Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lawrin Armstrong

Lawrin Armstrong was proposed for deletion. This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was delete

Lawrin Armstrong

This is a strange entry for me to make...User:Christofurio wrote it because he came across something Armstrong wrote and thought he was notable for inclusion. However, completely coincidentally, Armstrong is one of my professors, and I'm not sure he's really notable enough to include in an encyclopedia. Assuming that random academics will have to have done something to make them notable outside of their own fields (otherwise why not write about every professor?), I will have to vote delete. Adam Bishop 19:47, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• Delete: I'm sure he's a strong professor, but it's a bit esoteric a field, and the redlink of the whole book and both editors? Not known outside of his field nor the sole headliner above others in it. Geogre 20:23, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
• Well, in my opinion he's definitely more notable than pokemon characters, but then I'd vote delete for pokemon characters. Associate Professor and Associate Director, Centre for Medieval Studies - hmm, if those associates weren't there, I'd be tempted to vote keep, but my feeling is there isn't quite enough note yet for an article. Average Earthman 20:51, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • Comment: U. Toronto's Center for Medieval Studies is pretty much the finest medievalist center in North America. However, being head of it might be (often is) a rotating departmental thing. The Centre is one of the few really cool places to be for medieval stuff (U. Washington, U. North Carolina, and Kalamazoo are others). Geogre 22:58, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
• Delete I was thinking the same thing, the associates are my only block. Wyss 22:53, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
• Delete Spinboy 02:30, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
• I won't vote -- I can see which way this is going. When I google Armstrong's name, I get a respectable although not dramatic number of "hits," over a hundred. Let me explain a bit about why I put this article up there. I'm a finance reporter, and both for general background information and for possible use in an article I recently wanted to research Renaissance-era banking. Its hardly as "esoteric" a field as Geogre seems to think. After all, the success of the Medici family in this activity helped create the material preconditions for the Renaissance! Banking in many respects that still prevail today (including double-entry bookkeeping) was invented in Renaissance Italy. So it's an important field, and a complicated one. When I researched it, I found Armstrong's writings to be remarkable in their clarity. Without dumbing it down at all, he made complicated material palatable to non-experts and non-historians such as myself. But if that's not enough to make him notable ... so be it. I'll express my gratitude some other way. Maybe just a thankyou e-mail! ;-) --Christofurio 21:26, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)
  • I stand by my characterization. General knowledge of the subject isn't all that out of the way, but detailed scholarship on the subject is restricted to a very small number of experts. Edmund Spenser is well known, but Spenser scholarship is esoteric: it's pretty rarified when you get into Spenser Quarterly territory, and the number of scholars gets remarkably small. The point I was trying to make was that being a leader among Ren. banking experts is not like being the #1 Shakespeare expert or the #1 US Civil War expert, and therefore being really notable within that specialty was not enough to overcome the general difficulty of its being scholarly. Geogre 04:16, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Since I didn't ask to be included in Wikipedia in the first place, I don't really care whether I'm deleted from its pages or not. Like most professional historians, my published work is admittedly very specialized and 'esoteric,' although I hope this dosn't prevent me from making observations of more general value. Indeed, in all of my work I try to address an audience beyond the academy and to make technical historical problems--and their current relevance--open to non-specialists. Therefore I'm particularly gratified by Christofurio's comments: as a writer himself he knows that nothing is more satisfying to a writer than to learn he's being read. Perhaps the other contributors to this discussion should give it a try: they might even find that Renaissance banking is as interesting as the US civil war or Shakespeare. Lawrin Armstrong

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like other '/delete' pages is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion or on the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.