Talk:The New York Review of Science Fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Science Fiction, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on science fiction on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page. Please feel free to add your name the project participation list and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the importance scale.
Article	This article is a Article.

[edit] PROD

This journal was placed in a PROD process for notability. The journal is one of the important academic review SF journals, akin to a New York Review of Books for the science fiction field; and important as are Foundation, Extrapolation, SF-Studies. It should not be deleted, and certainly not on a PROD, which is completely inappropriate.

The fact that SF scholarship and criticism are significantly under-represented in wikipedia compared to media SF characters (the Pokemon test) does not mean that they are not notable; simply that wikipedia (and the google test) do not pick up academic work as well as they do fan & pop culture stuff. PROD is completely inappropriate, and a Google test -- or even a Lexis/Nexis newsworthiness test -- is not an appropriate criterion on which to evaluate the notability and merits of an academic publication. In fact, academic journals are rarely going to have third-party articles written about them; they are notable because they are the source of important scholarship. This is the sort of problem that WP:PROF is dealing with in biographical articles. As yet, there has been no such proposal for notability of academic journals, because, I believe, people hadn't been deleting these articles and creating this problem. I will work on a proposal that better clarifies the sorts of criteria for notability that would be applicable in the case of an academic journal. These would include, for instance, (a) citation factor; (b) significant contributions to the scholarly field; (c) frequent publication by noted authors (an important criterion for a review journal, like NYRSF); and so on.

PS - I think had the PROD editor known more about the field he would have searched for "NYRSF" and found a lot more information about it. Google tests are still completely inappropriate for academic journals but in the SF field they will work better than in most fields. (If you know what you're supposed to be looking for.) --lquilter 04:43, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

• I have now added a lot more information about the journal. I would note that as a result, this article is considerably more fleshed out than, say, Cell (journal). While that's nice for this article, this sort of reactive editing is actually not a helpful way to direct the evolution of the encyclopedia. It leads to smaller and more niche (while still notable) articles being fleshed out in an effort to stave off inappropriate deletions, at the expense of working on high-priority stubs. If an article appears reasonable and gives some assertions of notability then adding a {{cleanup}} or other working template is the better solution than PROD and AFD. --lquilter 08:08, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Agree. Thanks for all your work here. PRODing this article is wholly inappropriate. Maybe I'd better join WikiProject Science Fiction and keep an eye out. - PKM 17:49, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Good article, more than most, and it would be quite a job doing it for all of them until needed. Generally, JCR can be useful but it doesn't cover humanities. There have been so few of these that it might be best to do it reactively for now. DGG 04:05, 5 February 2007 (UTC).