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Nice article

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Thanks. 175.38.179.185 (talk) 11:25, 12 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination

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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 22:37, 5 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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[[File:|140px|Anne Wyllie in 2019 ]]
Anne Wyllie in 2019
  • ... that when Anne Wyllie and her team developed the saliva test for COVID-19, they were partly funded by the National Basketball Association? Source: "The NBA, like the basketball guys. They had heard about Anne's direct saliva testing technique called SalivaDirect, and they wanted to use it for the NBA season....WOODS: The deal was worth another half-million dollars. WYLLIE: It's as bizarre to us when we couldn't get funding from the NIH, but we could get funding from the NBA." (Source)

Created by DrThneed (talk). Self-nominated at 05:23, 19 September 2021 (UTC).[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
QPQ: Done.

Overall: Hook is cited and interesting. The only change I made was turning "NBA" into "National Basketball Association" (although I think everyone knows the NBA). Article is new enough, long enough and sourced. qpq is done and no copyvio detected on Earwig. This nom is a-go! BuySomeApples (talk) 00:01, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ha! Of course. Thanks @Theleekycauldron: for the hook suggestion, I'm happy with that, and thanks @BuySomeApples: for the review. I also have an image available now (not quite sure how to add it to the nom). As Anne uploaded it to Commons herself, I checked with her about the copyright, and she tells me she commissioned the headshot and owns the copyright. DrThneed (talk) 21:21, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
BuySomeApples, theleekycauldron and DrThneed: I've added the photo. Schwede66 03:53, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BuySomeApples, theleekycauldron, Schwede66 I had missed that one of the journalists covering the saliva testing story did write an update mentioning why Wyllie's page got created. I can now offer an alternative hook, if that takes anyone's fancy. DrThneed (talk) 20:21, 5 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • ALT2:... that because Anoop Singh asked "who is Anne Wyllie" (pictured), she now has a Wikipedia biography? (source: this article)
@Schwede66 and DrThneed: thanks, both of you! I'll take ALT3, I love it; I might make it a quirky hook, but for now, we'll make it the lead. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/them) 22:37, 5 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ALT3 to T:DYK/P7

Actual early life?

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The "Early life and education" section of this article devotes just five words to its subject's early life, before heading off to her education. And all it says is that she is from New Zealand. There is nothing about her parents, siblings, birthplace, upbringing, etc. Surely some of this information is out there and if it isn't, the article should say so. --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 00:14, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

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The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 01:08, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Publications

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Should the article include this selection of papers? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:47, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

