Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/EUROCALL


 * 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   keep. Much of the argument below has little bearing in policy but when the discussion is distilled down to what is relevant to Wikipedia's inclusion guidelines, the consensus hee remains that this article does meet the criteria. Shereth 18:09, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

EUROCALL

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

EUROCALL is a significant organization for the dissemination of information about the use of technology in language education. Its conference is attended not only by Europeans but by members of the international academic community. Please retain this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.206.239.172 (talk) 17:42, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Another speedy that I may have called too hastily. Educational organization with a minimal assertion of notability, and no third-party coverage. Delete.  Blanchardb - Me•MyEars•MyMouth - timed 17:13, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I've an interest in this entry as I'm the web admin of the EUROCALL website, and I'm astonished that a) there hasn't been a Wikipedia article on the org until now, and b) that folk are thinking of deleting it. EUROCALL is a legit non-profit international org going back to the 90s, which I've been involved with since 1996 or so. It holds regular well-attended conferences and publishes a refereed journal. Its personnel are quite clearly set out in its website, with emails, phone numbers, and postal addresses. Quite what the grounds for deleting the article are I don't understand, considering how much guff there is in Wikipedia. If the article is considered to be badly-written I'll happily help the original author out with a better-looking version, but to exclude a long-established international organisation from Wikipedia would be plain bonkers. I'm a newbie Wikipedia contributor so maybe there's something I'm missing.   —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fredriley (talk • contribs) 14:51, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I rally to  the defence of the author and his article because a few hours ago  you  hung an AfD on  a similar article of mine, and there now appears to  be a trend in  the making  for ultra-rapid deletions of extremely  harmless educational  articles.

"I am a member of EUROCALL, an extremely useful organisation. I cannot even begin to wonder why you should want to delete the article, the organisation serves the world very well and the same applies to its US equivalent CALICO.  Please reconsider your action.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.114.136.168 (talk) 09:47, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Article Rescue Squadron: "All too often, an article about a perfectly notable topic lies wounded, badly written, unsourced – but should its life be taken at Articles for Deletion? No! Only articles about non-encyclopedic topics should be deleted, not articles that need improvement. Improvement is the opposite of deletion.


 * An article should not be deleted just because it is ill-formed. Some writer worked hard on that article. Some reader can use that article. Those writers and readers, if reached out to, can help us preserve this worthwhile content."


 * These education articles have been created  by  the least  likely  perpetrators of the very  serious issues that  call  for speedy  deletion, and it is a sad day  for Wikipedia when such  informative articles, however short and unreferenced are to be  classed among  vandalism, spam, slander, and blatant  advertising. In  doing so, serious authors may  well  be discouraged from   continuing  to  contribute to  the Wikipedia community. It  is equally  important  for us to  consider who we  are deleting  as well as what  we are deleting. There are certainly  quite a few anonymous adolescent  vandals at  work; equally  there are Nobel  laureates behind the nicknames of some of the authors.--Kudpung (talk) 21:45, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The above treatise aside, is this association notable as per our guidelines? I don't see any references to ensure that it has any inherent notability for itself. Could the above commenter perhaps provide some coverage of this group to prove that it meets the guidelines for organizations? Until then, weak delete from me. Tony Fox (arf!) 22:48, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
 * My issue with the article, in response to some of the comments, is that there's minimal actual coverage of the organization to provide the reliable sources we need to determine notability. DGG's note on the journal is useful, but when I run a news archive search I mostly get articles about unrelated companies, with a few minimal pieces about this organization. If there are more sources out there that I'm not seeing, they need to be put into the article. Tony Fox (arf!) 16:02, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep based on  the existence of  a journal devoted to the subject or project published by Cambridge University press., now in its 21st volume-- from 1989 to the present and indexed in all the major services  . That sort of evidence would seem to show something a well established academic subject.  The article needs a little rewriting to clarify. Probably also needs a second article for the journal. DGG (talk) 04:43, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 12:03, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Education-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 12:03, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, I suppose it is a treatise, but  in  cases of AfD I tend to  look  at  the bigger picture and not  assume that  Wiki  rules are graven in  stone, especially  where stubs that  are clearly not  spam  are concerned. However, I  am  not the creator of the article and I  feel  the onus is on  the article's creator to fulfill the required criteria, as I  have done with  my  similar article that Blanchard AfDd, and which I now hope meets the criteria for keeping. In  cases such  as the above, I  usually send a friendly  message to  an author to suggest  that his/her article needs some urgent attention and wait  a while. Neverthless, I am neither an admin nor a 'maintenance' editor, so  although  the stub is indeed still lacking  important  expansion, my  suggestion  to keep it will probably carry little weight here.--Kudpung (talk) 12:43, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I am not sure what you editor guys at Wikipedia are looking for. Do you know anything about ICT and foreign language teaching and learning and how important it has become over the last 30 years? OK, so the article is a stub at the moment and ready for expansion, which many others better qualified than myself will doubtless do as they article becomes more widely known, But if you are looking for third-party evidence that EUROCALL is well-known and highly respected then you will find brief references to it all over the Web. You won't find a substantial article on EUROCALL on the Web - apart from my article (already cited) about it's evolution - and the same probably applies to CALICO. Here's a reference to EUROCALL - in German. After all, it is an international association. Monoglots, watch out!

