Günter Bechly (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)

Reading through the previous DRV from February, it is absolutely inexcusable that this article remains deleted. It is shameful enough that it was deleted in the first place, but the prior DRV included ample sources, and none of the detractors provided a cogent argument for why they did not constitute significant coverage in reliable sources. I believe this page was either deleted due to extreme prejudice or an ideologically motivated "consensus" and should not only be undeleted, but protected against future deletions. Snoopydaniels (talk) 18:47, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You mean Günter Bechly, not Günter Bechley. I have corrected the links in the request accordingly. This was last discussed here at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2018 February 3, where consensus was that the page should remain deleted. Unless you have new relevant information to add, this request is likely to be closed without action. Sandstein 13:45, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I closed the last DRV. One thing that's obvious here is that this is a topic which has attracted lots of sock/meat. And here we have an editor who created their account in 2010, made a handful of edits, then didn't make any edits until suddenly a few days ago, they came back to life, immediately got into a deep talk-page discussion about the difference between essays, policies, and guidelines, then quickly found their way to DRV.  Looks like a duck to me. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:41, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Endorse unless someone wants to make a serious (and well-sourced) argument that the situation has significantly changed since the last discussion a couple months ago. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 15:32, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that I don't normally have time to spend editing Wikipedia is completely irrelevant to the merits of my request or to my merits as an editor. I have actually supported Wikipedia financially because I value this resource. When it comes to controversial subjects, however, it leaves much to be desired.

The irony is that if Gunter Bechly wasn't notable enough for him to have a dedicated Wikipedia page, the deletion of that page has in and of itself made him notable enough to have a Wikipedia page. He is now the subject of numerous articles in sources of varying degrees of reliability and the subject of criticism by "reliable" sources who have an axe to grind because of his changing views on evolution. Here is some documentation of his academic and general notability:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guenter_Bechly - As you can see, he has 97 pieces of published research which have been read 11,586 times and have been cited 1,299 times. That's an impressive academic record by any standard.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=byMvnWsAAAAJ&hl=en - Google scholar registers a total of 1979 citations. How much research would an academic have to produce, and how many citations of his work would be required, to conclude that he has had a significant impact upon his profession?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110719072804.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/05/14/4231744.htm

https://freescience.today/story/gunter-bechly/

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/damn-i-didn't-win-censor-of-the-year-again - Jerry Coyne isn't a reliable source, but I'm sure many of the denizens of Wikipedia would consider him one.

https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/scientist-comes-out-against-evolution-loses-wikipedia-page-1.5466166

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/02/02/wikipedia-erases-scientist-history-12517

Note that these are just the English language sources I found in my brief research, whereas he is a German scientist. There were many sources I could not evaluate because they were written in German (and there were others written in Spanish.) Snoopydaniels (talk) 16:50, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Endrose per RoySmith. Szzuk (talk) 17:15, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Szzuk: Refer to my reply above. There are plenty of independent and reliable sources to justify an undelete. He was notable before the delete, and he is even more notable now in the wake of the delete. Snoopydaniels (talk) 17:22, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Referring back to what I said at the previous AfD, we have always for everyone else accepted that having described even a single biological species is notability, and he has described several, and also a genus; this is way behind the minimum necessary. There has sometimes been a certain lack of understanding about the importance of people in descriptive biology,but even so I do not think that in the last 11 years of discussions that anyone with a record such as this was even suggested for deletion. A case can be made that the involvement of coi and sockpuppettry may have affected the issue, but he is sufficiently notable that we need an article nonetheless. The conclusion at the last Deletion Review was "Endorse original close, no consensus on recreation... Somebody might want to try writing a new draft from scratch, " and that "the socking/canvassing is no more than a minor annoyance. " I intend to write an article myself after what I consider a reasonable period of time. I regret this was brought here without giving me a chance--although it will be about another 6 or 12 months until I get to it. I will also repeat what I said before, that I can find no real explanation for the deletion except his unpopular positions. There have often been nominations for deletions of scientists who are notable, but who also hold views supporting creationism or climate change denial or the reality of parapsychology (in this case it's creationism) . I continue to consider that as prejudice, and a disgrace to the encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 19:24, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Yeah, this article should exist (per DGG and WP:N), but we reached a conclusion what we had wasn't enough. I think that's wrongheaded, but that is where we are. But I don't foresee a strong enough consensus to overturn those decisions. But endorse last DRV close, overturn AfD to NC on the basis of WP:N being met in spades as a factual truth. Hobit (talk) 21:14, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse Dr Bechly still does not meet the minimum standards for WP:notability or WP:Academic. DGG (talk · contribs) says that there has been a standard of considering "anyone" who has named a taxon as notable, but there is no such policy in any of the biology projects I have ever seen.--Kevmin § 11:44, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kevmin: That is just obviously false. How does he not meet the requirements for WP:Notability or WP:Academic? Unless you can back up your claim, then your endorsement is meaningless. See WP:DEM Snoopydaniels (talk) 12:24, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

