Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Health Level 7


 * 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. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 12:04, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Health Level 7

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

This page is a about a list of standards which is the product of Health Level Seven International. It was split from that article.

Practically all of the information in this article is self-referenced to the company's own website. This article fails WP:GNG now that it is no longer connected to the company article.

Actually, what ought to happen is that all or most of this content should be deleted, then the content at the organization article should be copypasted back here. Then all self-referenced organization content should be deleted too. This is the page which has article history, so it ought to be kept. Perhaps this article should be moved to the organization name so that the history can be kept... I am not sure.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  11:42, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep - this is an 'open standards' organization (like Wikipedia itself, or Linux), which creates standards using a collaborative process. Hence, the central/focal source of information is the organization itself. Wikipedia may discourage this as a source - it will take some time to locate other reliable sources. HL7 standards are used widely around the world, and each of them probably deservies its own page (some of these standards already have their own page). I did perform the split mentioned above, with the intent to improve both resulting pages. Tertius3 (talk) 12:04, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * On Wikipedia "notability", which is the standard for inclusion into Wikipedia, has to be established for an article to remain in Wikipedia. Could you please identify the best 2-3 sources which discuss Health Level 7 so that they can be reviewed here? If at least that many sources cannot be identified which discuss this topic then it would be difficult to argue that this article should be kept. Thanks.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  12:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * so, a google scholar search on HL7 doesn't suffice (29k articles), or a scholar search for 'HL7 standard' (the subject of this page) with 18K search results? Specific examples are aplenty: Healthcare IT news (a US magazine) 2100 hits, 5500 hits on HealthIT.gov (a US government site) . CDA, one of the HL7 standards has 4800 hits on that website alone. The UK e-health insider website has plenty of hits as well . Aamazon has 7000 books that mention HL7 . To me notability is not an issue .. can't see the tree for the forest when it comes to the available information, actually, which is why it makes sense to have a summary on Wikipedia ;-) Tertius3 (talk) 13:33, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That is exactly what I am saying - those things do not matter with regard to inclusion in Wikipedia. After many years of having tens of thousands of discussions exactly like this, the kind of evidence you presented has been consistently been established as not meeting Wikipedia's notability criteria and the kind of evidence I requested has been. You could look into the deletion discussion archives to confirm this for yourself, and you will get opinions from other Wikipedians here. It might happen that some of them tell you what I am telling you. Please consider trying to present what I requested. If you really wish to do something different, then just speak up and whatever you want to do I will help. If you do not understand why things are the way they are, then ask. There are reasons and documentation for absolutely everything.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  13:44, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Erm, I think thousands of mentions on scholar is going to count as significant coverage in secondary sources to most people. The top hit for my search is an article in Progress in Standardization in Healthcare Informatics titled Health Level 7 - A Protocol for the Interchange of Healthcare Data by W. Ed Hammond of Duke University Medical Center.  Several down is Development of a Provisional Domain Model for the Nursing Process for Use within the Health Level 7 Reference Information Model, by Goossen, Ozbolt, Coenen et al in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.  The list goes on.  This subject has extensive coverage in the relevant academic literature.  In case it's not clear, that's a keep.  GoldenRing (talk) 12:03, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
 * GoldenRing, keep/delete opinions are conventionally listed in bold as the first word in an unindented bulleted paragraph; you may want to do that, to make sure it's noticed, and just reference your comment above, but that's up to you. On the search results question, I do not agree that thousands of mentions of a topic in independent reliable sources ensures notability criteria are met; while it's pretty likely, notability still requires significant coverage, and if all the the mentions are trivial mentions one-sentence mentions, I would still reject a topic. Part of the reason WP:GNG wants significant coverage in independent reliable sources is so that there's some independent material to rely on to write the article. Agyle (talk) 20:13, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I thought I'd made it clear that the two articles I'd picked out from the first page of those thousands of results constitute significant coverage in the secondary literature, but since it seems I hadn't: In my opinion, the two articles I cited above constitute significant coverage in the secondary literature.  Beyond that, I haven't bothered to look at any of the other several thousand papers that mention it.  A cursory glance at their titles suggest that these two are not exceptional.  GoldenRing (talk) 08:01, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * GoldenRing, I'm sorry, my writing was not clear, only my first sentence above was meant to be directed toward you. My comment about thousands of references was intended to address Tertius3's search result counts, and assertion that they signify notability. Agyle (talk) 23:01, 16 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Weak keep There are sufficient independent reliable sources to establish notability and provide for at least limited coverage of this topic. For example, see the PDF linked on this web page, and some of the references it cites. The current Wikipedia article is deficient in several ways, including over-reliance on primary sources, but that is not grounds for deletion. To quote the AfD admin instructions at WP:BEFORE: "C. Consider whether the article could be improved rather than deleted. 1. If the article can be fixed through normal editing, then it is not a candidate for AfD."


