Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shirley Ho

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep‎. Owen× ☎ 21:13, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Shirley Ho (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Does not meet WP:GNG nor WP:ACADEMIC Possible self-promotion page. Does not meet WP:GNG nor WP:ACADEMIC.

• Regarding WP:GNG: essentially all references point directly to the individual's personal website, personal pages at affiliated institutions (Simons, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon University, NYU), or publications
• Regarding WP:PROF: the achievements are low compared to the field average (astrophysics), and many claims are not really supported by references even after searching the internet. More in detail, testing the criteria for academic notability:

1. Impact: citation rates in astrophysics tend to be high, due to membership in large collaborations. Most of the citations come from such memberships
2. Awards: Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize and NASA Group Achievement Award are group collaboration awards given to members of a large collaboration; Macronix Prize is also given for "leadership in large, international collaborations" as well; Carnegie Science Award and National Blavatnik Finalist have arguable prestige to justify the existence of a Wikipedia page
3. Scholarly association: the International Astrostatistics Association Fellow is not highly selective or prestigious (its Wikipedia page itself lacks secondary sources)
4. Impact on Higher education: no evidence
5. Distinguished appointment: there is no evidence of the alleged Cooper-Siegel Development Chair Professorship, other than the subject's website and CVs. In any case, this is a junior professorship that lasts up to 3 years and can only be renewed once
6. Administrative post: no evidence
7. Impact outside academia: lack of broad media coverage
8. Scientific editor: no evidence

In spite of the brilliant career, the subject's accomplishments and impact do not probably warrant a Wikipedia page? Georgebrown5566 (talk) 17:07, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Academics and educators, Women, and Astronomy. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 17:43, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: California, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 18:06, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep. There do appear to be autobiography issues here, and that needs to stop, but I don't think that's an adequate reason for deletion by itself. This is a field where participants in huge collaborations get tiny parts in publications with huge citation numbers, and Ho is no exception. My usual strategy here is to look at first-author publications, realizing that this will also produce significantly smaller citation counts. For Ho I find on Google Scholar citation counts of 454 ("Correlation of CMB with large-scale structure I"), 176 ("Clustering of sloan digital sky survey III"), 53 ("Sloan Digital Sky Survey III photometric quasar clustering"), 47 ("The Posterior distribution of sin (i) values"), 42 ("Luminous red galaxy population") etc. If that were all, I wouldn't think it quite enough for WP:PROF#C1. But we also have individual recognition and to some extent in-depth coverage of her with the Macronix Prize [1], (state-level) Carnegie Science award [2], Blavatnik finalist [3], and fellowship of an obscure society. We also have some media coverage of her for her work on AI-based universe simulation [4]. I think it all adds up to enough. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:50, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  That's true, it seems quite arguable. I am a bit skeptical about WP:PROF#C2 as an additional criterion to satisfy WP:PROF#C1 because it seems hard for me to judge the prestige of the awards. There has been media coverage, but it does not seem to be independent of her affiliations (e.g. CMU).

  • Winners of the Macronix Prize (now OYRA [5]) generally do not seem to have Wikipedia pages, and the prize itself does not seem to get much media coverage
  • The Carnegie Science award is at the state level and again seems to be mainly covered by her university, Carnegie Mellon (which is enough to document that she won the prize, but not to judge whether it is prestigious)
  • It is also not clear whether the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists is important enough to warrant a Wikipedia page (the wikipedia page itself has not been for a few years)
  • Media coverage of her work on AI-based universe simulation [6] comes from the foundation where she is a group leader, the Simons Foundation, and is not a secondary source

  It seems that secondary and independent coverage would help to confirm the importance of these achievements. Georgebrown5566 (talk) 22:02, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep?. An unusual GS citation record like hers needs to be scrutinized as there are many reports around recently of citation gaming. This is a high citation field but I note that many of her papers have few authors which supports the strength of her contributions for a pass under WP:Prof#C1. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:35, 18 August 2024 (UTC).[reply]

  Trying to understand whether this should be considered extraordinary impact, I just had a look at Web of Science (which usually only considers actual citations to peer-reviewed journals). It reads 9 publications as first author (2 of them with more than 50 citations) and 23 as last author (3 of them with more than 50 citations). In addition, there are ~20 publications with more than 50 citations on GS where Ho is neither first nor last author. Georgebrown5566 (talk) 07:07, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Impact: It should be noted that in Machine Learning (which currently Shirley Ho is publishing in recently this area substantially), the senior author who guides the work are usually at the *END* of the author list, and when there are two senior authors, then they are listed towards the end as well. Notable examples includes the following: Lagrangian Neural Network Discovering Symbolic Models from Deep Learning with Inductive Biases

It should also be noted that while there were multiple large collaboration papers that included her name that may have biased the citation count, the number of participants in these large astronomy collaborations tend to be hundreds to thousands, while most of her papers have small number (~6) of collaborators where she seems to be the senior person.

