Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of important publications in computer science


 * 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 to delete. But if sourcing isn't improved to show this is a list of publications experts in the field consider important, not just a list Wikipedians consider important, a second AfD probably won't get such a generous close. W.marsh 15:36, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

List of important publications in computer science
del POV-ridden, nonmaintainable unreferenced for such an extremely broad topic as computer science. If something or someone is really important, there must be a wikipedia article. `'mikkanarxi 20:36, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep. How is this different than everything else in Category:Lists of publications in science? All seem like good ideas for articles, though they need cleaned up a bit. --- RockMFR 21:59, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. In fact, it appears that all the lists in Category:Lists of publications in science suffer the same problems. However, as only this is the only one that appears to be nominated, I'll stick to this one. The "criteria" are far too vague or subjective and are all a matter of opinion or a judgment call. We only have the say-so of the editors adding the publication to the list that the publication is "important" No sources are provided to back up the allegation of importance. How do we know a book is a "good" introduction or survey? How do we measure "influence"? What constitutes "most advanced"? There is nothing to verify or support these opinions. Isn't this list better left where it belongs, in a library's catalog listing? There also seems to be no line drawn to keep the list from getting longer and longer. "Importance" diminishes in a crowd. Agent 86 22:42, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment -- re: above, I don't know of any library catalogs that will tell you what papers are important out of all of them :) which is sort of the point of making a secondary list. --phoebe 01:35, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete any list with "Important" as a criterion. Major POV there. -Amarkov blahedits 01:21, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per Amarkov - what is the criteria for inclusion in such a list? WJBscribe 01:51, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep. The biology article has been brought here twice and kept. It was after the last time that the word "important" was added to all these lists. The chemistry list has a process to debate importance and come to consensus. I recommend that the others do the same. These lists are slowly approaching being lists of publications with a wide appreciation of their importance. If people think some entries are not important they can propse removing them on the talk page. --Bduke 02:20, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * But importance is subjective. It does not MATTER if there's a consensus as to what constitutes importance, since it's still a subjective consensus. -Amarkov blahedits 02:21, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I think we often use consensus to decide whether things are notable, important, etc. In the case of the chemistry article there some criteria about what importance means. These lists allow a reader to find a book that is historically or educationally notable within a discipline, so they are important articles. --Bduke 02:27, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * If it's being used to list all notable publications, then it should just be renamed to remove "important", but that's not the impression I got. -Amarkov blahedits 02:30, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * As I said when one of these lists came to Afd before, the consensus was to add "important". Now you want to remove it. It just shows that AfD debates are often not consistent. --Bduke 02:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * And... who said they were? Can you imagine the trouble we'd be in if results of AfD debates were binding throughout eternity? -Amarkov blahedits 02:44, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Surely if these publications are notable in themselves, they are worthy of individual articles. Those can then be listed. Otherwise the criteria for inclusion is very vague and subjective. Is 'important' a lower test that WP:N and if so, how is it determined? WJBscribe 02:36, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment. It does not appear when these lists come here that people are aware that they are part of a Wikiproject - WikiProject Science pearls. I think we need to determine whether this article meets the criteria set out there and then whether these criteria are proper for Wikipedia. If they are not, then the whole project and its created pages should go. Such a debate might lead to a positive developement rather than just deleting stuff that many editors have contributed to and found usefull. I note that the editor who started this Project - User:APH has not contributed to WP since January 2006. I do not know why but last year he was trying to make a positive contribution to WP with this project. --Bduke 03:28, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment Existence of a wikiproject does not denote or import encyclopedic value or notability upon an article within the subject matter of the project. Wikipolicies prevail. Agent 86 00:36, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong keep There are many such groups, where individual publications are other entities are not notable enough for a separate article, but are as part of an article such as this. We right here frequently end our discussions with consensus on a merge, and that produces such articles. The precedent with other sciences has been established. There are some people who don't  like such articles, but there are more who contribute to them. Contributions to such articles tend to com in bursts.DGG 01:46, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Sorry, your claim is quite ridiculous. If a publication is not notable for a separate topic, then how can it be "important"? `'mikkanarxi 23:35, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong keep This list has actually been useful to me in my job (as an academic); just now, I went specifically looking for it & came across this AFD. There may be subjectivity in determining importance, but there are also npov measures -- citation analysis, # of copies sold, historical first mention of a notable topic, etc., that can be applied to lists such as these. Individual articles for people or publications are much less useful; they don't provide the intellectual content of gathering things together, which is the point of this list. Wikipedia shines in computer science; let's keep it that way. -- phoebe 19:35, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * They don't have to be individual articles. If some breakthrough was a result of 2-3 seminal works, then write a single arricle about a "broken-through" issue and describe the papers there. Right now this eclectic collection is totally useless pile of data. I am surprized how scientists don't understand the importance of proper categorizing of things. "... in computer science", indeed. `'mikkanarxi 23:40, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * "In Computer Science", indeed. There are graduate programs in computer science, there are curricula in computer science, there are overview works about computer science, and there are libraries for computer science. It's a valid category, and such a list,done right, could be useful for all of these situations. I often encounter students who want to know what the seminal works in a field were. If replaced by smaller articles, whether it's an article about a publication or an article about a "breakthrough" discovery, you're still splitting up the collection of important reading in the field. I fully agree that the article needs work; but let's keep it and improve it. Also, if you're referring to me as a scientist, I'm not a scientist; I'm a librarian, so I like to think I know a little bit about organization. -- phoebe 01:11, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Also, having this list of course doesn't preclude discussing the papers in fuller detail in the appropriate topical or discovery pages, which should be happening anyway; and a list does not preclude having individual articles about the books or papers in question. This list, like most lists, can be partly duplicative; it's another way of viewing the available information. -- phoebe 01:31, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm torn about this list. The current version gets it partly right, at least in the sense that if a publication is included in the list, it is generally important. However, there is a huge problem: Who gets to decide what's considered important? Clearly it cannot be us, that would be original research. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, our job is to be a meta-meta-publication, if you will, that is, we have to find meta-publications that actually come out and say "publication A is important, publication B is not". The current list fails miserably in that regard: it doesn't cite any sources (which would have to be meta-publications, not those publications that are considered important according to the list). None. Zero. The two external links come closest, but then again who's to decide that "frequently cited" equals "important"? I want to say: start over and do it right. Be diligent, cite sources, use sunscreen, etc. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 21:23, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

comment. Quite a few entries strike me as ridiculous. For example, a number of textbooks. However popular they are, certainly they are not groungdbreaking. Further, "Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty process" labelled as breakthru. Huh? What did it break? If it was a real breakthrough, there should be a wikipedia article no matter what someone wrote above. And so on. `'mikkanarxi 23:33, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * The criterion for textbooks on most of the analogous pages are either the classic textbook in the field or the latest most widely used book. The second part at least needs to be updated every once in a while. Be bold.DGG 02:28, 6 December 2006 (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.