Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Carroll Alley

:{{la|Carroll Alley}} ([{{fullurl:Carroll Alley|wpReason={{urlencode: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Carroll Alley}}&action=delete}} delete]) – (View AfD)(View log)

:({{find sources|Carroll Alley}})

lacks any reliable sources to establish claim for notability. Michellecrisp (talk) 14:30, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

• Keep - A quick web search turned up quite a lot, including articles in Time Magazine[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,839785,00.html?iid=digg_share] and at NASA[http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/21jul_llr.html]. The stub needs work, not deletion.   SIS  15:10, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

::*I added the NASA ref to the article.    SIS  15:19, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

• Keep Searching for "Carroll Alley" nasa generates plenty of interesting facts by reliable sources. PHARMBOY (TALK) 17:15, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:54, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
• Don't have to be a rocket scientist to vote keep on this one. [http://news.google.com/archivesearch?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Search+Archives&as_epq=carroll+alley&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_user_ldate=1967&as_user_hdate=&lr=&as_src=&as_price=p0 93 gnews hits](some real estate false pos) , [http://books.google.com/books?q=%22carroll+alley%22&btnG=Search+Books&output=html 47 gbooks hits], principal investigator for major project, seems wellknown in his field. Working for government and the his pre-internetness should be taken into consideration - he seems to have gotten his Ph.D. at Princeton in the early 50s. John Z (talk) 21:40, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

::Damn, why didn't I think of that pun ;-)    SIS  22:50, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

:::Guess puns weren't up your alley today.John Z (talk) 23:08, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 00:00, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Notable investigator. More does have to be added, including his major works--and, probably in this case--criticism of them. But the sources above are sufficient for t hat. DGG (talk) 00:50, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
• Neutral, leaning towards weak delete. Somehow, after looking through the sources mentioned above I am not finding them quite sufficient for passing a notability case under either WP:BIO or WP:ACADEMIC. For the latter, there seems to be fairly little evidence of passing the standard criteria of WP:ACADEMIC in terms of scientific impact or citability of his work by other scholars (GoogleScholar[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22Carroll+Alley%22] and WoS give fairly little), nor are there significant academic awards, journal editorships or the like. There may be a passable WP:BIO case, but somehow I don't see it based on the references provided. The NASA, TIME and most googlenews and googlebooks references provide coverage that is mostly of fairly weak nature: as someone who relayed some information to somebody else, or performed some fairly technical (even if important technical) function in the Apollo project. The coverage never really seems to concentrate on him, and his sientific/engineering role in NASA is not described as sufficiently prominent (at least not IMO). One could, perhaps, make an argument that there is a multiple nontrivial coverage here which makes this pass WP:BIO, but I personally don't quite see it here. Nsk92 (talk) 11:11, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

:To me, the principal source of notability comes from his being the lead investigator for the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. I think this experiment was well known enough and influential enough that this proves his scientific impact. That his (uncontroversial) contributions mainly precede the internet makes the usual tools a little suspect. For example, [http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/21jul_llr.html the NASA page] used in Alley's article refers to Alley's history of the project, "Laser ranging to retro-reflectors on the Moon as a test of theories of gravity," published in Quantum Optics, Experimental Gravitation, and Measurement Theory, Eds. P Meystre and M.O. Scully, Plenum Publishing (1982), but it does not appear in a google scholar or google book search on his name.John Z (talk) 19:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

: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.