RfC responses

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  • Remove. Some of the publication have around 40 contributing authors, one of whom is Wyllie - listing them is pointless, arbitary 'fluff'. Editors deciding which are 'important' - which appears to be what has happened - is WP:OR. Pincrete (talk) 07:25, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Publications are central to a scientist’s reputation and standing. It is how they publish their results, and communicate their ideas. What a scientist publishes on, where they publish, who they collaborate with, how much they are cited elsewhere are all things a scientist is constantly judged on through their grant proposals, promotion applications etc. To call a selected list of a scientist’s most highly cited publications ‘fluff’ and ‘trivia’ is to ignore the central role that publication success has in an academic scientist’s career. Some research areas are highly collaborative (physics papers can have over 1000 authors, genome papers can have hundreds, it is still relevant to a scientist's career what they have published and where). There are a very large number of bios on Wikipedia with a list of selected publications, I would support a wider discussion of the best way of handling these. DrThneed (talk) 20:26, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep It's a shame that we have to discuss this here as it really should have a wider discussion resulting in guidance; MOS:WORKS unfortunately does not cover this. It seems sensible to me to cover a researcher's most cited works and to also cover the breadth of their research topics. Yes, people can go and find that out themselves but the point of Wikipedia is that editors do that work for the reader. It's the core point of having Wikipedia in the first place! Schwede66 20:33, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Remove as unsourced arbitrary fluff. Being an author amongst 40 of an author is not enough to justify inclusion. Wikipedia articles are not Academic CVs/Resumes. The publications should be mentioned, yes, but that's what the link to Google Scholar is for. That list will be up to date, unlike any list we could have. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:01, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Remove. She's not even a senior researcher, let alone PI, so there's no way she's actually directing the research she's published. JoelleJay (talk) 01:42, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep—lists of selected publications are commonly included in biographies in general, and for scientists are one aspect of notability. It’s pretty standard procedure. Use of proper citations can demonstrate if she was the lead author of a work or not. Montanabw(talk) 03:03, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just the ones where she is one of the four first authors in the list. These are normally listed in rough order of their contributions. Johnbod (talk) 03:22, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    I found nine articles that fit that criterion, (added all that weren’t already on the list) and one where she’s listed fifth (which I also added), as it just came out last month. I went through the others that were on @@DrThneed:’s list, and put where she was listed in the queue of authors. I suppose if there’s a particularly good reason to include one of those, we can discuss below, but your proposal makes sense to me. I also checked her bio page at Yale, which has a list of publications, and I noted which ones on the list were there. FWIW, Google scholar lists 64 articles under her name, but not all seem to be unique entries, and some appear to be foreign language translations. Scholia shows 49. Scopus lists 36 and a h-index of 17. Montanabw(talk) 04:56, 16 October 2021 (UTC) Follow up: I went ahead and hid the articles where she wasn’t in the top five. I think what remains are all the ones that meet Johnbod’s criteria plus one with only five authors total. Open to a better way to do this, but it works AFAIK. Montanabw(talk) 05:56, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep but trim. When selected well rather than indiscriminately these can give a much better picture of what a scholar's research looks like than we can often express more directly in prose, but eight seems too many and too indiscriminate for someone with a Google Scholar h-index of 23. In general, not having looked carefully at this case and without specific domain knowledge that would help select them more precisely, I would tend to (1) prefer papers that have won awards, if there are any, (2) prefer papers with the highest citation counts, (3) prefer papers where (in fields where this matters) the subject is listed in a prominent position, first or sometimes last, (4) prefer papers that are mentioned for some other reason in the main article (like because other people have named some discovery after the author), (5) prefer papers that cover a diverse range of topics and dates rather than listing several from the same cluster of papers, and (6) prefer research papers over surveys. (Also, I would list all authored books, separately from papers.) In the case of Wyllie, these principles lead me to think that the ones that stand out are "Longitudinal analyses reveal immunological misfiring" (new, major journal, highly cited); "Saliva or nasopharyngeal swab specimens" (also new, major journal, highly cited, and first author); and maybe "Streptococcus pneumoniae in saliva of Dutch primary school children" (older and top cited among the remaining first-author papers, on a different disease). —David Eppstein (talk) 06:18, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @David Eppstein:, that’s useful input. While the discussion was ongoing here, I altered the list to show the dozen+ papers where she was one of the major authors (top four plus one where she was “last author” of five) so maybe that’s the list to glean from. I also kept some others in hidden text where she was listed in the middle of the pack, but that others here had though worth listing, probably because or the prestige of the journals or the number of citations, I suppose… If you think they can be thinned to the 3-4 most significant papers, that’s fine with me, maybe keep the rest either here at talk or in hidden text so the next time the notability question arises (see below), we don’t have to go through and dig them all out again.
