Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Refounding Public Administration

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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 of the debate was keep all. Mailer Diablo 16:54, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Refounding Public Administration

Non-notable "classic text", part of a walled garden of probable collegecruft from a single user that also includes:

Many of these articles have gone down the speedy/tag removed without comment > PROD/tag removed without comment path, so now they come here. ➨ ❝REDVERS❞ 10:06, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Merge; I disagree with some of the above non-notable categorizations. This is a legit academic subject. I am not an expert either, but a cursory google search turns up lots of courses and summaries. Mosher's and Waldo's names come up several times as seminal authors. I don't know if all these authors, books, and journals deserve their own pages, but I don't think that we are dealing with a walled garden of probable collegecruft from a single user. Rmilson 19:29, 24 April 2006 (UTC)


  • Delete all; WP:NOT a free webhost. I'm 1000% sure that VATech has their own webserver.  RasputinAXP  c 15:05, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Non-notable is an interesting term. Just who gets to decide that and what are the implications to one of throwing it around flippantly? 105 people appoint someone a ranging expert...the august REDVERS...on whatever he wishes to rudely lambast and that is the basis of governance? Talk about the Wild West!

I notice there are not articles concerning Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones--easily two of the most important active political scientists in America by any serious expert's opinion...but no article on them? Obviously not notable. No article on Charles Perrow? Insignificant? No, forgive me, not notable. What would qualify one to call Charles Perrow or Dwight Waldo not notable, I wonder. Waldo has probably been read in Korean more than the sum total of all the people who will ever gaze upon REDVER's obscure writings he lists so pridefully at the bottom of his user page. What expertise and degree would you have called upon to state that Frederick C. Mosher is not notable when his work is translated in 8 languages and could probably be discussed by senior government officials in 10s of countries? I'm just curious what sort of definition of encyclopedia that might fulfill?

I was obviously mistaken in thinking that the purpose here is to start a thread that expands underexplored knowledge based on one's legitimate and demonstrable learning as expressed in articles. Now I find I did that only to have it ridiculed by the ignorant Mr. X...or REDVERS as he prefers. The Encyclopedia of Public Administration which would mirror most of what I put in here costs hundreds of dollars but would have been neither succinct nor wholly accurate. Just what is the point of the silly articles on obscure European punk bands and photos of even more obscure Belgian fountains you seem to prefer as content (if WP is not a free resource) when there is almost no discussion of the primary field that studies government bureaucracy and dozens of allied areas? I suppose it's just yet another Internet power trip of some frustrated and indenty-starved persons without the guts to sign their name or to discuss their qualifications on their web pages or in their edits. I suppose this resort to insult by REDVERS when someone has donated their time and expertise is deemed acceptable etiquette here. Shame. What a puny thing to do...to use your administrative authority to go through a contrib file to systematically delete contributions. That is strikingly ugly and remarkably small. People like you are exactly what the idea of free software and knowledge is not about. Oh dear. I had heard this was the deal of late here, but I was so naively hopeful. What a bizarre ethic you have; thank goodness we have relatively few power abusers as serious editors in the print world. Congratulations, you have preserved your fiefdom from another serious contributor. Ryan Lanham 00:54, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Ryan, first... please read WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA. Next, please read WP:BIO. The best usage of your time here would be to argue why these people meet the criteria for inclusion laid out at WP:BIO rather than disparaging REDVERS for nominating your articles for deletion. You might want to read Wikipedia:Deletion policy too and lay out a case for keeping your articles based on the criteria there. I should also mention that REDVERS isn't an admin to the best of my knowledge, so he has no power to abuse... I will say though that REDVERS should have notified you on your talk page when he nominated these articles per AfD ettiquette... bad form on his part.--Isotope23 03:03, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Thank you for your kind response. First, I had read the BIO page specifically on professors just before reading your note. All of the above easily qualify if anyone bothered to speak to a human about their reputations and works. I was myself setting place markers in a field I was encouraging others including world famous professors regularly invited to speak to many persons listed in wiki articles (deemed now not-notable by REDVERS) to contribute. Dream on concerning that point now. Second, it was not me who launched into a systematic edit begun with a rather sociopathic insult. I believe REDVERS claims to be an administrator on his user page. I hope it is not the case, but he claimed 105 users gave him the "keys to the janitor closet." NPA is a fine policy. Where does the right to self-defense get written up? Where does the right to know what you are talking about prior to using an AfD get described? As an academic I am inclined to defend my words. Criticize the merit, but if you delete because you believe you think things are not significant, the burden should fall to you for justification in print prior to having the AfD power. I accept your other points and agree with them.
