Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Archive 1

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Contents

scientific societies

A lot of periodicals are redirects to the learned/scientific society that published them. e.g. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

Stubs: {{sci-org-stub}}
Categories: Category:Scientific societies and Category:Learned societies

Does anyone know of a project that covers those societies; if not, do we want to include them within our scope? John Vandenberg 06:42, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

We certainly should include the journals they publish. I'm sure this will attract editors to the articles on the societies and we can see how it develops. The societies do have a wider role than publishing. However, where as in your example the article contains material about a journal, it should be in on of our categories. --Bduke 08:01, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Organizations has some coverage of learned societies. --Bduke 08:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Redirects should still be categorized as journals. See this edit for an example, and look at how it appears in Category:Philosophy journals. It is also an idea to keep track of these redirects, as eventually they should be turned into redirects to a section (ie. the section in the society article about the journal) or into their own articles. A "redirects with possibilities" category is often the most useful way to keep track of redirects like that. Carcharoth 00:31, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Looks good. I would like to automate tagging any redirects in this way. Any idea's how to compile a list of all redirect titles that a likely to be "journals"? The best approaches I can think of are:
  • look for any redirects to society pages and manually cull that list down.
  • google search for journals on wikipedia and filter that down to only contain redirects
John Vandenberg 02:10, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

some cleanup work..

Im doing some automated and manual fixes to the pages that use the journals infobox, and coming across some work to be done so I'll list them here until I have time to work on them (unless someone beats me to it :-) ):

John Vandenberg 02:04, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

unanswered humanities help desk question

In case anyone is keen to hit the stacks, here is an unanswered journal related question that I asked: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2007_August_4#Southern_Literary_Journal_and_Monthly_Magazine. There are two others that google can find: [1]. John Vandenberg 11:19, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Don't have access to a library with those, but I've replied over there with some thoughts. Carcharoth 12:27, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Specifically, the threads are:

The other one wasn't really about a journal. Someone should search the other desks as well. That was just the Humanities reference desk. Carcharoth 12:31, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Academic society at AfD

Not sure if this is the right place to raise this, but the Society for Cryobiology, which publishes the journal Cryobiology, is currently at AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/International Society for Cryobiology.

This reminds me that I've been meaning to raise the idea of thrashing out guidelines to notability for academic journals, societies etc. If articles on more obscure journals/societies etc are created by the activities of this WikiProject, then defending them at AfD is going to become a major concern. Espresso Addict 13:58, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

The article on the society is I think being adequately defended. But on the broader question ,we can try to set up a deletion notification as for other projects. However, keep in mind that this is not a question of always defending the articles, but rather of seeing they have sufficient informed discussion, pro or con. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting; we now need to figure out how to do it. I suggest we include not just academic journals but societies as well, as the articles are often connected or combined, and that we treat "academic' very broadly. EA, do you volunteer to check Afd? Can you run one of the tools listed there?--it is much more difficult otherwise. I will offer to keep an eye on PROD--at present there are not more than one or two a week there. DGG (talk)
I take your point about 'defending'; I meant that I believe this WikiProject needs to think carefully about what it considers to be notable, with reference to the views of the broader Wikipedia community & the general notability guidelines. I find it hard to see community consensus favouring adding every academic journal, no matter how low impact/shortlived/low circulation, and I'm not in favour of doing lots of writing that gets zapped at AfD.
I could check out AfD most days if that would be of use. I don't usually track the full page these days, but skimming for journals/academic conferences/societies wouldn't be nearly as difficult as checking for academics. Unfortunately, I've never managed to get any of the delsort tools to work for me. I run IE 6 and it seems to be becoming less and less compatible with editing Wikipedia. There may be some mileage in my switching to Firefox, but I'd need to discuss it with my sys admin. Espresso Addict 05:04, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
There are automatic procedures for generating notices. The most used one requires that all articles be tagged with a work group banner. Doing this would be a formidable undertaking, and I am not sure the results would pay. There are relatively few such deletions at present. It can probably be done with a bot using the categories, but this is an area I have no expertise in.
I call your attention however to User:AlexNewArtBot/AcademicSearchResult and the other pages there. There is also a log view--User:AlexNewArtBot/AcademicLog, with the successive days visible in the history--this view has the advantage of showing the terms matched by the grep expression. I do not regularly scan this one, but I sometimes scan the corresponding one for Education, in the log view. WW could probably try to set up a similar one for journals. It is possible to have this linked and transcluded onto one of the project pages. You'lll see from the main page there how other projects do it. DGG (talk) 04:54, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
I've manually checked 12-15 Sept without finding anything relevant beyond the society mentioned above, so I suspect creating a delsort category would be overkill. I'll keep on scanning for the moment, and create a project subpage when more articles turn up, unless anyone has a better solution.
A variant of the AlexNewArtBot would definitely be useful, although assuming it's only scanning new articles it wouldn't sort the problem of patrolling AfD. Espresso Addict 23:40, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

