Talk:K Bhogishayana

Very biased language + lack of sources

The "Professional Life" section is full of extremely biased language with zero references. Ex: "...one the finest teachers... one of the best academic institutions... He ran the college with an iron fist. Feared and revered..." I'm not really sure how to clean this up without sources. RassGroots (talk) 13:47, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I can find sources, there are many. I agree about the language. Ldm1954 (talk) 15:25, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

COI Disclosure

The original article was created by his daughter, KSujata who is no longer active on Wikipedia. I am her husband, his son-in-law, and will be doing some repairs to the article. As Vice-Chancellor of a PhD granting University I believe he passes WP:NACADEMIC without issue, albeit sources are needed. Ldm1954 (talk) 13:49, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree that the notability is there, assuming you can add some sources. Thanks Laurence. RassGroots (talk) 19:56, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I've added a fair bit. We have librarian contacts in Solapur who can find more, and there may be a few other sources -- I am stuck when it goes outside English. Ldm1954 (talk) 16:33, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Justification needed for Peacock tag

Moved from Special:Permalink/1186625915#Justification needed for Peacock tag

Please justify your tagging of the page K Bhogishayana as Peacock. Everything in it is sourced except for two minor details which will be shortly. It is all verified, and verified details on a highly notable Figure is not Peacock. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:57, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 Off the top of my head:

• This made a tremendous impression on the students, making the incident and the man legend among student circles for generations at the college
• Feared and revered, the students nicknamed him “Boss." An intellectual himself, he still valued students who were athletes.
• Considered a distinguished teacher, he had a strong social commitment beyond education to molding the lives and character of his students.
• Bhogishayana grew the college into one of the best academic institutions in the region in his role as principal.

in addition to this, I have some grave doubts about the quality of sourcing in the article since most of the sources are publications by orgs which he had some involvement in, they are not neutral as required by Wikipedia guidelines. Sohom (talk) 15:08, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

All the relevant information is secondary sources, there are no primary sources. Note that there is no sourcing from his family, deliberately. Everything is in those sources, please check in detail. The only unverified information at presenst is his gold medal, for which the English Department at Mysore is searching, and the names of his daughters. The later might be removed as less relevant. Those were flagged, justifiably, by @LadyofShalott

Compared to most academics on Wikipedia he is far, far better and independently sourced. That is not a throw away comment, I have reviewed many particularly on AfC. Ldm1954 (talk) 16:16, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 I disagree almost completely with what you said, most of the sourcing in the article is primary sources affiliated in some way with the deceased professor (for example [1] is a source from the college the professor headed, [2] is a promotional link to the college website, [3] is affiliated with the same college, [4] is from a college where the subject was a principal, [5] is a source from an organization where he was a member), not to mention that the prose is borderline hagiographical.

Just saying Compared to most academics on Wikipedia he is far, far better and independently sourced is not a valid argument, per WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS.

Also just to make it clear, I am not saying the subject is not notable (since I personally have not analysed that aspect of the article). I am saying that the sources being used here are primary sources and the language of article has a hagiographical tone. Sohom (talk) 17:01, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, but you are completely wrong. Sources 1-3,5,9,11,15,17,18 are unconditionally secondary. We can debate the others, but your "most" statement is very wrong. Calling everything vaguely linked as contaminated is not how sourcing and notability is done for academics. Ldm1954 (talk) 17:12, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 I don't think we are talking about notability here, we are talking about sources, and academic or non-academic nobody has preferential treatment when it comes to whether or not a source is primary. Sohom (talk) 17:38, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

1-3 are analyses of his brother-in-law's writings, secondary.

5 is an article about the foundation where he is mentioned

9 is about industrial action history

And so on. Not close to primary, please accept that. Ldm1954 (talk) 18:23, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

