Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of countries by number of Fields Medalists (2nd nomination)

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.

The result was delete. Sandstein 09:45, 26 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

List of countries by number of Fields Medalists[edit]

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This list article sorts the existing Fields Medal#Fields medalists table by country of birth/citizenship, which is not relevant information for the award and is often contentious. There's already consensus from Talk:Fields Medal/Archive 1#Nationalism (2014) and Talk:Fields Medal/Archive 1#Removing the entire nationality column (2020) that nationality/citizenship/birth is irrelevant data that shouldn't be in the main article. The list also fails WP:LISTN since the topic "countries by number of Fields Medalists" is not notable as a cohesive group: there are sources with tables or brief mentions of countries associated to Fields Medal awardees, but not many with actual significant coverage on the topic.

Unlike the Olympics for instance, the Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians who are not formally attached to countries (but are usually formally attached to universities). Many of the awardees are also barely related to their listed countries for various reasons. The issue of associating each person to a country is often problematic and unproductive, while still being irrelevant to the award itself.

This list was recently nominated for AfD here that was closed as "keep" with no prejudice to merge due to the large number of delete/merge !votes. What has changed since then is the new overwhelming consensus at the potential target article (Talk:Fields Medal/Archive 1#Removing the entire nationality column) that nationality/citizenship/birth is not relevant data for the Fields Medal. — MarkH₂₁^talk 20:43, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. — MarkH₂₁^talk 20:43, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. — MarkH₂₁^talk 20:43, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. — MarkH₂₁^talk 20:43, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete While I normally dislike rapid (less than ~6 months) renominations at AfD, the discussion at the Fields Medal Talk page provides valuable information and a strong indication that tabulating this kind of information is, as the nominator says, often problematic and unproductive. It is unsuitable for the proposed merge target, so merging the list itself is not really an option. A few sources were provided in the previous AfD; in my estimation, they might warrant a brief mention in the main article that the geographical distribution of Fields medalists is a topic people have discussed, but they can't sustain this list, which is fundamentally WP:OR. There are real, irreducible ambiguities in how to associate nationalities to medalists, and a list of countries is not a good way to present that information. There's room in Fields Medal for actual prose on the topic, if someone is willing to write it, but this list doesn't do us any good. XOR'easter (talk) 21:04, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Country in which the medalists worked at the time of their award might be relevant, and is still listed in the Fields medal article. Country of birth citizenship or citizenship at the time of the award is not relevant, in many cases is a matter of original research (because naturalization records are not public and high-level academics tend to move between countries much more frequently than some other people), and in some specific cases here the guesswork and original research needed to fill out the table has led to egregious mistakes (Martin Hairer is listed as the sole Swiss entry but despite being born and growing up in Switzerland appears not to have ever been a Swiss citizen). —David Eppstein (talk) 21:25, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. "Country of birth" and "country of citizenship at time of award" are (a) not particularly relevant (you could make an argument for listing the countries in which a medalist was educated) and (b) mixing them (listing e.g. Hairer twice) is weird. Also, this isn't even done accurately: Roth, Werner, and Grothendieck were all born in Germany (although none of them should be considered a German mathematician), and Russia is not the same as the USSR. Overall, too much original research goes into this. —Kusma (t·c) 21:39, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I agree with the above, particularly that too much original research is required. --Bduke (talk) 03:08, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Procedual close - While I am in sympathy with the anti-nationalist delete rationale, I think we should not be declaring an "overwhelming consensus" on an argument that was only started yesterday and it is at least a week too soon to begin this AfD. — Charles Stewart (talk) 06:05, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Chalst: While I understand that the previous AfD and the catalyst discussion for this AfD are quite recent, that doesn’t preclude a productive renewed AfD discussion here with the new points brought up since the last AfD and the new near-uniform agreement at the main article talk page. The delete !votes in this AfD are already more numerous and detailed in reasoning than in the entirety of the last AfD.
If the issue is just a week or so, it wouldn’t be much more productive to procedurally close this AfD and re-nominate in a week (particularly since this AfD would be open for at least one week anyways). — MarkH₂₁^talk 06:43, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@MarkH21: Personally, I think the delete case is strong and it is a good thing to see the synthesis of the rationale here. So far, though, Bduke and myself are the only participants in this AfD who were not part of the emerging consensus at Talk:Fields Medal, and the issue is much larger than this list: there are 191 subcats of Category:Lists of people by nationality, including the one for Nobel laureates containing 23 lists, and I guess that these lists see a fair bit of use, so I imagine a case for their navigational value could be made. I don't like be bureaucratic, but I think the issue deserves more time for reflection and to gather participation than the seven days that the AfD process normally allows. — Charles Stewart (talk) 07:51, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I've raised the general issue at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lists#Are lists of people by nationality worthwhile, especially regarding awards? — Charles Stewart (talk) 08:48, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Why nominate the same thing a month later when it ended as keep? I'll just copy and paste what I said in that one. Category:Fields_Medalists shows there are two other lists with the information: List of Fields Medal winners by university affiliation and List of Fields medalists affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study. I don't think these list would all fit in the main article. News media that announces the winner mention what country they are from. Dream Focus 17:15, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- I think that's really just an example of repeating guesswork and unreliable information across multiple articles. The prevailing opinion so far is that the "nationality" column does not belong in the Fields Medal article, and so by extension the "country" column should be removed from the IAS list. (As for whether those lists should exist, they aren't really in the same situation as this one. University affiliation isn't ambiguous like "nationality" has turned out to be, and those lists don't require WP:OR to fill out like this one.) XOR'easter (talk) 17:41, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- The renomination was due to the new discussion regarding the non-relevance of nationality/citizenship/birth to the Fields Medal.
  Also, as I mentioned in my nomination, Fields Medals are awarded to mathematicians who are actually formally affiliated with universities but not with countries. Whether a list would all fit in the main article is relevant to merging, but it's not a factor in whether the list should be deleted outright. News media also mention how old winners are and a host of other details that aren't pertinent. — MarkH₂₁^talk 17:54, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I agree with others that the collation of this information is problematic and doesn't really add much to the encyclopedia. "By country" is a problematic metric when most academics are most prominently affiliated by university, not country, and the country of the university is often different to the country of origin, It's also OR on how nationality is counted between origin and where they are based. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:30, 19 September 2020 (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.