Talk:Swarthmore College

List of alumni in main article

Re this edit summary: use of the number of interwiki links as a yardstick for notability is not unheard of on Wikipedia (it's sometimes used on requested moves and was used on year/date articles), it works almost all of the time, and the system has been completely workable on this article for the last three years. (Also see my previous ramblings on this topic). I've added references to each alumnus listed here along with their graduation date; in many cases the references were taken from the respective Wikipedia articles. I couldn't verify the graduation year of Justin Hall (who has only five interlanguage links) so I thought it might be a good idea to tighten the criteria further, and decided on a reasonable cut-off of 25 names on the list (which can be handily achieved by restricting the list to twelve interwiki links or more). Yes, it's a bit arbitrary, but at least it's measurable (unlike making arguments about which people are or are not necessary on the article). Quick disclaimer here: my personal favourite on the list, Peter Schickele is on thirteen interwiki links ... if we tightened the criteria even further (to twenty, say), we'd lose him, but that's a small price to pay. There's a comprehensive list at List of Swarthmore College people anyway. Graham87 06:52, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

I've brought this up with the higher education project (there's also this relevant project guide). This topic was also brought up at Talk:List of Swarthmore College people#Inclusion rules, but I think discussion is best here. Graham87 07:15, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Also, if we tighten the selection criteria much more, we'd lose Hawaii Governor Josh Green (14 interwiki links); I think state governors are inherently notable for this sort of list (especially when not from the home state of the university) and he's particularly relevant right now). I can quickly tell how many interlanguage links a page has because I have compact language links turned off and my screen reader tells me how many items there are in a list. Graham87 07:36, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Graham87, collegiate and university articles here are famously subject to bloat and puffery. You'll have no argument from me on reducing the number of alumni highlighted on the main page, nor certainly on the larger List of Swarthmore College people, which is also bloated. A first rule on that page certainly ought to be that only persons with separate Wikipedia articles ought to be listed.

But here... We've been reverting each other, but we're essentially on the same side. I likewise want to reduce the headcount of alumni on the main article. Your novel application of ascertaining how many interwiki (~foreign language wikis) each biographical article has is simply a specious fact that has no bearing on actual notability. (If I sought to determine notability of a Japanese samurai, I would look to the Japanese Wikipedia, NOT to the English Wiki. Sally Ride or James Michener are notable regardless if the Czech, or Japanese or Bantu wikipedias pick them up.) Even if this criteria was previously used, it has fallen into disuse as method of determining notability. A far better process would be to determine, by category of professional life, which titles, awards, accomplishments or other bar must be met for each profession. This is more fair. Publish those criteria on the Talk Page, and then assess each alumnus on the main page (or on the separate and larger List of Swarthmore College People) against those criteria. Jax MN (talk) 19:34, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but we'd need standardised criteria like that on every article about a college/university with a similarly long history ... which goes way beyond this page ... and I'd be concerned about the subjectivity of such criteria. Since there are so many people to choose from here, we need some kind of fairly aggressive way to prune who is and is not listed. International prominence seems like a good place to start (especially because Swarthmore attracts many people from outside its local area and even outside the US) and, apart from winners of things like Nobel Prizes (which are already listed separately), a reasonable first-order approximation of that is the number of interwiki links a page has. I know it's a blunt instrument which has occasionally been gamed in the past but it's one of the most easily measurable ones we have. (One way to find out the number of interwiki links a page has, besides the one mentioned above, is by going to its Wikidata item). As for your Japanese samurai example, if I were checking the Japanese Wikipedia and found one that seemed to be very notable indeed, I would have very grave suspicions about its article's verasity if it had few or no interwiki links. Such things are tracked at Special:MostInterwikis; while for these purposes it's almost useless (being crowded out by many non-biographical articles), this randomly selected part of the list contains [[Robert De Niro and Toshiro Mifune, who are obviously extremely prominent in their fields. As for the List of Swarthmore College people, I agree that the presence of a blue link would be a good minimum criterion there. Graham87 05:21, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

@Graham87/@Jax MN, I can speak to this situation pretty directly, having taken Pomona College, a close peer of Swarthmore, through FAC, which involved a lot of consideration of who to include.