• 1-3 - do not cite any information regarding him, they are about tangentially related information, it does not matter if these are secondary
• 4 Promotional link to college website
• 5 History of a org where the person was a principal, this might be a primary source, might not, but arguably authoritative, though it would be much better if we could figure out what the name of the book was and who published it. (if it was published by the same org, that disqualifies it as a primary)
• 6 Hagiographic message from the current principal of a college where the article subject was a principal, I would classify this as primary (or atleast not of the best quality)
• 7 No idea what this is, I cannot verify via online means that this book exists, or what is being reffered to here
• 8 Primary, listing of past luminaries by college where the person was the principal
• 9 Broken link, unable to verify anything here, but hosted by the university where the article subject works at
• 10 Again, no way to verify this even exists or what this is about
• 11 Some kind of listing of the members of a org which the subject was a part of, primary sourcing
• 12 Ditto as above
• 13 Ditto as above, except as a obituary (I think)
• 14 Award list, this is a good source :)
• 15 The newsreader just lists them as being part of some committee, I guess this is secondary, but barely so
• 16 Hagiographic message from college where the person was a principal, primary
• 17 A link to a org, the the person was in ? Seems promotional
• 18 A offline book, but atleast has a ISBN so I can verify it exists, no idea what it says though.

@Ldm1954 Hopefully the above conveyed why I called the sourcing dubious and primary. Again, I have just pointed out that the sourcing was primary oriented and asked you to improve them, I have not tagged the article with {{primary sources}} or taken the page to AFD for the same. The only specific thing that I did was tag the article prose as {{peacock}} because it reads extremely hagiographical (which is something others have brought up on the article talk page as well). I honestly do not understand your animosity in this case. Sohom (talk) 19:07, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

I really do not understand why you are stretching this. For instance calling the professional website of a major college within a university a "promotional link" is inappropriate. Universities are not-for-profit organizations whose behavior and other details is monitored by state institutions, their peers and their governance. These are tighter controls. Are you staying that all University web sites and all the information they contain including library archives, PhD theses, policy papers etc are unreliable? I don't think you will find much support for this position.

You are also stretching some other things. For instance stating "others" when it was one person for an early draft; calling a Marati language newspaper that has been around for 90 years and has a Wikipedia page unreliable is inappropriate; Rotary international is hardly an unreliable source.

To err is human, to retract is divine. Ldm1954 (talk) 01:53, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 The professional website of a college is promotional regardless of what it's profit status is, especially if no specific resource is linked to. Also in the context of Indian institutions which recieve little to no oversight from governance and related state institutions (leave alone peers) profit status realllly doesn't matter much.

Regarding your second point, these documents need to be judged on their individual merits. PhD theses are inherently unreliable unless published in a well known peer-reviewed Scopus indexed journal, policy papers pertaining to the university are primary sourcing and archives again must be evaluated on their individual merits (such as the independence of the authors and publishers). If the book is a book about the university, written by somebody affiliated to the university, it is primary sourcing and should be avoided.

Regarding the rest, "others" does refer to the one other person, I still think the article is hagiographical/peacock and I am yet to see any evidence on the contrary.

I am not saying the Marathi newspaper is unreliable, but you have not linked any proof that the article that you cite exists (ISSN/ISBN, newspaper clipping etc) and I said I could not verify anything about it due to this.

Wrt to Rotary International, I do not see what makes it non-primary especially when most of the content cited seems to be listing of user-supplied data. Sohom (talk) 08:34, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Dear @Sohom Datta,

I think it is important to clarify a few points, a key one being about university reports and theses. For a PhD thesis the review process is generally more rigorous than for Scopus journals, since too often journal reviewing is passed off to PhD students. For all major Universities the whole thesis is reviewed by a panel of 3-5 experienced faculty, who may require extensive rewriting. Depending upon the university the thesis advisor may or may not be a member of the committee, for instance in Cambridge, UK they are not. Sometimes there is an external advisor from another country, for instance Indian universities sending the thesis for written comments to someone in the US or UK. In addition, to my knowledge there is always a requirement that several papers have been published, if they have not the thesis cannot be submitted in the first place.

PhD students from India often take postdoc positions outside the country, and the level is typically competitive with Europe and US/Canada. Similarly the level of many undergraduate degrees is comparable. If any university starts publishing nonsense, or awarding "soft" degrees it drops down the rankings and will stop being respected by it's peers and it's alumni will find it harder to get the top jobs. There can also be legal issues, although these are less common and may not (yet) be important in India. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:07, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 I disagree with this, I am aware of how PhD, Masters and undergraduate thesis reviews are done in India and I have grave doubts on the reliability of the same. I would put more weight on the papers published during the PhD process, especially those with 5+ citations in any peer-reviewed non-predatory journal than a PhD thesis (unless the thesis is a amalgamation of the previous papers, in which case I would still prefer to cite the underlying peer reviewed paper).

