Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics

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 was redirect to The Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. T. Canens (talk) 01:06, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics

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I had tagged this article for CSD on copyvio earlier this morning; the original author, while removing the CSD template and copyvio template, remedied the situation, so good on him. However, the notability of this organization is still at question from what I can tell - there is not much about this organization, which is appropriately acronym'd to OCCAM. That name alone gives it bonus "cool points" in my book, but that's also an WP:ILIKEIT argument to keep it, unfortunately. As such, I bring this here to AFD for discussion. Dennis The Tiger (Rawr and stuff) 18:38, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Merge: I gather from the website that OCCAM is one of several divisions of The Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. It seems to me that what little material there is here could be merged with the other article. Perhaps the other article should be expanded to include the other divisions as well to avoid undue weight. (The other divisions are the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Mathematical and Computational Finance Group, the Centre for Mathematical Biology, the Centre for Nonlinear PDE, and the Numerical Analysis Group.)--RDBury (talk) 12:10, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions. —• Gene93k (talk) 15:03, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete and redirect to The Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. Subdivisions of institutes/departments usually do not get their own articles, and it does not appear that this one is independently notable. The article is too short (just two short sentences) for a formal merge to be justified here. Nsk92 (talk) 19:48, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:00, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. While I have no immediate opinion whether the article should be kept or not, I'd like to point out that "Delete and redirect" is the worst of the various options. We can delete it, which is simple and only leaves the odd red link, or we can merge it to The Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, which is a bit more work per RDBury, but a redirect without merge only serves to leave the reader who followed the link astonished and puzzled why they ended up on the target page. --Lambiam 20:21, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Although I don't think people would be that astonished by being redirected to to The Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, I am fine with a plain "delete". The article, in its current form, is very short and there is very little verifiable information that may be lost if the article is deleted. The issues regarding various other divisions of the institute, how to mention them etc, can be discussed directly at Talk:The Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. A "merge" close for low-traffic source and target articles is likely to create a situation where nothing gets done for a long time, and the situation just gets stale. In my experience, merge discussions conducted directly at talk pages, even for more visible articles, tend to attract very little participation, drag on forever and often produce no result. Also, even if a merge is performed and a redirect is created, the redirect can easily be undone and the merged article restored (because the history log does not get deleted). I have seen this happen several times. Then another AfD is needed and people end up wasting even more of their time. Therefore, except for cases where the source article contains a significant amount of verifiable information that may otherwise be lost, I believe that "merge" as a formal outcome of an AfD discussion is something to be avoided. Nsk92 (talk) 20:55, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: If this is changed to a redirect page, wouldn't it be better to keep the history intact than to delete it? Or is there some policy or some reasons in precedent why that's a bad idea? Michael Hardy (talk) 22:16, 17 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Right. The history would be kept. I think that by "Delete and Redirect" the person probably means "Delete the contents and rewrite it as just a redirect". "Delete and Redirect" is probably not the clearest way to express this. Herostratus (talk) 03:25, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete (or remake as just a redirect, at the closer's discretion). I'm looking at their activities. The big deal is a couple of conferences they are holding: OCCAM Lattice Boltzmann Workshop and Future Challenges in Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience.I checked all chairs and presenters from institutions in anglophone countries. None of them have articles except Philip Holmes, and it looks doubtful that he should. (The non-anglophone-country presenters are even less likely to have articles, I assume.) Granted this is an esoteric field, but not that esoteric, so this is not a good trend. They don't publish a journal or anything (as far as I can tell), and they don't host conferences with academics notable enough to have Wikipedia articles, so what do they do to be notable? Nothing, as far as I can tell. Herostratus (talk) 03:25, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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.