Talk:R. Scott Bakker

Untitled

The author's name is R. Scott Bakker, and I don't know how to fix the error, since every page seems to link to this article. You can see the correct name in the article text - it's just the title of the article that's off now.

• Page moved. Rycanada 23:46, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Just added some more information that RSB has revealed about the Aspect-Emperor series.--Werthead 23:57, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Bakker specifically created his own official forums which is called the three seas. http://forum.three-seas.com/ I have no idea why SFF is calling itself the official forums, as I thought he only had one official forum. -- Anon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.79.176.92 (talk) 06:10, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

He has two. I believe the SFFWorld forum predates his 'official' one, and both are still in use by fans and during his periods of activity on the Internet he visits both of them.--Werthead (talk) 16:44, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi Scott

R. Scott Bakker clearly wrote this article about himself, so I just wanted to say hi. 2601:405:4400:9420:786C:BB49:1CB0:3F2F (talk) 14:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Bakker fans so desperate to read something new from him they attribute his wikipedia page to ole RSB. 2600:1700:DF50:D9B0:C520:FBE0:A071:7ED (talk) 17:26, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

It’s true that the article seems overly positive of his ideas and work. 86.31.178.164 (talk) 17:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I thought it was especially nice of him to list every single one of his blog posts individually and refer to them as "philosophical essays". 2601:602:A001:17C0:68DA:973F:A4D8:40A8 (talk) 08:40, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Notability

I am attempting to edit this article in good faith after independently hearing about R. Scott Bakker and finding the Wikipedia article in the state it was in. It appeared the article was written primarily by fans, and was full of external links to fanpages and interviews. I have cleaned up as much as I easily can, but I am finding it extremely difficult to find verifiable, reliable, independent sources discussing the author's works to the extent described in the article. I have not been able to find many reviews of his books outside of self-published blogs, and most of his philosophical work published in journals is uncited. Much of what I have found online about R. Scott Bakker is wholesale copy-pasting the poorly cited Wikipedia article, or is entirely in the realm of fansites and blogs. Looking for input from other editors on determining if this author meets Wiki standards for notability. Mintopop (talk) 23:53, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm not logged in at the moment but I 100% agree with this estimation of this page. It does appear to mostly be a vanity project which just went unnoticed for over a decade. Each of his series appear to have their own articles, if nothing else those should be merged into this one. 2601:602:A001:17C0:68DA:973F:A4D8:40A8 (talk) 08:25, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

My apologies for missing this, I didn't realize talk pages weren't automatically included in the watchlist by default. When I have some time this week maybe I will try to run this page and the novel pages through the RFD process. Mintopop (talk) 21:10, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

I enjoy the author's work (fictional and philosophical), but I agree the sources of this article are severely lacking and probably not compliant with guidelines.

I will try to help provide better sources, if they exist.

I have two main questions:

1) Is a Publisher's website a meaningful secondary source?

2) What do you mean by "his philosophical work is uncited"? Do you refer to lack of citation of said papers in the wiki article? or do you mean lack of citations from other scholars in equivalent journals? Niflrog (talk) 21:35, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

I can't speak to your second question but the answer to the first is no, the publisher's website would be a primary source. AntiDionysius (talk) 21:43, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Niflrog (talk) 14:35, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

re: question 2, his work is not really cited by other scholars. I'd have to dig it up again but when I went looking I was only able to find a handful of his work actually published in philosophical journals. Of all of his work in journals I found, only one was cited by other scholars and even those citations were just brief mentions that the paper existed without really expanding further upon it or using it as a significant source. Mintopop(talk) 14:38, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand the point of his papers not having citations. If they have been published, they have crossed the peer-review threshold. I do not think the research papers support the idea that the author is a very cited philosopher, just to support the idea that he is a researcher in the field of philosophy of mind.

In addition to those papers, I would like to submit this:

As per the Western University Canada's EGG governance website, the author is an "Independent Neuro-Philosopher" which belongs to this research group, thought:

The EGG wishes to be as inclusive as possible, and to involve full and part-time faculty/lecturers as well as graduate and post-graduate students who are either actively conducting research in electronic and information governance or have done so in the recent past, as well as those who are supervising student research in the relevant areas (but who may not be publishing research themselves).

Again: it is not notoriety in the sense that he is a highly cited researcher, but in the sense that he is a researcher in Philosophy of Mind.

I found a handful of additional secondary sources: mostly reviews from back in the 2000s when his books were coming out. These reviews seem to be from reliable sources (genre magazines with some reputation). When I check the wikipages of other authors (whose profiles are not being considered for deletion), renowned genre magazine coverage seems to meet the notoriety threshold.

( Of course, one thing is to find the sources, another one is to integrate them into the article)

Locus Mag(2006) :Locus Magazine, 2006

Publisher's Weekly : [1]https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781585675593

His book "The darkness that comes before" has been included as "optional reading" in UWO's undergrad program:

[2]https://www.uwo.ca/writing/undergraduate/courses/pdfs/2020_winter_course_outline/4880g_001.pdf

I think the author meets notability criteria, even though the article as it stands right now, does not reflect it. Niflrog (talk) 14:53, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

"I'm not sure I understand the point of his papers not having citations. If they have been published, they have crossed the peer-review threshold. I do not think the research papers support the idea that the author is a very cited philosopher, just to support the idea that he is a researcher in the field of philosophy of mind."

