Talk:Betsy Devine

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Notability: having books in significant libraries[edit]

OK, I have coauthored two well-received books and had 75 pages of my blog published in a third one. Making my job easier, I will skip citing locations for the two books I worked on with my husband, sparing my critics the trouble of pointing out that he is notable enough to get books into libraries without my help. Very true, but I did make a "significant contribution" to both books, being second author on Longing for the Harmonies and making a 75-page "contribution" to Fantastic Realities."

Not many libraries have online catalogs, and we are talking here about a paperback published in 1992, but I see that at least Harvard has a copy of my joke book for scientists Absolute Zero Gravity. [1]

So does Yale [2]

So does Princeton [3]

It was published only in the US (Firestone is a branch of Simon and Schuster) but it seems London's Wellcome Trust has a copy in its really excellent history-of-medicine collection. [4]

Anyway, I hope this is evidence beyond the warm reviews you can easily see on Amazon or elsewhere that it is a good book, one that some good libraries as well as people wanted to own. betsythedevine (talk) 20:05, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding references to satisfy concern of "unreferenced"[edit]

These are not meant to address "notability" but to give reliable sources for statements in article about my background and life

  • Married to Frank Wilczek in 1973, our two children are Amity and Mira: [5]
  • Masters degree in Materials Science (Applied Physics) from Princeton (listed under the name "Elizabeth Wilczek"): [6].
  • In 1988 NYT book review of Longing for the Harmonies, described as "freelance writer": [7]
  • In book review in Nature 338, 215 (1989) described as "engineer-writer" [8]
  • Writes a blog "Funny HaHa or Funny Peculiar": [9]
  • Inclusion of stuff from my blog in book Fantastic Realities is cited in reviews at Nature and Times HIgher Education Review
  • Liberal blogger, who edits Wikipedia [10]
  • Working for Feedster, supporting Howard Dean -- there are a ton of Google hits of blogs reflecting these statements but nothing in real media.
  • Talk at Wikimania 2006 on "Schrödinger's Wiki" : [11]
  • I don't know if my speaker's bio from Wikimania 2006 would be considered a reference but if so here it is: [12] "Betsy Devine has a master's degree in engineering from Princeton and many years of immersion in geek sociology, including both Slashdot and Wikipedia flame wars. See her userpage. Her blog and her Wikipedia watchlist reflect wide interests in science, politics, and reputation theory. Dead-tree publications include Longing for the Harmonies (a popular-science introduction published by WW Norton) and Absolute Zero Gravity (a science-joke collection published by Simon and Schuster.)" betsythedevine (talk) 11:53, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Active in pursuing 2002 NH phone-jamming scandal [13] betsythedevine (talk) 11:53, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding source material as requested[edit]

In response to a request made on the AfD page, I am adding material found via Google News Search [14] for the interest of anyone (other than me) who wants to work on this bio. I am not claiming that any of this stuff proves I am notable, but it is presumably source material if Google News indexes it, and none of it is primarily about my much-more-notable-than-I-am husband Frank Wilczek. Now it's time to cook dinner! betsythedevine (talk) 17:30, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Betsy Devine's blog on Tom Colantuono's role in Republicans phone-jamming scandal" (Brief article)
Source: New Hampshire Business Review
Publication Date: 16-MAR-07
As usual, it takes outside media to raise a question that the New Hampshire press never did, at least publicly, about the 2002 state Republicans phone-jamming scandal.
This time it s courtesy of Betsy Devine on the Daily Kos blog, who in her March 10 posting asks--in reference to the recent revelation of the firing of eight Republican U.S. attorneys, many of whom cite an unwillingness to schedule the timing of investigations of Democrats to make them more GOP campaign-friendly. The question: "What about the U.S. Attorneys who didn't get fired?" And Exhibit No. 1 is none other than New Hampshire's U.S. Attorney Tom Colantuono, the former Republican state senator.
As Devine sees it, "it took Colantuono's people more than a year before the FBI questioned their top/only suspect in the NH phone-jamming, a crime by Republicans.
But in other matters, Colantuono could move fast.
Just before the 2004 elections, he moved fast to block Democrats from questioning phone-jamming suspects--and fast again to file corruption charges against a NH Democrat..(...more quotes from a blogpost I did on Daily Kos.; this article does not mention my husband Frank Wilczek.)
  • Via page 2 of search results: something from the Boston Globe quoting one of my blogposts at BetsyDevine.com. The story is behind a paywall but the blogpost they are quoting is "I pledge allegiance to the fish". I might add that the attitude of article author Adam Gaffin and other blog-reading types tends to be "Cambridge's Betsy Devine's husband is Frank Wilczek, an MIT professor who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004." [15]