Awards: National Blavatnik Finalist award is given 28 scientists across the country (including fields ranging from biology, ecology, life sciences, to chemistry, computer science, engineering, physics to applied mathematics). LINK The website seems to point to quite a serious selection process as well.

Media coverage of her work: She is the PI / director of Polymathic AI (which is a collaboration building an AI scientist). The work of Polymathic seems to have received quite a bit of media coverage: a few examples: [7], [8] [9], [10] [11] Surelyyouarejoking (talk) 01:59, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to the 11 edit (all on this subject) for these comments. Do you have any connection with the subject that should be reported under WP:COI? Xxanthippe (talk) 02:44, 19 August 2024 (UTC).[reply]

WP:COI: It is indeed an interesting coincidence that "Surely" in User:Surelyyouarejoking is pronounced similarly to "Shirley", and that the page was originally created by a similar single-purpose profile User:Shirleysurely and soon deleted for lack of notability. Georgebrown5566 (talk) 07:44, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Georgebrown5566, you are also a new user account, and nominating Shirley Ho for deletion is your third edit ever. Doesn't this suggest your account to also be a similar single-purpose profile? CaptainAngus (talk) 01:43, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It was more of a triggering event. As a scientist too (in a different field) it hurts to see relatively young scientists using this site to boost their notoriety. Instead of complaining, I thought I could make the difference, and more is coming! You can see more contributions on my side (time permitting), I asked my mentor if I am following the right procedure, and yes, please feel free to give feedback or suggest other ways to help! I don't know the person or the specific awards, this is what I could find online, so please double check :) Georgebrown5566 (talk) 06:01, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Impact: (please see the comment above for the discussion about the questionable impact, considering both first and last authorship); papers should be peer-reviewed to be considered, and [7], which appears to be only a preprint, does not contribute to WP:PROF#1; according to Web of Science, Ho appears to be the senior person on about 14% of her publications
• Awards: the question is whether the Blavatnik Prize is a major award comparable with the Nobel prize or Fields Medal, or whether it still conveys a high level of academic prestige; in the case of Blavatnik, Ho is a finalist but did not even win the full award [8].
• Media coverage: should we consider the contributions to "Polymathic AI" as general notability WP:GNG? the organization does not have a Wikipedia page and does not seem to conduct peer-reviewed scientific research (I could only find one published paper of arguable impact). The mentioned articles show media coverage but do not show impact, since they mainly refer to the beginning of the collaboration but not to its achievements; it is written in an interview style and many of the articles come from institutions affiliated with the initiative [9, 11], probably not independent.

Maybe this could be considered for WP:TOOSOON? Georgebrown5566 (talk) 07:32, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

TOOSOON is what you say, after justifying a delete opinion, when you think they are on track to become notable later. It is not a justification in itself. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:33, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Star Mississippi 02:31, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep per NPROF#5. A named chair at Carnegie Mellon is listed here ("She joined Carnegie Mellon as an Assistant Professor in 2011, becoming Cooper Siegel Career Development Chair Professor and tenured Associate Professor.")
  I consider @David Eppstein's comments on citations and prizes persuasive as well, in lieu of my own capacity to weigh in on their relevance. Oblivy (talk) 02:54, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • That definitely does not pass #C5, though. C5 is for "a comparable level of achievement" to distinguished professor, a step above an ordinary full professorship. A "career development chair" given to newly tenured associate professors does not match that description. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:26, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    That makes sense. In fact, I found the listing of dual-roles (chaired professor and associate professor) confusing. So much to learn... Oblivy (talk) 05:58, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak keep. The awards (or near awards) all together come very close to meeting WP:NACADEMIC. I would have expected more independent Google news coverage (so as to satisfy WP:GNG), but I think on net this meets the WP:NACADEMIC guidelines. Malinaccier (talk) 13:53, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.