Talk:Naomi Sager

A fact from Naomi Sager appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 16 March 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Naomi Sager helped develop the first computer program to parse English?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2015/March. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Naomi Sager.

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Contested deletion

This article should not be speedily deleted for lack of asserted importance because... Sager is an important character who has been cited in Wikipedia in a number of occasions (please see the back links). The content, however, needs to be expanded and edited. Please do not delete the page so that other people can contribute expanding the page.

@Mightyscience:, @Whaterss: (and, for that matter, @DGG:, @MelanieN:) I looked at her biography on New York University's website, clocked the bit about her contributions to Univac and thought "Obvious WP:PROF is obvious". This is absolutely not a candidate for speedy deletion. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 14:50, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping, User:Ritchie333. I'll take a look. For starters I wonder about the present tense "is" in the lead sentence; she must be 88 years old! But certainly not a candidate for speedy deletion. --MelanieN (talk) 16:56, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

She is listed as "retired faculty".[1] But what a woman! Let's see how far we can take this article! --MelanieN (talk) 16:59, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There are a few other Naomi Sager's on a book search - I've found "Naomi Sager PhD" seems to be the best one. I cannot find any obituaries and 88 is not unbelievably old (she's younger than the Queen - just). I find it ironic that her work - investigating a system to parse English and determine patterns and triggers, has come up here in a computer system that cannot do the same and stop an incorrect deletion tag! Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:09, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, there's always those unpredictable bio-systems (aka humans) to deal with. I wasn't astonished by the notion she was still living at 88, but I was surprised at the implication that she is still working! But then, so is the Queen... --MelanieN (talk) 17:21, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

BTW the article isn't clear about her PhD − whether she actually has a PhD or simply "took up a study". We need to clarify that. --MelanieN (talk) 17:23, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably because I saw The Theory of Everything recently and the film ends with the statement that Stephen Hawking is, aged 72 (now 73), entrenched firmly in his role as theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Cambridge and is not planning to retire ... and assumed (naively I guess) that if he isn't, nobody else is ;-) The paper I added under "works" is, I think, her PhD thesis, but I'd have to check more closely on that. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:26, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Working at 72 isn't surprising. Working at 88 - and in the computer field yet - would be pretty amazing. --MelanieN (talk) 17:39, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I see that you are actively working on the article right now, so I am staying away to avoid edit conflict. You might ping me when you are done for the day. Of course, by the time you are done with it, it will be a GA and won't need any further help from me... --MelanieN (talk) 17:41, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@MelanieN: - well I've got to pop out in a mo, and I was hoping to finish off Woolwich Ferry for GA soon, so I'll leave the floor in your capable hands for the mo. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 18:01, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The best information for her is the bio at NYU, (ref2) which explains that her work was unfashionable, and therefore not widely published. If there were addition publications, they would be on that page. According to that page, she received a PHD in K=Linguistics from U.Penn. in 1968. She retired in 1995, at the age of 67, which is not unusual. Looking at the refs is better than speculation. The only real chance of notability will be if a tribute to her is published saying she was indeed a seminal figure. DGG ( talk ) 18:28, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive that I'm late. My time zone is UTC+8, which is evening when you ping me. After looking over your talks and this article, I feel that the speedy deletion issue may have been solved, since this article has been improved and your talk proved that "Naomi Sager" probably has enough notability to have her own article on Wikipedia as a academic. Whaterss (talk) 23:35, 4 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'll work on her publications more when I get the chance. Here is a bibliography [2] of some of the articles from the Linguistic String Project which she headed. Her work is heralded as important at multiple other, pre-existing Wikipedia pages, for example Zellig_Harris#Legacy and Discourse analysis#History, so I have no doubt that we can establish her significance. --MelanieN (talk) 00:59, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Whaterss: That's fine. I see you're relatively new to NPP and mistakes do happen - the important thing when they do is effective communication and resolving issues, which has happened here. So we're all good. The article as created was a blatant copyvio so a speedy tag was legitimate - the article has been more or less nuked and paved. Keep up the good work at NPP, somebody's got to do it. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 12:13, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Ritchie333: Thank you for your encouragement, I'm actually new to here. As you said, we've done well and I feel we'll do better at NPP. Whaterss (talk) 12:21, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I found a reference stating that she was a pioneer in the field; that should settle any remaining doubts about notability. --MelanieN (talk) 19:13, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Good work! Whaterss (talk) 02:30, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]