See the Oct 2017 deletion log. There is no significant secondary coverage of Bechly himself present so WP:NOT is not satisfied, and writing articles on things does not satisfy WP:Academic. The small amount of coverage that has happened since has not been about Bechly, but about the faux drama of the Wiki article, so there is still no coverage of Bechly.--Kevmin § 12:42, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Again, that's clearly not true. Both the DRV from February and this DRV include many sources demonstrating significant, reliable and independent coverage. Coverage of the deletion itself includes coverage of Dr. Bechly. They are not mutually exclusive subjects. In fact, WP:N specifically says that the subject does NOT have to be main topic of the source in order to be considered significant coverage. So your argument fails on that score as well. Meanwhile the first possible criteria for WP:Academic is to have had a significant impact in one's discipline. Writing articles does not satisfy that criterion, but writing articles that have been cited almost 2000 times does satisfy that criterion.

Quoting WP:Notability:

1. The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources...The most typical way of satisfying Criterion 1 is to show that the academic has been an author of highly cited academic work – either several extremely highly cited scholarly publications or a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates.

Also, WP:N specifically says "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." So even if the articles are solely about Bechly, that is an invalid basis to discount those sources.

Snoopydaniels (talk) 13:17, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Endorse The "significant coverage" presented in the original AfD was thoroughly examined and debated at that time and found wanting. There were no indicators of significance ever presented in independent sources under WP:GNG. The coverage in sources that were significant were entirely tied to organizations with vested interests in describing Bechly as prominent and repeated on this project by obvious puppets and shills. The sources presented in the first deletion review and those presented above do not clarify the original discussion because they are fundamentally not about Bechly but instead are about Wikipedia. The attempt to claim that a person who was not notable magically became notable because he was judged to be non-notable is at best convoluted and nonsensical. As mentioned, his initial descriptions of multiple species does generate citations. Having spent some not-insubstantial time reading through the citations to Bechly's papers, I found that these citations were not especially numerous and were almost invariably mere acknowledgements of these initial descriptions. I differ from DGG in that I do not consider this a significant scholarly impact and so Bechly's work did not qualify under WP:NPROF#1. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 19:32, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Eggishorn: The wording of your argument makes it sound like you may not understand the "significant coverage" element of WP:N. The content of the source doesn't have to "indicate" the significance of the subject if by "significance" you mean "importance." Nor does the source itself have to be significant in that sense. The source simply has to cover the subject in enough detail to extract the relevant information without having to do original research. The source does not have to supply every detail required in order to write an encyclopedia entry. The mere fact that the subject is considered worthy of coverage, whether in depth or in summary, is what indicates notability. (Indeed, that's the dictionary definition of notability.)

For this same reason, your claim that "The sources presented in the first deletion review and those presented above do not clarify the original discussion because they are fundamentally not about Bechly but instead are about Wikipedia", even if it were true, is irrelevant. Again, WP:N specifically says "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." The very fact that the deletion received coverage by reliable, independent sources is indication that he was notable to begin with. Go back through the DRV logs and let me know how many deleted articles have received similar coverage. The whole reaction to the deletion invalidates the claim that he is not notable, even if you don't think that notability is justified by his accomplishments.

Your opinion on the significance of the citations is irrelevant. The notes on criteria 1 from WP:Academic do not describe the character of the citations beyond the kinds of materials in which they appear. WP:Academic only says that they have to be sufficiently numerous. I linked to two different sources of information about citations and they are very numerous. If you look at the average citation rate of articles in plant/animal sciences then compare that to the citation rate of Dr. Bechly's work, his is something like double the average.