European Conference on Artificial Intelligence on AFD

Copied from an announcement by Lambiam in Wikiproject CS: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is on AFD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. —David Eppstein 23:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I've got a bit behind on checking AfD. Both Music Theory Spectrum & Symbolic Interaction (journal) were kept. Espresso Addict 05:54, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
And again I think you're heroes, defending treasures the rest of the community don't realize they're sitting on. Alastair Haines 14:02, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
The discussion on that AfD on European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is going as keep, but it is a relatively week and poorly documented article. we really need to do considerably better and the ease of this AfD may not hold as more people notice. To a certain extent AfD often accepts articles on computer science and technology if some well known people speak for them strongly enough, even if the references are deficient; this does not happen as easily on most other subjects. DGG (talk) 00:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Science and medicine in general seem to do better than humanities and arts at AfD. I suspect it reflects the balance of backgrounds of contributors to Wikipedia. Espresso Addict 08:21, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Lol, and the perhaps the personalities of people in the disciplines also. An old theory that's been exploded (unless useful in teaching) gets scrapped in the sciences. In the humanities, there are a thousand ways to analyze dead issues. I spend my life reading languages no one has spoken for 3,000 years! I try to understand why people who were wrong disagreed with other people who were also wrong, but in a different way, then show that medieval commentators misunderstood the disagreement. No wonder I'm wrong headed about notability. ;) Alastair Haines 16:55, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


Update on monitoring deletion

The deletion monitoring subpage has now been in operation for a month, during which time 19 AfDs & 11 PRODs have been listed, though some have been of only marginal relevance. (The latter is probably an underestimate of the total, as I don't think PRODs have been continuously checked.) Does anyone have any idea whether this is enough to justify a separate deletion sort page?

I suspect it would be easier to monitor related deletions if more people were involved, and also probably more equitable to have a community deletion sorting page, rather than a specific subpage of this WikiProject. One problem would be coming up with an easily understandable title for the page, as "academic journals" excludes conferences and societies, which come up for deletion more commonly than journals. Espresso Addict 23:18, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

A community sorting page sounds like a good idea to spread the load. How about Academic journals, societies and conferences for a title, the first two words give people the idea, and context will suggest their inter-relatedness. Alastair Haines 10:51, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree that there is sufficient need for a proper delsort page; all that is required is a pagename that encompasses it all. Alastair's suggestion is a good one. Academia is the simpler, provided everyone understands that adacemics are listed on "Academics and educators". Another option is Academic organisations, or Learned organisations in order to catch organisations that are not strictly academic. John Vandenberg 12:26, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree with "Academic journals, societies and conferences" as a title. Hopefully people will look at the page if they think the deletion debate/notice they want to sort should go there, and there can be a bit of text explaining that related articles (eg. awards) can go here, but that other related articles (eg. university-related stuff and academics and educators) should go elsewhere. The only worry I have is that we should really have some clear notability guidance, as setting up such a page might conceivably increase the number of nominations, and there should be arguments in place to defend articles if needed, or support the deletion if needed. Carcharoth 13:04, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I too agree with Academic journals, societies and conferences as the title; I think Academia would confuse too many people over what gets listed there and what at Academics and Educators. Either way, the text needs to make absolutely clear what is listed where. Some of the grey areas I recall encountering in the past month are student newspapers, student clubs, amateur societies, literary publications, publishing companies of educational material and academic libraries.
Re Carcharoth's point, we've had no success in deciding notability guidelines -- I suspect the project members are in reasonable agreement at least as regards journals, but external comments have not been possible to incorporate. It might be easier to write them once some more relevant items have been gone through the system. Espresso Addict 19:29, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I'm busy until the end of November and won't be able to systematically scan AfD/Prods for related articles. The last day that has been completely scanned is 27 October. I put in the request at delsort on 23 October, but so far there's been no feedback from those not involved in this project. Espresso Addict 12:08, 1 November 2007 (UTC)