Talk:Douglas Ulmer

Untitled

I see today, 6/29/2017, that another writer created a draft-- see Draft:Douglas Ulmer: Revision history-- on 21 December 2016, before mine but has not pursued it. Does that have any significance to the deletion discussion?Mitzi.humphrey (talk) 15:27, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Conflict of interest

At least one major contributor to this article appears to have a close personal or professional connection to the topic, and thus to have a conflict of interest. Conflict-of-interest editors are strongly discouraged from editing the article directly, but are always welcome to propose changes on the talk page (i.e., here). You can attract the attention of other editors by putting {{request edit}} (exactly so, with the curly parentheses) at the beginning of your request, or by clicking the link on the lowest yellow notice above. Requests that are not supported by independent reliable sources are unlikely to be accepted. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 10:01, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

As the writer of the article, I have been told by talk to refrain from editing the article. I regret that my COI has negatively affected this article. I hope that the current editors will try to improve the article. The subject of the article was not aware of my original creation of the article and may not even now know that it was recently nominated for deletion.Mitzi.humphrey (talk) 12:26, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

My "COI", as it has been called in a deletion discussion, is that Douglas Ulmer is my husband's deceased sister's son-in-law.Mitzi.humphrey 22:33, 14 March 2018 (UTC) In other words, he is my husband's niece's husband. Our niece is herself a Ph.D. from Berkeley Univeristy of California and a college professor and administrator. They met while undergraduates at Princeton.Mitzi.humphrey (talk) 19:24, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Request edit on 20 August 2017

Please replace Douglas Ulmer's place of employment. He no longer works at Georgia Tech. Douglas Ulmer has returned to Arizona and is now Head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona.--Mitzi.humphrey 03:02, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Done. I couldn't find an independent source that described his move (like how long he had stayed at Georgia Tech... or really anything independent about his career at all) but I at least updated the current position and sourced it to his Arizona math department page. EricEnfermero (Talk) 03:36, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

References

Request edit on 03 March 2018

Please add the web link which shows 197 citations for Douglas Ulmer on the American Mathematical Society search engine.Mitzi.humphrey 22:55, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

I do not think this should be added, per WP:ELNO: "Except for a link to an official page of the article's subject, one should generally avoid providing external links to", among other things, "Any search results pages, such as links to individual website searches, search engines, search aggregators, or RSS feeds." Furthermore, the search results are in this case a mishmash of journal articles together with conference schedules, calendar entries and other ephemera. It provides no real illumination about Ulmer's work or his noteworthiness. XOR'easter (talk) 23:19, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

XOR'easter, do your reservations also apply to information from Google Scholar and Cambridge University Press search engines?Mitzi.humphrey 14:09, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Yes. He appears not to have made a Google Scholar profile for himself (a page like this one which gives affiliation, research interests and a list of publications that the owner can manage). Links to a publisher's search engine are considered promotional—they are essentially advertising for the publisher—and are best avoided. Nor are they particularly helpful for Wikipedia's purposes: the mere existence of a book says less than how that book was received. XOR'easter (talk) 14:48, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

References

Request edit and question about notability guidelines for academic scholars

Which of the sources of information suggested at the top of the article on Douglas Ulmer are considered appropriate third-person documentation for notability of mathematicians? Mitzi.humphrey 14:46, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

In principle, any of them. Coverage in newspapers can indicate that a mathematician has engaged in and been recognized for public outreach activities. If a mathematician has written textbooks, searches for reviews of them and college courses that require them can indicate that those books are influential. XOR'easter (talk) 15:02, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Request edit

Please add as a reference for the publications of Douglas Ulmer. This link goes directly to a list of his mathematical papers at the American Mathematical Society website.Mitzi.humphrey 22:18, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

That is the same link which you requested above. It is still unsuitable, for the same reasons already given. Nor are you representing it accurately. It does not list his mathematical papers; rather, it lists everything on the AMS website which happens to include his name. XOR'easter (talk) 23:42, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

