Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Oxford Portraits in Science

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 no consensus. Mr.Z-man 00:46, 3 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oxford Portraits in Science

OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 20:38, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I forgot to put in a comment in the template, so here goes. This is merely a list of books. This fails WP:NOTE. OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 20:39, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete No context. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 20:44, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and expand per below. Admittedly I know bupkis about this subject. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 21:21, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Besides being WP:Trolled by Orange Marlin, this list is obviously notable (check the two external links and do a check on google scholar and google books) and should not have been put to AFD per WP:BITE. Also Orange Marlin did obviously didn't check WP:BEFORE in addition to all this other nonsense. --Firefly322 (talk) 20:57, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How was this trolling? Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 21:21, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Clearly not just a list of books. They're all part of the same series, and if the name Oxford is attached, chances are it is notable. Should warrant further investigation. (If kept this should go in a table format). Also the lack of context isn't hard to fix, a cursory Google search makes it easy for any editor to provide context. - Mgm|^(talk) 21:03, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment – sofixit. What makes this series of books notable? We don't devote an article to every series a publisher puts out, even the OUP. The article has to demonstrate why this particular series is notable, using reliable third party sources. And having looked at the two links, they barely mention the series, and do nothing to establish notability. . dave souza, talk 21:20, 28 October 2008 (UTC) [see below for delete comment after detailed investigation dave souza, talk 15:45, 29 October 2008 (UTC) ][reply]
Delete its just a list. Oxford does not make it notable, we'll end up with pages for every publishes series at this rate. --Snowded TALK 23:18, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete (edit conflict) No claims of notability. The 2 external links are for a book review of one of the books, not the series. The other, again, is a reference to one of the books. But in this context, even if it were about the series, it would not be notable. Doing a Google search trying will obviously give many false positives, and is not a reliable method of establishing notability in this case. - Atmoz (talk) 23:24, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete unless RS is found establishing notability of this series per WP:NOTE. If individual books or authors are notable, they should have their own entries - the series should onlt have an article if a significant number of the books are notable or it itself is notable per WP:NOTE. Oxford and author notabilities are separate. Verbal chat 23:26, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep Several individual books seem to have been reviewed in School Library Journal and Booklist. [1] Better than nothing. Zagalejo^^^ 23:28, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The editor is notable, but how is a book series written by others for kid? notable in itself? Are the individual books notable? ... don't think so. Vsmith (talk) 23:31, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as per Mgm, Zagelojo. Edward321 (talk) 23:46, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as a significant series. DGG (talk) 00:09, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - per WP:NN. List is not notable; each book in themselves are not notable, notability hasn't been established in third party sources. Shot info (talk) 06:09, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete – I've now spent some time searching, and have found no evidence that the whole series is edited by the Harvard University astronomer Owen Gingerich, or that the series is in any way notable. Gingerich is listed in the Media Review reference as "General Editor", but OUP don't note any editors for the other books in their web pages I've looked at. OUP produces an immense number of series, just follow the links in the sidebar to the left of this list. Remember Wikipedia is not a directory of non-notable lists of series of books by publishers. What's still needed is a reliable third party source asserting that this is notable as a series, and my research found nothing. dave souza, talk 12:10, 29 October 2008 (UTC) clarified/grmr 17:15, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep a reasonably significant series. That the series is meant for kids should not be an issue. --Regents Park (sink with my stocks) 18:52, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment on notability Individual books in the series have been well reviewed in important journals: including, but not limited to, Isis (journal), The Quarterly Review of Biology, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and many others. The exact phrase has about 18,000 google hits and every library seems to carry the series and many respectable organizations recommend one or more books on their websites. I doubt if the works will be cited elsewhere (!) but it seems notable enough to me. --Regents Park (sink with my stocks) 21:45, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Additional comment on notability The series definitely meets the threshold standard per WP:Notability (books). Books should have at a minimum an ISBN number (for books published after 1966), be available at a dozen or more libraries and be catalogued by its country of origin's official or de facto national library. Given that the series has been reviewed in scholarly journals, I would rate the series as being at least above the threshold. Do note that scientific books for children are unlikely to be cited elsewhere and the only way of determining the value of the book (or, in this case, the series) is to see how they have been reviewed. The number of reviews and the quality of reviews matters. There are many reviews reviews are almost uniformly favorable. --Regents Park (sink with my stocks) 13:03, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete As stated above it's just a list, we might as well include listings of every series of books written by every author.Paste (talk) 19:34, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Just because it's by Oxford doesn't mean that the series is notable--and why should it be? It's a list of short biographies--what's the point of listing them? And it's not even a pretty list, it looks like it came out of the sandbox too soon. A review was mentioned: yes, the article lists a review, and it's a review of the book on Faraday, NOT a review of the series, and that's what the article is about, supposedly. RegentsPark, DGG, and others, with all due respect, the burden is to prove that the series is notable, and I have not seen any of the proponents of this article provide a solid reason to believe that. Drmies (talk) 20:14, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're working with an unnecessarily strict interpretation of WP:N. If specific parts of the series have been discussed in independent sources (there are other reviews besides that of the Faraday book, as mentioned above), then why shouldn't the series as a whole be considered notable? I agree that the list is a work in progress, but that's the case with the vast majority of articles at Wikipedia. We don't delete things because their incomplete. Each book in the series is in hundreds of libraries [2], [3], [4], [5], etc, so I don't see a good common sense reason not to have an article about them. Zagalejo^^^ 00:36, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Eh, libraries have lots of books, and there are multiple book reviews for most books. Taking this logic, we can similarly justify articles on all of the series of books produced by publishers – OUP alone has many series. Just from "Oxford" series links, we could have a huge number of articles with the same sort of information, including but not limited to Oxford English Literary History, Oxford English Texts, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, Oxford Hispanic Studies, Oxford Portraits, Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature, Oxford Books of Prose, Oxford Studies in Social History, ... etc, etc. . . . Sources are needed to verify that any particular series is in some way notable, otherwise the argument you present is original research. . . dave souza, talk 09:28, 31 October 2008 (UTC) link corrected to the one meant originally, dave souza, talk 22:37, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly, I don't see what's so terrible about having articles on all those book series. We're not talking about Gundam characters here. Zagalejo^^^ 06:54, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete No in depth coverage from independent reliable sources = nothing for us to write. Also, notability is not inherited. - Eldereft (cont.) 15:21, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Our primary mission is to collect and develop educational content and this article clearly qualifies. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:29, 1 November 2008 (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.