This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was - no consensus - SimonP 13:33, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

Nicholas J. Hopper[edit]

Does not pass the average professor test, vanity and/or self-promotion, only recieved his phd in 2004. Previously nominated for vfd but the discussion has gone strangely missing. All his pubs are conference proceedings, has not published in an academic journal--nixie 02:39, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

same goes for Luis von Ahn and he is not even a prof...so I put him up for deletion and redirected here to keep from cluttering vfd-MarSch 17:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC). I gave Luis his own page because he's a completely different kettle of fish. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 15:45, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Vanity. Ganymead 02:52, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Mere professorship does not reach the bar of notability. Kelly Martin 02:54, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. I applied the ((cleanup-importance)) tag nearly a month ago. Nick's a nice guy and a great lecturer, but he's still below the bar of notability for professors. android↔talk 03:12, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
• Question/comment. Why is it that profs have a "bar of notability" but pocket monsters, ingredients of Wars Trek, televangelists, people who run around after balls, etc., do not? I don't know Nick at all, but advances in steganography seem much more significant than the preceding stuff. -- Hoary 03:33, 2005 May 15 (UTC)
  • There are guidelines for most of these things you mention. The Pokemon issue is undergoing discussion right now. Star Trek: WP:FICT. People who run around after balls: typically, I've only seen well-known pro athletes get kept, though I haven't seen many athletes up for VfD, I must admit. There are a lot of professors out there, and Nick's only been one for a year or so. In the grand scheme of things, he's an obscure Pokemon. android↔talk 04:26, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
    • Comment: I had a look at Wikipedia:Poképrosal but quickly gave up: commercialized whimsy and ersatz cuddliness (I think) is a soporific mixture for me. For better or worse, WP:FICT doesn't represent my impression of what's going on, which is that any level of reverence for the minutiae of Star Wars/Trek is immune from the charge of fancruft. (As a participant experiment, I've even made a single contribution to this.) And I've seen sports-related people by the thousand. -- Hoary 06:56, 2005 May 15 (UTC)
• Keep. He's only an associate professor, but he's already got a long publishing history including Proc. ACM. Good stub. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 05:46, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all tenured professors (at any institution) and all professors at major institutions. Being an assistant professor at a major university like Cornell or University of Minnesota is notable. Klonimus 06:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. --Unfocused 06:06, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and expand. Published professor. Megan1967 06:31, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Also, original posting IP hasnt visited the article since October 2003. EvilPhoenix
• Keep and expand per Tony Sidaway and others. Kappa 07:46, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. As an associate (not full) professor with a PhD for only a year, not notable enough yet. Quale 08:03, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. No indication of notability beyond that of an average professor. Do we really want every college freshperson coming here and writing articles on all their professors? Gamaliel 08:08, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Opinion seems to be divided. Kappa 10:07, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • True, but I think the real problem is not just the potential for articles on all living non-notable professors. If they're to be included, clearly all the dead non-notable professors should be added too. This is simply a bad idea. Quale 17:24, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. I am not normally a deletionist when it comes to academics, but in that case I do not see how he his more notable than millions of others. I strongly suspect that he is getting a "keep" bias because he is in computer science. Maybe some of the keep voters could expand the article to show how he stands out. Martg76 12:12, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep; legitimate inbound link from Captcha that has been slightly filled out. Please, nominators, check What links here; at the very least we could be talking about Luis von Ahn, a graduate student only from Captcha, in the same VfD. Samaritan 12:34, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep; and as far as EvilPhoenix's concern that the original poster has not edited for 1,5 years - so bleepin' what? Also, the inclination that there is a keep bias for his computer science degree - please, provide sources ;) So long as it can be expanded, there's no reason to remove it. --TVPR 12:45, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. 1000 hits in googletest for "Nicholas Hopper" and "Nicholas J. Hopper" together. -MarSch 13:19, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  this in contrast to Manuel Blum who gets 17800 hits and the Turing award and introduced the acro captcha. This Hopper is just someone he works with and so is Luis von Ahn, so I vote delete that also. MarSch 17:48, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete unless further evidence of notability produced. PatGallacher 17:24, 2005 May 15 (UTC)
