Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Student Approaches to Learning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Excuse me but explain to me why you consider this an essay and what in your opinion is not an essay - it was supported with plenty of primary and secondary references there was no opinion it reported the different views on learning styles from different sources. Previously I have been a great supporter of Wikipedia but this experience persuades me that my colleagues are correct and that the entire project is a pile of inane rubbish (It gets deleted but we still have articles on Darth Vader's Helmet).Ardalby (talk) 20:43, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

As the AfD took place more than 3 weeks ago, I must confess that I don't remember much about this article (and since it was deleted, not being an admin, I cannot look up the article now). It would have been good if you had brought up your objections while the AfD was ongoing. In general, the most likely explanation is that it was written as a typical scholarly article, meaning that it contained a fair amount of synthesis. While synthesis is peffectly fine and in fact necessary in a research paper (you present some data and then argue that the data supports a particular conclusion), on WP synthesis is considered a form of original research and is not allowed under WP:NOR. Figuratively speaking, it is not OK to argue that 2+2=4 from the laws of arithmetics, but it is OK to explicitly cite a specific reliable source which says that 2+2=4. This problem is easily avoided when we are talking about plain facts, e.g. "he stated that..", "she was born on ...", "the battle took place on...", "he was appointed to ..." and so on. But with WP articles on more abstract subjects (such as attitudes, opinions, philosphical concepts, etc), compliance with WP:NOR is harder since it is more difficult to avoid making substantial inferences. Being a mathematician myself, I personally have much more simpathy towards WP articles on scholarly subjects than on pop-culture ones, but one still has to stick to the basic WP policies such as WP:NOR, WP:NPOV and WP:V. It also pays to assume good faith, per WP:AGF. I am fairly sure that your article was deleted not because of some kind of anti-intellectual bias of the AfD participants but because they honestly thought that the article violated WP:NOR.

As a practical matter, I can offer a few suggestions:

1)You can ask the closing admin, User:JForget to give you a copy of the deleted article; then you can work on it in your user space (create a subpage of User:Ardalby), bring it up to speed in terms of WP:NOR compliance and then re-create the article in the main WP space.

2)You can file an appeal at WP:DRV and ask there for the original delete decision to be overturned. It is likely that in that case the deleted content will be temporarily restored, at least for the duration of the DRV discussion.

I personally recommend option 1) since it is fairly unlikely that a DRV appeal would ultimately succeed while option 1) will allow you to achieve a functionally equivalent result. On the few occasions where I created a new WP article from scratch, I always worked on it in my user space first, before creating a main WP space entry. Incidentally, this way one always gets to keep a copy of the article in one's user space for future improvement even if the main space entry gets deleted. Regards, Nsk92 (talk) 12:30, 6 June 2008 (UTC)