User talk:Horacelamb

Welcome[edit]

Hello, Horacelamb, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of your edits have not conformed to Wikipedia's verifiability policy, and have been reverted. Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations that have been stated in print or on reputable websites or other forms of media. Always remember to provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed. Wikipedia also has a related policy against including original research in articles.

If you are stuck and looking for help, please see the guide for citing sources or come to the new contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Dougweller (talk) 17:43, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Walter Rudin[edit]

Although I believe he has died, please don't add it to his article until you have a reliable source -- see WP:RS which in this case is most likely going to be a news source. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 17:44, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Manuel Blum[edit]

Hi, you recently reverted my edit tidying the infobox at the Manuel Blum article. Template:Infobox scientist describes the doctoral_students field as

Insert names of doctoral students supervised by the scientist. If a student does not have a wiki article, then comment the name out. It can be reinstated once such an article appears. The idea is to list only those students who are significant enough to warrant their own article.

I feel my edit was in line with that description. The purpose of an infobox is to give a short summary of key information about the article which may be of interest to a reader, not an exhaustive list of all students. Information like that belongs elsewhere, like the Mathematics Genealogy Project. I hope you don't mind if I reinstate my edit? Gareth Jones (talk) 09:44, 28 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A large part of Manuel Blum's notability comes from his large number of highly influential theoretical computer science advisees. In fact, the reason that I was looking at this page in the first place was to check this list, including the students whose names you deleted. Some (I can't attest to all) of the advisees that you deleted are highly notable and deserve Wikipedia pages - e.g. Ronitt Rubinfeld a theoretical computer scientist at MIT. If you are an expert in this area and are familiar with each of these students' work then surgically removing some of these names would be a good idea. Removing all the students who do not yet have webpages is too much. I am going to revert your edit once more, but am not interested in an edit war and will yield to others' final decision. Horacelamb (talk) 01:47, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I also found deleting the names needlessly destructive. If the style guideline is to be followed to the letter, then the names should be commented out rather than deleted. On the other hand, wikipedia certainly is not consistent about excluding students without articles (to pick articles out of a hat, see for example here, here, or here), and obviously being "significant enough to warrant their own article" does not mean that an article has already been written. Noamz (talk) 03:22, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]