Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Richard Ovenden

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The result was Nomination withdrawn. Sources added. PeaceNT 13:44, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Richard Ovenden

Found on Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles. A WP:BLP with no sources since 2005. No apparent notability, either: sounds like your average British academic. See WP:PROF. Sandstein 19:51, 18 May 2007 (UTC) Withdraw. Sources now added, and people think he's sort of notable (I couldn't say). Sandstein 18:49, 22 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

~~Delete~~. One book, which gets a total of 25 Google hits, and is around #1.7 million on Amazon; 598 hits for himself. Doesn't appear to be a recognized expert in his field, from that. Tony Fox (arf!) 19:59, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I need to work more with Google News Archive; judging from the refs Addhoc found, he's a recognized spokesperson for the field. Changing to weak keep. Tony Fox (arf!) 17:52, 22 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Weak Delete I want to be generous, but frankly, this is quite non-notable in the big scheme of things. 83.67.34.115 21:15, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep pending some work. He is, more precisely, "Keeper of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, at the Bodleian Library--this is one of the 3 or 4 most important positions for UK rare books and manuscript librarians. People in this position are expected to publish, and he has, beyond the one book--a number of articles in the good professional journals. His work is referred to by many others--there are a total of 130 hits in GScholar, though I have not sorted them out yet. Amazon rank is is a totally absurd measure for a scholarly book in the humanities, & so is google counts. He's to be judged according to his field. There are probably about 50 or 60 UK specialists in his subject, & he's in the top 10%. "there is no such thing as "the average british academic"--there are scholars in different subjects, & the subject needs to be taken into account. He has published nothing in Physical Review, and has never had his work mentioned in Nature, and thats about as relevant as Amazon and ghits. But I'll need to upgrade he article a little to demonstrate this. DGG 03:15, 19 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I did, in fact, look at Google Scholar, and it may be my untrained eye, but it didn't really do much to indicate notability. He's got some reviews, one book, a couple of papers, and a lot of links on there where his name doesn't appear on the page at all. If you can distill all of that down to something that meets WP:PROF, I'm quite happy to reconsider. My apologies for using the Google and Amazon comments, but those were all I could find that were relevant to the discussion at the time; I work with what I've got. Tony Fox (arf!) 06:44, 19 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - a "Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL" search indicates notability. That said, fully support nominating articles that have been tagged for too long - in this case 18 months - and then only keeping them if sources are included. Addhoc 16:02, 22 May 2007 (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.