    • 3-4 is a good target number. Dozen+ is way too many. But also, "most important" is not really the right idea. We're not looking for the papers that are most important, independent of Wyllie's contribution to them, but for the ones that are the most representative of her top work, or for which her specific contributions made the paper important. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:26, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep but trim. A selected publication list is an important supplement to an overview of an academic's research; not all the significant papers in their career will be cited in the research section. I personally always include one in an article on a researcher, and usually include the four or five most heavily cited of their papers in Web of Science, favouring ones in which they're the first or last author (last author often signifies the supervising or second-most-important contributor – authors in a scientific paper are not generally in order of their contributions), or that seem to have been important in their early career. Of course, this is subjective, like all biographies; there's no one objective set of criteria for which papers to include, just as there's no one correct way to write a biography. We just do our best. —Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 08:50, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @Giantflightlessbirds: sounds like there’s a consensus forming around thinning the list to 4-5 papers. If you look at what’s there as of my post today, maybe we can start a thread below that sorts out what to keep? Montanabw(talk) 17:39, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't think this "last author often signifies the supervising or second-most-important contributor" applies in medical research, certainly not when there are 20+ authors, and the names of the last several authors tend to disappear in online publications. Anyway, as far as I can see, she isn't named last on any of her papers, but is first on some. Johnbod (talk) 12:54, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • I don't know of the specific conventions for this area, but my understanding is that in cases where the last author position is significant, it's given to a senior person who is responsible for funding the lab in which everyone else worked. As a researcher only newly advanced to a research position from a postdoctorate, Wyllie does not match that description. So my assumption would be that, for papers where she is last, it means either that her contribution was least or that she was alphabetically last among a set of low-contribution authors. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:29, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • Note that for that recent paper on which she is last, she is also the corresponding author, which generally means a greater degree of responsibility for the paper than you are suggesting. The acknowledgements section also says ALW received funding for the project (and does not mention funding received by any other author). These are the problems with trying to use author order to interpret contribution (shrug emoji!). Not that I am against your idea of a trimmed list, I think it is a pragmatic solution, and I am not attached to any particular selection of papers, but the decision of what to include and exclude is always going to be a bit arbitrary. DrThneed (talk) 02:51, 17 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - arguments about the selection basis are spurious insofar as an academic's article is better with a Selected papers section - which gives some insight to the reader as to the work the subject has engaged with - than without. Such lists are arguaby improved if well curated, but still useful if not. --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep a list of significant publications is de rigeour for scientific biographies, I personally have written hundreds of them (I recently wrote biographies for all NZ women professors); publications are the primary work of modern scientists. The extent, nature and selection of the list varies widely. For the stubs I write I use the most highly-ranked according to google scholar, but I'm happy to admit other methods work better in different circumstances. Stuartyeates (talk) 00:27, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep but trim We almost never include a full list. The usual practice is the 5 most cited papers. It's important to include them, because the published papers are normally how a scientist becomes notable, in either the usual or the WP sense. Selecting them in this way is unambiguous and avoids bias. Like others here, I always add them to an article about a scientist--I too have done it hundreds of times without objection. It is also possible to include the most recent paper or paers-- I would usually put that in thetext, not in a list. Any other particularly important ones can be mentioned in the article, but if this is excessive, we usually trim it there also. (or at least, I usually rewrite to reduce the number) But it's only the important papers that make for the notability. Including the whoile list belongs in the CV, which we always link to. Here it counts as undue coverage and promotionalism. Trying to distinguish based onauthor role csan sometimes be done objectively, but relying only on author positio orbeing listed as correspondingorder sometimes does not match the actuasl practice in the field (I have a few times used the criterion of "the 5 most cited independent papers" in the sense of being published after the graduate and post doc years, or not including the name of the advisor, but that's in exceptional situations and I wouldn;t suggest it in general -- and in any case it does not apply here, where her major work is after she already had an independent position.) DGG ( talk ) 17:50, 28 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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The list of publications in the external links section is sufficient. We don't need an arbitrary selection of articles she published, so I've removed that section as pointless / in violation of WP:DUE. