Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of academic conferences

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 of the debate was no consensus, KEEP. NSLE _(T+C+CVU) 07:48, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] List of academic conferences

Delete, this list contains only two entries - the first (computer science) is merely a disambig link, and the second (optics) contains a link to a page that hasn't even been created. This article gives no useful information whatsoever. Mushin 04:36, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

• Note. As of listing, the article has been in existence for roughly one half hour. This should be taken into account in the voting process. For the time being, I'd wait to see if author fleshes this out before voting. B.Wind 04:48, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete: This is an impossible to maintain list in its perfect form. "Academic conferences" would not just be the annual APA conference, wherever it may be, and the BPA conference, wherever it may be; nor would it be "MLA" and "ASECS." In a perfect form, it would be "MLA, SAMLA, NEMLA, SCMLA, PCMLA, MTMLA" then "ASECS, NESECS, SESECS, SCSECS," etc., and then it would be "SAMLA Atlanta 2005" and "SAMLA Charleston 2006" etc. I.e. a list of every academic conference would eat up all our servers, and that's just the United States. Add in the UK. Add in France. Add in Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, all the Scandinavian nations, Germany, Russia, etc. Simply put, there is no conceivable way that a list could be fashioned, much less maintained. Geogre 16:07, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Interiot makes a very good argument. I still have to say weak delete: I almost think that a list of major academic conferences should go into academic conference or some similar larger article and then the list be a {{prettytable}}. I know I'm getting into content advice and not dispensation deliberation, here, but I agree with the content, just not a list that can't be complete or maintained. Geogre 13:56, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Good point, I did not think of that reason, although it is definitely valid. Mushin | Talk 16:11, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

• Keep, we tackle a similar problem in Trade fair#List of trade fairs. It's good to promintently note in the article that there are huge number of them, to make it clear that every single one shouldn't be listed there, as some simply aren't notable enough. However, I think it's good to have a list like this because, IMHO, there are some that aren't notable enough to have their own page on Wikipedia, but are notable enough to be briefly mentioned on some page somewhere on wikipedia, and something like this is one potential home for those medium-notability items. In terms of categorization, that can be worked out in time, organically, once the article starts growing. --Interiot 20:30, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete as un-maintainable. At least trade fairs are held on a regular schedule for a number of years. While some academic conferences fit that description, there an awful lot of them, and an awful lot of ad-hoc one-off conferences. Where do you draw the line? -- Dalbury^(Talk) 00:47, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
• Weak keep per Interiot. Let's see if this article goes anywhere - perhaps they will develop reasonable standards to deal with Geogre's concern, and it seems we have many other long lists around. ESkog | ^Talk 13:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Agree with Interiot. There is certainly a value in having a list of major regular confererences in all fields of academia. The fact that the list has just been created and does not have many entries for now should not be a reason to delete it for good. Instead, we should all work to enrich the list with what we know. In most academic fields, there are only a few truly prestigious conferences. For fields that have too many small conferences, sublists can be created to solve the problem. Xgu 21:57, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

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.