The article Mark Frederick Boyd is an example of the trials and tribulations of bringing a sub-stub article up to Wikipedia standards. It was created on August 27, 2010, as a 17 word unsourced sub-stub, consisting solely of:

Mark Frederick Boyd (May 21,1889-Michigan, USA-1968)

An American Bacteriologist who discovered a shigella species known as shigella boydii.

After thirteen edits over almost ten years, at the end of May 2020, the article content was just 26 words, and remained unsourced. In June 2020 the article was expanded to 57 words, with three sources cited, and read:

Mark Frederick Boyd (May 21, 1889 in Michigan, USA – 1968) was an American bacteriologist. He did studies on malaria in Brazil, Jamaica, Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina.^[1]

== Biography ==

Mark graduated college in 1911, and received a Master of Science degree two years later.^[2]

In 1950, he won an Honorary Degree in medicine by the Florida State University.^[3]

References

^ "Boyd, Mark F. (Mark Frederick), 1889-1968 - Social Networks and Archival Context". SNAC. Retrieved 2020-06-19.
^ "New honor is Dr. M.F. Boyds". Iowa City Press-Citizen. 22 October 1921. p. 4 – via Newspapers.com.
^ "Honorary Degrees Awarded" (PDF). Florida State University.

In August 2022 I was working on an article about a Native American group in Spanish Florida and noticed I was citing three journal articles by a Mark F. Boyd, and remembered citing other articles by that author. I looked for a WP article I could use as an author-link in a citation. I found the article on Mark Frederick Boyd, and while the time frames matched, there was no indication that the two men were the same. I looked at one of the sources cited in the Boyd article, and found that Mark Frederick Boyd was the author of several articles on the history of Florida. I also noticed that there were discrepancies between that source and the Boyd article.

After repeated Google searches, I found a few reliable sources that I used to rewrite the article. I fixed the following errors in the article:

Boyd was born in Minnesota, not Michigan.
Boyd was not a bacteriologist. He taught bacteriology for a year or two at a time at a couple of universities early in his career, and did work with some diseases that are caused by bacteria, but he was a public health/disease prevention specialist in the early part of his career, and specialized in malaria for most of his career as a physician/researcher.
The article failed to note that Boyd's degree in 1911 was an MD.
The honorary degree conferred on Boyd by Florida State University in 1950 was a doctorate in science, not in medicine.
Boyd worked in the U.S. state of Georgia, not the country of Georgia.
Of the 25 years that Boyd studied malaria while employed by the Rockefeller Foundation, he was based in Tallahassee, Florida for 15 years, but Florida was not mentioned in the article.

In addition, the claim that Shigella boydii was named after Mark Boyd, which was in the article for almost 10 years, and which was still in the Shigella boydii article until August 19, 2022, was also wrong, as the species was named after John Smith Knox Boyd.

After five days of several hours each searching the Internet and sorting sources, I managed to expand the article to 616 words using a dozen sources. This is the burden that poorly-sourced stub-articles place on efforts to improve the encyclopedia. As it turned out, Boyd does (at least minimally) meet the GNG, but I could not be sure of that until I had spent hours searching the Internet.