Comment Please also be mindful of the need for verifiability. It is not enough for you to assert that the accomplishments of these scholars is notable in their fields; each article needs to point to some independent reliable sources (as Uppland shows below through JSTOR). Also, the burden for any edit (whether a minor content change or the creation of a new article) is on the editor, to show with reference to Notability and Verifiability that the edit or article is justified. However, it certainly would have been more polite for someone to contact you and refer you to these policies, giving you a few days to work on the articles, before proposing them for deletion. Thatcher131 04:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Comment, I revoked my delete opinion above based on Thatcher131's reasoning, which is rather sound. I think it is worthwhile to give Ryan a chance to source these articles and prove that they meet accepted wikipedia guidelines. I want to reiterate what Thatcher said above though... speaking to a human about their reputations would constitute original research and is not going to meet verifiability. These articles need to be sourced with written citations (web or good old-fashioned print) that support the claims made in the articles. This shouldn't be too difficult for some (if not all) of these articles based on what u p p l a n d has stated below.--Isotope23 13:54, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Thank you Thatcher131. Does verifiability mean consensus? Or does it mean expert opinion? There are trivially hundreds of articles written with facts that are not "verifiable" in some hard form every day. I am all for journalistic standards--to pitifully invoke credentialism, I have worked for someone on the Pulitizer Committee (who is not in Wikipedia) for the last two years. That is easily discoverable by someone who wishes to search about me. Is it "verified?" No. It is counter-sourced. I think this is a good and worthy project overall, but the goverance and the standards are where the hardcore should vett their expertise, not in AfD'ing article stubs. That should be a democratic process of the marketplace. If a new article is now hit within 30 days by an outsider, simply bot delete it as insignificant. Don't rely on the power-crazed to serial AfD with a two-word explanation. Ryan Lanham 13:45, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Verifability does not mean consensus or expert opinion. It means the claims are sourced in what would be considered a reliable source. As it states on the WP:V page: "the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. Yes, there are loads of article out there that are not verifiably sourced... and there are at least a few people around here who go around tagging them for missing sources, contacting creators, etc. That's pretty much the nature of an open collaboration such as Wikipedia.--Isotope23 13:54, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
      • Verifiability in some respects depends on the claim being made. If you are writing an article on John Smith that says he teaches and writes in the field of public administration, you should be able to provide a bibliography; not his entire CV, but selections showing his more notable accomplishments. If you want to say john Smith is the leading PA theoretician of the 21st century, you will need rather stronger proof, such as winning important prizes, or being recognized by the leading expert group in the field (for science in the US this would be the National Academy; I don't know what it would be in PA). If it is the unwritten consensus of the field that he is a leading figure, you will have a problem, but maybe he was the keynote speaker at an international conference, which would validate the unwritten consensus. To give one specific example, you can't say that Waldo's The Administrative State is the classic work in PA but you can quote other sources as saying so (such as textbooks, articles or reviews in peer-reviewed journals, and so forth). Post to my talk page if you want to discuss it further. Thatcher131 14:20, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Thanks again Isotope23. I apologize for my ignorance and will be more thoughtful in laying out pointers to sourcing in the future if I cool down enough to write again. What Uppland quite authoritatively and appropriately researched and wrote below I could have written off the top of my head, but I did not...I was trying to learn how to start writing here...what the style is. Perhaps one could tag new authors for particularly helpful comments until they reach a standard deemed "experienced" rather than spanking and alienating them. That is what many academic journals try to do. It is what all newspaper editors do. Regardless, I understand the point you make and that which is in the rules, and I agree to comply with it. Still, I would not be so quick to fall back on the rules as perfected. Those with more experience, I reiterate, probably can do more good by thinking through how those can work better and offering encouragement rather than using a heavy hand which is alienating in the extreme--accuracy is great as a norm in WP--public is an even better norm. There are trade-offs.
