Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/K. Banerjee Center of Atmospheric and Ocean Studies


 * 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.   Many !votes weak on both sides, but lack of forthcoming sources to establish the verifiability of the article is telling. Early keep assertions that nom was suggesting improvement rather than deletion are wrong. lifebaka ++  20:23, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

K. Banerjee Center of Atmospheric and Ocean Studies

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

The first thing that will strike the reader is that this article (about an Indian research centre) is a complete mess. The prose is disjointed and ungrammatical; phrases like “two world class Meteorologist are behind this centre” and “now need not to say more about future of this centre…” make me suspect that the intention is to promote the centre, though the text lapses into incomprehensibility so often that it’s difficult to say for sure. The style is quite distinctive and reminds me of previously deleted articles on people connected with the centre, notably Prem C. Pandy and Dr. Vivek Kumar Pandey; both of which also wandered between promotion and incoherence before tailing off into excessively long and largely irrelevant lists of external links. Previous attempts by experienced users to work with the person behind this cluster of articles (to be fair, his or her first language is almost certainly not English and I suspect he/she has little understanding of Wikipedia norms) have completely unsuccessful, so I have little hope that the article will improve if we leave it alone.

The fact that the article is WP:RUBBISH is not by itself a reason to delete it, so I started trying to improve it myself… and hit a brick wall before I made a single edit. Regarding the current text as beyond cleanup and intending to boldly replace it with a stub as an interim solution, I looked for the centre’s website to find some background information, and after much Googling it seems that it doesn’t have one – very strange for a modern research centre. In fact, Allahabad University’s own website makes no mention of this group and Google turns up 35 unique hits, none of which give me any useful information on the centre itself. The vast collection of external links in the article doesn't help either; many of them are 404, many of the live ones don’t mention the centre at all, and the few that do are either papers published by the centre (which tell us about the atmosphere and the oceans, but not the centre), or else things like telephone directories.

A research centre of this name verifiably exists, verifiably publishes papers on oceanography and is verifiably associated with the University of Allahabad (see here, for example)... but after much effort, I can’t say any more about it than that. Is it a faculty within the university, an interdisciplinary association of staff from several faculties, or even a name for one professor’s own research group? How many people does it employ? Without being able to verify the most basic facts like these, I don’t feel that I could even turn this into a viable stub. I also notice that the centre gets seven Google Scholar hits ; I don’t know what would be sufficient for an individual university department to be seen as notable, but it would be unusual for a single academic with this few papers to be accepted as notable.