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:13, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I've just restored that list and in my edit comment, I encouraged you to start a discussion on the talk page. I see you've done so already. Thank you. I suggest we give the article's author an opportunity to say something about this, too. Schwede66 03:39, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Reverted, the list is pure fluff. We are not a directory of publications, that's what the google scholar link is for. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:50, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have again reverted the deletion of the publications. Several reasons:
  1. It was not a random list. My general approach in selecting publications for an academic biography is to compare different sources (Google Scholar, Scholia, Scopus etc) to ensure I include both the most highly cited works but also the breadth of research that a person has published on.
  2. A list of selected publications is an entirely normal thing to have in an academic biography on Wikipedia (and elsewhere). Calling it fluff is to ignore the importance of publications to a scientist's reputation.
  3. I don't know why you are so keen to send people to Google Scholar for a publication list. There are multiple places you can see a list of someone's publications, but they all have their quirks. Scholia is great but rarely includes everything, and suffers from the problem that few of the page's readers would know what to expect by clicking the Scholia button. In the past I have found Google Scholar to have errors and misattributed papers, Scopus is only available to be viewed properly by subscription.
  4. I have searched but have not found a policy on lists of publications in academic biographies. If you know of one, do point me to it.
DrThneed (talk) 04:46, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The policy is WP:DUE/WP:INDISCRIMINATE (and also a lot of WP:WHATABOUTX because there's a lot of articles that include this sort of irrelevant trivia). You picked 7 papers from 2020, 1 from 2014, with no stated criteria for selection. All from large collaborations. That's the definition of an WP:INDISCRIMINATE selection. It's your own personal opinion of what papers should be mentioned. Wikipedia isn't a resume, there's a list of papers in the external links. If people want an up-to-date list of the most cited papers, they can check [1] and sort by citation. If they want an up-to-date list of the most recent papers, they can sort by year. What this article should do (and already does) is summarize the research areas, not list a random papers. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:47, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's not a random list, as I already explained. If you take issue with the particular papers selected, then by all means suggest others. Your point about not including information that people can find elsewhere makes little sense to me, as that point could be applied to everything that is contained in Wikipedia. DrThneed (talk) 06:14, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • In general Wikipedia should have the same sort of bibliographical treatment of topics as RS accords. So for someone who is principally an author (e.g. James Joyce) full bibliographic coverage would be appropriate. For people who are only incidentally authors it is more problematic and we have had situations in the past where people self-promote with huge lists of papers taken from PUBMED searches and so on. As a general rule of thumb, if a publication has had any sort of detailed examination in RS (a review, a critique, and so on) then it may be due in a list of selected publications. Otherwise we risk WP:LAUNDRY and flirting with WP:OR, by asserting the importance of works the wider world has not given such attention to. Alexbrn (talk) 08:45, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Academics are not really "incidentally" authors, are they? Publication of results is the primary mode of communication of scientific research. I agree that an entire list of an individual's publications would be inappropriate, which is why I did not include one. I don't see any discussion elsewhere about your rule of thumb to only include papers that have had "detailed examination" elsewhere? I have had a look around to see if I am out of step with the wider view, and by clicking on around 20 bios in a random science category I found around half had a list of selected publications. Only one of those had any indication of how the selection was made. It seems to me that if people object to the list being included at all, or want to impose rules about what can or can't be included, that would be an appropriate discussion to have in a wider forum, to come up with some policy around this? DrThneed (talk) 19:52, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, a wider discussion would seem appropriate. I also was surprised by the notion of calling research scientists "incidental authors"; that really feels like an odd thing to say. Schwede66 20:10, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@DrThneed: Most academics, particularly outside the humanities, are - yes - incidentally authors; writing is just the necessary task of communicating the principal thing they