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Various sources list this man as a visionary in music, medicine, psychology, art, nuclear physics, and philosophy. He was also a child prodigy according to various sources. You may want to add him in both articles. (unsigned comment by User:Deibwan, 12:42, 9 May 92014)

The section was removed twice over the past six months (see this edit and this one) due to "incorrect examples of polymath".

Based on both the Chinese and English versions of Wang Wei's page, he is likely not appropriate for this list.

A more suitable candidate would be Wang Yangming, whose pages in both languages support his classification as a polymath.

Hope this helps. 籠鳥飛行紀錄 (talk) 09:00, 23 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi all,

This is my first starting a thread here, forgive me if I don't know the Wikipedia etiquette so well.

For disclosure I am the Michael Araki mentioned in the "In Academia Section".

Two people have disputed the fact that the whole section is mainly using self-references (i.e., using the authors' papers as references, like it is done in academia). I believe the reason is that somebody took the only review available on the construct, which is my pre-print "Modern Literature on Polymathy: A brief review" and used that to create an initial version on Wikipedia. Later, some non-research people like Waqas Ahmed were added.

What was not okay about the recent exclusion was that the person chose to single out one author from an entire section that consistently followed the same format across six entries (authors). This selective judgment appeared highly biased, which I found quite aggravating.

One obvious course of action is to take down the whole section. However, I believe it would be a disservice to people, as it contains valuable in-depth information on the construct.

Alternatively, the community can help by adding secondary, independent references. For my case, some of them are here:

https://www.polymathu.org/fellowship

https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/01/16/do-you-have-a-polymathic-personality-a-psychologist-explains/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-school-walls/202005/cross-pollinate-your-mind

Some recent apers citing my work on polymathy: Acar, S., Cevik, E., Fesli, E., Bozkurt, R. N., & Kaufman, J. C. (2024). Testing the domain specificity of creativity with Kaufman domains of creativity scale: A meta‐analytic confirmatory factor analysis. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 58(1), 171-189.

Karwowski, M., Czerwonka, M., Wiśniewska, E., & Forthmann, B. (2021). How is intelligence test performance associated with creative achievement? A meta-analysis. Journal of Intelligence, 9(2), 28.

Abdulla Alabbasi, A. M., Runco, M. A., & Ayoub, A. E. (2024). Creative activity and accomplishment as indicators of polymathy among gifted and nongifted students. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1255508.

Angus, R. W., & Barlow, M. A. (2024). Organizing transactions between entrepreneurs and human capital resources under Knightian uncertainty. Small Business Economics, 1-21.

Díaz, M. V., & González, M. G. (2023). Cross-curricular training of specialized translators: an interdisciplinary didactic experience in economic and technical translation. CLINA: an interdisciplinary journal of translation, interpreting and intercultural communication, 9(2), 17-40.

Жукова, Т. А., & Черных, Я. В. (2022). Мультипотенциальность и перспективы ее развития на уроках английского языка. Вестник Мининского университета, 10(2 (39)), 6.

Гарифуллина, А. М., & Валеева, Р. А. (2021). Сущностно-содержательная характеристика мультипотенциальности педагога. In Педагогическое образование: новые вызовы и цели (pp. 90-96).

Some books (that I am aware of) https://www.amazon.com.au/Polymath-Multiple-Disciplines-Extraordinary-Autodidact/dp/1647431638

https://www.amazon.com.au/Learn-Like-Polymath-Multidisciplinary-Irreplaceable-ebook/dp/B08JKPHMX7

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Polymaths-Multi-Specialists-Revolutionize-Learn/dp/B0CSVXZ7VY

Koehler, A. (2022). Paving a Path to early College-from Homeschool to the Ivy League. Parenting for High Potential, 11(3), 13-14.

It seems that the breadth, depth, integration approach from my model has become a major view on the construct. I personally find it funny that my other papers have not been cited on the Wikipedia page, which is okay, but it just gives the impression that I only have the 2018 article instead of being one of the most prolific academic contributors to this very underexplored topic in academia (I know that the competition is not big as only very few scholars have published peer-reviewed articles on the topic).

Best regards, Dr Michael Araki DrMikeAraki (talk) 17:36, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Arguing about your own importance on wiki is a really really bad idea; just don't go there, for your own sake. And see-also WP:COI William M. Connolley (talk) 18:11, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I agree with DMacks and also with William M. Connolley. Per WP:COI you should not have put it back into the article.

Taking down the section is clearly the proper course. Blog posts (see WP:FORBESCON) and self published books on amazon are not the secondary references we would need to establish WP:DUE weight, as they do not meet the requirements of Wikipedia:Reliable sources. MrOllie (talk) 18:13, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

If more people agree, we take down the whole section. As I said: "What was not okay about the recent exclusion was that the person chose to single out one author from an entire section that consistently followed the same format across six entries (authors). This selective judgment appeared highly biased, which I found quite aggravating."

As long as you single out only one author indiscriminately, I will keep questioning your judgment. DrMikeAraki (talk) 18:19, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

By 'the section' I mean the section about you. I take no position on anything else in the article as of yet. That someone has not (yet) fixed all problems everywhere does not mean that they cannot start with one. MrOllie (talk) 18:20, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Okay, since more people have agreed, I removed the whole "In Academia" section. Like I said before: "One obvious course of action is to take down the whole section. However, I believe it would be a disservice to people, as it contains valuable in-depth information on the construct."

