Template:Did you know nominations/International Sociological Association

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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by PFHLai (talk) 02:05, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

International Sociological Association[edit]

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Created/expanded by Piotrus (talk). Self nom at 01:00, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

  • According to the prose checking tool, it was expanded from 1251B to 5454B, a 4.3x expansion. Do you have more you can add? Also, there is one bare url (http://www.isa-sociology.org/global-dialogue/). Also, most of the refs are from the ISA website. Are there any independent sources available? Chris857 (talk) 20:03, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I added a little, I hope it makes it over 4.5x, but I am really grasping at straws here. I can always spam some mostly irrelevant factoid from one of the sources, but I'd prefer not to. I've formated the ref, and no, no other sources are available, it is 90% self-published material. That said, majority of it should be rather reliable, the author being an academic - Jennifer Platt from University of Sussex. It might not have been peer reviewed, but there's simply nothing else out there, as far as I can tell, and nothing seems fringe-ish or extraordinary. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 21:07, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
It's not at x5, sorry. The quantity of self published material is a worry. Secretlondon (talk) 17:07, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
No, it was a 4.96x time expansion. You know, it is the slavish attention to the rules that ruins the fun of working at Wikipedia. But, fear not, in the spirit of collaboration I have expanded the article to 5.00x exactly, from 191 to 955 words. If you have an issue with the sources, feel free to ask for a second opinion at WP:RSN through I am quite sure that the current references satisfy the start-class criteria, which is sufficient for a DYK class article. Cheers, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:44, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
I did a quick copy edit of the article and that by itself raised it from 4.96x to more than 5x. Before the article was at 1251 chars, so needs 6255. It's now at 6803. Also, for this kind of article - on a major academic organization, some self-published sources are inevitable.VolunteerMarek 00:23, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
Yes, an article about a topic like this one will inevitably cite some self-published sources, but it should not rely exclusively on self-published sources, as this article currently does. (Indeed, third-party sources are required for the WP:GNG.) Hasn't anyone ever written about this organization in books, journal articles, or news media?
Another concern with the article is the lack of unique descriptors for the various sources cited. Many of the cited sources are identified as having the same title: "ISA - International Sociological Association", but it is clear that they are different individual pages on the ISA website. All pages on the website apparently have the same name in the "title" meta-tag, but the meta tag is not the title for Wikipedia referencing purposes. Please provide titles for the different pages, so that a user can more easily identify them -- and can hope to find them when the URL goes bad (the current "titles" are no more helpful than bare urls). For example. http://www.isa-sociology.org/public-sociology-live/ should be titled "Public Sociology, Live!", http://www.isa-sociology.org/about/internal.htm could be called "Internal Organization", and http://www.isa-sociology.org/publ/isrb.htm should be called "International Sociology Review of Books". --Orlady (talk) 18:26, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
  • I have fixed the reference titles, it seems reflinks failed yet again to do the job :/ And no, I cannot find any other sources. They may well exist, either not digitized, or so poorly indexed that Google finds nothing, but I am pretty sure all they would have would be cursory mentions. You can find those on Google Books, and in some academic journals, but they are passing mentions of little value. Other then the cited publication commissioned by ISA and published on its pages, I am pretty sure ISA itself has not been a subject of any (digitized) publication. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 19:15, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
  • You are saying that this organization fails the general notability guideline because it has never received substantial third-party published coverage. Not only would that be a problem for DYK, but it would mean that the article could not be retained. It's hard to believe that any reputable professional society like this would fail the GNG -- there must have been some outside attention to the organization and its activities over 60+ years. Indeed, I've found several published sources in Google News. I searched in English, German, and Spanish, and I expect that searches in other languages would turn up more material than I found. Here are my hits that look most potentially useful:
  • [1] and [2] came up in searches for current news.
  • In the archives I found [3], [4], [5] (this obituary indicates that the book "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste," by Pierre Bourdieu, published in France in 1979 and in the United States in 1984, was listed by ISA as one of the ten most important works of sociology of the 20th century -- the list of ten most important works might merit inclusion in the Wikipedia article). --Orlady (talk) 19:50, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
  • The thing is, such refs are not good for much in the article. This refers to a recent small conference, I mention in the article that ISA organizes them regularly. We probably could find refs for few more if we dug through some news archives, but I don't see how the article would benefit from it; the linked ISA page is the best source for those conferences - it provides a list of all of them in one place. This just mentions that ISA exists, there is a lot of refs like that - but they don't add anything of value to the article. The top 10 sociology books is an interesting find, but as far as I can tell, it is primarily discussed... on ISA's pages: [6]. The list is mentioned in passage by various works, like the NYT you found, or some books ([7]. I am not seeing any analysis of this list published anywhere else, and the cursory mentions I see in books or such, if they cite a source, they cite ISA and its webpage. For a reliable source, I have accessed this academic article, which discusses the list, citing as its source for the information "International Sociological Association (ISA) (1998) 'Books of the Century', ISA website, http://www.ucm.es/info/isa/books/. Accessed 17 March 2004. ". I have added a new ref for ISA being a leading international sociological organization, but that's the best you can find about ISA in other sources (or, at least, that I can find). And you are right that in light of GNG this is a problem, so I have started a discussion here you may find of interest. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:35, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
  • 5x expansion criterion is met, article is well-supplied with footnotes, hook fact is supported, and QPQ review is done. Reference citations are now properly documented, and the article now has citations to a few sources other than the ISA itself. For all intents and purposes, it's good to go.
However, before this hits the main page, please either provide a third-party WP:RS for the statement "It is the premier international sociological body" or delete it. It apparently is supported only by the organization's own self-description. The organization is acceptable as a source of much factual information about itself, but Wikipedia should not republish ISA's self-congratulatory statements as if they were verified facts. --Orlady (talk) 02:15, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Good now! :-) --Orlady (talk) 22:29, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
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