I'll go one further, in fact. I think everyone who has been main or sole author on a publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal deserves a Wikipedia article. Yes, this would include a whole lot of grad students. But if they're making or have made verifiable contributions to their field, we should be including them. No question.
-Snowspinner
Nah, I disagree with that. I've written several papers in astronomy, and a referee's report has even described me as a world leader in my field, but I'd hate to see an article about myself. The specific field I am allegedly a world leader in does not even deserve its own article, although it gets a mention in [[planetary nebula]] (because I wrote that) and one of my papers is cited in [[Cat's Eye Nebula]].
Wikipedia readers are far better served by a brief mention of my field in the appropriate context than they would be by any article on my personal contribution to that field, and I suspect the same is true for 90% of published academics.
WT