Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eurogene


 * 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. Essentially almost a week keep, being equal discussion for retention or deletion after an appropriate period of time, with significant argumentation pointing out coverage in secondary sources in addition to noteworthy associations and management. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 18:09, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Eurogene

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Non-notable project. One of a number of articles created in an effort to promote the EU Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development. Hardly any of these have notability independent from their organizers/participants and this one is no exception. No independent sources. Does not meet WP:GNG. Crusio (talk) 14:35, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

petrknoth (talk) 16:05, 21 August 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.108.145.40 (talk) 15:14, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Dear Crusio, The reason for deletion of this article seems to me invalid. The Eurogene project was and is a significant step forward in the area of providing Open Education Resources in the area of human genetics. Please have a look on eurogene.open.ac.uk and eurogene.eu. Eurogene is definitely not a private or a for profit organisation. It is a not for profit project being run by a network of European Universities in particular The Open University, European Genetics Foundation and European Sociaty of Human Genetics. Please have a look at the video http://eurogene.open.ac.uk/about-eurogene on what Eurogene actually is. To give you an example of an educational resource that is provided by eurogene please go, for example, to http://eurogene.open.ac.uk/node/3598 . These resources are being used by thousands of people wordwide! In addition, there has been a significant research that lead to the development of Eurogene: please have a look on the list of the scientifically referred publications that were written during the project at the bottom of this page: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/name/eurogene . These papers were presented at an internationally approved high profile conferences. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions. Petr
 * Unfortunately, being "important" or "used by thousands of people" is not an issue here, unless this is documented by reliable third party sources. --Crusio (talk) 15:25, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete Wikipedia uses coverage by reliable, secondary sources as its watermark for inclusion. Eurogene does not have significant coverage in third-party sources. Angryapathy (talk) 16:15, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Dear Crusio, dear Angryapathy, Matteo Dutto from the European Genetics Foundation speaking. There are indeed secondary sources about Eurogene and they are available at the following link http://www.eurogene.eu/?t=page.php&p=16 The first and most reliable one is an article called Gene genie's treasure trove by Mark Frary, which was published on The Times, Wednesday March 23 2011 paper edition. Also, a post about the Eurogene project by Bertalan Mesko was featured on the Science Roll blog and the portal has been included as a reference for genetics education both in the epractice portal and in the Scientix Portal. Should we include all these independent sources in the description page? --Matteo.dutto (talk) 17:05, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  —Tom Morris (talk) 16:35, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete - Nothing on Google, Google News and Yahoo that would be notable for Wikipedia. SwisterTwister   talk  20:53, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry to say this, but I do not thing that Google, Google News nor Yahoo should be considered respectable authorities - contrary to your claim these authorities are not independent!. What matters is the acceptance within the scientific community, thus you should be referring to the third party evidence, such as newspaper articles, scientific articles, opinion of the European Society of Human Genetics etc. According to the suggestions above, it seems to me that if we paid money to Google for appearing higher in the result list, there wouldn't be a problem ... This type of argumentation puts me very much off.