do, which is science. So, this article would never start with "Anne Wyllie is an author ...". Sometimes the "author" label might work (Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking?). But not here. Alexbrn (talk) 07:24, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Alexbrn: I don't agree with your binary of either someone is an author or their writing is incidental. Publications are a central part of doing science. Science that doesn't get published may as well never have happened. DrThneed (talk) 21:13, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The more important point being that this isn't creative writing, those just regular research papers authored by large research collaborations. In doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2588-y, Willie is one of 38 authors. Woop-dee-doo. We don't need to cover this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:52, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think a lot of scientists would disagree about whether writing science publications involves creativity or not, but I disagree with you that that is an important point at all. Scientists are judged on their publications. It is part of their notability. Creativity doesn't come into it.DrThneed (talk) 21:13, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's quite simple then: show us the publication which accords Wyllie the sort of bibliographical coverage you are pushing for. Wikipedia is meant to be a respectable tertiary source, summarizing accepted knowledge and based on secondary sources. Unlike a creative professionals (what we classify primarily as "an author"), a scientist usually doesn't get this. Or is there some source yet to be revealed? Alexbrn (talk) 21:48, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know what you mean by "a scientist usually doesn't get this". I see a lot of scientist biographies on Wikipedia with a list of selected publications. Why are you attempting to set a different standard on this page than anywhere else? DrThneed (talk) 23:26, 15 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There are a lot of poor articles on Wikipedia, especially promotional bios. That's not a reason to make another poor one. Alexbrn (talk) 04:32, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Then I'm sure you'll be pleased to find there are also plenty of bios classified as "good articles" with similar lists of selected publications. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - this is just from the first two lines of the table of good articles on biologists. So I could go on but it would get a bit boring. DrThneed (talk) 05:46, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
So I'm having trouble seeing why this bio exists at all other than to spite someone?? Is it really justified from the coverage of her critiquing Singh, because that could pretty easily be classed as BLP1E. The coverage of her research also seems pretty standard for COVID paper authors and it's not like she directs her own research group let alone has a professorship when she's a 2016 PhD working in someone else's lab! This page honestly is likely utterly embarrassing for her -- how is it remotely beneficial professionally to receive a wiki article solely because some activists wanted to "help" a junior scientist whose credentials were questioned? JoelleJay (talk) 01:42, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep in mind that this is a field where someone with just a 2017 bachelor's can have 1500 citations and an h-index of 10! JoelleJay (talk) 02:01, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You misinterpret the guideline. The individual is notable and her publications help establish that. Montanabw(talk) 03:14, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Which guideline? NPROF asks us to consider how a researcher compares to others within their field; where has this sort of analysis been done? JoelleJay (talk) 04:34, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Looking at the list here, and verified [2] she is, among other things, the lead author of a piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That’s relevant. Many articles on scientists include a list of selected major publications. See, e.g. David Eppstein. I am rather puzzled why the drama here, as a list or selected publications helps to make the individual’s notability clear. Montanabw(talk) 03:14, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thewriting is part of the research. Unpublished results are not influential. But that makes a person a researcher, not a writer, just as doing th earithmetic for the data does not make them a mathematician.--~
  • Asfor the importance of the research, we go by citations. The citation counts in Gogole Scjolar for her most cited articles are 778 (the Nature article "Longitudinal analysis... ") , 512 (the NEJM article) , 471, 373, 259 (Scopus or ISI counts would be expected to be half of these) . The highest level that has every been suggested here (by DavidE)for people in even the most active fields of biomedicine is 2 publications with more than 200 cites. I'll mention that I have typically been somewhat septical about notability for young scientists who get in the news--but none of the ones I've been skeptical about have had anywhere near this much scientific influence as measured by citations. DGG ( talk )
No single citation metric is ever going to be an appropriate benchmark for all subfields. Like I said in another comment, looking at her coauthors I've come across numerous students, lab assistants, and techs who have multiple papers with 200+ citations (on Scopus!); among those with 10+ papers, there are at least 10 who share the same four highly-cited papers (436, 279, 244, 179), so clearly this discipline is not at all conservative when it comes to who gets authorship. This is true for many subfields. JoelleJay (talk) 21:38, 29 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion of orange notability tag