PhD students from India often take postdoc positions outside the country, and the level is typically competitive with Europe and US/Canada. Similarly the level of many undergraduate degrees is comparable. I agree since I'm in a similar position IRL :) However, the second statement does not really track due to the existence of prolific degree mills and insufficient scrutiny of academic malpractises (such as plagarism) in the country. Sohom (talk) 09:20, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

I do not count undergrad or masters theses, few do. Since I have been external examiner I do not agree with your statements about the level at major universities in India, and Shivaji University with an A++ rating is not a degree mill.

It depends upon discipline, but I would not count 5 citations as meaningful. I also know of several theses which are better cited than papers, going back to Maxwell but still others to this day. Often theses contain information and details omitted from "then a miracle occurs" papers.

Describing material from an Indian state university as unreliable is stretching things a bit. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:41, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Since I have been external examiner I do not agree with your statements about the level at major universities in India I disagree but I will take your words at face value :)

It depends upon discipline, but I would not count 5 citations as meaningful. I also know of several theses which are better cited than papers, going back to Maxwell but still others to this day. Often theses contain information and details omitted from "then a miracle occurs" papers. Exactly my point here, which university publishes it is irrelevant. Unless it has been peer reviewed and cited by others, a PhD thesis (or for that matter a research paper) is nothing more than a slightly more rigorous blog post describing something that the researcher has theorized, observed or proposed (figuratively speaking) and would be unreliable. The citations are what lends the paper it's legitimacy.

Describing material from an Indian state university as unreliable is stretching things a bit. I don't think it is imo, based on what I said above. The fact that is coming from a Indian state university amounts to nothing compared to other factors such as what level of peer-review the work (the most readily availiable metric of which is citation count) has been subjected to, the affiliations of the author and the independence of the publisher of the work. Sohom (talk) 10:01, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand, you are insisting that PhD theses are not peer reviewed? They are. Also citation count has never been a metric of merit, only popularity.

I think you are really stretching to retain a somewhat weak position. While we all do that sometimes, we should not. Ldm1954 (talk) 12:40, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Please read what I have said above. My whole point is that university material is not inherently reliable. It depends on what the material is, what it's publishers are, who authored it and finally whether or not it has been peer reviewed. Certain universities have a higher standard of peer-review than other (heck I have seen it vary even between professors in a specific research group), and it is extremely difficult to judge if a specific piece of material has been peer-reviewed.

The reason I am stressing on citation counts and peer reviewed journal publications is because that provides us with a easily referencable visual feedback that the article x has been reviewed by atleast y number of people. I agree that less popular work will recieve less citations, however, that also means that the ideas put forward by the work have not been found usefull (or have not been accepted) by other researchers and thus should probably be given less weight over others in the same topic area that have had more citations.

Anyway, non of the references here appear to be PhD theses, and I think it would be better to focus specifically on the issues with the article at hand. I will focus on comments on the thread in the Lets restart section and will not be replying to anymore comments regarding this specific tangent :) Sohom (talk) 14:13, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

This conversation should be held on the article talk page. LadyofShalott 12:50, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Moved :) Sohom (talk) 14:00, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Let's restart

@Ldm1954, @LadyofShalott I think the previous conversation has gone offtopic and it warrants a restart to only focus on issues related to this article. The two concerns that I have are:

• The prose in the article is borderline hagiographical/peacocky, the following sentences are particularly egregious:

• This made a tremendous impression on the students, making the incident and the man legend among student circles for generations at the college
• Feared and revered, the students nicknamed him “Boss." An intellectual himself, he still valued students who were athletes.
• Considered a distinguished teacher, he had a strong social commitment beyond education to molding the lives and character of his students.
• Bhogishayana grew the college into one of the best academic institutions in the region in his role as principal.