• Keep. ✏ OvenFresh2 18:23, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Wikipedia is not paper; if we can have articles for every minor character in Star Wars, Star Trek, and each of those pesky Pokemon, we can have an article about Professor Hopper. Kelly Martin 22:36, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Plentiful as those minor characters are, they're a drop in the bucket compared to the number of associate professors out there, and they're all published (well, practially all). Granted, his field isn't Recreation and Leisure Studies, but do you really want to open the door to all the published Asst. Profs in any field? And which field's publications will we count/discount? -- Mwanner 02:04, May 16, 2005 (UTC)
• Comment. This article is now well into its second year, and survived a VfD listing shortly after being created in October, 2003. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 06:55, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yep, and you can see how wonderful the article has become with the advantage of 2 years development. It's 3 sentences -- still barely a stub after 2 years. This is an opportunity to fix the mistake made when it survived the first VfD. Quale 16:25, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Non-notable, vanity page. Inclusionist pileons here mean that the next db dump current of wikipedia will likely not fit gzipped on my Zaurus, and it means searches will produce more bogus results. Vanity and cruft make wikipedia less accessable to everyone. --Gmaxwell 00:55, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• I see no vanity here, but all right, he's just starting. So, a particularly unenthusiastic delete -- a vote understood to say nothing about NJH's WPworthiness when he has a book or two, or a widely cited paper or two, in his CV. -- Hoary 03:07, 2005 May 16 (UTC)
• Delete. An associate professor with a few publications is not notable. There are thousands of these people--and yes, thousands more who are deceased. Also, since obscure academic publication is a requirement for an academic job, using publication as a "reason" for "notability" is a tautalogical argument. It's like saying a dog is notable for barking. C W Merchant 18:50, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • But we have articles on sports people just because they are good at their sport. Average Earthman 20:55, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - an average professor; a list of publications is just evidence that he is doing his job. CDC (talk) 21:38, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Thoughts on Inclusion of Professors (DO NOT VOTE HERE) moved to talk page.
• Delete, nn. Radiant_* 13:34, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, this page was made when he was a grad student. Imagine if all grad students are archived just in case they achieve notable status. Without a major contribution to a field, associate and even full professors should not be in an encyclopedia.David D. 17:13, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Question just how much input did Ahn and Hopper have in the captcha project? I note at the Carnegie Mellon captcha project [1] page they are listed as PI's along with Manuel Blum, John Langford (It is strange that grad students would be listed with PI status). There are a lot of collaborators on this project too [2], should they all be listed too (Udi Manber Nancy Chan Scott Crosby Richard Fateman Brighten Godfrey Bartosz Przydetek Roni Rosenfeld Ke Yang)? There is a fine line between participating in a project and conceiving of the project. Conceiving the project does seem to be worthy of a wikipedia entry. Did Hopper and Ahn have imput with the conception of this project? David D. 17:40, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete for the same reason I'd vote to delete my parents if articles were created on them. As basically all professors are published somewhere adding that adjective does nothign to establish further notability. -R. fiend 21:21, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, professors are not inherently notable. --W(t) 22:17, 2005 May 17 (UTC)
• Delete. His website lists one journal paper that has merely been submitted, rather than accepted. Being published isn't adequate, being significantly published with papers that are attracting a high number of citations is the requirement. If you're judging on journal publications, I'd require a fairly hefty number of papers or citations - say 50 journal papers or one (as first author) with 100 citations as a minimum to consider being published (note, this is from a physics viewpoint, other subject areas may vary). Although even this can be well surpassed - one professor I've co-authored papers with has over 3000 papers to his name. Average Earthman 20:55, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.