Finally, WP:Academic also considers making a "significant discovery" sufficient to make someone notable. This is established by "a substantial number of references to academic publications of researchers other than the person in question, that this contribution is indeed widely considered to be significant and is widely attributed to the person in question." By your own admission, it took you no small amount of time to review the citations of his work and those citations were often acknolwedgements of Dr. Bechly et. al.'s description of newly discovered species. So you yourself have just inadvertently affirmed that he meets criteria 1 of WP:Academic on the basis of having made a significant discovery.

I totally grant you that Dr. Bechly is not the most notable academic in the world. Perhaps not even in the top 50%. That does not mean he isn't notable at all and it does not mean that the article should have been deleted. Snoopydaniels (talk) 21:12, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Snoopydaniels:, firstly, and at the risk of some self-aggrandizement, I should say have been involved many AfD discussions with fair "success" rate. This is hardly evidence of infallibility and neither is it a claim to some sort of exalted or senior status but I think it is cause to believe I have a generally-acceptable understanding of notability criteria. I therefore ask you to please not attempt to lecture me on the meaning of those standards.

Your second point is merely to repeat the argument that coverage of the deletion of Benchly's article since the original AfD discussion creates notability. Repeating something multiple times, no matter how many times you quote notability guidelines out of context, does not make it any more true. No coverage of the notability debate anywhere has any significance on Benchly's notability. At most, they may make for plausible citations in a Wikipedia article on how the project's notability debates are covered in mainstream media.

Thirdly, AfD and DRV discussions are nothing but discussions by various editors of their opinions on the indicators of notability. It is up to the closing administrators evaluate whether they think those opinions are valuable or helpful. Pronouncing another editor's opinions irrelevant creates the appearance of bad-faith prejudging of those evaluations and is not usually helpful to the discussions. Let the closer decide what is relevant and what is not.

Fourthly, you misunderstand what my comment about "...some not-insubstantial time..." Such time commitment requires only my diligence in using standard databases to first find articles where Benchly was cited and then to locate the articles and then to read these articles and then to track down the actual text that cited Benchly and then to back-track it to Benchly's original papers and then to determine if those articles showed any evidence that Benchly's papers had significantly influenced the citing papers. This would be require a commitment of "...some not-insubstantial time..." for even the merest handful of citing papers. Many of the citing papers were quite long and cited dozens, if not hundreds of other papers. That I engaged in such effort does not demonstrate anything about Benchly. If it necessarily demonstrates anything, it either demonstrates something about the influence and significance of the citing papers or it demonstrates my commitment to giving Benchly a fair hearing.

Finally, I'd like to give you some free advice (worth exactly what you paid for it, of course). WP:BLUDGEONING this discussion with detailed disputations of each and every editor who disagrees with you contributes little to the eventual outcome. Your opinion on whether Benchly meets the notability requirements is clear already to whomever reads this discussion and to whomever may eventually close it. Unless you can present some new evidence that the original AfD discussion was wrongly-decided mere contradiction of editors will likely not overturn the prior discussions. As that essay makes clear, Benchly's notability would be best demonstrated if either:

1. There was overlooked evidence that Benchly met the notability criteria which was available at the time of the AfD discussion and which was not presented or discussed at that time. (So far: No)
2. There has been new significant coverage of Benchly himself or his research in reliable, independent, secondary sources that is not directly tied to the deletion discussion. (So far: No)

Saying that so far the answers to those questions is no does not mean it must remain no. If you can provide such then it will be taken seriously here, at least by DRV !voters with an open mind (of which I count several already participating here). Anything else is just re-plowing the same ground. Do with that suggestion as you will. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 22:15, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Your reply is a bit mystifying. If this is a forum for editors to voice their opinions, then I don't see how you can object to me expressing my opinion about where your reasoning is faulty, regardless of how long and storied your career as an editor. And I have no idea how that's supposed to demonstrate bad faith on my part, if indeed that is the whole purpose of this forum.

