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Talk:William McGreevey

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Notability

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Hi Red_Phoenix, moving over the discussion here because some items I turned up are more substantively relevant to the entry and perhaps of interest to future editors. Per our conversation, I was hoping to send the entry through AfD and maybe get a snow close so you wouldn't have to wait a whole second week. While I initially only had procedural concerns (and I completely share your frustration with them--were it not for numerous RfCs indicating community preference to keep BLPPROD in its current form, I would've gone with IAR), in covering my bases for AfD I found a few more substantively significant things: for one, McGreevey has an h-index of 19; health care economics isn't my field so I don't know for sure but that sounds unusually high to me, for an associate prof. And then evidently he wrote quite an important, widely reviewed book on Colombian economic history; as well as edited a collection that had some reviews as well.

In my eyes, there's virtually no question someone with a COI added to the page, given what a hard time I've had verifying a whole bunch of these details, but for notability I'm inclined to think he actually passes WP:NAUTHOR, at least. There's also the bit that much of his career was pre-internet, so often someone like that gets a little more flexibility at AfD... For me that makes the case at least ambiguous enough to de-PROD; I feel like best options at this point are either to stubbify down to what's verifiable and then leave it in hopes someone else can expand; or, send through AfD to see if others agree with my take on notability. Do you have a preference? I am sorry I didn't notice this stuff before, both for the delay in patrolling PRODs (I only drop in there from time to time) and in not noticing the substantive issue sooner; at first blush I didn't think an associate prof had any chance of being notable, myself. Innisfree987 (talk) 22:12, 24 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My opinion really is this: I need to see reliable sources independent of the subject in order to establish notability. Based on what you found, at least from your description it sounds more like the book itself would be more notable than the author. Basically, could McGreevey himself pass WP:GNG with sources focused on him specifically and not just passing mentions? If he truly passes WP:NAUTHOR, he would pass the GNG as well, and so far I haven't seen that about him specifically. For now I'm leaning AFD, but I'll think on this some more. If you have some links to share on what you've found, feel free to share them here and I would like to review them. Red Phoenix talk 01:30, 25 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well, so far I've found (and cited in the entry) eight independent (from him and from each other) scholarly reviews of his works, and NAUTHOR says an author is likely to be notable if...[t]he person has created or played a major role in co-creating a significant or well-known work...In addition, such work must have been the primary subject...of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews. There is some debate about the relation of SNGs to GNG, but in practice I have never seen an entry on an author deleted or obliged to be converted to a book entry if the author had multiple reviews discussing even one work (I suppose, on the view that discussion of their professional work is in fact about them). Additionally here, he has the edited collection that drew reviews in addition to those for his monograph, plus the short New York Times piece on his personal life. I tend to think the AfD conclusion will be that the aggregate is best handled with a single page (that's how I'd ivote at present) and that clean-up is needed rather than deletion, but I'm ok if you want to pursue it, to test the theory. Innisfree987 (talk) 02:03, 25 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I would rather we not waste the community's time in trying simply to test a theory. As it stands, I think that enough action has been taken on the article that it's not nearly the concern it was before, and I will not pursue any further action. Red Phoenix talk 03:15, 25 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Makes sense to me. Glad to improve the entry a bit at least, in the course of the attention to it! Innisfree987 (talk) 03:23, 25 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]