Talk:IEEE Edison Medal

Edison Medal

See: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents

• Whats the rationale for deleting an article with over 50 incoming links? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 02:48, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

• In response your question, when I deleted the article, I was making my way through a large list of articles about the IEEE and its publications, etc., that asserted no notability whatsoever. When I reviewed this article, I did not see any assertion that this particular award was notable. My thinking was that anybody could create an award and then confer it upon notable people, but that would not make the award in question notable. However, looking at it again, the statement that "it is the oldest medal in this field of engineering" is clearly an assertion of notability. As a result, I will be restoring the article as soon as I finish leaving this message. Please accept my apologies, and thanks for bringing this to my attention. -- But|seriously|folks  03:25, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

• Your confusing "the biggest and the best and the oldest" with the Wikipedia requirement of the topic has to be the subject of "multiple independent sources" with enough information to verify the statements. You don't have to be the oldest, the best, fastest. Thats for The Guinness World Records. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 03:34, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

• Please re-read carefully the criteria and the process for speedy deletion. Whatever prompted you to delete this article? Was it ever even tagged for possible deletion? Did you note the references in the form of external links? The explicit statement that it was the oldest article in its field? I see that some of the other IEEE articles now have puffery-sounding statements that they are "respected" or "notable" which should head off similar speedy deletions. But some of those have been tagged as needing sources. The Nobel Prize article has a similar puffery-sounding statement that it is a distinguished award ( I will not tag that with {{fact}} because common sense and a familiarity with the area of knowledge the article represents tells me it is true, but refs exist to substantiate it). I think it demeans Wikipedia to have to put a hoky sounding "This X is very notable because---" statement near the beginning of each article just to head off admins from speedily deleting it for lack of a claim of notability. The claim can be implicit in the article, and references can overcome the lack of such a formulaic claim being put in each and every article to head off someone on a deleting spree. For Edison Medal or something similar, before a speedy deletion or even an AFD you might check Google Books, where you could find [1] a book on electrical engineering, "Electric Energy: An Introduction" By Dr Mohamed A El-Sharkawi, 2005, which states explicitly that the Edison medal is "the most coveted prize in electrical engineering in the United States." In Google Scholar for the Edison Medal you will find 345 citations [2] . Did you check for the references to it in the scientific and popular press over a span of a hundred years, like New York Times articles over the decades on how it was a prestigious award given to noted scientists like Tesla for a lifetime of achievement? In the end an article like this should have gone to AFD where it probably would have gotten a snowball keep. It would also have brought in other editors who can assist in checking to see if some award or journal is a notable one. Please take time to distinguish which articles are and which are not deserving of speedy deletion. When someone finds a series of articles in an area they are not particularly conversant with and which look like candidates for deletion, a good strategy might be to nominate on for deletion via AFD so there will be other editors chiming in with refs to show they are notable. Thanks. Edison 12:33, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Recipients

The history and recent recipients sections were replaced with a complete list of the medal recipients. The individual citations are more suitable for the biography articles, and this change is consistent with the IEEE Medal of Honor. --Jiuguang Wang (talk) 20:03, 26 April 2008 (UTC)