  • Strong keep all, as this mass-nomination is clearly insufficiently researched. Recognized academic fields, recognized academic journals and leading academics in those fields are all notable. I just made a sample search for Dwight Waldo, as his was the longest of the biographical articles. "Dwight Waldo" gets 16,500 Google hits, 573 Google Books hits and 906 Google Scholar hits. "Dwight Waldo" also gets 1096 hits in the academic journals incuded in JSTOR. Hits on Waldo include books titled Mastering Public Administration: From Max Weber to Dwight Waldo (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, cop. 1989) and A Search for Public Administration: The Ideas and Career of Dwight Waldo, by Brack Brown & Richard J. Stillman, II (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1986). I am convinced of the good faith of the author and suspect that we would get similar results with several of the other articles. I might add that I had personally never heard of Waldo before. The Dwight Waldo article is actually posted on April 23 – any reason not to just give it more time, and perhaps add a {{unreferenced}} tag or something? u p p l a n d 03:35, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Here is an ethic I can admire even if it serves my interests. Frankly, Max Stephenson is iffy at best. The rest are no brainers to public administration experts--as was budget theory which was summarily deleted--perhaps the most important topic in PA. On that I would frankly sign my name and stake my reputation--that is what academics do every day. Imagine the power of the summary delete. Imagine it. You can erase the words of another with 5 characters--that sort of power without a review--without a countersignature? This is the sort of governance issue that should constitute the meat of what is meant by "verifiability"--in short, checks and balances--not reputation is what should matter. Why not make all new articles provisional until they have been edited by at least 5 independent persons? Again, I would argue that these are the sorts of administrative ethical processes that need to exist in WP...not some empowered idea of an administrator who relies hugely on discretion. By the way, anyone who knows something about administrative discretion of public bureaucrats--which clearly WP administrators are--would associate the idea with the "not-notable" John A. Rohr and his not-notable contributions to Refounding Public Administration while he was at an non-notable CPAP studying the non-notable theorist Dwight Waldo and other things. Sorry for this and the other rants...they are overboard I admit.Ryan Lanham 13:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
If a previous article was deleted you can request its undeletion at Deletion Review, or recreate it so it does a better job of asserting notability and verifiability. Your 5 editor suggestion would be completely unworkable given the amount of vandalism and hoax articles that target wikipedia. The New Pages Patrol is generally a good thing, as you will see if you stick around, but some of the editors there need to have Suggestions for patrollers inked on their monitors in large black letters. Thatcher131 14:07, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Comment: I restored Budget theory, which had been redirected to budget, but not actually merged (and not deleted). Ryan, if you are uncertain about how to best write and format articles on Wikipedia, you can work on them in your user space until they are ready to go out in the main article space. Just make a temporary subpage of your userpage with a slash, like this: User:Ryan Lanham/Dwight Waldo. And always keep in mind that you are not writing for a limited academic audience, but for people who in most cases have not the slightest idea about your field. u p p l a n d 14:56, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I will study that process better. Maybe public administration and the legal process in general can learn something from WP. Ryan Lanham 14:16, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all Yet another case of articles sent for deletion before they ever really get started. There's no harm in leaving them alone, tagging for references or cleanup, and coming back in a week or so. In any case, the articles should be nominated separately next time as there appear to be great disparities in the notability of different people. Thatcher131 04:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete 'Refounding Public Administration' as advertisment. As for the rest, keep (on the basis of Wikipedia is not paper) for anyone who has obtained some notability outside of their place of employment, delete departments, 'theorists', etc. (on the basis of Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information). Peter Grey 18:26, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete all as a walled garden of people who don't meet WP:BIO/WP:BLP. Stifle (talk) 09:46, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment: the reason this appears to be a walled garden is very likely that it is an underrepresented area of little interest to most authors on Wikipedia, as opposed to the hundreds of articles in Category:Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its subcategories and subsubcategories, i.e. a case of systemic bias. That does not make the academic field of public administration in some objective sense less important than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its theorists less important than Buffyverse characters or its journals or institutions less important than individual Buffy episodes. This is not a case of "if we keep that cruft, we might as well keep this cruft". This is a case where we keep enormous amounts of cruft because of a determined fanbase blocking any attempt to delete it (not that I really mind it so much), while some AfD participants apparently aren't interested in listening to people who actually seem to know something about and are willing to contribute to articles on key persons, concepts and institutions in an underrepresented but established and recognized social science (the Google Books, Google Scholar and JSTOR hits I mentioned prove this to be the case) which Wikipedia should cover. u