But unless I'm very much mistaken, this isn't just a forum for airing opinions. It's a consensus building process. Therefore, it's hard for me to see how addressing specific objections raised by individual editors in order to bring them around to my point of view is counterproductive. Snoopydaniels (talk) 00:45, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If it's mystifying, it's only because you likely haven't read the linked essay. You will never bring all editors around to your point of view. Consensus isn't achieved by outlasting all other editors until you bring everyone else into agreement or your opinion is the only one left. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 01:04, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's mystifying because you are contradicting yourself. And I never said anything about bringing all editors around to my point of view. But it's painfully obvious that some of them haven't given a lot of careful thought to this. Snoopydaniels (talk) 03:50, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, WP:PROF does not require significant coverage. It requires basically being an authority in the person's field (most of the other possibilities there are just shortcuts for proving an authority in the most obvious cases).

As for using describes a species as an equivalent of that for WP purposes, the guidelines are what we do as much as what we say, and I do not remember any article on a person who described even one species ever having been rejected. I may have missed some, of course, but I have made this argument once or twice a year for 11 years now, and it was always accepted.

significant coverage does not mean enough to write an article without OR. That's WP:V, with the qualification that primary sources are sufficient for the basic facts of a bio, and if they are enough to show the qualification for notability--for WP:PROF, for example, to show important publications or a major prize or a named professorship, that's sufficient. "significant coverage " for the GNG means something more substantial than a notice--something that indicates that writing about the person was because the person was considered important. How it is actually interpreted in different fields tends to vary. How it is actually interpreted in an AfD depends of what result one is trying to reach. Anyone experienced at AfD can in any except the most obvious keep or deletes take the same references and make a plausible case for significant or not significant. The reason WP:PROF does not require significant sources is because the ones in the usual sense are rare in this field to find for people who are not media personalities or famous, and the consensus has been that we want broader coverage than that in science. (And, for that matter, because I and others made an argument that anyone whose work was cited a few times probably had it discussed in enough detail to meet what could be called significant coverage, and that means every post-docand up would get an article, and the consensus has been that we don;t want that either. DGG ( talk ) 02:22, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Kesari Tours (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)

This page was speedily deleted under G5 four times by User: DGG, User: Sandstein, User: Fram and User: SpacemanSpiff. I got to know about these series of deletion after my article got nominated for Speedy Deletion by User: DGG. I have gone through the past articles created by random users and I found that it was completely promotional content but if you go through the content uploaded by me was factual. I actually came across this organization while planning a trip with my friends. While searching for more information about the company, I found that it is not present on Wikipedia which is an extremely important platform for any user who is seeking information about the company. So I created this article but I was not even considered for discussion on deletion of the article by User:DGG. I have also requested him to open discussion with me on his talk page and let me know if I can edit that article. As per User:DGG, he was suppose to review and get back to me but I have not yet heard back from him. As a contributor, I will like User:DGG to review the article Kesari Tours and let me know if I can edit and publish it again. I have included all the relevant news sources to support the facts and figures mentioned in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gadgetsgigs (talk • contribs) 08:28, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Latest version of the article was written in obvious marketing speak (which people who work in marketing often genuinely do not seem able to see), and I endorse the deletion. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:22, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have another question too, raised by User:Usernamekiran below. How did you examine all the previous versions and determine that they were completely promotional content - when they were already deleted, and you are not an admin and can not see them?

Finally, Gadgetsgigs, do you have any personal/professional connection with Kesari Tours? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:28, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• (edit conflict) @Gadgetsgigs: hi. just a question: how did you go through the past articles created by other users? This would be handy, i find it useful, but i dont know how to do it. —usernamekiran(talk) 11:25, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Closer's comment: Actually, the second-to-last deletion was the result of an AfD I closed, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kesari Tours; and the speedy deletions were per G11 (advertising) or G4 (recreation after AfD). I don't really see anything in this request that calls the result of the AfD into question. Sandstein 12:15, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse close of the AfD and the G11 deletions. Obvious COI editor needs attention too. —SpacemanSpiff 12:33, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
•  Comment: given the filer's rationale provided here, and at DGG's talkpage; it looks like they are requesting for the article being considered to be published rather than reviewing the AfD. —usernamekiran(talk) 05:48, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse deletion and keep salted. Promotional/non-notable, come back when you have a neutral sourced article. Stifle (talk) 13:38, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]