petrknoth (talk) 9:57, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
 * You misunderstand: Google and Yahoo are being used here NOT to see how high the project ranks there, but to find sources about the project. SwisterTwister's "delete" !vote is based on a failure to find adequate sources. --Crusio (talk) 10:01, 23 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I can see your point, but I still disagree with the deletion. According to the Wikipedia Notability Guidelines sources can encompass all forms of published media, including non-online sources. It seems to me that an article on the The Times paper version is to be considered both reliable and independent from the subject.Also, given the depth of the coverage and the quality of the source I really cannot see what else can be expected in terms of sources from an entry about a free Open Access initiative like Eurogene. In my opinion the problem can be easily solved by including the list of external references in the entry. --Matteo.dutto (talk) 11:38, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Europe-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 00:25, 24 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep on the basis of that Times article. Of course print is usable, and verification from a online copy of it is adequate for a topic like this. I do not compare this with many other european project articles--this particular one is much more specific and is actually producing something other than PR-talk DGG ( talk ) 00:08, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for this decision! Can we now remove the deletion box from the page? I think we should follow Matteo's advice to improve the article by including references to the third party evidence. Hope this is OK. petrknoth (talk) 10:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment @petrknoth: DGG's !vote is a !vote, not a decision. And there is nothing against editing an article that is at AfD to try to improve it. @DGG: I agree that the Times article is a good source. However, GNG specifically states that multiple sources are needed (and the blogs/portal sources given above by Matteo.dutto don't qualify as reliable sources), so that at best, this means that some info on Eurogene could be included in an article on a broader topic (such as the one on the Framework Programmes itself). So for the moment I am not withdrawing the nomination. --Crusio (talk) 09:28, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment @Crusio: Would you agree that articles published at respectable international peer-reviewed conferences are a valid evidence? I agree that we can include some info about Eurogene to the more general Framework topic. Petr Knoth (talk) 10:48, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course they are, if they are independent. I do not doubt for a second that project members have produced publications mentioning the project, but publishing is what academics do, so that is nothing out of the ordinary. If other people have published scholarly papers about this project, that would be good evidence of notability. Barring that, per analogy to WP:PROF, if articles about the project written by project members were heavily cited, that would also constitute evidence of notability. However, for a citation-dense field like genetics, several hundred citations would be needed at the least (that would probably not even be enough to make a single researcher notable, let alone a consortium of 21 groups). --Crusio (talk) 10:08, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment This sounds completely unrealistic. Our group at the Open University is doing research into the models of Open Access publishing and the citation behavior. It is well know that it takes years to develop a significant amount of citations. Hundreds of citations are completely unrealistic as this will happen to only a very low proportion of papers usually at least after a decade of its existence. In addition to that, it is known that papers regarding fundamental research will attract more citations than papers describing specific application areas, such as in the case of Eurogene. Moreover, metrics such as h-index have been found unreliable and have been significantly criticised. Based on them, Wikipedia should not inform about the discoveries made, for example, by Albert Einstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index#Criticism (had he died after publishing his groundbreaking results). Shall we suggest to delete the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein ? I agree that academics do publish papers, but not everybody is successful. Therefore, I believe that even the fact that papers had passed the peer review process at high impact conferences should be considered as an independent evidence. For example, one of my Eurogene related papers was published at the COLING 2010 conference which had that year less than 19% acceptance rate and is considered the best conference in the world in the area of text processing. Petr Knoth (talk) 11:52, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * You misunderstand. I am not saying that having hundreds of citations is necessary for notability, only that if all else fails, then hundreds of citations might help to establish impact/notability (and, yes, it usually takes years to accumulate that many). Albert Einstein's bio is in no danger of being deleted, regardless of the number of citations to his papers (or his h-index), because there are tons of articles and even books about him and his life. Having a paper accepted in a highly selective journal/conference is a worthy accomplishment, but in itself not enough to establish notability, because many papers (even in high profile journals such as Science or Nature never get cited even once (have a look at WP:PROF for more details about this). --Crusio (talk) 12:40, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Disagree on this, because Wikipedia does specify that ideal sources for e.g. medical claims are published sources, such as reputable medical journals, widely recognised standard textbooks written by experts in a field and others. The reason is that if Nature or Science publish an article it does not matter if it has been cited or not, it means that the publication/claim has been approved as valid by a third party (in this case Nature or Science). If this was not accepted, it wouldn't be possible to claim on Wiki that publisher N published an article A about topic T before this article had been more than n-times cited! This sounds ridiculous as the evidence is the existence of the article. Thus, in case of Eurogene the only claim we are making is that there is an Open Access portal for genetic materials. The evidence that this is true is: the presence of the portal and the educational materials, the fact that the people who worked on the project provided materials, the fact that the project has been funded by the European Commission (see the CORDIS website), the existence of the Times article etc. I wonder what else might be needed to support our claim. --Petr Knoth (talk) 11:14, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * You nail it on the head: such an article shows that something exists. It does not show, however, that something is notable. An article in Nature that never was cited obviously did not have much impact on its field. Nobody denies that Eurogene exists, the discussion here is about something completely different: notability. --Crusio (talk) 10:34, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The discussion is obviously not leading anywhere. I understand that in your personal view The Times, respectable journals or European Commission do not establish notability. I strongly disagree with your claims and feel they are unsupported by the text here reliable third party sources, but that is all I can do. Btw. it is not true that articles that are not cited in the first years after they were published do not have impact! Many discoveries were completely rejected at the time of their creation and it took a long time until people realised their benefits. So, I understand that to establish notability in your eyes the portal would have to exist for years regardless of how useful it is. Therefore, the only thing I can do is to vote Keep as in my opinion the the sources presented are notable as well as independent.'--Petr Knoth (talk) 13:36, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Any subject can be notable shortly after coming into existence provided there are good (and independent) sources (EU sources are not independent here). The discoveries that you mention that were initially ignored have been heavily cited since. In contrast, there are articles published in Nature or science over 40 years ago that have never ever been cited, not even by their proper authors. I maintain that there is no evidence that such articles ever had any impact at all. --Crusio (talk) 12:52, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * From an academic perspective, I would like to ask you to prove that they will not have any impact in the future and that they will not be cited. Please also delete all the Wiki articles about the non notable villages that do just "exist" and are not cited (thus have no impact), the thousands of articles about sportsmens and sport events that just took place and did not have any impact nor were widely cited. --Petr Knoth (talk) 14:14, 26 August 2011 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.108.145.40 (talk)
 * This discussion is getting ridiculous. I don't have to "prove" that they'll never be cited, you have to show that they are cited (see WP:NOTCRYSTAL). As for all those other articles, see WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, not really a good argument in this kind of discussions. and could you please log in and sign your contributions to keep the edit history here clean? --Crusio (talk) 13:24, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * On the contrary! You claim that they have no impact -> you prove! I do not claim this. Petrknoth (talk • contribs) 14:05, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Let me put it this way: "no citations" = "no evidence of impact". And: "just having been published in Nature or Science" = "not sufficient evidence of impact". --Crusio (talk) 14:18, 26 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep I've just realized that I didn't cast my vote yet. I do not wish to enter the discussion about the sources and academic articles, as it's up to each user interpretation of the guidelines to decide what makes a source "independent" and "reliable". I would just like to go back to what we previously agreed on. There is at least one source we all recognize as such (The Times article). What the guidelines would suggest now is to include this entry into a broader topic, but I do not agree with this solution. Given the peculiarity of the project it would be difficult to include it into the Framework Programmes section as previously suggested and it is also true that, unlike most EU project, the portal is still online after the project end and providing free access to a collection of educational materials which cannot be found elsewhere. I guess that when it comes to discussing articles deletion the first question should always be: "Can this entry be useful to Wikipedia Users?". I would say yes in this case and therefore apply an occasional exception to the multiple sources principle.--Matteo.dutto (talk) 14:02, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