Die Hauptziele von EUROCALL bestehen darin, die Integration von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (ICT) in den modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht und die Zusammenarbeit von Fachleuten auf diesem Gebiet zu fördern. Die Palette der Themen ist breit gefächert: Lernforschung, Integration von CALL/TELL/ICT in den Unterricht, Corpora, Lehrerweiterbildung, Multimedia-Programmierung, autonomes Lernen, Organisation von Selbstlernzentren, computergestütztes Testen, Softwaredesign, Fachsprachen, Literatur, interkulturelle Kommunikation, Lernen über das Internet, Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache und vieles mehr.


 * The principle aims of EUROCALL include:
 * The integration of information and communication  technologies in  modern foreign  language teaching and to  promote the collaboration of sopecialists in  these areas. The range of thesmes is wide: learning  reearch, integration of CALL/TELL/ICT into  lessons, Corpora, further education  of teachers, multi-media programming, self-study, organisation of self-study  centres, computer aided testing, software design, language for special  purposes, literature, intercultural  communication, learning  on  the Internet, treatmemnt  of natural  language, and much  more. roughly translated  by--Kudpung (talk) 03:55, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

GroovyGuzi (talk) 17:08, 7 July 2009 (UTC)GroovyGuzi

http://eurocall.tu-dresden.de/eurocall.htm


 * What we are looking for? Here, you are asserting that the issue Eurocall is addressing is notable. Fair enough, but that does not mean Eurocall itself is notable enough for inclusion. See WP:NOBLECAUSE. Now DGG may have pointed you in the right direction, I'm not sure, but the main point is, the notability of an organization (click on the link to see what we mean by that) would be shown by the fact people unrelated to the organization find time to write stuff about the organization itself. You wrote that I won't find an article about Eurocall or Calico on the Web. If that is true, then that is by itself a solid argument for deletion, per our notability policy and precedents too numerous to count. Wikipedia refuses to be the first site to become a third-party reference about an organization.