Too bad you didn't read that and instead wanted to fight and accuse me. Now, the whole section, which now I learned is not in accordance to Wikipedia's guidelines", has been taken out. DrMikeAraki (talk) 18:41, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Not a single person aside from you has agreed to remove the entire section. Stop editing the article until an actual consensus has been reached here on talk. -- Fyrael (talk) 18:46, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

"Taking down the section is clearly the proper course" I believe this was said by William M. Connolley. Again, please read the whole thread. DrMikeAraki (talk) 18:52, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

DrMikeAraki, he did not. Drmies (talk) 18:57, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I read the entire thread and I don't see William M. Connolley agreeing to remove the whole section or even mentioning it. You are now vandalizing the page and it looks like you are doing so because you didn't get your way.--VViking_TalkEdits 18:58, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Okay, I thought it was William M. Connolley that said that, butI realized it was MrOllie.

Again, "What was not okay about the recent exclusion was that the person chose to single out one author from an entire section that consistently followed the same format across six entries (authors). This selective judgment appeared highly biased, which I found quite aggravating."but since 3 people have been bullying me around this issue, I will leave it as is, with only myself singled out and the other entries with the very same issues as is. DrMikeAraki (talk) 18:59, 5 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I quote here from the Wikipedia article on Charles S. Peirce: "His classifications [of sciences], on which he worked for many years, draw on argument and wide knowledge, and are of interest both as a map for navigating his philosophy and as an accomplished polymath's survey of research in his time." I think he deserves to be included as a polymath.

This biography provides a very good overview of Peirce: Joseph Brent: Charles S. Peirce. A life. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1998, ISBN 978-0-253-31267-9

KlausPrinz (talk) 06:37, 31 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

This seems to switch from being listed chronologically to alphabetically. Which should be preferred? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:07, 24 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

Seems like the examples-list is growing again. What should be the inclusion criteria? DMacks (talk) 17:53, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I feel like the "examples" list is not helpful, and more likely to generate disagreement than insight. The article even admits that who is and isn't a polymath can be a point of contention, since it is not strictly defined. That makes such a list largely meaningless. Making criteria for the list would be defining it ourselves, and taking a definition from the article is electing one to be "official", both choices are problematic. I suggest just removing the list. ~2026-21790-79 (talk) 14:13, 8 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

User:William M. Connolley has done the needful. DMacks (talk) 16:06, 11 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Citations to Ahmed's book were removed because: 1) the main source didn't have proper information (publisher, location, ISBN etc) and only had a link to the book that has its own Wikipedia's page. This, in turn, is debatable and the book's page was listed for deletion. 2) Ahmed's opinion is not supported by other specialists in polymathy as special gifts. The fact that famous researcher on Leonardo Da Vinci wrote an into to Ahmed's book doesn't make that researcher or Ahmed himself a specialist in polymathy. 3) the page had multiple citations that could be grouped into one using "ref name= " expression 4) many other researchers (see the list on this talk page) also wrote about polymathy. So this page should be re-worked to remove specific names as if only those few names define the subject. SemantLeo (talk) 15:58, 2 August 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hi SemantLeo I'm grateful to you for setting out your reasoning on this talk page. My conflict of interest has been clearly stated with respect to this topic but I think Wikipedia's policies are quite clear in how they apply to this article and your edits. I see that you're new and the way you use some core terminology differs, I think, from how Wikipedia uses it.

• You state that "the book's page is listed for deletion". This is not true, as anyone here can check for themselves. There are processes for proposing deletion of an article, but they have not been invoked because the book meets the criteria of notability, having been covered by multiple independent reliable sources. There have been two independent reviews of the article, which could have rejected it as non-notable if that had been an issue.
• Your point 1 is that the citation information for the Ahmed book was incomplete. You say that publisher, location, ISBN and other key information are lacking. Anyone can see that this is false simply by looking at the article (as it is now or as it was when you started editing). This part of the citation: "West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781119508489." indicates the publisher, location and ISBN. I see the citation is in the "Further reading" section, which it shouldn't be, but clicking on the "Ahmed 2018" links (that you deleted) took the reader to this full citation. Even if the full citation had been lacking, that would be an argument for adding the missing details, not removing a substantial chunk of sourced information.
• Your point 2 would be pertinent if the article were stating Ahmed's opinions as categorical fact, but it wasn't. It was stating them just as statements by Ahmed in his book (published by Wiley, a respected academic publisher) and the reader can make their own decision how seriously to take them.
• As a stylistic matter, multiple redundant citations should be combined to make things easier for the reader. Despite what you claim in point 3, there was no such problem with the Ahmed citations in this article because the separate citations were to different pages of the book. Even if there had been this problem with the article, this is a reason to combine citations, not to delete sourced content.
• Your point 4 is "other researchers also wrote about polymathy". This is also correct but also not a rationale to delete sourced material from the page. It's self-contradictory: if your concern is that the article should reflect a wide range of published perspectives, then why delete one published perspective from the article?
• Your edit summary says the text you removed was "non-neutral". Wikipedia's neutrality policy is here. As the policy shows, explaining someone's position is not the same as taking that position. Non-neutral writing would say, for example, that it's the worst polymathy book or alternatively that everyone should read it. Text can't be criticised as non-neutral merely for setting out what the book says.
• As a result of your deletion of sources from the article, there are now statements which are unsourced which were previously sourced. Wikipedia requires statements to be verifiable. There is no rationale for leaving the statements in the article but removing the book citation and page number which the text is based on.

Please let us get at least to an agreement about the basic facts of what has happened, and if there is a deeper dispute let us go through the steps to resolve it. MartinPoulter (talk) 17:02, 2 August 2026 (UTC)Reply