This sort of list is deceptively tricky, and in order to really feel I did it justice, I basically had to FLC List of Pomona College people first. After I had that knowledge, I chose a target length for the list at the main article that seemed WP:DUE, and limited it to people that reached a certain level of eminence. It's really hard to articulate exactly what that level is, which is unfortunate particularly given the need to explain it others inquiring about adding someone specific. The closest I can get is "at the top of their craft". Some standards (e.g. U.S. senators are listed, but U.S. Representatives aren't) are only in my mind. It's tempting to try to rigorously define them, as UC Riverside has interestingly tried to do, but ultimately that's a fool's errand, as the standard will change over time and it's impossible to define all the ways in which someone can be notable.

I had a slightly easier time with listing notable faculty, which is something that I think this article ought to do in addition to alumni. The way I put it in a hidden comment (and I'd strongly suggest a hidden comment here to avoid creep) is, As a rough rule of thumb, there should be a chance that a random person with no special interest in the listee's field might have heard of them. Be particularly picky about professors who taught only in brief visiting roles.

I'm not a fan of using the number of language editions as a proxy. Relying on something outside English Wikipedia to dictate our content feels off, and I'm not sure how accurate a measure of notability it is. As tempting as it is to cede editorial judgement like that, I don't think we can avoid it.

I would also recommend removing the gallery, replacing it with just an image of one person as illustration of the section. In the context of the entire breadth and history of an institution like Swarthmore, it's almost a stretch to say that any individual student is due to be mentioned, but it's certainly a stretch to say that they are so due as to warrant a photo.

Hope all that is helpful, and best of luck developing the article! It'd be great to see Swarthmore reach beyond C-class someday. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:45, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb: Thanks very much for your detailed reply. It sounds like you've done an absolutely enormous amount of work on Pomona's page and the related articles. I for one don't have any great ambitions for this article; I came across it because a good friend of mine, Codeofdusk, went to the college and it ended up on my watchlist because I did a bit of work on the history section back in 2018; my interest in the alumni section, the only other one to which I've made any significant contribution, came a bit later.

You make an interesting point that the interlanguage links are completely out of enwiki's control. what do you mean by one image as an illustration of the section? As I'm blind I prefer not to deal with images if I can help it ... I'd be OK with just removing the gallery completely. As for faculty, I'm being very picky but on a quick skim, only Solomon Asch, Wolfgang Köhler, and W. H. Auden (for name recognition more than length of service) really stand out to me. Graham87 09:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Many sections benefit from having a visual element, so I just mean that I'd be alright with a single photo of an alum being used in the article. This works best when the article is in need of more visual elements and when there's a single alum who stands out above the rest (e.g. Obama at Occidental). But I'd also be fine with no image; the main thing I object to is galleries, which use up an undue amount of space. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:18, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

It strikes me that Detlev Bronk (for his presidency of a national science body and a very high-ranking university), John Hopfield (for popularizing the Hopfield network), and Jane S. Richardson (for her work on ribbon diagrams seem to meet your "top of their craft" rough criterion you mentioned, but I removed them while filtering out the list. But I can't think how to articulate what would make them worthy of reinclusion in a form that I could add in an HTML comment ... hmmm ... Graham87 10:05, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I tend to agree with your point, Sdkb, regarding the excessive space taken up by galleries. I wouldn't want multiple lines of galleries, but a line that can be scrolled is perhaps acceptable - some other school articles do this. I am stridently against publicity seeking, like that sought by every manner of "internet influencers", but do not mind the inclusion of bona fide graduates who have attained professional competency or other notability, with their own WP articles, it may be an evolution of our standard that is allowable if Wikipedia is to be a comprehensive source. We're not space limited, like a print encyclopedia, but should not and cannot include all material. That's what the references are for: we are a starting point. Here, it seems fair to surmise that plucky Swarthmore backers seek to promote the legitimacy of that campus, in the same way that the Ivys, Stanford, MIT and several other schools do, within this space. It's a good school, and they're probably not wrong in asserting such. "Where to draw the line" is the issue, hence I favor strict rules by each category of professional work. Jax MN (talk) 20:34, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb and Jax MN: OK I've removed the strict language requirement, removed the gallery (as I don't think just *one* alumnus particularly stands out here), and added a brief notable faculty section. Whyile searching for "notable a" in the wikitext, I found this PhillyVoice article which was added in 2016 (with the wrong title), which had some interesting entries I hadn't thought of adding before (e.g. the actor Stephen Lang and baseball administrator Lee MacPhail (he doesn't have so many interwiki articles but not many people have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, especially executives). I also found this thing, which isn't directly usable as a source of course but did cough up another highly notable entry, Robert D. Putnam. That's about as much work as I personally want to do on the lists for the time being. Graham87 10:31, 24 August 2023 (UTC)