 * I do want to note that I found very few independent reliable sources with significant coverage, though my search was not exhaustive. Most of the above search suggestions are critically flawed, failing to distinguish search results that refer to the HL7 standards rather than the HL7 organization, and even the search for "HL7 standards" was apparently done without putting the phrase in quotes, so it also failed to distinguish results referring to the standards. Also, most references to "HL7 standards" or "Health Level 7 standards" I checked in scholar.google.com were trivial, just mentioning in one sentence that a project used the HL7 standards, rather than providing useful information about HL7 standards that could be used in the Wikipedia article or that I'd count toward notability.


 * I also think a good case could be made for renaming this article as Health Level 7 (standards), and having Health Level 7 and Health Level Seven redirect to Health Level Seven International, as "Health Level 7" (whether proper or not) seems to refer to the organization more commonly than their standards in published literature. "HL7" may refer to the standard more than the organization. However, these issues seem beyond the scope of this AfD discussion. Agyle (talk) 20:13, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:40, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:40, 16 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep since my inline keep above has been criticised - please don't count it twice. The coverage in RS is not just present but extensive, not just significant but profound.  GoldenRing (talk) 08:04, 16 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Trim and merge back to Health Level Seven International. The intricate detail can be purged as it is based mainly on primary sources and/or instructional in tone. --Animalparty-- (talk) 22:31, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That makes the most sense to me, but AfD guidelines state "if the article can be fixed through normal editing, then it is not a candidate for AfD." Independent sources are available to "fix" the article: 1 2 3. Agyle (talk) 03:32, 26 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, -- RoySmith (talk) 00:19, 26 May 2014 (UTC)




 * Keep - HL7 is one of the main standards in the healthcare programming industry, and appears often on, say, job application requirements lists. Someone Googling what the heck "HL7" means on a job application, task requirements list, etc would absolutely expect to find out that it is a set of very notable, widely referenced international standards. They wouldn't expect or want to know about the organization that produced it. It would be like linking ASCII to the page on the American Standards Association - a standard is not at all the same thing as the organization that produced them, and in fact for most standards, the organization that wrote them is in most cases significantly less notable, whether you're talking ASCII (ASA), OGG (Xiph), OpenDocument (Oasis), HTML (W3C), TCP/IP (IETF), HL7 (Health_Level_Seven_International), or any other standard: people daily use and refer to the standards themselves, but rarely think of (or even know about) the standards bodies behind them. Standards stand alone as notable. Just because the HL7 standards happen to be named after the organization that crafted them does not mean they should share an article: Wikipedia has a fine set of tools for distinguishing homonyms. DewiMorgan (talk) 20:57, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Agree - it is unfortunate that the organization and its standards bear the same name, but most persons using the name HL7 are referring to the standard, and not to the organization. Some of HL7's standards already have their own individual page on WP, whereas others don't - such as HL7 version 2, which is probably the most commonly implemented standard created by the HL7 organization. I'm quite prepared to clean up and properly source the content of these pages, but that'll be on hold as long as this debate rages. No sense in editing a page if it's going to be deleted. Tertius3 (talk) 07:04, 4 June 2014 (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.