Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Disability

Alexandre Baril

Alexandre Baril (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View AfD | edits since nomination)

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This article is highly problematic because it presents this guy as some major, influential academic, but then behind this façade of seeming notability and extensive citations is a dressed-up résumé cited almost entirely to Baril's own works and completely failing to meet our notability guidelines for academics. The article has been flagged as an autobiography since 2020, and the sourcing problem has been flagged since 2019. Moreover, it fails to demonstrate that this guy is notable at all. There is a single two-page review of one of Baril's work's included among the sources, but other than that, there's nothing to indicate that he has any influence at all and not just a proverbial tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear.

There are a couple of potential claims to notability in the article:

• "Baril was the first Francophone trans person in Canadian history to be employed as a professor specializing in trans studies to teach on sexual and gender diversity in French." This is an absurdly narrowing set of qualifiers and we generally don't have articles for people whose main claim to notability is as "the first X to do Y" except in particularly historic circumstances.
• "In 2025, Baril was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for his contributions to Canada". This medal was awarded to over 30,000 people in Canada, so it's not that exclusive an honor, and is not "a prestigious academic award" as the academic notability standards would look for.
• "Baril is described as one of the first trans researchers in Canada to publish work on trans issues from a transactivist perspective in the French language." The provided source is one of Baril's own works, so this is not a valid claim (and the weasel words attribution "is described as" is kind of sneaky and reflective of the whole article).
• "Baril is the first person to create and define the notions of cisnormativity and cisgendernormativity in French" -- This is another somewhat deceptive claim. My first thought when I saw that was, "Oh, he came up with those concepts? I guess that's pretty notable, maybe I was mistaken." But no, looking at those articles indicates that they were coined by someone else, and he was just the first to use those words in French. We generally don't have articles for "first person to use this word in this language", so again this doesn't help.
  * Coined various neologisms. Without independent sources to indicate that these terms have caught on with wider usage, this is basically just some guy shouting into a vacuum. Not a claim to notability.

It's certainly possible that Baril is actually an influential academic, but the current article completely fails to demonstrate that and instead comes off as one guy (or one of his students) sneakily trying to promote his works by passing them off as more impactful than they actually are. If he does actually meet notability standards, then I think the article needs to be redone entirely from scratch because the current one is very flimsy. 3 kids in a trenchcoat (talk) 00:04, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Academics and educators, Disability, LGBTQ+ studies, and Canada. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 00:06, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
• Delete His h-index is 24, so the citation count is too low. He is an associate professor, so fails WP:NPROF#5. Baril has published one notable book, but this is not enough for WP:NAUTHOR, for which the usual practice is to have at least two. Kelob2678 (talk) 09:31, 18 March 2026 (UTC)