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I dispute the addition of the orange notability tag to this article and recommend it is removed. Wyllie's achievements meet criteria 7 for notability of academics: she (and her work) has had a substantial impact outside academia, as described in the article regarding saliva testing for Co-VID. I also note that there are statements on this talk page that she is not notable because she is a junior researcher/new researcher/young. This is irrelevant. I also note that the disputes over her notability on this page are reminiscent of numerous other disputes over notability of women scientists in recent times (e.g. Donna Strickland and Clarice Phelps) and am aware that there is a significant amount of unconscious bias against women in the Wikipedia editing community. It would be appreciated if editors could examine their biases and consider the article on its merits. MurielMary (talk) 02:26, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've simply removed the tag. Maybe the tagger could read up on notability criteria. Schwede66 02:42, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Please tell me more about my "unconscious bias against women scientists". I am disputing her notability for two reasons: 1) It is not clear that she is widely considered the developer of this spit test (and this is a key point per NPROF: it is necessary to explicitly demonstrate, 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.). This field has unimaginably high publication and citation rates (I just came across a lab assistant with a 2019 bachelor's degree who has 10+ papers and 1200 citations; I haven't finished analyzing other authors in her discipline but it's looking like the median among professors and senior researchers (which is a far less strict parameter than the "average professor test" advised by NPROF) is around 5000 citations); moreover, being a developer of a commercially successful diagnostic tool does not automatically grant someone notability any more than it does the inventors of any other technology. Media coverage of particular splashy results is also not an automatic exemption from BLP1E, especially those for COVID-19 where almost anything published in a high-profile journal gets write-ups in lay media. 2) A premature biography has a very real potential for damage to one's professional career. It is even worse to have a premature biography that was made not because one has made an exceptionally greater impact than the average professor in their field, but because internet people wanted to stick it to some CEO for asking who they were and questioning their credentials. Especially if this becomes what she is known for, which is much more likely now that the media is commenting on it. JoelleJay (talk) 04:29, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Glad to tell you more. NPROF is a WP:SNG guideline. As such it is a supplement to the General notability guidelines. Here she has not only scientific work, but her work passes GNG as she has become part of the wider public debate. She is a high profile individual in this particular area, and, apparently, a figure of some controversy. But hey, if you want to try AfD, go for it and the discussion can continue there. Montanabw(talk) 04:45, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Incorrect. NPROF is explicitly not a supplement to GNG. Many other SNGs are supplementary, in the sense that they only suggest whether notability exists but, when questioned, notability needs to be confirmed through GNG. Instead, NPROF is independent and does not rely on GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:40, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Selected pubs

