The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was kept by PresN via FACBot (talk) 00:28, 16 February 2022 (UTC) [1].[reply]


List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Princeton University[edit]

List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Princeton University (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Notified: Sephiroth BCR, Minimumbias, WikiProject Awards, WikiProject Higher education

This list was promoted back in 2008 along with a few other "List of Nobel Laureates affiliated with X" lists I might bring here to WP:FLRC later. The reason I'm bringing it here is that I don't think it satisfies WP:FLCR 3(c) (In length and/or topic, it meets all of the requirements for stand-alone lists; does not violate the content-forking guideline, does not largely duplicate material from another article, and could not reasonably be included as part of a related article.), particularly when it comes to the WP:LISTCRITERIA.

Nobel Prizes are not awarded to universities, but to individuals. Universities have an interest in claiming Nobel laureates and Prizes as "theirs"—it's a matter of prestige—but that's simply not how the Nobel Prizes work. This is not like the Olympics where the athletes formally represent their countries, and there is no generally agreed-upon way to assign credit for Nobel Prizes/laureates to universities.

When this question, i.e. how is "affiliated with" judged? was brought up by Testing times in 2008 at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Nobel Laureates affiliated with Princeton University/archive1, the nominator Sephiroth BCR replied It ranges from the University of Chicago, which considers any laureate that walked on the campus to be an affiliated laureate to the University of California, Santa Barbara, which only considers members of the faculty that did their research for their Nobel Prize while at the university. Whatever the university considers "affiliated" is what we're going to use, as anything else 1) would be a WP:V problem 2) would be a WP:OR problem as we would be creating our own system of what constitutes affiliation. That's fair, I suppose, but it means that lists for different universities aren't directly comparable to each other.

I suspect that it was to solve this problem of corresponding lists for different universities not being comparable that the criteria were changed back in 2018—to create a set of lists that all consistently use the same criteria. The intention was good and it may have even been a good idea, but the implementation was unfortunately misguided. The problem is that the effort to come up with criteria that could be applied consistently across all these lists ended up producing a set of criteria that was created by Wikipedia's editors, not by WP:Reliable sources. In other words, the criteria themselves are the result of WP:Original research. Consequently, applying these criteria produces novel content. Not helping matters is the fact that the de facto modus operandi was tracking down laureates' CVs and then applying these WP:OR criteria to determine whether someone should count as affiliated with a particular university or not.

This resulted in us recently having a very long AfD (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation) and then a very long DRV (Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2021 October 21) followed by further discussion on the relevant talk page (Talk:List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation), with the eventual outcome being scrapping the WP:OR set of criteria and rewriting List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation from scratch with an entirely different approach that is used by the official Nobel Prize website. This list, i.e. List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Princeton University, still uses the WP:OR set of criteria however. So what we currently have here is a subpage to a defunct version of List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation.

We recently delisted another of these lists, see Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania/archive1. One of the reasons we did so was the issue of the criteria for the list. My suggestion would be to delist this as well and redirect it to List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation. TompaDompa (talk) 01:48, 13 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, a few points here. Ber31: to be honest, the reason this has stayed open so long is because of your habit of posting long, long messages that aren't in response to anything and that just restate your position in more words and preemptively declare victory. It's exhausting to read, so I've been avoiding this nomination. In the future, please tone it down.

Besides that, in the end this nomination hasn't really moved from where it began: some editors think that the inclusion criteria, both on this list and on the set of all similar lists, is fundamentally flawed. Others, especially one other, do not. No one has raised any issues with the structure/content/formatting of this particular list beyond that. As a result, all we have is a content dispute that has failed to gain traction over the last few months. And while I personally greatly dislike any inclusion criteria for these lists that aren't "people who did the research for which they got a Nobel Prize at this institution, this does not seem to be the consensus that has arisen in any of the discussions so far. As such, since there's no real consensus either way and FLC/FLRC isn't really the place for content disputes in the first place... closing this as kept. --PresN 15:01, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.