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.
Delete Although the subject of the article, Dr. Steven Q. Wang, has made contributions to society as a dermatologist specializing in skin cancers, and as the author of an eBook called Beating Melanoma, he doesn't appear to be notable (as Wikipedia defines it) even within his field. I would love to be proven wrong on this, since Wikipedians insist on free passes to jocks, including minor-league (AHL) ice hockey players, but they question entitlement for people who save lives. However, this is the lone contribution from an SPA, and I can't see him coming in except under an "all pro athletes are gods" type standard for physicians. Mandsford14:47, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Sloan-Kettering is one of the top half-dozen cancer hospitals in the country. Someone who is head of a department there is almost by definition a thought leader in the field. In addition, he has numerous hits [1] at Google Scholar, which are heavily cited by others. PubMed is harder to evaluate since there appear to be multiple authors named Wang SQ, but many are by him. He also writes for popular consumption. [2] --MelanieN (talk) 01:17, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Changing my vote to Keep. I was hoping that I would be proven wrong, so thank you, Melanie; I never considered the merits of being a department head at S-K. We don't have as many articles about physicians as we do about jocks, in large part because the sports fans are more assertive than doctoral fans, but also because there's this get-permission-first and a hold-everyone-back mentality among people in academia. Hence, the eggheads preceding us constructed these ridiculous inclusion standards like "Oh, he has to have published 100 peer-reviewed articles in no fewer than 25 separate journals" or "she has to had a surgical procedure named for her", while the sports fans simply have "dude played a regular season game". I'm sure someone with a Ph.D. will cite WP:PROF and say, "No! No articles about people who have accomplished something that I haven't done yet!" It may seem like we're not about anything else here besides Bart and LeBron, but it doesn't have to be that way. Mandsford13:09, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Mandsford, I share your frustration over the inclusiveness for sports figures vs. the strict standards for professionals and academics, but I can see where it comes from. It's part of our culture plus Wikipedia's need for Reliable Sources: Every newspaper has a sports section, every television news program devotes a certain number of minutes to sports every day, and so it is inevitable that Reliable Sources can be found for even the most obscure professional player. Comes the day when newspapers and television devote an equal amount of Reliable Source coverage to academics and physicians, then we will have an article about every significant physician. I'm not holding my breath. --MelanieN (talk) 14:48, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Still, much of our policy on athletes is based on inherent notability, where they don't have to prove the reliable source coverage, and we should be more welcoming of cancer researchers and heart surgeons as well. A substitute who appeared in only one NFL game in the 1970s would probably not pass WP:N, but does pass WP:ATHLETE (and I'm not arguing against that at all). It would be difficult to find widespread coverage for someone who served in the legislature in Uruguay in 1897, but we even that out by WP:POLITICIAN. Conversely, we have detailed coverage of the daily weather from reliable sources, but we exclude that by a common sense policy WP:MILL. One of the things in deletion debates, of course, is that the people only respond to things that they are interested in; thus, the persons who give an opinion on one a sports or entertainment topic are usually not the same as the persons who give an opinion on a medical or mathematics topic. All of this is generalization that has a ring of truth-- I think that the difference is that the geeks, and I use that term with no apologies, are self-loathing and reluctant to see "one of their own" get mentioned, and at the same time, too timid to disagree with the fans of sports and entertainment, or even enter a debate. You never see a sports fan urge deletion of an article about a surgeon-- many couldn't care less-- but you sure see it among a lot of people who ought to give it some thought. People who take no pride on their careers in educating, healing, researching, or advancing society, truly are geeks. Mandsford16:23, 27 July 2010 (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.