Talk:List of The Graduate School of Political Management people

Red-link names in a list of notable faculty

In a list of notables all the names should be either blue or red links. It's recommended to wait until a name has an article before adding it to the list. That's the advice contained in our {{uw-badlistentry}} template and the Write the article first essay. Which leads me to wonder why we aren't following the recommendation.

Editors finding red-links in a list of notables will often remove them. This is especially true when there are either no references or the references don't seem to satisfy any notability guidelines. Sometimes this leads to an extended cycle of removals and insertions of the same red links.

I believe the requirements to be included in the notable faculty list are:

• they are a faculty member
• they meet the Wikipedia notabilty criteria

Not all faculty are notable. Having a Wikipedia biography is normally accepted as proof of notability. Names without a biography should have references sufficient to show they meet a notability guideline. The guidelines that typically apply to faculty would be WP:BIO, WP:PROF or WP:N.

Some of the red-linked names have references that leave their notability in doubt. References to their work place biography page or press releases (or articles based on press releases) usually are not helpful to notability. I see little to be gained by leaving those red-links in place. It's likely they'll be removed by editors at some point and we'll cycle around again and again. I'd like to hear from other editors what their views are, particularly if they feel it is important to add names before writing an article.

This may be of interest to Ruhri Jörg (talk · contribs) and Onel5969 (talk · contribs) Gab4gab (talk) 16:30, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

That's a spot on assessment, Gab4gab. Redlinks in and of themselves aren't a bad thing, but particularly in list articles they can be problematic. Many list articles have a "note" (hidden from the casual viewer, but appears when you begin editing) saying that an entry to the list should have a WP article prior to inclusion. If you look at Wikipedia:Red link, the lead states: "It is useful while editing articles to add a red link to indicate that a page will be created soon or that an article should be created for the topic because the subject is notable and verifiable." Then you look at the red links in this list, and I don't think I see a single redlink for someone who would pass notability criteria. I checked over half the 40 references, and not a single one was not from a non-independent source, or was in-depth about the person.Onel5969 ^{TT me} 18:06, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Dear Gab4gab and Onel5969,

Thank you very much for your feedback! This is indeed helpful, as I'm still trying to find my way around things here - and quite often still miss some things...although there seems to be a explanatory page to almost anything somewhere :)

After the initial removal of names in this list I have tried to check again for notability of the removed people. On most of them, I certainly agreed. The ones I thought might still be notable, I re-added to the list - with the intention of adding their articles later, just as you described might be one of the common ways of doing it...("It is useful while editing articles to add a red link to indicate that a page will be created soon or that an article should be created for the topic because the subject is notable and verifiable."). Thus I'm currently researching and drafting the first articles. And whilst I have tried to only include people that I think are probably notable - I might of course in some cases still be wrong! If it turns out that a certain person doesn't meet the notability criteria, I will then of course not only abandon the article of the person, but also remove them from this list! I don't try to blow it up or anything like that, but have just been trying to use it as a "collection" of the articles I want to work through next... as there are more than 100 faculty members of this college alone and I have spend quite a considerable amount of time on a rough-analysis already.

Hopefully this clarifies my thinking... in the future I should probably follow the suggested route of first creating / in-depth checking articles. I currently just find this method much more convenient to handle (as I then have all items in one list and don't loose track of all the data etc.). In either case - thank you both and have a good week!

--Ruhri Jörg (talk) 13:26, 12 December 2018 (UTC)