I believe that EUROGENE is a good tools for professionals (and very skilled patient organizations) to have the correct education to follow this rapidly moving field of genomic into personalized medicine. Domenico Coviello, MD, PhD Director of Laboratory of Human Genetics Galliera Hospital,  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Coviello (talk • contribs) 14:33, 27 August 2011 (UTC)  — Coviello (talk&#32;• contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * Keep I am a medical geneticist and from my experience with many patients organizations and professional organizations in the medical fields, I can declare that genetics is the most interesting fields because today with genomic studies is present in all field of the medicine. Education is very much needed because the field is very raplidly moving! Although it is quite easy to read the important new discovery in biotechnology and genetics, it is more and more difficult to understand the real impact on the patients and on society, unless your basic knowledge in genetics in mantained linked with the news.


 * Weak delete The main source is the Times story, and going by the logo, that appears to be a press release from the Open University (one of the project participants), rather than an independent news story. An additional confusion is that there are at least two unrelated companies called "Eurogene," and an unrelated European organisation (eurogene.org). However, if the projects picks up steam, there should be a more news coverage. -- 202.124.74.113 (talk) 10:52, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The Times article is not a press release. I found it online in NewsBank. Goodvac (talk) 02:24, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep. A nearly full-page article in the Times of London is sufficient to establish notability.  Sandstein   06:32, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Note that WP:GNG explicitly requires multiple sources. Hence, one article in the Times is not enough. --Crusio (talk) 09:52, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
 * No, it says: "Multiple sources are generally expected". That's not a requirement. I normally expect multiple sources too, but a long article in one of the world's most prominent newspapers is quite enough for me.  Sandstein   12:11, 30 August 2011 (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.