The issue, in general, is the article excessively leans on primary sources. A publication by the author in a journal is a primary source as well. I don't believe this is necessarily an issue in itself. But look at it from my perspective as someone who does not have knowledge of the article subject: The page stated he was a philosopher, and goes on to frequently touch on his philosophical work. Most of his "work" goes back to blog posts (primary sources which are not independently published), and when I was able to find his work in journals it was not cited by others. The article has been languishing with poor sources for literal years. When I come across the state of the article and I am unable to easily find reputable independent sources supporting the notion that he is a respected professional philosopher, then it comes across to me as a vanity article where someone pontificates on philosophy on their own website and would like others to think they are a philosopher. Genre fiction often explores philosophical concepts, but that does not make every genre fiction novelist a philosopher either. If we cannot find good reliable secondary sources validating that he is a philosopher, then the claim should be wiped from his page entirely. Mintopop(talk) 21:22, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

I've heard of Bakker, though haven't read him. He has the reputation of being an author's author, so let's focus on criterion (1) in WP:AUTHOR ("The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors"). The second hit in this Google Scholar search is a review of Steven Shaviro's 2016 book Discognition, which spends an entire chapter discussing the philosophy of Bakker's 2008 SF novel Neuropath. Bakker's novel The Darkness That Comes Before made Locus (magazine)'s Best of 2003 list (albeit in the First Novels section: link), and the first two novels in Bakker's The Prince of Nothing series were positively reviewed by Victoria Strauss in the highly regarded (semi-professional, editorially independent) early-2000s online magazine SF Site: Book 1 (describing Bakker's debut novel as "impressive" but "overwritten") and Book 2 (describing the series as "ambitious and literate" work "that deserve[s] attention from all true connoisseurs of fantasy"). His fiction has also been published in Nature, a highly regarded science journal. I think these sources / achievements qualify Bakker to be considered notable, though most of them aren't cited by the current version of the article. Criterion C1 in WP:BEFORE states "If the article can be fixed through normal editing, then it is not a candidate for AfD", though it's worrisome that it's been tagged for cleanup for so long. Hopefully we can start getting the article into a better state ... I'm not sure that I can help much, but I'd start by adding a Themes (or Philosophy) section, moving material from Works to here, then adding information from independent secondary sources like Shaviro 2016 and Greve 2019. Preimage (talk) 11:29, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors also has a page on Bakker here; I don't have access (and as a tertiary source, it's not ideal for us to use directly), but I can see it cites positive Publishers Weekly reviews for all three books in Bakker's The Prince of Nothing series, so that might be another angle worth following up on. Preimage (talk) 12:12, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

@Preimage Hey, I appreciate you pulling a lot of this out! I think I saw some of these when I was doing my initial searches but did not register them as proper sources per wikipedia's definitions. I am quite new to editing so maybe my understanding of the wiki preference for sources is overly strict, and I am open to having that changed. I was not sure if reviews in genre mags like SF Site were considered reliable and independent. I'm also not sure how things like fiction publications in Nature are addressed per Wiki standards. My idea was that Nature would obviously be a great source for science research, but publishing fiction in Nature would not really be treated any differently than a primary source elsewhere (eg the philosophical publications I had mentioned which had not been cited by others). Mintopop(talk) 16:44, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Good point about Nature — I'd assumed their stories were all commissioned, in which case inviting Bakker to write a piece would be further evidence of notability. This was the case back in 2006, but some time between then and 2014, they moved to a submission-based model. Bakker's piece was published in Nov 2013. So as you say, we should probably not treat it any differently from publishing in any other science fiction magazine.

Another thing that might be worth mentioning in the article: Bakker's sales. This October 2016 booklet from his US publisher The Overlook Press claims that Bakker's fantasy novels have sold over 175000 copies (much higher than I'd assumed). It would be nice to have a third-party source for this, but UCLA's Research Guides: English and Comparative Literature: Book History and Book Sales Data page indicates that book sales typically need to be sourced from publishers (pre-2005), and our article List of best-selling books makes use of publisher websites to source sales figures for some books. Preimage (talk) 01:11, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

"I have not been able to find reviews" have you checked Goodreads and Amazon,there's literally thousands of them are you blind or just mentally challenged 2405:201:4016:8042:1354:4755:C511:917A (talk) 22:01, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

2405:201:4016:8042:1354:4755:C511:917A, please refrain from personal attacks. Assuming you're a fan of Bakker, they're really not going to help your cause. As per footnote (4) in WP:Notability (books), user-provided reviews "[on] [s]ocial media review sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing do not qualify for this criterion." (Edit: this footnote is on identifying bestsellers, WP:USERGENERATED sounds like the more relevant policy to cite here.) That's why we've been talking about reviews in Publishers Weekly and other trade/news/academic publications. Preimage (talk) 22:13, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

I am actively in the process of removing uncited biographical claims, as well as removing "works" that are described as drafts or otherwise seem to only exist as blog posts. There is a ton of confusing language in this article about things that were drafts/unfinished but may have later been published, and lots of references to his personal blog that will need to be unpacked. This article is a ton of work to edit, and even the interviews referenced are not very helpful since they are mostly covering fluff topics.

I understand there has been some pushback and rumblings in the fan community since my proposed deletion; I encourage any who stumble across this to please help improve the article so others can learn about him. I do not know or have any real personal opinions on the author, and the vitriol of the fanbase is a major demotivator to further improvements Mintopop(talk) 18:04, 20 September 2024 (UTC)