Talk:Claus Wedekind

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DYK nomination[edit]

from User talk:Sadi Carnot

Hi, I've nominated an article you worked on, Claus Wedekind, for consideration to appear on the Main Page as part of Wikipedia:Did you know. You can see the hook for the article at Template talk:Did you know#Articles created on May 22 where you can improve it if you see fit. MeegsC | Talk 23:36, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Meegs, thanks for the nod, Wedekind's MHC-study is legendary in the mate-selection books and circles. I'm bogged down on time presently, the article was meant to be just a good start article. Later. --Sadi Carnot 11:04, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Notability[edit]

I'm not convinced Wedekind meets WP:PROF in terms of notability. The MHC papers were interesting, certainly, but hardly groundbreaking enough for their own article. Thoughts? Rockpocket 00:17, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I find WP:PROF difficult to interpret. Perhaps Professor Wedekind meets criterion #3: The person has published a significant and well-known academic work. An academic work may be significant or well known if, for example, it is the basis for a textbook or course, if it is itself the subject of multiple, independent works, if it is widely cited by other authors in the academic literature. I can't check citation indices myself. Outside academia, I do remember his study being reported in Swiss newspapers, and The Economist as well. No idea whether this helped, but I thought I'd throw it in anyway. ---Sluzzelin talk 01:02, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I largely agree. The problem is differentiating between media-friendly academic works and scientifically notable ones. I happen to work in the olfaction field and am of course familiar with Wedekind's paper. His paper does get mentioned in textbooks, for example Pheromones and Animal Behaviour: Communication by Smell and Taste by Tristram D. Wyatt, but then so do plenty of other papers (including one or two of my own). It certainly doesn't form the "the basis for a textbook" and is widely cited, but no more so than many other olfaction papers. Personally I don't think being the first author of one or two interesting papers as a student or post-doc justifies an article, especially since his output on the subject since is hardly spectacular [1]. I appreciate this may sound a bit harsh, and I assure you I have no axe to grind with Wedekind, I have never met him and I like his paper very much. I just feel if we are going to write an article on t-shirt tests and MHC class as odor cues, we should do so under t-shirt test, or more appropriately under pheromone or major histocompatibility complex, not as a bio of an otherwise nn scientist. Rockpocket 02:00, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I defer to your reasoning and experience in the field. (Incidentally, I have met Claus Wedekind and found him very likable, but, of course, my interests here are the encyclopedia's ! Still, a t-shirt test article might be nice, especially if we find a good picture of sniffers. ) ---Sluzzelin talk 02:27, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the info is repeated at Major_histocompatibility_complex#MHC_and_sexual_selection anyway, so I think the best thing would be to merge the info to that. I'll wait for a few days to see if there is any other opinion voiced here before doing anything though. Rockpocket 02:35, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Rockpuppet, this article is no-brainer. Wedekind has been referenced in so many books and articles that the count goes well into the 100s. His name was a redlink on several pages before I started this article. I have read about Wedekind in many books, e.g. Helen Fisher’s 2004 Why We Love – the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, or more before I started this page. Wedekind is famous. He is the first scientist to show scent-based genetic mate selection preferences in humans. You are obviously biased, being that you work in the field as you say. I have never met Wedekind nor do I work in the scent industry; I just know that I have come across his name enough times (I own over 125 books on science of human mating) to know that he is encyclopedic. Furthermore, since when did we start merging names of people into articles about a person’s work? Please remove the merge tags. I could add well over 50 references to this article if you seriously think Wedekind is not notable, e.g. here's Google books search for Claus Wedekind MHC. His study was done over a dozen years ago, and it is still being written about. Thanks: --Sadi Carnot 07:42, 19 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

To put this into perspective for you, I just dug through some of my files and guess what, Wedekind was in the August 1997 issue of Cosmo (pg 177) along with notables such as David Buss, Devendra Singh (notable for waste-to-hip-ratio studies), and Helen Fisher. Go figure? A non-notable academic (that all three of us have heard of) in one of the world’s most popular magazines. --Sadi Carnot 13:27, 19 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • clearly notable, as i see it. From his CV he has written several dozen publication on a range of topics in major journals. His main topic in fact seems to be sperm competition and various other aspect of sexual selection. He seems to work primarily with fish; this well known study seems to have started as one of his subsidiary lines of research. Article merely has to be written to demonstrate this. It was not obvious from the present article that he had done any other work. See [2]. The question of the relative notability of scientists and their discoveries is not a well settled one in cases of people known only for a single piece of work, but that isn't the case here. As Sadi isn't around, I'll touch up the article a little. DGG (talk) 22:06, 21 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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