p p l a n d 10:48, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • keep all per Uppland. if any of the people listed above are, indeed, unnotable, resubmit individually with an argument, at the very least number of google or citeseer hits. dab (ᛏ) 12:30, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all. I'm not convinced that all of these deserve Wikipedia entries, but I am convinced that most of these make claims of notability that are sufficiently substanital to deserve individual examination and argument rather than an assault in bulk. Dragons flight 12:53, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all, per Uppland. What know they of Buffy, who only Buffy know?. --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 13:02, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • keep all per Dragon's flight, and Uppland. Also, some of these are just ridiculous. For example, John Rohr is a well-known academic. JoshuaZ 13:17, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all. Systemic bias, not lack of notability, seems to account for the lack of interest in the articles. After sufficient time has been given to gather sources and verify the content of the relevant articles, individually renominate the above pages which do not meet Wikipedia's notability standards, assuming such is the case for any. Encyclopedia articles are more important, not less, for significant but obscure topics, as those are the ones which people are most likely to look up to gain a basic understanding of the topic. -Silence 13:51, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep all. Another foray in the Wikipedia war against knowledge workers. Monicasdude 14:01, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all per Dragon's flight and Uppland. Postdlf 14:05, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all without prejudice to renominating some in the future. Most seem to still need sourcing. All need to be written better for those unfamiliar with the topic. --Rob 15:54, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep or Merge Rkevins82 16:20, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all per Silence Walter Siegmund (talk) 16:22, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all. Public administration is a legitimate field, and one I have a faint dream of getting into should I ever become independently wealthy. IMHO, it is more notable than basically any computer game, which are inherently ephemeral. Give the author, and other contributors, time to bring the articles up to full speed. I'd rather see articles that aren't fully ready for prime time be in a nearly walled garden state than linked to from everywhere. GRBerry 16:30, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all per Silence, Uppland, Dbachmann, and others. This mass nomination seems to have missed the mark. Wikipedia's not going anywhere, and these can be renominated once the articles have had sufficient time to develop and once the author has been allowed and helped to climb a bit more of Wikipedia's learning curve. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:55, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • When someone nominates an entire collection of articles, I'm going to spot check one or two, and then pass judgement on the whole lot. I did that checking and I'm convinced; this is important enough stuff to merit having articles at this level of detail. Further, the arguments of the other keep folk are persuasive. So is this: VP posting. So then... Keep the entire lot and without any aspersion, strongly recommend that Redvers do a bit more research in future before nominating academic articles in wholesale lots this way. Come back in a few months and individually nominate those that have not demostrated notability or haven't been sourced, if you must. ++Lar: t/c 23:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all per Uppland, and thanks for his principled intervention. "Non-notable" is too easily thrown around here for non-pop culture subjects. Unless you have some standing to assess notability in public administration, you simply aren't credible. Perhaps the articles should have made their claims to notability clearer; that's an argument for improvement, not deletion, especially with such young articles. · rodii · 02:06, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep All Academics are all notable IMO, especially since most have published work. If you are claiming they aren't notable, proivde specific examples for each nom, citing WP policy. Mike (T C) 18:30, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
  • None of these seems to be related to Star Trek, Star Wars, Battleship Galactica, Final Fantasy, Paris Hilton, Harry Potter, Ashlee Simpson, or any of the other concerns of millions of right-thinking Wikipedia editors. Ergo, non-notable. Terminate! Gosh, what came over me? I forgot for a moment that this is supposed to be a serious encyclopedia. Keep. But I think I know where the suspicions arise. Take the Waldo article, for example. It sets off with: Perhaps the defining figure in modern public administration and public management and recognized the world over for his contributions to the theory of bureaucratic government, Waldo is only now taking his place as one of the most important political scientists of the last 100 years. That's quite a congeries of claims, and, intended or otherwise, it has a strong reek of PoV. The author may wish to bone up on, say, Ashlee Simpson to see how bio articles are written -- WP being WP, there seems to be an inverse relationship between genuine significance and care evident in the article -- although an article on an academic who's not a hirsute scientist needn't have such elements as a lengthy, photographically illustrated section on "image and personal life". (Score a bonus ten points if you can read all the way through Ashlee Simpson without falling asleep.) -- Hoary 07:16, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all. I concur with all arguments made above in favor of keeping this group of articles. --Coolcaesar 05:57, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
  • 'Keep all TheGrappler 11:56, 29 April 2006 (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.