Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Frederick John Gladman

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 No consensus and therefore default to Keep. NawlinWiki 18:50, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Frederick John Gladman

Frederick John Gladman (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Copyright and plagiarism concerns. Article is nothing but a copy of the first listed reference with minimal rewording. -- Diletante 00:45, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

• Delete based on a lack of notability. My feeling is that this doesn't qualify as a 'blatant copyright violation' (originally tagged for speedy as a copyvio) and the source is attributed (thus not plagiarism per se), suggesting a clean-up tag would be sufficient if the subject were sufficiently notable for inclusion. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:49, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

  IMO this is the most notable of all biography articles the user has created. I also disagree that this is not plagiarism. consider

• article: "Gladman attended a Lancastrian school until apprenticed at 14 as a pupil-teacher to Robert Soar, headmaster of the British and Foreign School at Bushey, Hertfordshire."
• reference: "He attended a Lancastrian school until apprenticed at 14 as a pupil-teacher to Robert Soar, headmaster of the British and Foreign School at Bushey, Hertfordshire."
• article: "Gladman acquired a 'Queen's scholar' scholarship to the Borough Road Training College, London, for one year's teacher-training. In 1859-62 he taught at a small British and Foreign School at Godalming in Surrey. "
• reference: "he was admitted as a Queen's scholar to the Borough Road Training College, London, for one year's teacher-training. In 1859-62 he taught at a small British and Foreign School at Godalming in Surrey."

If one uses directly copied sentences like this you must use quotes and attribution or it is plagiarism! You can use ideas without quotes if you give sufficient citation, but this is a near verbatim copy of a page that does claim copyright on the text. -- Diletante 01:43, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Regardless of the sourcing / citation issue - this guy just isn't notable enough (after reading the ADB article I was left wondering why they bothered, maybe they had a quota to meet?)Garrie 03:12, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• Comment I have taken about 10 minutes to word-smith the article so as to eliminate most (perhaps not all) concerns related to copyright violation and plagiarism and to allow it to be considered for deletion on merits of notability rather than technical concerns. This is in keeping with the general admonition to Just Fix It. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 03:26, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Your "wordsmithing" just obsfucates the fact that this article is plagiarized at best or copyright infringing at worst. You can't just change words areound until it bears no resemblance to the original text. Until it is re-written from scratch it will be plagiarism!!! If there was a non-plagiarised version I would have just fixed it by revertying to that version but I was following the wikipedia guidelines for copyvio by placing the speedy delete tag there. -- Diletante 15:09, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Comment If there is agreement with this statement, then could some other admin please delete the article immediately and I will retire from editing because a) I obviously do not understand what content is suitable for inclusion for Wikipedia and b) I'm a danger to the legal standing of the resource. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 17:12, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
      • No need, I have rewritten the article to satisfy my original concerns, though this does not address notability concerns that others have voiced. -- Diletante 22:55, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
• Delete, no obvious notability. Even the ADB entry says that his reforms weren't revolutionary. --Dhartung | Talk 03:45, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• Weak delete as a probably not notable local figure. WP is not a specialized biographical dictionary, but a general encyclopedia. DGG 04:26, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• Comment: Inclusion in a biographical dictionary with a national scope demonstrates that an editorial committee, whose competence in the area of their national (in this case Australian) history is likely superior to that of random wikipedians, has determined that the person is notable on a national level, even if that may not be obvious to someone unfamiliar with the context (I'm reminded of a recent proposal to delete as "non-notable" a stub article on a member of the Académie française, probably because the proposer was simply unfamiliar with the obvious notability implied by that membership). It is likely that the article needs more work to clarify the importance of Gladman to a global readership, but deleting the article opens up a rather huge can of worms. Why should Wikipedia, for instance, keep the probably tens of thousands of entries on players of American football, which is, after all, a rather uninteresting game that hardly anybody outside the United States gives a f**k about? How many of the American football players with Wikipedia articles even have entries in the American counterparts of the Australian Dictionary of Biography? Pharamond 06:31, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: Wikipedia keeps all those football players because WP:BIO specifically includes athletes who have played in a "fully professional league." While the bar for athletes is too low, there is nothing in WP:BIO specifically giving a free pass to everyone in this biography. What of WP:BIO's criteria is claimed that he passes? (And quite aside from anything else, that biography has over ten thousand entries. Heck, I got into Who's Who Among American High School Students, a publication that seems to be just as discriminatory.)  RGTraynor  18:22, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

