Stan Shebs said:
My personal fav in this category is renowned computer scientist Ralph Griswold. Apparently if you developed novel new languages in the 1960s, that's undiscovered prehistory to the young PHPers.
We've all got our stories of stupid nominations to VfD, often by a green-but-keen editor who has not heard of something and has no way of evaluating the subject. I'm new enough as an editor to remember my own early solecisms, so I can sympathize. Some substubs are salvageable if you know enough--I remember someone listing an article that contained only a fragment of a sentence referring to Stuart Hall. The Stuart Hall article contained a passing reference to the concept, which happens to be a significant strand in the theory of literary criticism--reception theory, it was. I happened to have heard of Hall through his televised work and some of his articles in Marxism Today in the 1980s. And so a substub rapidly developed into quite a decent little article.