Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sigmund Freud University Vienna

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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. → Ξxtreme Unction {yakłblah} 01:07, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sigmund Freud University Vienna

University that was created in August 2005. No students, no staff, no research yet. Martg76 11:18, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

  • Keep Its been accredited by Austrian Accreditation Council. It's notable as a university that exists so not crystal ball even if very new. Dlyons493 Talk 11:46, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    • Comment The nominator subsequently put a copyvio notice on the article and an admin deleted it. I've put in a stub which hopefully someone will expand. Dlyons493 Talk 16:45, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Keep

I disagree with a deletion for the following reasons:

(i) this is not just a private "pop" stile university, but it has been *officially* accredited by the official accreditation commission set up by the Austrian government recently.

(ii) I do not agree with Martg76 that if an institution was founded recently, it should not be entered into wikipedia.

(iii) I do not agree with Martg76 that if no student & staff numbers etc are given, the institution ought to be deleted: by the same standards, the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of technology (the university I am professor) would have to be deleted from wikipedia as well.

Hence I strongly recommend revising the deletion procedure and keeping SFU online on wikipedia.

In case of doubts, I also strongly encourage Mart76 or anybody else to contact me directly.

Thank you,

Karl Svozil Svozil(at)tuwien.ac.at Karlsvozil


  • In my opinion, deletion of this entry would result in an incorrect and inconsistent wiki knowledge base, since SFU *is* an official Austrian university, no matter if you keep the entry or not. Deletion of the entry would result in the fact that some moderators or users purge an existing Austrian university out of the wiki database.

In this case I would kindly like to know when an Austrian university would be acceptable as an entry in wiki.

In my opinion *by definition* it should be included in wiki if it is included in that official list: http://www.akkreditierungsrat.at/cont/de/privatuni.aspx

Actually, for private universities, this list and the wiki list should be one-to-one. Karlsvozil

  • Keep as an apparently verifiable university (with a singularly horrible website). - Randwicked 15:49, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Update: Most of the page is a copy & paste from here [1] and has been tagged as a copyvio. Martg76 16:32, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Keep. DLyons493 stub. Officially accredited university named after eminent person, albeit one yet to open. I think that all accredited tertiary facilities are worth an article and I vote to keep accordingly. Capitalistroadster 18:29, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete; which sources say that this university is real? The article and the university web site say so [2], but Google search for "Sigmund Freud University"+"Wien" does not help (similar results for Vienna instead of Wien). The problem here is not notability nor crystal ballery, the problem is verifiability. What exactly is the proof that this is not an hoax? If sources are provided, I would be happy to change to strong keep. Paolo Liberatore (Talk) 18:57, 19 November 2005 (UTC) Sorry, I was reading an old version of this entry, without the link provided to the list of accredited universities Keep Paolo Liberatore (Talk) 19:03, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Weak keep. I think a not-yet-open university is pretty crystal-ball-y, but I'm eventualist enough to believe that this will be a fine article when the university opens, which is apparently fairly soon. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 19:00, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Weak keep concur w/Guy. KillerChihuahua 00:53, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment The university is already open, has students and staff, and is up and running (ie teaching courses, staff etc.) ;-) So, dont worry, not crystal-ball-y (funny name)! Yet I repeat my allegations with regards to user Martg76: why delete for an obviously incorrect reason? His claims that SFU has no staff can be falsified with a single look at the SFU homepage which I clearly linked... He also did not dare to contact me, although it would have been so easy to sort things out.
    • I hold explicit written permission from SFU to use the logo of SFU for its Wikipedia entry, so there is no need for anybody to purge the entry because of the logo copyright ;-) --Karlsvozil 10:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Please don't get personally offended if a page you write gets put on AfD. I don't think the SFU website establishes that SFU is notable. It doesn't have a list of courses (only a rough overview of the program here [3]), and the staff seem to be mainly people with jobs at other universities who are doing this part-time. And please, I did contact you about the copyright violation on your talk page, as is customary here. Martg76 13:38, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Thank you, Martg76, for your continued interest in the matter. I am not personally offended. But I have to clarify wrong claims, as these affect decisions here. Let me state things clearly, at least how I see them now:
    • The original claim of Martg76 (please see above, first entry) was that SFU has no staff and no students. This is provable incorrect.
    • Martg76 now points out that (please see last posting), from his judgement, SFU is not "notable". This is a shift in argument. I disagree with this claim.
    • However, there is another interesting issue here: disregarding the official Austrian accreditation council, which decides in a lengthy and very considerate process about an institution's university status, a user in the status of Martg76 could argue for deletion on the basis that this decision is *not sufficient* for a listing of this institution in Wikipedia; thus making Wikipedia's entries effectively incomplete. This quite subjective way would not correspond to methods by which I personally would like Wikipedia to add information; it is certainly not in accordance with practices I know in science. (It appears to me that by analogy, somebody could argue that Nobelium is not worth mentioning because it is "so rare";-) --Karlsvozil 15:13, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  • The shift in argument is due to this discussion and changes to the page resulting from discussion, which has brought more facts to light. In that sense, it has certainly been fruitful. Originally, the page did not give figures about students and staff. The website does not state any such figures either (at least I couldn't find them), it doesn't even make clear whether courses have started yet. As said before, the page seems to indicate that the "staff" consists mostly of people normally teaching at state universities. I highly doubt that the figure of 80 given at the page now refers to 80 full-time employees. With respect to the criteria for inclusion, I don't think that government approval is particularly relevant. Lots of institutions and things need to get goverment approval. The general criterion is "notability" or "importance", which, however, is nothing that could be subject to scientific review. It's of course highly subjective, which is why we have discusions here to reach consensus (which seems to be going in favor of this page anyway). Martg76 16:30, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  • This is a very interesting discussion, and at least I learn a lot from it. Because the way I tend to see an Encyclopedia like Wiki is like this: the world out there is factual and "quasi-objective", and there should be a corresponcence between the world and its representation. Effectively, what is implemented here is a (more or less) pluralistic-democratic way of "voting" how this representation should look like. This sounds reasonable, because all representations are man-made by definition. However, for me as a physicist it appears questionable to "vote" for or against certain things which are fixed by convention (such as the SFU case, which was settled by the Austrian Accreditation Council) or by Nature itself---it would, to repeat the extreme case, be questionable to "vote" for against the inclusion of an element in the Periodic table. ---Karlsvozil 10:42, 21 November 2005 (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.