I’m open to the possibility that someone with access to more specialist offline, or perhaps non-English, sources might be able to sort this page out and rewrite it as a coherent article, or stub, which at least meets verifiability requirements; if someone can do this I’ll happily withdraw the nomination. However, this hasn’t happened in the six months the article has existed, and I don’t think it is in the interests of Wikipedia to keep content this poor hanging around indefinitely, especially when there are serious notability and verifiability concerns surrounding the subject. I’m therefore bringing it here. Iain99Balderdash and piffle 21:07, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of India-related deletion discussions.   -- Iain99Balderdash and piffle 21:09, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.   -- Iain99Balderdash and piffle 21:10, 31 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Weak Keep I though about trying to rescue the page before it inevitably ended up here, but as mentioned above, it will take considerabl rewriting. Nontheless, it appears to be a major national resource, not just an laboratory at a particular university, or a university department. I am a little bothered low, but the relative few number of graduates so far at the doctoral level, and the newness of the institute. DGG (talk) 01:39, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The text does imply that it's a major national resource, certainly, but is there any further evidence of this? As you say the low number of PhD graduates seems a little odd if this is the case, as does the negligible web presence. I also note that the text mentions "When permanent faculties are in place..." - which implies that it is something at a preliminary stage. Iain99Balderdash and piffle 23:11, 3 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep - in desperate need of cleaning but schools are notable.MY♥IN chile 02:16, 1 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment. AfD is not clean-up. All these issues seem to be addressable as wikifying and regular editing. Banj e  b oi   02:55, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
 * In general I agree, and as mentioned I put some time into trying to fix it; but the difficulty in verifying even fairly basic information is not obviously easy to address (I've exhausted the resources available to me for doing so), and I'm not convinced that replacing badly written unverifiable text with well written (or in my case, adequately written) unverifiable text would be a major improvement. However, if someone can find some meaningful sources to improve it I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Iain99Balderdash and piffle 11:33, 1 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep: Editing issues apart, this institution is fairly different from your typical school or college.To my knowledge this is one of only two such institutions, the other being in Goa. Needs a lot of work though. I'll see if I can chip in. --Deepak D'Souza (talk • contribs) 12:05, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. A grotesque mess, with no substantial independent sources in sight. -- Hoary (talk) 16:30, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep. Yes it's a mess but with 90+ links I'm willing to concede good faith that this unwikified attempt is savable. We're dealing with multiple cultural divides including English as a second language, new to wikipedia and geek interpretation. My impression is that will be seeing a lot more of these issues as new users worldwide are able to access and participate on building wikipedia. Banj e  b oi   07:47, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * There's something in what you say. However, I think you'll find that a lot of these external links are not sources or authorities for substantive propositions but instead mentions that this or that exists. (These allow pseudo-sourcing of a kind I'll caricature with Britney Spears is a sexy singer   ) The factors you've listed are here mixed up with what seems to be a relentless, long-term effort to glorify one Prem C. Pandey and anything related to him, and an inability or unwillingness to digest requests and instructions (phrased more simply than this). You've made a good start with the article but I fear that you're going to have to waste hours more of your life before the article looks decent, and even if that happens I'll probably wonder why this requires its own article rather than being written up in a paragraph within the article on the university. -- Hoary (talk) 08:20, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * That may be possible but I'd still believe there is a bit more to this than just self-promotion of some sort, and we can always delete it later if once we see what actually there isn't up to it. I'd like to hear what those familiar with the field have to say as well some folks more familiar with India's educational and governmental system set-up. With the recent Tsunamis and other environmental phenomena I don't find it hard to believe that this is somewhat notable. That it's so poorly structured doesn't help but that's also not a reason to delete. Banj e  b oi   08:36, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment. AfD notice placed at WikiProject Environment‎. Banj e  b oi   08:23, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. AfD notice placed at WikiProject India. Banj e  b oi   08:26, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. AfD notice placed at WikiProject Meteorology Banj e  b oi   08:36, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep. The reference part is a mess, but just like Banjeboi pointed out that AfD is not a cleanup department (or forcing someone to cleanup) OhanaUnitedTalk page</b> 15:33, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Reluctant Delete. I'm reluctant, as the center appears to meet grounds for notability, but as the nominator has pointed out, there are severe verifiability, POV and quality issues for this article. It is a disgrace to Wikipedia to have an article like this around, and it would require a complete rewrite to meet standards. Delete and userfy it, and allow it to be created in the future without prejudice when it meets minimum standards. RayAYang (talk) 20:51, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. AfD is not clean-up nor do we delete articles that need clean-up tags such as rewrite, we fix them. <u style="text-decoration:none;font-family: papyrus;color:#CC00CC">Banj e  <u style="font-family: Zapfino, sans-serif;color:#8000FF">b oi   22:02, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I really doubt this one is fixable by anybody interested, and I believe that articles that are unfixable on any rational timescale should be removed. In fact, this article is so poor that, if one relies on it alone, it puts the notability of its subject into doubt. The state of the sources is so poor that notability may well not exist, and the center may well be nothing more than a funding vehicle (there are lots of other "centers" at universities dotted around the world with first-rank researchers attached to them; this does not entitle them to articles, just like departments do not get articles, for the most part, absent storied history). I believe the center is "probably" notable, since it appears to exist, and on balance research centers named after people tend to have significant coverage, but that's a good way from *showing* that our usual standards at WP:ORG have been met. RayAYang (talk) 04:09, 3 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Then let's see this one fixed. Assuming for a moment that there is something here that's worth fixing (and it's such a dog's dinner that I really don't know), then of course there is a huge amount of work to be done. I see that efforts have already been made (and I also see that one of the longterm contributors to this article is still "improving" it in his own odd way), but the efforts in the direction of lucidity and persuasiveness seem to have hardly scratched the surface, pardon the cliché. I'm hard pressed to find a single sentence within it that approaches what I expect in an encyclopedia article. (True, there is It is one of the leading atmospheric and oceanic science centers of India which also deals with earth environmental phenomena which is clear enough, but "leading" is either substantive or mere PoV, needing evidence or deletion respectively.