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I’m seeing a rough consensus forming around keeping a list of selected pubs, the only question being how many and which ones. So I’m going to move over the list from the article (as I last refined it, which is imperfect, but it’s a place to start) for us to establish a consensus before further editing. Montanabw(talk) 17:49, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This one is very recent and she is the “prestigious last” (maybe?) on the list:

  • Fenichel, EP; Koch, RT; Gilbert, A; Gonsalves, G; Wyllie, AL (3 September 2021). "Understanding the Barriers to Pooled SARS-CoV-2 Testing in the United States". Microbiology spectrum. 9 (1): e0031221. doi:10.1128/Spectrum.00312-21. PMID 34378949.

These all list her in the top four or higher of the list of authors. Most, but not all of these are listed at her bio page at Yale, here. Not sure if she selected what was listed or if the webmaster did, but the list is probably worth noting.

These were included in earlier versions so maybe should be looked at, but she is in the “middle of the pack” in terms of the list of authors.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Montanabw (talk • contribs)

We are not a CV-replicating endeavor or personal/institutional web page which exists for the sole purpose of promoting its employees. Give an external link to her page, sure. Readers can access that. But duplicating its content is not out job. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:39, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sigh. Once again, this is neither a CV nor is it an indiscriminate list. I pulled 16 out of over three dozen+ papers from which could be drawn a selected list of major work. Such lists are very common across many biographies of STEM individuals. As @David Eppstein: points out, the goal here is to find maybe the 4-5 publications that are most representative of her best or most important work. What’s in Google scholar or what’s on her faculty page can be used to help us find those 4-5. So let’s have a productive discussion about that. There is consensus to have *a* list. There is a consensus forming that a dozen papers is probably too many to include for someone at this stage of her career, and that we should try to see if we can narrow it. David mentioned some, and @DrThneed: had some useful thoughts too, as did @Johnbod:. So lets see if we can reach consensus on 4 or 5 of the above and end the tendentious portion of this discussion. Montanabw(talk) 23:25, 17 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I said 3-4, not 4-5. At this point in her career, even five may be pushing it too far. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:27, 17 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Montanabw: you keep repeating that, yet no selection criteria is given in Anne Wyllie#Selected_publications, and no source it given to verify that these publications satisfy said criteria. This is an arbitrary list, compiled according to personal tastes. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:02, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As is true of every biography currently on WP that lists some but not all works written by the subject. If you want a guideline for publication lists, write one. Montanabw(talk) 07:19, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You are fooling yourself if you think that any biography article that is not a line-by-line copy of the subject's cv can somehow avoid making arbitrary decisions about what to include and what not to include. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:36, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Probably yet another reason why this shouldn't be included to begin with. But you can easily have an objective criteria for selection if one must include publications, e.g. top 5 cited articles or similar, with a source to back it up. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:51, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You seem to have missed my point. It is not possible to write a biography with or without selected pubs and be purely objective. Even the choice to write the biography is non-objective. Objectivity is a mirage, a chimera, not something that it is useful to aim for purity in. Just to pick something obvious, the first claim we make in the article: we call her a "microbiologist". Her Google Scholar profile calls her a "medical microbiologist". Her official appointment is as an epidemiologist. She also has degrees calling her an immunologist. Someone has to make the choice of which of these things to call her. How can that be objective? Even before that, we title the article "Anne Wyllie". The choice of name as "Anne Louise Wyllie" in the first sentence is spelled out by MOS as her full name. But the press about her calls her "Anne Wyllie" while the papers she publish consistently use "Anne L. Wyllie". Someone had to choose which of those to use as the title. That choice is not objective. Choosing to go by citations alone is a choice. It is a choice to relinquish your decision-making ability to a formula, but it is still a non-objective choice, and usually not a good one (it will miss important papers that are not as heavily cited, and emphasize papers that get their citations for unimportant reasons or for which the subject's contribution was not significant). If you want pure factoids without the interpolation of human thought, might I suggest Wikidata instead of Wikipedia? —David Eppstein (talk) 01:49, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed Wikidata is where those papers should be documented, not here. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:00, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Wikidata is a fine site for being unselective, and listing all the pubs we can find. That's objective enough. That's also what one does in a cv. In an encyclopedia article, though, some judgement is called for. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:03, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Precisely. Now will someone recommend the top five? Or four, or six? Let’s focus on content. Montanabw(talk) 07:19, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I already recommended a specific list of three. Did you have some objection to that list? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:32, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It was just buried in the stuff above… I found it, see below. Montanabw(talk) 07:40, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Curated list

[edit]

So, given that someone has to bell the cat, here’s a start. David suggested above that we consider "Longitudinal analyses reveal immunological misfiring" (new, major journal, highly cited); "Saliva or nasopharyngeal swab specimens" (also new, major journal, highly cited, and first author); and maybe "Streptococcus pneumoniae in saliva of Dutch primary school children”. I would consider adding this year’s “Testing Saliva to Reveal the Submerged Cases of the COVID-19 Iceberg" as it notes, “All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.” and/or "Saliva as a gold-standard sample for SARS-CoV-2 detection" which is from The Lancet, and notes “ MA-H and ALW contributed equally as senior authors.” That’s five. Thoughts? Montanabw(talk) 07:40, 18 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Those five work for me. Thanks for all the effort you have put in to try to establish a consensus. DrThneed (talk) 04:42, 29 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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