Talk:LDOCE

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[edit] About the proposed deletion of this article

This article has been tagged and proposed for deletion by Greenrd on 2007-04-13. The concern raised is that the article is 'unencyclopedic'.

I'm removing the tag, and explaining why I think the article should not be deleted.

Acronyms don't seem to be "unencyclopedic articles", by modern standards at least. The English Wikipedia features lots of them. It even includes very technical or little used ones (if you look at the disambiguation pages, you'll find that most 3- or 4-letter words are an acronym of something). Anyway, acronyms about dictionary names are definitely included (see OED, SOED, OALD, GCIDE, etc.).

I think this article only appears "unencyclopedic" because it is short, and its subject relatively less famous. BTW, both dictionaries are far from irrelevant. After all, the youngest of them has been published for almost 30 years, and provides a free online service. I'd agree that the article should be expanded, not deleted. But I believe that this still is a good starting point: it gives title, publisher and date of first publication for each possible meaning. That's enough information if you suddenly need to know what "LDOCE" is (as it happened to me, and I had to google it). Stefano 03:40, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

At the moment, this article is neither a stub article (because it does not focus on one topic), nor a disambiguation page (because it does not disambiguate between any other Wikipedia articles). In order to fix this issue, one or more of the dictionaries must be determined to be notable enough to merit a Wikipedia article, and then stubbed (i.e. a stub created for it). I'll leave that to someone who knows more about the topic of dictionaries.—greenrd 10:53, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Formally, I have nothing to except, but also consider that:

• this article cannot focus on a single topic because the acronym itself might expand to different dictionaries;

• this article cannot be turned into an actual disambiguation page because, at this time, information about different dictionaries is collected into a single page (an internal link is provided in the main article). Should in the future someone write individual articles written about these dictionaries, this page can be easily turned into a "proper" disambiguation page;

• this page should actually be a redirect to that single page, but the information presented here would be off topic there.

As for the notability, I think mainstream dictionaries are sufficiently notable, even if there's not much to say about them (let alone enough to devote individual articles to them). Most people just need to know "what" they are, i.e. the full title and perhaps the publisher. Stefano 18:17, 17 April 2007 (UTC)