Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Glasgow University Union

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was KEEP. dbenbenn | talk 20:57, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Glasgow University Union

Just some college student social club. If someone really thinks the info is encyclopedic, University of Glasgow seems to have plenty of room. Niteowlneils 21:01, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Delete, if anybody wants to merge into Glasgow University that's fine by me. --fvw* 23:27, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)
• Delete, not notable enough. Megan1967 01:06, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Retain, this is not just any old social club, it is an important student body, it is also notable as the last student union in the world to ban women from membership, it was quite a struggle to get this overturned. If this is not notable enough quite a few entries might be deleted, I have tended to take a broad minded attitude to this in the past. It could create space problems to merge some of this into the main Glasgow University entry. PatGallachertalk 01:15, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Student unions are inherently notable and encyclopedic. Keep.--Centauri 03:13, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Gamaliel 04:01, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep --Spinboy 06:04, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep (or merge). I certainly want this kind of information somewhere in an unlimited-size encyclopedia. Kappa 06:55, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Well-written article on an old (1885) and significant student organization at an important university. / up+land 11:16, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Samaritan 14:19, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. The student union deserves at most a mention in the article about the University. User:PatGallacher says merging this into the main article would create "space problems". That basically means that the University Union is not even significant in the context of an article about the university. If that is so, it certainly isn't significant enough to have an article on its own. But, in fact, the interesting features of the student union situation are already the subject of several paragraphs in the main article. --BM 14:32, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • The "space problems" are due to the article size of University of Glasgow, and are nothing to do with significance. Uncle G 15:09, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)
• Comment. Votes like this one make me begin to think VfD (and Wikipedia in general) is a waste of my time. Between the two-thirds "consensus" requirement to delete an article, and the cadre of VfD habitues who will vote to keep almost anything, it seems that it is almost impossible to keep junk out of the Wikipedia. Practically the only things that can be deleted are the most egregious vanity articles written by high school kids about themselves and their bands, patent nonsense, and extremely bizarre original research. At the rate crap articles are accumulating, Wikipedia is sure to hit the one million article "goal" very soon, and most of it will be complete junk. I wonder whether Google will continue to give Wikipedia a high PageRank when three-quarters of it is trivia and crap, even if the other quarter is a useful resource? How low can the signal to noise ratio fall before people give up? --BM 14:32, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • That is just so silly. Who is going to think, "Oh Wikipedia has a trivial article about such and such, so the articles about Shakespeare and particle physics must be crap"? Philip 15:05, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • You miss the point. If I happen to find a good article in Wikipedia, I can tell whether it is good. But what if an article title comes up in a Google search? Or, what if I see a non-red link in another Wikipedia article? At some point, the probability that a Wikipedia article is going to be vanity, some narcissistic aspect of so-called Internet "culture", popular culture sub-trivia, something from a fictional universe, a sub-stub, a moronic list, or something else exasperating will mean that it won't be worth the probable annoyance of following the link. "Results" in Google searches from Wikipedia and its mirrors will start to be a plague, if that hasn't happened already in some areas. --BM 15:42, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Do some new page patrolling sometime. You'll witness that there is a significant amount of junk that is kept out of Wikipedia every day. This article is nowhere near being in that category. Uncle G 15:09, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)
    • I did do new page patrolling at one point. You are correct that CSD gets rid of a lot of junk. It could get rid of much more if people would trust the administrators. The recent CSD policy vote shows that basically people will not trust the administrators; they insist on voting on anything that requires on any judgement at all. My experience from new page patrolling is that if something is not an obvious CSD candidate and has to go through VfD, it is an uphill battle to get it removed, unless it is such outright vanity or nonsense that nobody has the nerve to vote to keep it. Every keep vote has to be answered by more than two delete votes, and since people who are opposed to an article insist on voting "Merge" or "Redirect" (which equate to keep), it is actually even worse. In practice, deletion requires near unanimity. Each VfD failure to delete an article becomes a precedent for keeping other junk. On the next VfD about something similar, there will be people saying, "If we can keep X, why can't we have Y, which is at least as notable (etc) as X". So junk and precedents to keep junk are accumulating exponentially. As for this article, we are in the process of setting the precedent that not only every university on the planet will have an article, but also every university student organization that can mention any minor curiosity. The fact that the University of Glasgow has a strange student union structure is a minor wrinkle that perhaps merits a mention in the article on the University. It doesn't elevate the two student unions to the point where they should have articles of their own. --BM 15:43, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep A rather insensitively phrased nomination from a user who appears to be completely lacking in knowledge of British universities. Philip 15:05, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• There are approximately 700 students' unions in the United Kingdom. They don't all deserve their own articles, by a long chalk. Student unions are not inherently notable. However, those rare few that stand out from the crowd, and are notable, certainly do. The distinctly odd structure, the debates on joint membership, and the struggle over sexual equality make this one stand out from the crowd. Keep. Uncle G 15:09, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)
• Keep I am one of those habitues that almost always votes keep. --JuntungWu 16:33, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. In my opinion, reasonably large and/or old student councils and students' unions merit their own articles. Alarm 17:44, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Chris 23:44, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.