Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Medway-Sydenham Hall

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 Ernescliff College; no consensus about the other two.  Sandstein  20:00, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Medway-Sydenham Hall

Medway-Sydenham Hall (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (delete) – (View log)

I am also nominating for deletion:

Ernescliff College (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Saugeen-Maitland Hall (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

All three of these article are about residence halls that do not rise to the level of encyclopedic notability. I would be happy to withdraw this nomination or change my mind if additional evidence were offered. ElKevbo (talk) 18:32, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

I have dropped a note on the Talk page for the Universities Wikiproject to generate thorough discussion of this nomination. --ElKevbo (talk) 18:45, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep Saugeen-Maitland Hall. This residence is infamous in the region, and most university students in Ontario have heard of the residence and its reputation. There many media sources cited in this article, so it is very newsworthy, and thus encyclopedic. It should also be noted that the Saugeen Stripper article was eventually merged into this article. The general consensus was that the 'stripper' event on its own wasn't deserving of its own article, but it would be acceptable as part of the residence article. See discussions here and here. Rawr (talk) 19:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Might it be helpful and more worthwhile to go ahead and separate out that article's nomination from the other two? I do not agree that Saugeen-Maitland Hall is notable but I can understand how others can hold that opinion as it is somewhat different from the other two articles. --ElKevbo (talk) 19:11, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

You're the nominator, so you can do what you like. But I should point out that there are many other residences and dorms in wikipedia, so if you nominate these 3, you should nominate all of them. Go to Category:University and college residential buildings and take a look. Going down through the sub-categories, I count over 100, and I'm guessing most of them them are about as encyclopedic as these 3. So if you want to be fair, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Rawr (talk) 21:26, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

One step at a time... --ElKevbo (talk) 22:52, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Medway-Sydenham Hall. (No opinion on the other two articles for the moment). No independent reliable sources to demonstrate notability. GoogleNews returns nothing.[1] Fails WP:N. Nsk92 (talk) 23:28, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Delete. Ernescliff College and Saugeen-Maitland Hall as well. For Ernescliff College there is nothing in GoogleBooks[2] and a single hit in GoogleNews[3]. Fails WP:N. For Saugeen-Maitland Hall GoogleBooks has 6 hits[4], and GoogleNews has 4 hits [5], all with basically trivial coverage. The article on Saugeen-Maitland Hall cites a bunch of references, mostly to the local student paper, mostly about various goings-on in this residence hall. No independent reliable sources to indicate historical or architectural notability of the building. The bottom line is: fails WP:N. Nsk92 (talk) 23:44, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Keep Medway-Sydenham Hall and Saugeen-Maitland Hall. I must take exception to either Google News or Google Books being lauded as reliable databases. More authoritative and news databases (e.g., LexisNexis) must be searched to make the claim that the item in question isn't notable. With free databases, you get what you pay for: an incomplete picture.Dansich (talk) 21:27, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

• Delete all 3. The only one with any possible notability is S-M, and its altogether a trivial one. th earticle is a perennial BLP trap. and efforts to clean it up have been strongly resisted-- with understandable reason, because if it were, there wouldn't be anything left. DGG (talk) 02:43, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Ernescliffe College. The other two are owned and operated by a university, but Ernescliffe College, while located at the University of Toronto, is not owned by the University of Toronto, but rather by Opus Dei or an affiliated organization. The article is supported with a newspaper article, but the URL for the newspaper article doesn't seem to work. I have the feeling that some sudden development will eventually make Ernescliffe College unambiguously notable. --Eastmain (talk) 05:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep (with regret) Medway-Sydenham Hall and Saugeen-Maitland Hall. These two articles serve as good examples of how not to design or operate a university residence. Think of the history of both residence halls as a recreation of the Stanford prison experiment over a longer time-span. Yes, the bulk of the coverage is from the UWO Gazette, the student newspaper, and from Western News, the administration's paper, but there is no reason to question the reliability of either newspaper in this context. To the extent that Google News doesn't pick up all the references cited in either article, that is evidence of the weaknesses of Google News rather than the lack of notability of the article. The fact that an article attracts vandalism is not reason to delete it. --Eastmain (talk) 05:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
• (Weak) Keep. I agree with Eastmain--keep the M-W and S-M articles. They both seem to be actively edited, which might be taken as a sign of an article's usefulness. BLP issues will have to be dealt with as they arise. The Ernescliff College article, however, is nearly nonexistent and receives no apparent attention and can be deleted without loss. --AnnaFrance (talk) 18:15, 13 May 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.