Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brexgata University Academy

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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 DELETE. The smell of fish surrounds it. The basic argument is the we don't know what it is. Until somebody can figure out just exactly what the heck it is, it probably shouldn't have an article. 15:43, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Brexgata University Academy

Brexgata University Academy (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

There appears to be strong elements of hoax or pseudo-history in the history of the article and in the contributions of its main authors/editors.

It has been on Wikipedia since December 2004, and the history shows that it originally contained extravagant claims to originate in the Carolingian period: "The ancestor school of Brexgata was founded in 798 by a small group of Carolingian noblemen."[1] This claim was disputed by User:Stbalbach and removed (see talkpage and history), but it still seriously weakens the credibility of the article.

A number of closely related IPs edited this article:

These also added links to it in various places, as did

That user also added the sentence "Another school, nowadays embodied by the Brexgata University Academy, was founded in the year 798 by Carolingian leaders." to the "University" article in May 2006[2]. This sentence is still there. User:ActaCarolingiana later removed a tag requesting a source for the statement.

There appears to be no evidence that it is in any way connected to an institution founded in 798. Even the official website which describe the historical claims says that "To ensure ease of reading, the detailed references and sources are not listed in this Executive Summary".[3] Instead it just lists a number of people, which does not really make the information verifiable.

I can find no evidence that this Brexgata University Academy is a real institution of higher education of any kind. The only three hits in Google Books are for books advertising MBA programmes. There is not a single hit on Google Scholar for an individual associated with it. Using the most general searches possible, I find no hits for "brexgata" in the catalogues of Library of Congress, the British Library, the Royal Library of Belgium, the German National Library or the Bibliothèque nationale de France. If there had been any publication obviously about Brexgata or even any publication (journal, publication series et or even individual publication) associated with this institution such hits would have been found.

A real institution surviving since the Carolingian period is unlikely, to say the least, to completely have evaded being covered in scholarly publications. A real institution of higher education and research, regardless of age, would have been mentioned somewhere among all the posts of the national library catalogues of five nations. Pharamond 09:05, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

  • Reserve opinion for now, unitl I can find more. This institution and the inexorably linked Thierry Graduate School of Leadership are quite confusing. First, regarding the 798 establishment, the current Thierry/Brexgata has nothing to do with the period college in any real sense. There was (according to their website, at least), a Carolingian-period leadership school of some sort. Some thousand years later, the current institution was established, and claims it is the reopening or somesuch of that prior institution.[4] Saying something doesn't make it so; their own evidence indicates it was actually absorbed (or at least its library was) by the Université de Paris.[5] But beyond that, I can't figure out just what sort of institution this place is. Thierry is apparently real, because there are a lot of people citing Thierry degrees in their bios online.[6][7] And that means Brexgata is real, since the two organizations' websites are littered with cross-references and veiled discussion of a "merger-integration". But someone else, for example, should review this, because I cannot for the life of me parse that text well enough to conclude whether or not this place is even accredited, or by whom! Brexgata is listed, as part of Thierry, in Peterson's MBA Programs 2006[8], but I, too, am unable to find any actual discussion or analysis of this school or its programs or, frankly, just what is going on with this place at all. Serpent's Choice 11:04, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment. I'm glad someone else noticed this peculiar article. My sense is this is a real entity, but very small and virtual. We have removed any mention of the Carolingian claim, probably the only thing to do is watch it carefully so the "regular editors" don't slip it back in. There are many small private schools that are not accredited, the entry in Peterson's should give it some credibility as not being a hoax and actually existing. -- Stbalbach 12:47, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Weak keep and merge into this the article for the Thierry Graduate School. This is an umbrella organization for the combination of the school --which does exists as a sort of a glorified business school (giving a PhD although its director does not have one himself) with a notional accrediting agency called USRED -- http://edu.univ.be/brexgata/ucred/home.htm, formerly known as the Inter-collegiate Advisory Council for International Programmes (IACIP). According to the UCRED website, "In order to prevent possible fraudulent use of information made available to the general public by means of the internet , the Council no longer publishes an open-access list of accredited programmes." The preposterous medieval origins continue to be the major theme of their website. It should be possible to disentangle & present the material properly when done by unaffiliated editors. Once the articles are combined I will add this and some other quotations from their website so that the readers can figure out what is going on and evaluate it themselves. There are occasional articles where a person or organization does a respectable job, but this is not one of them. DGG 22:19, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete I'm baffled by this institution. The fact that the word "Brexgata" does not appear in a single Google News or Google News Archive search, in any context, does not fill me with confidence. "Thierry Graduate School" appears in one archive search. The web sites create an aura of notability, but there seems to be a sense of a disconnect going on here. The fact that no individual on the board or faculty, or any alumnus connected to either entity has a link to either article, just doesn't instill me with confidence. If I'm looking in the wrong place or missing something, I don't see it, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise. Alansohn 15:47, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
You have found the reasons why the organization is probably somewhere between a con and a diploma mill, but the School does seem to have a staff. DGG 01:38, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete since no independent sources establish notability --Work permit 01:42, 8 May 2007 (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.