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:58, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Again, these are great reasons to clean it up not for deletion. We think it's notable but no one's has yet to put in the time to wikify and covert the sources. Then there's the writing, the regular contributor's obviously have a culture and English as a non-primary language gap. I have problems figuring out wikipedia policies and protocols so I have absolutely no issue with seeing how someone, whose language skills are wanting for this English-speaking wiki, has even more of these issues. And yes, this is made more cloudy with so many sources and links cited but if even a small fraction, say ten percent, are valid that's already ten refs, far more than quite a few articles have. This does need a lot of work but that's not a reason to delete; It's too much work to clean up sounds all too familiar to many articles that have been also in need of some TLC but now make wikipedia a better encyclopedia after improvement.  <u style="text-decoration:none;font-family: papyrus;color:#CC00CC">Banj e  <u style="font-family: Zapfino, sans-serif;color:#8000FF">b oi   06:12, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * If you can't get around to the serious job of clearing it up, how about making a more convincing start? Just to inspire you, I've done started for you. The first sentence made very humdrum assertions with a number of references. I looked at four of them; one didn't exist and I identified the others. (I realize that looking at diffs is tedious, but it's considerably less tedious than what I did, so please look at it, and click to see my edits that followed.) I then looked at the three links. One certainly did not mention "Banerjee" and seemed not to mention the esteemed Prem C. Pandey, for which it was cited a second time (I'm not entirely sure about the latter); I removed it. Another didn't mention "Banerjee"; I removed that too. The third actually did mention the Centre; yes, amid hundreds of kilobytes, we read a single short and minimally informative sentence about it. Figuring that it wasn't worth the electrons, I deleted that too. ¶ Four references done; only 26 more to go. Enjoy yourselves! At the end, you may even decide that it was all worthwhile. ¶ My own guess is that you'll start but give up out of boredom, that this AfD will be closed as "no consensus", and that the multiply-named, multiple-IP-using author will just continue to shovel in "references" he hasn't even read. So prove me wrong! -- Hoary (talk) 07:48, 3 August 2008 (UTC) .... PS I've done some more of this. I haven't yet encountered a single link that genuinely is the reference that it's purported to be. Will there prove to be any? -- Hoary (talk) 08:54, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: Since nobody else has done anything substantial, I've continued to look through the "references" (those attached by <REF> ). I've come up to the point where KBCAOS and the esteemed Professor Pandey intersect. Before I arrived, Pandey's (unspecified) "help" to KBCAOS was a claim with four "references". Two didn't even mention him. One, which I've left in for now, says who he is but says nothing about KBCAOS. Another promises to say that he won some prize, though as it's in a huge PDF file and I'm connected via dial-up right now, I haven't yet investigated. ¶ Benjiboi writes above "the regular [contributors] obviously have a culture and English as a non-primary language gap." Yes, yes, true. But this isn't how Indians "reference" any academic paper that I have ever seen. (If it were, then Indian submissions would never be accepted by non-Indian publications, while Indian publications would be a laughing-stock.) My more charitable interpretation is of a quite stunning degree of incompetence. My less charitable interpretations include mindless "reference"-stuffing and at least one that WP:NPA probably prevents me from expressing. ¶ NB I haven't yet even started on what the article says, with its wikilinks to itself, etc. -- Hoary (talk) 12:49, 3 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete more Pandeyspam. Honestly, I see no evidence that this is anotable subject and considerable evidence that the serial vanity merchant Pandey is padding his resume again. Per nom, it's essentially unverifiable. Guy (Help!) 20:15, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * So just to be clear here, you've looked through the 90+ references and nothing supports any of this content? <u style="text-decoration:none;font-family: papyrus;color:#CC00CC">Banj e  <u style="font-family: Zapfino, sans-serif;color:#8000FF">b oi   22:18, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment I don't know about Guy, but I have been through all the external links in the article and I cannot find a single one which could be used to support any substantial content. The centre is credited with a few papers (several links to journal articles). Some people associated with it (with yahoo.com email addresses... which seems a little odd, like the lack of a website) participated in a conference of some sort. Some money was requested to initiate it in 2001 . That's about it. The remainder of the links are a depressing mishmash of non-existent pages, pages which do not mention the centre in any way (most of the live pages do seem to mention people called Pandey... but usually in the context of the NCAOR which does appear to be notable), Wikipedia mirrors , Wikibin , posts to mailing lists  and something called My Soccer World . The mere fact that the article contains a large number of links does not mean that they could be converted to references if only someone made the effort - I have made the effort, and they cannot. I'm not going to reformat them to look like proper references if they don't actually support the text in the article. Believe me, I am sympathetic to keeping articles on academic subjects, and have put a significant amount of time into this one, but I am left with the conclusion that there is not enough here to support even a useful stub. Iain99Balderdash and piffle 23:11, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * My point was that the assertion that nothing was of value was made not by looking at the references or potential value but by judging the contributor. <u style="text-decoration:none;font-family: papyrus;color:#CC00CC">Banj e  <u style="font-family: Zapfino, sans-serif;color:#8000FF">b oi   02:44, 4 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete as per Hoary until and unless someone comes up with real sources. Schools are not necessarily notable and so are departments and institutes, it's sources we need. --Crusio (talk) 20:56, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * delete. I've never heard of it, and there is no evidence for its existence. No website, yet it claims to be one of Indias major centres? Nonsense. Note that A research centre of this name verifiably exists, verifiably publishes papers on oceanography and is verifiably associated with the University of Allahabad (see here is wrong: the source used there, "Current Science", is a very minor journal - again, I've never heard of it - and I doubt it goes to the trouble of checking peoples affiliations (journals don't, on the whole). The argument that the article has 90 refs so must somehow be OK is non-tenable William M. Connolley (talk) 21:47, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * This seems over strong. The first Ph D from the Centre is listed in the University Alumni list. The Centre does appear to exist, but whether it is a major centre or is notable enough is of course another question. I'm neutral as I do not have the time to wade through the complete mess that this article is. --Bduke (talk) 22:16, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Where? The claim of 7 Ph D students has no refs. Which ref do you mean? William M. Connolley (talk) 23:17, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I think Bduke means this page. However, the page in question looks to be the same as the alumni section in this version of our own Allahabad University page (as edited by someone called User:Dr. vivek Kumar Pandey) so probably copied from it... I wouldn't put too much faith in that page as a reliable source. Iain99Balderdash and piffle 23:33, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * You could well be right. How complex the whole matter gets with external pages copying wilipedia articles. If nothing cam be produced to demonstrate it does exist, then it should not just be deleted but speedy deleted. --Bduke (talk) 01:04, 4 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment. Article is now being targeted by deleting content and references. I find this alarming at best. <u style="text-decoration:none;font-family: papyrus;color:#CC00CC">Banj e  <u style="font-family: Zapfino, sans-serif;color:#8000FF">b oi   23:05, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I've hacked out a pile of unref'd stuff, and invited debate on the talk page. Do please join me there, if you are interested William M. Connolley (talk) 23:17, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Please identify one or two credible, reliable, substantive references that have been deleted. &para; Some way above, you ask JzG how many of the dozens of "references" he has read. I wonder how many you have read. (I also wonder when you are going to start improving the article, a job that you say can and should be done.) Over the last couple of years, I've read many inserted by this inimitable writer; but in this particular article I've so far read under twenty. The greater number have of course been provided in support of this or that assertion about this Center. Worried that the "K." of "K. Banerjee" might be spelled out, that "Center" might be "Centre", etc., I've searched for the string "banerjee". Typically, this string doesn't even appear anywhere within the "reference". Sometimes it does appear but the "reference" says nothing about the assertion that has just been made. Should I have been more culturally sensitive and recognized all of these, however vapid, as genuine "references" and left them in? -- Hoary (talk) 01:10, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * You could move them to the talkpage as "these don't seem to support anything"; I'm working on rescuing several other articles and given the tone at this discussion it doesn't seem like any amount of improvements would make a difference. <u style="text-decoration:none;font-family: papyrus;color:#CC00CC">Banj e  <u style="font-family: Zapfino, sans-serif;color:#8000FF">b oi   02:44, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I could indeed, but I can't be bothered. Here is the last version of the article before I started to examine the external links between and to remove those that said nothing. Just look in that old version of the page and click on any link that doesn't appear in the latest version. -- Hoary (talk) 04:07, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: Whatever KBCAOS is, it does seem to be a "Centre" rather than a "Center". I'd so rename the article myself but don't want to cause additional confusion while it's undergoing this AfD (which it might not survive). Anyone wanting to search for something substantive about it within any of the various "references" should start by looking for "Banerjee", but if there are too many irrelevant hits (e.g. for irrelevant people named Banerjee) should look for "Banerjee Centre" rather than (or as well as) "Banerjee Center". &para; Meanwhile, I've deleted yet more of the footnotes for citing papers that don't even mention what it is that's footnoted. -- Hoary (talk) 08:02, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * If you wanted to be really thorough, you could also look for "KBCAOS" - a couple of pages use this abbreviation without spelling it out. But I've already looked for it in all the links which were not 404 or obviously useless (like mailing list posts), and it doesn't add anything significant. Iain99Balderdash and piffle 08:37, 4 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Weak Delete. In general, I think that accredited degree-granting colleges and universities are inherently notable once basic WP:V requirements are met. This one does not appear to be a university or a college even though some degrees (seem to be?) awarded; its size and activities are rather unclear and there are still outstanding WP:V problems with figuring out exactly what the center is and what it does. Nsk92 (talk) 17:11, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete given the lack of verifiable sources as argued by Nsk92. --Crusio (talk) 17:23, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep The article has verifiability, the references and external links need to be re-organised, however. --RekishiEJ (talk) 12:38, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Which parts of it are verifiable, and what are the sources which support them? Iain99Balderdash and piffle 12:44, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete. Most research university departments have several centers, and we don't usually keep articles about the department level, let alone the center level, unless there is significant coverage specifically about the center in third party publications. “They exist” isn't good enough. This one may or may not exist, but the disaster that is the references section doesn't convince me that they have the nontrivial coverage needed for our notability standards. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:18, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Strong Delete. Sorry not only is there the puff and vanity aspect but it doesn't meet notability. --BozMo talk 11:46, 6 August 2008 (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.