Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Critical Information Studies

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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 Merge to Siva Vaidhyanathan. I will place the merge template and leave it up to the people involved to perform the merge. Keilanatalk 17:12, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Critical Information Studies

Critical_Information_Studies (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) - (View log)

It should be deleted since it isn't notable beyond his writing about it. Are there any third parties who remark as to its notability? None are mentioned in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.167.198.159 (talk) 05:34, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Keep. I'm curious as to why the entry on Critical Information Studies is being considered for deletion. I began it as an offshoot of Siva Vaidhyanathan's Wikipedia entry. He's a very highly regarded communication scholar and public intellectual, whose work has appeared in academic journals and major national periodicals. He's also appeared on Comedy Central's fake news program, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Critical Information Studies is the term Vaidhyanathan has coined to describe an emerging, interdisciplinary field of study concerned broadly with the politics of information in contemporary societies. Though the term has not yet enjoyed widespread uptake (it was coined only 18 months ago, as of this writing), I don't see any reason why the entry would need to be taken down. It doesn't appear to violate any of Wikipedia's criteria for deletion. Among other things, it's clearly not advertising, and the original entry was authored by me--someone who respects and admires Vaidhyanathan's work but who's not, per se, his "friend." Striphas (talk) 17:14, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
Speedy close Botched nom by an anon IP. Article provides references, which check out, so WP:Notability is not an issue. Dhaluza (talk) 02:10, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Keep. The article does need some cleanup, but - given that no rationale for deletion was provided by the nom, I see no obvious reason to delete this article. I suppose a re-nomination with a proper rationale may be taken on the merits, should an editor wish to provide such a rationale, but I believe this nom should be closed as Keep. UltraExactZZ Claims ~ Evidence 04:15, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Merge and Redirect to our article on Siva Vaidhyanathan. Note this is actually a well-formed AfD in spite of its puzzling appearance. The effective nomination date is 4 January 2008. The nominator is 24.167.198.159 who should probably have added the word 'Delete' to his vote above, as well as his signature.
  • The article has little content beyond a precis of Vaidhyanathan's article. Our articles should digest what the world says about a topic, and not what the original presenter said about it. Looking at WP:BK to get an idea of how notable an entire *book* must be in order to be covered, I see this as falling short. It hasn't won any literary awards, the author is not already so notable that any work of his should be covered even without secondary sources, etc. WP:BK also notes that Some of these [secondary] works should contain sufficient critical commentary to allow the article to grow past a simple plot summary.
  • I realize that this phrase has attained wide currency on blogs, but we don't consider them reliable sources
  • The Jean Camp paper appeared in 2002 so cannot be a commentary on Vaidhyanathan's 2006 paper.
  • Eschenfelder's paper is a preprint, and has not yet appeared in a reliable source (scheduled for summer 2008)
  • The Andrew Ross paper refers to Vaidhyanathan only in two citations, and does not have anything in the text about the paper
  • Our article (that we are discussing) seems to be promoting 'critical information studies' as though it was a new generally-recognized phrase, which needs to be supported with more evidence per Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms.
  • Our existing article Siva Vaidhyanathan is rather short and there is plenty of room to add this material, if it is significant enough relative to his other work.

EdJohnston (talk) 04:52, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Merge to the article on Vaidhyanathan. In general an individual academic's theories are not separately notable. DGG (talk) 00:19, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Merge per DGG. The suggestion to close this as a botched nom is a bit WP:BITE]y. The anon/IP editor formed a reasonable determination that the article should not exist as a stand-alone article, and the mutiple-step process to correctly list an AFD is tough for most beginners. JERRY talk contribs 03:36, 9 January 2008 (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.