 * It is important for you to make a clear distinction between the notability of a cause (which you asserted here beyond argument) and that of an organization working towards that cause (which you haven't hinted at, yet others have done it for you here). --  Blanchardb - Me•MyEars•MyMouth - timed 22:39, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment: Maybe if the above German text (see my translation) is taken from the German Wikipedia and it article is sufficiently referenced, perhaps those references could be translated into English and used here.--Kudpung (talk) 03:55, 8 July 2009 (UTC)


 * DWIW, I was clearly talking not about the issue, but the particular project. A book or 2 by a reputable publisher discussing a project makes that project notable, both by common sense and by GNG. A entire multi-year run of a journal from a major scientific publisher devoted to a particular project is much, much more so.  I'd certainly to argue that normally even one or two special issues on a project in a reputable  journal is enough to show notability -- but this is 20 years worth of regular publication! . DGG (talk) 04:55, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

DGG's last comment hits the nail on the head. The long-standing ReCALL journal itself, which is read by academics (and not just EUROCALL members) in this field all over the world, is proof enough of EUROCALL's significance. EUROCALL is referred to by numerous organisations, e.g. The National Centre for Languages (CILT, UK), The British Council, The European Commission, The Council of Europe, etc. As I said before, you probably won't find an entire article by a third party extolling EUROCALL's achievements, and this is true of many organisations, authors and educational establishments that have entries in Wikipeda. But you will find numerous recommendations for EUROCALL both on the Web and in print. Are these the kind of third-party references that you are looking for?

GroovyGuzi (talk) 09:48, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=159356 (USA)
 * http://www.languages.dk/eurocall/rapport_fra_eurocall_98.htm (Denmark - in Danish, including a picture of the Spanish Ambassador to Denmark, who attended the 1998 conference).
 * http://www.prleap.com/pr/98382/ (USA)
 * http://www.elearningeuropa.info/main/index.php?id=20&page=fix (European Commission)
 * http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Computer_assisted-language-learning
 * http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/downloads/languages_ict_global_call.pdf (Languages ICT, UK - a subsidiary of the National Centre for Languages)
 * http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/conferences/2009-eurocall-new-trends-computer-assisted-language-learning (The British Council)
 * http://www.britishcouncil.org/brussels-learning-blended-learning.htm (The British Council, Brussels)
 * http://www.prof2000.pt/users/vstevens/proforga.htm (Vance Stevens, UAE)

I suppose editors do not often admit their mistakes. I have been brutally edited on occasions and, as an editor and reviewer who has worked for several international publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis, Peter Lang, I may have been a bit hard at times. I think Wikipedia is right in maintaining editorial standards, but here the editors are being a bit rigid. I have written entries for two encyclopedias (one published by Elsevier and one by Routledge) that have not been subjected to such harsh and, dare I say, naive editing. GroovyGuzi (talk) 10:02, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I originally added the comment below to the discussion page of the EUROCALL entry instead of this special page, where it apparently belongs (at least the discussion on the other page seems to have died down). So let me repeat here that I think there is ample ground for keeping the EUROCALL entry as well as the CALICO one. For example, the claim that one gets many other hits when googling EUROCALL is rather surprising - try googling for EUROCALL and language and you will indeed find over 19000 hits which all seem to be about exactly the organization we are talking about here, e.g. just to pick a couple from the list: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-115103425.html http://bildungsserver.vhs.at/fachgruppen/eurocall So why is this not ample proof for the fact that EUROCALL is a notable organization according to the Wikiedia guidelines? For the record, below is my original statement, which I had posted at 11:18, 8 July 2009 (UTC):

I would also strongly support that the Wikipedia articles for EUROCALL and CALICO remain. I work in the area in which both of these non-profit organizations are active, and it is readily apparent that they should fit under the notable criteria, i.e. they are international and information about them can be verified by third-party, independent, reliable sources. For example, Cambridge University Press publishes the journal of the EUROCALL organization called RECALL, which can be directly verified at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=REC In the same way, the CALICO journal published by CALICO can be readily verified in library catalogues, such as http://swb2.bsz-bw.de/DB=2.312/SET=1/TTL=1/SHW?FRST=6/PRS=HOL&HILN=888&ADI_LND= If more proof is needed, please let me know. I am very surprised that this even is an issue. Prof. Dr. Detmar Meurers (The Ohio State University, US and Universität Tübingen, Germany) Detmar (talk) 17:07, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Notable academic institution. Colonel Warden (talk) 21:54, 11 July 2009 (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.