• Some ten thousand biographies presumably representing all of Australian history (as short as that is) isn't that much, especially in an encyclopaedia with 1,7 million articles. Wikipedia would have no problem swallowing every single one of those ten thousand, as well as the fifty thousand or so people included in the Oxford DNB and every other comparable reference work that tries to cover the notables of the entire history of a nation. To compare it with Who's Who Among American High School Students, which apparently includes a pretty large selection of a small subset of a population at a certain point in time, is not really appropriate. As for his notability, well, it isn't obvious to me... but I know nothing about the history of Australian education, and I would rather trust the editors of the Australian Dictionary of Biography to make that decision for me. Pharamond 20:46, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

• Comment Maybe I'm missing the point here but why is this guy in the Dictionary of Australian Biography? As far as I can tell from this article he spend his entire life in southern England — iridescenti (talk to me!) 21:46, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Gladman was influential for all Australian schools in two ways. Firstly, Gladman's work as inspector of schools was foundational in the years when civilisation in Australia was broadening to include educational standards superior to previous times. Gladman's suggestions influenced the curricula of Australian Schools. Secondly, Gladman's textbooks were an essential part of teacher education. Even as late as the 1930's, a beginning teacher may be given a copy of Gladman's 'Control and Teaching', pointed to their classroom and told to go teach. Such an incident happened to JP Rodgers, a noted Sydney High School Principal (for some thirty years from the 40's to the seventies). I have Rodger's copy. I modelled the Bio from his 1875 edition/copy. Cliff Turney, in compiling his history biographs on Australian educators cited Gladman, as have other researchers, but most of these were before the days of the internet, and this probably stymies some.DDB 05:49, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep The assertion that is not notable falls as Gladman was recognised by his peers and those that followed as the educational authority in Australia, having credit from his Brit background when few others in Australia could lay similar claim. DDB 05:54, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment your input suggests that the person is certainly notable enough for inclusion. However, and this is where a lot of Wikipedia biographies fail, the things that make the person 'notable' are not included in the article. If this strong influence on Australian education during the formative years of the nation can be described and documented, then the article should be kept. In its present state, there is no indication of how important the man is. Internet Schmiternet - citation of online sources is helpful but not essential - that's why the URL parameter is optional on most citation templates. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 10:03, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Exactly. It drives me nuts when people swallow whole and unquestioningly the unsourced assertions in AfDed articles. WP:V requires multiple reliable sources. Does anyone have any others?  RGTraynor  13:39, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
• Comment I intend to scan some of the elements of the 1875 published "Control and Teaching" book. Among it's contents is an expanding page (folded) that shows a detailed curriculum for a week. It had been adopted widescale by schools in the following years. The French Education Minister in early 1900's boasted that he knew what every French student was doing by the clock, Gladman's folded curriculum was similar in effect. It irritates me that I've not the resources of an institutional researcher in Australia, yet some lazy ones are asking me to chase down stuff which they could do better. I think Gladman was only referred to deletion because of payback against me for supporting/creating Turney earlier. DDB 00:22, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment Rest assured, nominating this for deletion had nothing to do with you, DDB. You don't need to scan in pages of a book to place a citation in the article and supporting material that demonstrate notability. If you have such material in hand that clearly describes the place of this person in history and don't share but merely complain - I'm not sure what to call that, frankly. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:31, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
    • CommentHad I added the material at the beginning, an ambit claim of original creation of material may have been used as a trigger for deletion. I've grown cautious after continually seeing the same names in relation to deletions. DDB 02:49, 28 April 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.