Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences

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 Keep. (non-admin closure) Tofutwitch11-Chat -How'd I do? 01:15, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences

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Copying from PROD: Just a list of links to departments, no indication that it is "especially notable or significant" as per Wikipedia:College and university article guidelines. Prod was removed without any explanation. Magioladitis (talk) 01:01, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Education-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 01:19, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Unless somebody can provide secondary sources on this administrative division, of interest only to a handful of bureaucrats who work there, it should be deleted. I will check back in a few days. Abductive (reasoning) 05:25, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep The guidelines referred to are not official Wikipedia guidelines and so have no standing here. Removal of a prod tells us that there is no consensus to delete and so is not a reason to delete either. If the article needs work, then that is a reason to improve it, in accordance with our editing policy. In my experience of working upon the similar article for the engineering faculty, it is quite feasible to make such improvements. For example, in a brief search, I soon found sources such as A century of British geography or Geography at University College London which discuss the long and distinguished history of this faculty in detail. Colonel Warden (talk) 14:18, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Official" doesn't mean anything. Those guidelines were developed by consensus, and should not be disparaged or dismissed. Abductive (reasoning) 19:11, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No consensus was obtained for them in the previous similar case. In any case, well-recognised policies such as WP:BURO and WP:PRESERVE, trump such parochial essays. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:24, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What do those sources say? They are unaccessable by me. Abductive (reasoning) 19:11, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

They discuss the history of geography education at UCL, geography being one of the departments of this faculty. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:24, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well then they are not really pertinent, are they? Abductive (reasoning) 22:30, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I accept that the article as it stood when prodded lacked any third party citations and was essentially just a stub. I have now added a history section utilising some such citations and will add some more shortly. Colonel Warden has referred to a couple of books which include commentary on departments within the faculty (books are undoubtedly the best source of material on the history of the faculty since the majority of its history predates the internet). I am in no doubt that many more exist.

The majority of departments and centres within the faculty do not have their own articles, despite being highly notable. This faculty article serves to give them a representation on Wikipedia. It is also a natural break-out article from the main UCL article, to prevent that article becoming over long, and it is worth noting that many peers of UCL, such as Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Copenhagen, have articles for their constitent schools/faculties for similar reasons.Rangoon11 (talk) 20:50, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally, then, it would be best to add information on the departments to this page rather than create many more articles, right? Abductive (reasoning) 22:30, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Where there is no separate article for a department or centre within the faculty then coverage of that department or centre within this article becomes essential. Only two of the 30 or so departments and centres within the faculty have their own articles at present though, so that is currently overwhelmingly the case. If articles for more of the departments and centres were to be created then that might then cause a duplication of some content and require this article to be modified. I personally think it unlikely that articles for many more of the departments and centres will be created, and certainly wont be starting any myself. However I don't think that we should base decisions about this article on other articles which may or may not be created in the future, this article already exists and is presently the only suitable place available on Wikipedia for coverage of the activities of the majority of departments and centres within the faculty. Rangoon11 (talk) 13:42, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, not because I'm fully convinced of the case for notability, but because it's going to be a mess if we delete just this article. Rightly or wrongly, all the faculties of UCL have individual articles (as do most of the other component parts), whether or not they have any special claim to individual notability. There might be a case for merging all faculty articles into one article, but if the UCL template randomly links to either redirects or articles depending on which ones happened to be nominated for AfD, that's going to confuse the hell out of the average Wiki user. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 21:37, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment UCL has well over 100 departments, institutes, units and centres and only a very small proportion have articles; of the 30 or so listed in the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences article only two have articles.Rangoon11 (talk) 21:47, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This is more than a single department, but a first order division of a very major university, and all such should have articles. As Rangoon says, this will then serve as a place for information on the individual departments, which would have sections with a redirect. Some few of the departments could then be considered for articles. I think we probably will need to revise the guidelines so they express the developing consensus, but we might do well to deal with individual cases in such a way as to clarify what the consensus is. We make the rules. We make their interpretations. We decide in individual cases to what extent we want to follow the rules as written, or to use the intent of them. Most of the contested decisions at AfD are based on just how rigidly to interpret a rule. In my opinion, one of the reasons for not having articles on most individual departments is to reduce the tendency to insert spam; if we watched over them carefully and made them ourselves, rather than waiting for university PR agents, we would be able to avoid it. (As a rough guideline, I'd suggest that any department with more than 5—10 notable faculty in the present, or more than 20-30 historically, or having historically more than one Nobel Prize winner, is appropriate for an article. Those with fewer, go with the higher order divisions.) The administrative organization of a university or other organization may be of limited interest in its own right, but it';s a way to organize articles. And actually it is not of such limited interest, because it reflects the changing emphasis of the university and the educational system. And there's a very close precedent for this: we group elementary schools according to school district. DGG ( talk ) 18:13, 12 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.