written by Mnëv. It can be found here. It reports flaws in two papers. Neither one of those papers is the one listed above. One of those papers is shown in Google Scholar as cited 15 times and the other one 4 times. The one that was cited 15 times is the one with the one-paragraph erratum published by Biss. The erratum was cited twice, and Mnëv's report was cited once.

Another paper was cited 25 times, another 23 times, another 21 times, and the rest have less than 15 citations in the system. (Some of the works that cited his works are not peer-reviewed publications, of course; this is all just using whatever criteria Google uses.)

From this I conclude that he does seem to have published a substantial amount of work, although nothing that was cited more than 25 times that was not later retracted, and at least two of the five works cited 15 times or more have indeed been officially retracted or self-confirmed as flawed.

—BarrelProof (talk) 23:13, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

I think you are somewhat confused. An erratum says in plan language that the paper is invalid. In mathematics, this is equivalent of "retracted". The theorem is either proved or not, there is no middle ground, thus the erratum says the main theorem is now a conjecture (again). Also, you are discussing other publications. I think this list of top journal ranking (it's incomplete, there are over a thousand journals, see longer lists elsewhere). In mathematics, one paper in the top journal is worth more than 100 papers in less prestigious journals. Having only one such paper and it being flawed implies the mathematician is either extremely not careful or intentionally fraudulent. There is no way to tell which way is Biss, so nothing needs to be changed in the article. Mhym (talk) 02:53, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I prefer to stay closely to the wording used in the cited sources. I also just learned that a fourth paper that is among his most cited publications (with 21 citations in Google Scholar) also had a published erratum by Biss and his co-author saying their paper had a "fatal error". So now we cite that three papers each had published "erratum" reports, and a fourth was "retracted". —BarrelProof (talk) 04:26, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I just think this is a WP:DEADHORSE issue. Maybe or maybe not because of his flawed mathematical work Biss stopped doing research in mathematics. This was almost 15 years ago! He has since been on record on many issues in politics. Having math section similar in length to his political views section is not NPOV, in my opinion. Mhym (talk) 22:05, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

The amount of material about his mathematics career is much less than the amount of material about his politics and political career. Also, a significant part of the information about his mathematics career is about his notable work on a novel for teen-age readers that is unrelated to the retractions. Moreover, part of the discussion of the retractions is about that topic being raised as a political issue during a campaign. Only one paragraph is about the problematic papers themselves. (And his mathematics career appears to have ended about 10 years ago or less, not 15 years ago – he was still publishing multiple new papers in both 2008 and 2009, does not appear to have run for office until 2008, and did not start to draw a salary as an elected official until 2011. It does not seem clear exactly when he resigned or took a final leave of absence from his Assistant Professor position, but 2010 seems likely.) —BarrelProof (talk) 22:35, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

His last paper was submitted on 2007-10-29. Since he has 3 other co-authors it's unclear how much he was involved at the time of submission, but let's say he was. His first run for office was in 2008, which started in 2007 [4]. This article also mentions he is still employed by UChicago. OTOH, this article [5] states he was involved in politics since 2004 first on a volunteer basis. So I think 2007 is a fair date when he moved to politics, giving us 11 years. Mhym (talk) 09:21, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

He may have started focusing more on politics than on math around 2007, but I'm fairly sure he continued to do some significant amount of math work for a while after that – at least some teaching and following through on pre-publication revisions of the papers that were published in 2008 and 2009. Math professors generally need to do something in order to draw a salary (and he wasn't getting a salary from politics until 2011). Here is a record of a revision submitted in 2008 (perhaps by a coauthor, but he was the lead author). This also appears to be from 2008 or 2009. His erratum to "The homotopy type of the matroid Grassmannian" paper was submitted in November 2008. Even publishing an erratum is working on math. Anyhow, like I said, it's closer to 10 years than to 15 years. The rest is nit-picking. —BarrelProof (talk) 00:52, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Oh my, you are confused. For one, Biss wasn't the "lead author" - there is no such thing in Mathematics. He is listed first in *alphabetical order*. Personally, I lost track of what you are trying to prove. Mhym (talk) 09:41, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for clarifying. What I was trying to determine was when he stopped doing work on mathematics (including teaching, not just new innovation development). I believe it was somewhat later than 2007. —BarrelProof (talk) 15:09, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

According to this, "He taught math at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008, and left to pursue a career in activism and politics." and "Biss served as a policy adviser to the Democratic governor of Illinois starting in 2009". —BarrelProof (talk) 09:48, 29 March 2018 (UTC)