Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cell recursion theory


 * 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   delete. postdlf (talk) 01:00, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Cell recursion theory

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This article is an attempt to publicise a brand new theory, announced to the world in a book published July 2013, which has not yet achieved notability. Whether it ever will do so remains to be seen: if and when it does we can have a Wikipedia article about it.

As originally written, the article was sourced only to the book in which the theory is published ("The Origin of Metazoa: An Algorithmic View of Life", by Rafaele Di Giacomo, Jeffrey H. Schwartz & Bruno Maresca). It is perhaps worth mentioning that the article was created by a single purpose account, every single one of whose edits publicises work by Rafaele Di Giacomo. The article was given a PROD saying, amongst other things, "Article is only sourced to a single paper from earlier this month", and, after the author of the article removed the PROD, the article was tagged with. After that, the author added a whole string more "references", evidently in an attempt to avoid the impression of there being only one source. However, all of those additional sources were published years before the invention of Cell recursion theory. In fact, these additional references are not actually used in the article as citations for any statement about Cell recursion theory: they are used as citations for other matters that the article tries to link to Cell recursion theory: for example, the article says Brenner also stated that: “Biology urgently needs a theoretical basis to unify it and it is only theory that will allow us to convert data to knowledge”, and gives a reference for that, but it does not say that Brenner actually said anything about Cell recursion theory; nor could it, as the cited source was published three years before the publication of Cell recursion theory.

I have just done a Google search for -wikipedia "Cell recursion theory", and got no hits at all. A search for "Cell recursion theory" produced all of seven hits. One was the Wikipedia article, and the other six were pages at www.alternativefuse.com, none of which actually mention "Cell recursion theory". (It seems that Alternativefuse is one of those sites that fakes Google hits for things it picks up from Wikipedia in order to attract custom. To make sure, I used Alternativefuse's own site search facility, and confirmed that Alternativefuse has no page at all mentioning Cell recursion theory.)

The long and the short of all that is that there is no evidence anywhere of satisfying Wikipedia's notability criteria. JamesBWatson (talk) 12:59, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom, was intending to put this up for AfD myself if the creator continued to ignore attempts to open a communication. --McGeddon (talk) 13:20, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:36, 19 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete - non-notable. I might recommend redirecting to the book, if only the book were notable, but that is not the case either. Agricolae (talk) 18:39, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete. At least as our article here is written, this looks very WP:FRINGEy: throwing around buzzwords from important but unrelated areas as if that were all that was needed to propose a theory. We shouldn't have articles on such topics until they have attracted enough mainstream attention to be able to write something properly neutral about them, even if it's only "not even wrong". —David Eppstein (talk) 06:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete. I came to the same conclusion as JamesBWatson but didn't have much time to put together the excellent argument for deletion when I saw it. The single-purpose account promoting this new theory that has not had any time to be either reviewed or ignored in scientific literature or books. I'm reminded very much of (Eugene McCarthy) who had been promoting his website and a 4-year old self-published self-proclaimed revolutionary book that contained his ideas on evolution. (Discussion here at the Tree of Life WikiProject for the curious). Anyway, the theory needs time for additional sources to establish its notability. At the very least I'd like to see someone in the literature publish a response or criticism so that balance could be included but perhaps no scientist will see it worth their time. Rkitko (talk) 00:02, 21 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete as not (yet) notable. The article seems to exist only to advertise a recent paper that has had 0 citations, and the article title does not appear in searches. -- 202.124.88.21 (talk) 02:03, 21 July 2013 (UTC)
 * 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.