  • Also via page 2 of search results:

"Blinq: pictures of America at the polls." Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA) Publication Date: 08-NOV-06 Byline: Daniel Rubin

Nov. 8--By midday, pages of photographs were up -- Jesus lording over the voting booth inside a Philadelphia church, the "Stand Back" sign in Falls Village, Conn., the "Vote Aqui" instructions at P.S. 274 in Brooklyn, N.Y. The Polling Place Photo Project sought to capture democracy in action, enlisting an army of shooters across the nation to document where they voted and post the results on a Web page.
It was one of many novel ways that the Internet was used to cover Election Day 2006 in real time, in some cases filling holes left by mainstream media coverage. A New Hampshire blogger named Betsy Devine chose the Flickr site to share photos of last-minute campaign disinformation slapped on windshields in her town. VideotheVote.org became a place to post any footage of troubles at the election booth. VoterStory.org was a blog version of the same....
  • Also via page 2 of search results:
Sep 29, 2002 New York Times by FRANCINE PARNES
Betsy Devine, a writer and engineer who throughout the 1990's owned and lived in Einstein's furnished house with her husband, Frank Wilczek, a physicist, recalled one bedroom, without a closet, that had a 16-foot-long clothing-storage piece, elaborately carved with an inlay of flowers, fruit and faces of Greek gods.
"It was huge," Ms. Devine said. '"We couldn't even imagine how it got through the door. It took up so much space that it even blocked a door. We thought of it as Satan's idea of storage..."
  • Also via page 2 of search results, from the Nashua (NH) Telegraph, October 11, 2006, a story in which I play a small role and my "notability" derives only from my NH origins and ongoing work with the IgNobel Prize people.
GraniteGeek.org, my Web site - for those who can't stand waiting a week between "Science from the Sidelines" columns, got its first scoop (well, mini-scoop) last week. When I lamented on GraniteGeek that nobody from New Hampshire won an Ig Nobel award at Thursday's annual presentation of those science-satire prizes, it drew a response from Manchester native Betsy Devine, who lived near Stark Park and went to Webster School in that city. She...

Notability Tag[edit]

I added the tag after the recent AfD. I don't see what the claim to notability is in this article; I don't think that this concern is new judging by previous comments on this discussion page, but I still don't see it. I could be missing something here, but it doesn't appear to meet our notability standards. I think some additional references and a more clear claim to notability is needed on this article.

Also, I think it would really be best if someone other than the subject of the article works to establish notability. BWH76 (talk) 07:42, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The claim to notability is just "having made a significant contribution" to books that are in the collection of good libraries. My blog, which used to get more attention (from me as well as from others) was the subject of one on the first podcasts done by Morning Stories, and 75 pages of it were published in a book by World Scientific. That's about it, really. betsythedevine (talk) 09:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Given that the article has passed WP:AFD twice, and that Betsy has recently been under attack by several editors, the timing of this is starting to feel like WP:DEADHORSE.
Taking a look at WP:Bio, it says under "Failure to explain the subject's notability":
If an article does not explain the notability of its subject, try to improve it by:
  • Rewriting it yourself
  • Asking the article's editor(s) for advice.
and that's all.
The consensus should be pretty clear by now: the article is a keeper. If you want it to have more sources or more information, go for it! But otherwise, I think the tag should be removed. Dori (Talk • Contribs) 23:19, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • After waiting a week for the person who added the notability tag [16] to return and take the advice of Dori Smith, I am adding references requested myself. I fully accept the contention by BWH76 [17] when he was one of the few people to vote "Delete" in the most recent AfD of this bio, that my husband is much more notable than I am. Even so, I did make a "significant contribution" to some substantial books that I am proud to have been part of creating. I also agree that "it would really be best" for somebody other than me to try to fix this, but I don't see why I should have to leave this bio defaced by inaccurate and unfair stuff if nobody else takes time to clean up the mess. betsythedevine (talk) 10:23, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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