Conversation

<<Clarice Phelps may have been the first African-American woman to help discover a chemical element. For Wikipedia, that wasn’t enough. >>

https://undark.org/2019/04/25/wikipedia-diversity-problem/

I'm not completely sold on this. Unlike the Donna Strickland case, where a draft article was turned down even though the subject obviously met Wikipedia's own "academic notability" guideline, there just wasn't a lot to read about Clarice Phelps. (The above-linked article represents a substantial addition to the corpus. And it's pretty short.) Reasonable people could make different calls in a borderline case like hers.

Apparently Undark didn't link to the deletion discourse, which you can find here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Clarice_Phelps

The writer at Undark says "Wikipedia moderators bypassed the step of calling to improve Phelps’s page and instead went directly to recommending it for deletion", but as best I can tell, "moderators" didn't do that. Some user named "Icewhiz" did, and they don't appear to be an administrator.