Talk:Donald R. Brown

Dr. Donald Randolph Brown Died in 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Missouri%E2%80%93Kansas_City_School_of_Dentistry — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.226.35.194 (talk) 05:51, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Notability

ChamithN added a Notability tag, and Clayoquot removed it with other tags, commenting "all addressed". I am struggling to see much in the article to support Notability: it is mostly a report of the incident at his graduation, and the subsequent reconciliation. It isn't really a biography; there is nothing about his career achievements or anything else noteworthy. That single event does not seem to sufficient for notability, even given the subsequent ceremony to make amends, so is there something else that prompted the removal of the tag?--Gronk Oz (talk) 08:37, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree. I don't see any significant importance in the subject of this article. It clearly doesn't meet Wikipedia:Notability (people) criteria, which is why I added the tag in the first place.--Chamith (talk) 09:09, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

This article has been created as a part of an editathon covering the hidden history of African Americans in STEM, Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/African Americans in STEM, and it is significant in that context as an African American first. The new editor working on this piece was attempting a larger list of African American men in STEM fields, similar to List of African American women in STEM fields, but finishing a list turned out to be too much to do during the time of the event. From my perspective, although I don't have time to go through the policy questions right now, I'd be happy to let biographies about "African American firsts" stand, because it can be pretty challenging to research the topic.

That said, I acknowledge that there may be disagreement as to whether this individual is notable. May I respectfully request that any administrator wishing to delete this article please userfy it instead, either in the creator's talk space or mine? Have exchanged e-mail with this editor now, and want to remind the experienced folks about WP:BITE here. We need to support our new editors who show up at events and want to continue collaborating with us afterward! --Djembayz (talk) 16:11, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Djembayz. Perhaps it would help if you could indicate what makes him an "African American first". Currently, the article only says that he is the first African American to graduate in dentistry from that particular school. Is there anything more to it; was he the first to graduate as a dentist in the country, or in the state, or something similar? Otherwise, we would expect to have an article about the first person of every race who graduated in every field from every university - obviously that won't work so can you give us something more to work with... --Gronk Oz (talk) 02:37, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, there's more to it. A single Black dentist was a *really big deal* in the context of the times, because Black people and White people touching, even for purposes of medical care, was considered shocking by people who were racists. Having a Black dentist meant that Black people got care! If you did not experience this because you are too young, or come from someplace else, then you are fortunate. Racist sentiments could be truly nasty and discouraging.

There's a second piece to this. Generally, the first African American in their field at a US institution is the person who opened the door for integration, and how the institution chose to handle the situation is a very significant part of its history. We can be pretty certain only a very few of these African American pioneers have their story recorded in reliable sources, so I wouldn't worry about us being swamped with too many of these biographies. In fact, one of the big issues stressed at our editing event has been that it's been really hard to find role models for young people, because so few stories like this are available. I don't know if you've tried getting oral histories from folks about the civil rights era in the US, but my experience is that there are enough difficult and painful stories from that time that many people would rather not say very much about it at all. Yes, you could merge these African American firsts into the history of the educational institution, but essentially that gives you a section about "here is all the negativity associated with ending segregation ..." which can easily turn into angry edit warring, or deleting material for PR purposes. Handling the topic of desegregation in a US institution as a biography instead, "This is the first African American to attend, what is known about them, and what they are willing to disclose" is a more straightforward and NPOV way to approach the topic.

The field by field aspect of desegregation was and remains highly significant. Racism meant that people of color had no guarantee of access to basic professional services, until the profession was desegregated. Some fields desegregated earlier than others.

Because I am just getting started on these articles, as the experienced Wikipedian attempting to support African-American subject experts, I don't know the standard ways these situations have been handled. I do know we have a bunch of new people, many of them highly educated African Americans who are interested in helping out on this topic, and this promising group of editors will quickly disappear if we are over-zealous about deletion. Could I suggest that in the interests of getting the diversity ball rolling here, we let a few of these lesser-known biographies of early African American STEM professionals go for now, to encourage people to continue surfacing information for us on this important topic?

