Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/North-East Regional Development Agency, Romania


 * 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. No sources have been adduced so the keep arguments are by assertion. Spartaz Humbug! 07:18, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

North-East Regional Development Agency, Romania

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Let's use a two-pronged approach to evaluate notability here:
 * Is the Agency inherently notable for what it is or does? Well, it's not a government agency, for one. At under 100 employees, it's not especially large. Essentially, it's a group of technocrats who receive EU funds and decide how these will get spent – no doubt mirroring similar entities across the EU. A worthy endeavour, but not something that jumps out as encyclopedically notable.
 * Is the Agency notable for having been covered in independent, reliable sources? Searching in English, we get <100 Google hits, none of them especially illuminating. In Romanian, the numbers are higher, but the quality of the hits does not, as far as I can tell, rise to the level of "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Lots of links to them from city halls and prefectures and the like. Links from local businesses, too. A couple of speeches by local politicians mention the Agency in passing, as do some local and business newspapers. But nothing in any greater depth than a line or two, it seems.

Hence, I would argue for deletion. We link to the Agency's site at Nord-Est (development region), as is proper. But do we really need this massive chunk of wholly uncited bureaucratese on a small agency without any administrative powers that no reliable source has bothered to cover in any meaningful depth? I would submit we do not. Biruitorul Talk 04:03, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. "Need" is a subjective term inappropriate in application to recommend article deletion. It is important that we focus discussion on notability and whether or not citations can possibly be culled from reliable secondary or third-party sources. That said, in my opinion, through a comprehensive search of online data, I do not believe that the article can possibly be sourced to support either notability or inclusion on Wikipedia. Cindamuse (talk) 04:41, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Romania-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 23:33, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 23:33, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * We do have a complete set of regional development agencies for England - these have equivalent geographical scope ("regions" as defined by the EU). See e.g. East of England Development Agency and more generally Template:Regional planning in England. However it looks like the English development agencies also have funding from UK central government, not just reallocating European funds. Do the Romanian development agencies have comparable budgets and roles? It's unfair to look at the number of staff - the budget may be quite high per staff member since the agency will be disbursing funds. Similarly we don't necessarily need to have entirely English-language sources. It's anglo-centric to have articles for the British regional development agencies but not the Romanian ones purely for linguistic issues, but I would understand it if the Romanian equivalents have less importance and smaller budgets. What kind of annual budget are we talking about for them? I would suggest anything in the region of €50 million would make the agency notable enough for its own article - that would be smaller than the English equivalents but not by an order of magnitude, and especially in a country as poor as Romania, would be a very substantial sum. TheGrappler (talk) 22:43, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, keep - on closer reading of the article, the budget is at the order of magnitude that I suggested made it worth keeping. It's not a long way behind the English development agencies, and any governmental body throwing around hundreds of millions of euros in the course of a couple of years seems worth keeping. TheGrappler (talk) 22:46, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * TheGrappler, allow me to address some of your points:
 * This is not a governmental body, as the very first line of the article makes clear.
 * I have no idea what budget the agency has; neither the article nor their website seems to say. They are indeed throwing around tens of millions of Euros in Structural Funds and Cohesion Funds, but their operating budget (employee salaries, etc) is likely far smaller.
 * Notability comes from "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject", not from the size of one's budget, whatever that may be.
 * In case I wasn't clear enough, I performed a thorough search of Romanian-language sources on the Agency (I'm a native speaker) and came up short. As far as I can tell, there simply isn't significant coverage available.
 * If kept, what sources would you use to rewrite the article? In its current form, being entirely uncited, it is unacceptable for our standards; it needs to be rewritten wholesale from the reliable, published, independent sources upon which this encyclopedia relies. What sources might those be? If they don't exist, then we can't really have a valid encyclopedia article about the Agency. - Biruitorul Talk 23:50, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

 Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   07:54, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree that in its current state the article isn't very good. But I see nothing in what you wrote that proves deletion is necessary. Whether the body is strictly "governmental" or not, isn't really relevant - it is one of a network of designated regional development agencies, that were created to comply with EU law. It would be nitpicking to say it's not "official" in some sense. Of course, their staff is relatively small and so is the budget of their operations per se, but it's the fact they are responsible for the disbursement of pretty serious amounts of money that makes it noteworthy (maybe more so than most bodies with similar staffing, which usually are responsible for far smaller sums of money; for similar reasons most banks with even just a few hundred employees are clearly notable, while we wouldn't have articles on most manufacturing businesses with similar staff levels). The bulk of this article doesn't need to be sourced to independent sources - key facts like the amount of grants made make more sense to be sourced to the organization itself. A source does not need to be independent to be reliable. For information about their creation and purpose, perhaps the primary or secondary legislation that established the agencies could be used? I'm quite happy with this article being replaced by a far briefer one - something along the lines of East of England Development Agency - that just summarizes what it does, where it's based, when it was established, and the kind of budget involved. On balance this RDA appears to be just as significant as its English counterparts. TheGrappler (talk) 01:27, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll grant that the Agency's own website can be used to verify certain facts (say, general data about programmes implemented). And I'll grant that the enabling legislation could be used "with care... to make straightforward, descriptive statements" (per WP:PSTS). However, we still fall short of WP:GNG, which does require at least some independent coverage. Even if 90% of an eventual article is sourced to the website and to the law, the other 10% will have to come from (presumably, in this instance) newspaper accounts. But I'm afraid those are still lacking at the moment, and that's why I say notability is not established. - Biruitorul Talk 04:47, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I take the point that notability is not inherent, but I'd be surprised if there's not enough coverage to satisfy GNG - one problem with this type of article is that sources are unlikely to be completely independent e.g. such an agency tends to get mentioned by people who've been funded by the agency! I suspect there will be EU technical papers which consider the agency, which may be worth digging for. It's the sort of administrative stuff that I doubt will feature much in newspapers. However, I'd be tempted to take the rather dull mentions by prefectures etc as a sign that the agency does fairly wide-reaching work within its scope, and therefore passes the GNG. It strikes me that this is the sort of thing that ought to be notable since the analogy to the English equivalents is not a stretched one. If this is not to be kept as a standalone article, perhaps some of the content (e.g. about staffing and budget) should be merged to a general article about regional development agencies in Romania? TheGrappler (talk) 13:02, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * In terms of prefectural etc. mentions, those are indeed dull: a link here, one here, etc. And yes, I've suggested that Nord-Est (development region) would be a good target for mentioning the Agency if this isn't kept. I'm not saying it's not at all notable, just probably not enough for a standalone article. - Biruitorul Talk 14:36, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * That makes sense. Having separate articles for the development region and the agency that administers the funding seems excessive if sources are so thin on the ground. But would it be better to merge than delete? I can't see that there is any benefit from deleting this article and its history, rather than doing a bit of content merging and changing this page to a redirect (which would allow the history to be accessible to anyone wanting to build a more substantive article if sourcing became available?) TheGrappler (talk) 14:10, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I could live with a merger. We may as well keep this discussion open and see if anyone else has something to say, but a merger of relevant content and a redirect to the article on the region wouldn't be a bad outcome. - Biruitorul Talk 19:31, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds fair enough to me! There's a fair amount of material on this page as it stands, which would be useful to anyone doing work on the merged article. And it seems to be doing no harm whatsoever to leave it in the page history, so I do hope that at the end of this debate it doesn't end up deleted and the page history made inaccessible! If the closing admin is going to delete this, could they userfy a copy to my userspace, please? Cheers, TheGrappler (talk) 01:28, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi there to everyone ! My name is Ovidiu Savu, I am an employee of the North-East Regional Development Agency and - for 2 years - I have been appointed to be the coordinator of my agency's and my region's representation office in Brussels. At the same time I am the author of this very debated article. Well, thank you TheGrappler for your pertinent considerations as well as to Biruitorul...I don't want to be too long, I just want to say that I have seen articles less interesting than ours that are still online and nobody initiated debates on various topics. I am not accountant and I am not dealing with financial figures but if this piece of information is really so important to you, you may know that the annual budget of the agency is somewhere around Euro 5 million (operational costs only)...In Romania there are 8 development regions and 8 development agencies. You may search everywhere you may want and you will see that our agency is ranked no. 1 in terms of funds absorbed, projects implemented, activities, etc. In this respect I find that the article is quite relevant, does not harm anyone and, even though was not written with style (I am really sorry for not being a real journalist or a professional editor)it presents key information sourced from the website, our presentation brochures and....that's it. If you will finally decide to delete, then the decision must be taken based on far more reasons than the ones already listed. Keep up the good job !
 * Actually "searching everywhere we want" is proving to be the problem! If you could direct us to appropriate sources it would be very helpful, especially if they were from the EU or Romanian government. TheGrappler (talk) 21:32, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.


 * Delete per nom. Article does not meet notability criteria of WP:ORG, completely lacking reliable secondary sources. Article is excessively promotional in nature. Uncle Dick (talk) 17:41, 27 August 2010 (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.