• The article's sourcing seems to have some primary sources which are best avoided, and it would be better if these could be swapped out for more robust third-party coverage of some kind. The following are particularly egregious:

• [6] is a source from the college the professor headed (ref 5 in the article)
• [7] is a promotional link to the college website (ref 4 in the article)
• [8] is affiliated with the same college (ref 8 in the article)
• [9] is from a college where the subject was a principal (ref 16 in the article)
• [10] is a source from an organization where he was a member (ref 13 in the article)
• [11] is a promotional link to a society the article subject was in (ref 17 in the article)

Hope we can agree on these core issues and work towards making the article better :) Sohom (talk) 14:00, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

A key issue is that most of those are in fact direct quotes from others. I will edit next week (after Thanksgiving) to make that clearer.

I completely contest your description of 6-11. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:15, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

6. Validates that he was Principal and grew the college

7. Is a set of Essays on his 75th birthday, "promotional link" is inaccurate.

8. Validates that he was Vice Chancellor

9. Is a document that validates the strike

10. Is a newspaper article on him defending the students from police

11. Is a conference proceedings that validates that he was president of the Solapur branch of Rotary International.

Please stop misrepresenting the content. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:23, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 Th numbers here do not correspond to the reference number, please click on the specific links that I have provided and match them against the references. [7] (in the comment) is a link to https://www.sangameshwarcollege.ac.in/. It is definitely not a set of essays for his 75th birthday. Sohom (talk) 14:28, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

I do not understand why you are changing numbers and taking things out of context. In terms of the article sources:

5. Verifies that he was promoted to Principal.

4. Is a link to the college to validate it exists

8. Validates him as Vice Chancellor

16. Validates that he was President of the education society

13. Validates a commemorative speech in 2023 by a former high court judge

17. Validates that he co-founded the local branch of an international leprosy charity.

Whatever your numbers are, please stop misrepresenting the article, that is unprofessional. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:45, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

I am not misrepresenting anything here (the changes in the numbering order are done by the software because I am linking to the sources, it is automatic). I understand that these are validating specific things, but would it not be possible to validate these same things against some kind of third-party sourcing (like ref 5 or 14) instead of using sources close to the person, (it is fine if the answer is no, but if you can, you should, since per Wikipedia guidelines you should try to use primary sourcing as less as possible) ?

Also if ref 4 is just proving the college exists and doing nothing else here, please remove it. Sohom (talk) 14:53, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

All of these are secondary sources from independent organisations/people. Surely you are not considering a prior supreme court judge oration, a multinational charity with an annual expenditure of ~£4M or an organization with 1.4 million members as tainted! Ldm1954 (talk) 15:02, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

For the purposes of this article, I am, especially when the article subject here held specific highly ranked positions in the same organization. To give you a more pedestrian example, you would not expect Google to put out a neutral statement for the obituary of Sanjay Gupta (business executive) (the current head of their Indian business wing) right ?

Also, relatedly would you mind if I put this up on the third-opinion noticeboard that way we could make more headway rather than going back and forth on topics we are clearly disagreeing on ? Sohom (talk) 15:21, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I would expect Google to put out a neutral press releases. Bias would be bad PR. The obituary of the coach of a local high school may be less secondary, unless he wrote it himself.

I would prefer you do not. I already stated I will do some clarification edits next week, plus I am waiting for data from Mysore University for his MS award.

I cannot see how, for instance, you consider his photo in a conference proceedings as tainted. If it is them most major society fellowships and awards are also tainted, instead of being one of the standard proofs in WP:NPROF. You will rarely find more than a notice on the society web page or newsletter and a press release from the University/company. If you contest this then you are in a minority of one. Ldm1954 (talk) 16:33, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ldm1954 I'm happy to wait on you to make your edits (and I will be doing so for the time being). Your last few statements are misconstruing what I said so just to clarify.

I cannot see how, for instance, you consider his photo in a conference proceedings as tainted. - I don't think I am objecting to a photograph in conference proceedings anywhere. I have explicitly listed the sources I am unhappy with, non of which are about any kind of conference proceedings.

If it is them most major society fellowships and awards are also tainted, instead of being one of the standard proofs in WP:NPROF. You will rarely find more than a notice on the society web page or newsletter and a press release from the University/company. - WP:NPROF explicitly allows certain kinds of primary sources to prove notability, that does not mean that those sources are not primary. It is best to avoid such sources like press-releases unless absolutely necessary. I honestly don't see where the confusion is here. Sohom (talk) 18:37, 24 November 2023 (UTC)