[kevinpet]

> Just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel, a Wikipedia editor had smugly insisted that she wasn’t a notable physicist.

I heard about this at the time, and it stood out to me as totally missing the point. It's completely 100% possible that winning the Nobel Prize elevated Dr. Strickland from not notable to notable. A physicist who has done work that could win a Nobel Prize is probably getting close to notable but it's hard for an encyclopedia that doesn't engage in original research to adjudicate that. Actually winning is that third party recognition that wikipedia's notability standards are supposed to rely on.

[hyperpape]

This isn't the case. I'm familiar with the standards applied for living philosophers, and they fall far short of the level of "future Nobel prize winner" (A quick glance at Wikipedia show I took classes from 7 such individuals while in grad school). Similarly for physicists: there are over 1000 21st century physicists listed on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_physicis....

[kevinpet]

You misrepresent my claim. I said it is natural to assume that someone who has done work that will earn a Nobel prize is at least approaching notability. I did not say that is required for notability.

I'm not a wikipedia expert but many of those don't meet their criteria for notability. Taking the first in the Canadian physicists category, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abella The only non-primary source that isn't an obituary is Who's Who in Science and Engineering. He objectively doesn't meet the criteria listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...

I can't find the original pre-deletion article, but the edit comments mention that Strickland was a past president of the Optical Society. The guidelines for notability contemplate this sort of thing when they say "The person has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society)". There are lots of other criteria, but that's one of them, and we can recognize that the Optical Society is not in the same category.

You can say wikipedia's notability criteria are inconsistently applied. I'm not surprised. But most of these complaints amount to asking wikipedia to recognize inherent merit, which it doesn't do. Wikipedia correctly recognized Strickland's notability after the Nobel committee recognized her merit and accomplishments.

Interestingly, while responding to this I noticed that the article we are discussing here, when talking about Strickland, probably misrepresents things. The edit history on wikipedia shows an article was created and then deleted in 2014, not "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel". The Washington Post article cited in the previous sentence doesn't support that claim either. So part of what we are discussing here includes supposed facts which might be fully invented or significantly distorted by the reporter.

[mbrubeck]

> The edit history on wikipedia shows an article was created and then deleted in 2014, not "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel".

Gioia is referring to this page, which was created in March 2018 and rejected in May 2018, which is indeed "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel":

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=842614385

(However, the stated rejection reason was that the draft article did not provide the required level of independent reliable sources.)