Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Catholic Church in Sudbury, Suffolk

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge to Sudbury, Suffolk. Jujutacular ^talk 17:26, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Catholic Church in Sudbury, Suffolk

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This article makes no claim to notability. It's sole outside source is a mapping program's indication of where the church is located. There are no third-party sources referencing significant coverage of this particular church. --NDSteve10 (talk) 18:33, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Insufficient references to establish notability. Prsaucer1958 (talk) 19:53, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete—I'm not finding any sources outside of yellow pages and self-references. —Deckiller (t-c-l) 20:55, 5 November 2010 (UTC) Merge—per below. —Deckiller (t-c-l) 19:29, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Looking in books is so passé isn't it?
There are in fact two sources cited in the references section of the article. The first points to an article about a different church, but was probably intended to be this page about the 1893 Our Lady and St John church, on which this article's content is clearly based. There are, in addition to those WWW pages, actual books documenting the work of Leonard Stokes. Nicholas Pevsner has something to say about the church. And Anne Vail, in ISBN 9780852446034, devotes the whole of chapter 20 to the Shrine of Our Lady in Sudbury, which has been both at the mediæval church and at Stokes' 19th century church.
That said, this is loosely paraphrased text, with the wrong references (added post hoc by someone other than the original author) at a bad title. I know that I'd start again from scratch. How Vail2004 treats the subject makes a fair case for not treating these churches individually. Uncle G (talk) 17:00, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep It is listed Grade II which gives it automatic notability (LBS number 275971 — check it on Heritage Gateway or Images of England). OK it needs some work, but that does not deny that it meets WP's requirement for notability.--Peter I. Vardy (talk) 18:18, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Sudbury, Suffolk for now. Case for notability is borderline (generally a building needs to be a grade I- or II*-listed building and not just II), but given the brevity of the article it makes sense to merge the encyclopaedic bits into Sudbury for now, like we can do for non-notable churches. Should someone wish to add a lot of encyclopaedic information from reliable sources, we can always split it off again later. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 19:23, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the comments above regarding listed building ≠ notable. Listed building includes around half a million structures, including many small private residences, and it is doubtful that every one of these would meet WP:N criteria. I added the two factually supported statements about this church to the Sudbury page, and continue to feel it should be delete. --NDSteve10 (talk) 20:12, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - specialist sources will exist that give more in-depth coverage. Somebody with access to the local history library services in Suffolk will almost certainly be able to turn out a decent non-stub article on this. The listing is not in itself convincing, but the fact the building has a remained in use as a church (rather than e.g. being shortly closed then converted to a private dwelling) means that the building has long history as a sizeable community focal point. TheGrappler (talk) 00:41, 7 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Merge into Sudbury article. 92% of listed buildings are Grade II, so not overly notable. Mjroots (talk) 10:24, 7 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Merge into the Sudbury article as above. To answer TheGrappler's comments, it is not enough to claim that reliable sources must exist out there somewhere. Either they do, in which case they must be produced to save the article, or they are not in evidence, in which case the article must be deleted or merged. Ravenswing 22:02, 7 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point; although it's also true that the current, small article does say a couple of useful things. My argument that other sources exist was in the hope that people could see the potential for development rather than judge this article on a few lines of text; I think that notability is arguable even without them. An independent article even a few lines long can be helpful and non-harmful if it pertains to something that is certainly physically real, whose notability is arguable either way, but which allows e.g. that information to be navigated to via the category system (e.g. for Catholic churches in England) and via geodata on a map. If information about all local churches was merged into small town articles, it does help centralize information about the town, but in a sense it breaks up the structure of information about the individual churches by removing them from access via category and geodata systems. I'm quite happy to let a high school sub-stub continue to exist even if all I have to go on is proof that the high school is of non-trivial size and has physically existed for a couple of years: fleshing out the article from reliable sources can be done later. Similarly, it strikes me that there is enough information available to prove that this church is near-certainly capable of having a very decent article written about it. Therefore its continuation as an independent article is a marginal argument, and the alternative is merging the material to Sudbury so we are talking purely about what is best for the purpose of organizing this information.

The fact that the article subject is physically extant and distinct from the town in general makes me sway very much towards keeping it: the information is better sorted in that way, since it allows use of geodata and category navigation. On the contrary, if the article was a substub about one component (such as a line of argument) in a wider philosophical dispute, and that component could potentially be fleshed out into a fuller article of its own, I'd still be more inclined to merge it into the main article for the timebeing, since the information would be better presented in a wider context and there would be no navigational benefit to spinning off a few lines of prose (that can wait until expansion, when "undue weight" can influence a spin-off decision). I'm not arguing on pure inclusionist criteria, but there do seem feasible arguments both on notability and organizational grounds for maintaining an independent article on the church, even if it only runs to a few lines for now. TheGrappler (talk) 02:00, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Christianity-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 02:34, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 02:34, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Probably merge to Sudbury, Suffolk. This is usually thge best solution for local churches. The only thing that might persuade that of that being inappropriate would be the notability of the architect, but that is not my subject. Even if merged, his article could have e link to the relevant section in the Sudbury article. Peterkingiron (talk) 22:37, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Sudbury, Suffolk. There appears to be a lack of significant coverage in reliable sources independent of the subject, so it would appear this isn't sufficiently notable for a stand alone article. In this context, merging is probably the best option. PhilKnight (talk) 00:59, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.