References

Some changes reverted

I removed a paragraph that was added today by an editor with a declared conflict of interest. The material was unsourced and not really worth including: continuing to work is what working academics do, and merely having publications listed on Google Scholar is true for everybody. (Nor is merely reporting numbers from search engines really a good practice. They fluctuate, and their significance is hard to gauge. Google Scholar sometimes lists different copies of the same paper as separate articles, for example.) In addition, the claim about being AMS treasurer appears to be untrue. Currently, the treasurer is Jane M. Hawkins, and the documentation I can find indicates that her appointment will continue until January 2021. XOR'easter (talk) 18:29, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

I began writing the article on Douglas Ulmer on 7 January 2017. He remains in active scholarly contact with research collaborators in the United States and abroad. {{admin}} Now in 2020 references to his additional accomplishments are being deleted by other editors. The original decision of the lengthy notability debate about the article was "no consensus".Mitzi.humphrey (talk) 20:29, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

The statement that he remains in active scholarly contact with research collaborators in the United States and abroad is true of virtually every working mathematician and adds nothing to this article. In fact, it does rather the opposite, coming across as puffery — promotional writing that tries far too hard to sell its subject, thereby becoming counterproductive. The claim that he was chosen as Treasurer of the American Mathematical Society is simply false, according to the AMS itself. As you have a declared conflict of interest regarding Prof. Ulmer, you are strongly advised not to edit this article yourself. Editors will be happy to add material describing any more recent scholarly achievements by Prof. Ulmer, provided those achievements are documented in reliable sources and the description is not empty boilerplate. XOR'easter (talk) 00:29, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Mitzi.humphrey, you have been repeatedly warned not to edit an article with which you have a conflict of interest. Your own statements indicate you are aware of this. Please desist. XOR'easter (talk) 16:42, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

These edits read like fishing for compliments. They oversell the unremarkable — please, please do not add content that makes the subject of the article look worse because it lacks all sense of what is typical for a mathematician to do. They're like praising a baker for his ability to consistently use up flour. ResearchGate scrapes the whole dang Web for academic papers; being listed there means nothing. A link to there is in fact less useful than a CV, because the latter represent some effort at curation, and we already link to Ulmer's CV (it is currently footnote 3). This is strongly reminiscent of the content removed during the deletion debate. As I wrote then:

For example, "The American Mathematical Society has three PDF mathematical publications for Doug Ulmer on its own website"—which points to a page of search-engine results, providing no new information beyond the fact that he has at least three journal publications. [...] Another example of what I mean: "He lectured on elliptic curves over function fields at the 2009 Park City Math Institute, and the lectures are archived at the Cornell University Library." This read, at first, like the Park City Math Institute was an event at Cornell and the lectures had been videotaped, but no, the PCMI is in Utah, and "the lectures are archived at the Cornell University Library" just means that he posted his notes to the arXiv, which is hosted at Cornell. Everybody is on the arXiv! Likewise, a little later, notes that he wrote are said to be published "on the mathematics website of Stanford University", but this is really just a copy of another arXiv posting included on the reading list of a seminar course. The "Lectures, articles, editorial activity, and visiting professorships" section reads too much like PR written by an outsider to mathematics.

This promotionalism does Prof. Ulmer no favors. XOR'easter (talk) 22:38, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree with everything XOR'easter has written in this section. --JBL (talk) 23:24, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, JBL. In my judgment, none of these more recent edits are encyclopedic. A grant is not an award in the sense of a medal or a prize. Linking to an Internet Archive mirror of an arXiv paper of no particular distinction is puffery, carrying on the seeming pattern of not knowing what the arXiv is. Even the section title "Writing and research" is a mismatch with its content — being on the editorial board of a journal is service work, not doing your own research and writing. This persistent promotion without any regard for how the mathematics profession actually operates is an embarrassment to the subject. And, of course, these edits come after repeated warnings to refrain from editing where a conflict of interest exists. If there were a Wikipedia article about me, and a relative of mine was inflating it with misguided, irrelevant and inaccurate material while acting like the rules don't apply to them, I'd be a bit miffed. XOR'easter (talk) 06:46, 4 January 2020 (UTC)