Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Data ownership


 * 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. Ad Orientem (talk) 01:05, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Data ownership

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This is original research by synthesis (WP:SYNTH). There is, broadly speaking, no erga omnes legal right of property or ownership in (generic) data in (almost) any jurisdiction. There are legal concepts that protect certain rights of certain people in certain data, such as privacy laws, copyright, trademarks, criminal law (e.g. as regards classified government information), etc., but this is not ownership in a legal sense. The article partially tells us so and partially conflates such rights with ownership.

There are sources that use "data ownership" in a completely different, technical rather than legal sense, e.g. to assign data in databases to certain persons or software programs, but that's not what the article is about (or maybe the "responsibilities" section is; difficult to tell). Finally, the article also tells us that there is a "philosophical concept" of data ownership, but doesn't tell us what this is or what the sources for it are.

The article is the creation of a student editor, who, it seems, simply threw together everything they could find in a search for "data ownership", without realizing that the sources they found pertain to wildly different concepts and domains of the social sciences (law, computer science, scientific ethics, etc) and do not add up to a single, unified notion of "data ownership" that the article suggests exists. An article that distinguishes between these concepts is imaginable (although perhaps dubiously notable), but would need a rewrite from scratch.  Sandstein  13:47, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 08:30, 19 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment Sandstein's assessment of original research by synthesis is correct; I'm not sure whether the article can be saved by content reduction. Perhaps Information privacy law could be a redirect target? power~enwiki ( π,  ν ) 00:10, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep/merge Data ownership is a well-established and important concept within data law (21600 hits on Google Scholare: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22data+ownership%22&btnG= ). A standalone article seems entirely possible, or merge to Information privacy law for now. Bondegezou (talk) 11:05, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * See WP:GHITS. The problem is that there is no one definition of that concept. Or can you provide one, based on a reliable source? 11:56, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * See WP:BEFORE. From the very first of those 21,600 hits, I offer, "For databases, "ownership" and "use" are easily confused as both connote privileges ranging from read and query access to creation and modification rights. By usage rights, we mean the ability to access, create, standardize, and modify data as well as all intervening privileges. Usage, however, is not what is meant by ownership. We use ownership and the residual right of control to mean the right to determine these privileges for others." There are problems with the article, but AfD is not clean-up. Bondegezou (talk) 20:46, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * So you're now talking about "data ownership" as a concept in programming applying to databases, which is something completely different than what the article is supposed to be about. This is not the topic at issue here.  Sandstein   20:55, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * No. Data ownership is a rich concept that can be examined from multiple, socio-technical perspectives. The article at present focuses more on legal perspectives. As an associate professor in health informatics, I am drawn to a more technical literature, so that's what I found. Both the paper cited (literally the first of 21,600 hits) and the current article content are about the same thing. Bondegezou (talk) 10:41, 25 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per Sandstein's research. This article was the work of a single-user account, literally as a class assignment, and the nom's description of the result as an interdisciplinary word salad is accurate.  Nothing here worth saving.  --Lockley (talk) 04:34, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Being a class assignment is not a reason for deletion. It's far from being the best article on Wikipedia, but there's some OK material here, and AfD, as ever, is not clean-up. Bondegezou (talk) 10:41, 25 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment Data ownership is a rich topic that can be examined from multiple perspectives. One can talk about legal aspects, one talk about social aspects that feed into those legal aspects, one can talk about technical methods to deliver solutions to managing data ownership problems, one can talk about how technological developments create new issues. Technical and legal aspects are not completely different senses: they are different views on the same issue. Clearly an article on data ownership is possible, however good a start you think the current article is. Here's some materials to demonstrate WP:GNG is met:
 * Fishbein (1991). "Ownership of research data" Academic Medicine. 66(3):129–33
 * Stoeklé et al. (2018) "La propriété des données génétiques: De la donnéeà l’information" Med Sci (Paris). 34:1100–1104
 * Horner & Minifie (2011). "Research Ethics II: Mentoring, Collaboration, Peer Review, and Data Management and Ownership" Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 54:S330–S345
 * Van Alstyne, Brynjolfsson & Madnick (1995). "Why not one big database? Principles for data ownership" Decision Support Systems. 15(4):267-284
 * Parry & Mauthner (2004). "Whose Data are They Anyway?: Practical, Legal and Ethical Issues in Archiving Qualitative Research Data" Sociology. 38(1):139-152
 * Moodie (2010). "Power, rights, respect and data ownership in academic research with indigenous peoples" Environmental Research, 110:818–820
 * Evans (2011). "Much ado about data ownership" Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 25(1):69-130
 * Deverka et al. (2017) "Creating a data resource: what will it take to build a medical information commons?" Genome Medicine, 9:84.
 * Hoeren (2014). "Big Data and the Ownership in Data: Recent Developments in Europe" European Intellectual Property Review. 12:751-4
 * Montgomery (2017). "Data sharing and the idea of ownership" New Bioeth. 23(1):81-86.
 * Demster 2012 "Data ownership evolves with technology." J AHIMA. 83(9):52-3, 59.
 * Cleary, Jackson & Walter (2013) "Research data ownership and dissemination: is it too simple to suggest that 'possession is nine-tenths of the law'?" J Clin Nurs. 22(15-16):2087-9. Bondegezou (talk) 11:20, 25 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I don't contest that there are a lot of sources that include the string "data ownership", and that an article (or more likely several) is possible to reflect the wildly different perspectives that various fields have about this topic. But the rationale for deletion is that the current article is worse than having no article at all because it is incompentently written original research; any recreation would need to start from scratch. See WP:TNT.  Sandstein   11:25, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
 * The list above is not "sources that include the string "data ownership"". I have reviewed each of those articles. They are articles substantially about data ownership, as per GNG criteria. They do not "reflect [...] wildly different perspectives": they reflect complementary and consistent perspectives. Plenty of the current article is correct and well referenced. You did not previously claim WP:TNT. The current article does not reach a WP:TNT standard. TNT is for a page "beyond fixing". TNT notes that "Copyright violations and extensive cases of advocacy and undisclosed paid sock farms are frequently blown up." This isn't anything like those. Bondegezou (talk) 15:07, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, 78.26  (spin me / revolutions) 20:53, 25 January 2019 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ad Orientem (talk) 00:41, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Complex topic and potentially a WP article in the future, however for this verion, WP:NUKEIT. Britishfinance (talk) 23:03, 9 February 2019 (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.