And again, in any event, we need the basic info for collaboration, so please userfy this rather than deleting! --Djembayz (talk) 04:36, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I think this is one of those areas that Wikipedia can't handle well since this is a tertiary source that is intended to reflect other sources and understandings. In other words, subjects that are poorly covered in general are unlikely to meet our criteria for inclusion and coverage. Wikipedia is not a good venue to correct injustices or poor coverage of important topics since we - by design and intent - are a trailing indicator of notability and importance. People who believe that a subject is poorly covered in the larger world outside of Wikipedia have to fix that issue first (Sorry! I know how shitty and unhelpful that answer is!). This is, of course, different from subjects that are well-covered and represented in narrow bodies of work that are unknown to large groups of people i.e., there are many good sources but no one has written an article about the topic yet.

With all that said, there isn't any harm in allowing these editors some time to work on their articles to see where they go. That might be better done in draft or user space, however. And it's a distinct possibility that the first approach you described - one or more list articles - might be a better way to go if these people are notable as a group but of questionable notability on a an individual basis ("notability" only being meant in the narrow Wikipedia sense, of course). It may also be more appropriate to include information about these individuals in other articles such as their alma mater's article or new articles about desegregation, education, etc. That would be in line with our typical approaches to inclusion of information about individuals who have only limited notability e.g., only notable for one specific fact such as a crime or important achievement. ElKevbo (talk) 15:37, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm coming here in response to the message that Djembayz made at Universities, but I'm afraid to say that I generally side with ElKevbo on this matter. I'm going to make my point via an analogy, which is women educated at my Alma Mater, Cambridge University. In some ways, this was a very similar situation: some lecturers refused to teach them, and their was riots in the streets when the university tried to extend the right to get a degree to women. For this particular issue, we have ended up with a couple of paragraphs at University_of_Cambridge#Women.27s_education, there would presumably be a longer section at History of Cambridge University (which really should exist, but doesn't yet), there is the possibility of a separate article History of Women's Education at the University of Cambridge, and we have articles on particular woman pioneers, such as Philippa Fawcett.

The question here is how much of this infrastructure of articles should we create on this particular topic. And, for that, a good guide might be WP:EVENT, which I'll summarise as saying that when a person is notably for a single event, it is better to create an article on the event, rather than on the person. Looking at the Donald R. Brown article, I can see that his main claim to notability is that he is one of two early African-American attendees at UKMC. Of the three sources, one is equivalent to a blog article, one is a press release from UKMC (but talking about another early African American graduate), and the third is an article in the UKMC Alumni Magazine. From this set of sources, it looks to me as if a section on "Early African American Graduates" in the main UKMC article would probably be most appropriate - I would have gone for a longer section in a History of UKMC article, but Wikipedia current doesn't have much else about UKMC in the main article, so spinning it off now is probably premature. If you feel that adding this much detail in the main UKMC article is unbalancing, then I think that the coverage would justify a separate Early African-American Graduates in UKMC as a sub-article, following WP:SS. However, the sources given right now don't really justify a separate article for Donald R. Brown - his only claim to fame seems to be as one of two early African-American graduates at UKMC, and there isn't much to distinguish him from the other graduate. Having a joint article at the subject would seem to meet the notability guidelines better than having a pair of (nearly identical) articles about each of the individuals. Bluap (talk) 17:10, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

ElKevbo and Bluap, you both have more experience with writing about universities and education than I do. I'd like to suggest you move merge the information in this biography into a couple different places in university or education articles, and then explain how this is done for the diversity learning pattern over on Meta, Problem: How to handle African American firsts biographies, and history of desegregation in universities. This will give us a pattern to work with in future articles of this type. It will also enable editors who aren't specialists in this area to find an appropriate way to put this information into the encyclopedia.

When the information is merged into other articles, the biography can go to user space for further development. --Djembayz (talk) 14:09, 1 March 2015 (UTC)