Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment


 * 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. Given the unanimous "keep" !votes, there doesn't appear to be much use in keeping this open any longer and I withdraw the nomination. Randykitty (talk) 17:20, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment

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Coatrack article to promote studies showing that Nova Publishers are a top publisher. Not a single one of the references is actually about this "research school". Randykitty (talk) 22:08, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Education-related deletion discussions. Randykitty (talk) 22:38, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Netherlands-related deletion discussions.  Human 3015   TALK    23:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions.  Human 3015   TALK    23:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions.  Human 3015   TALK    23:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Environment-related deletion discussions.  Human 3015   TALK    23:44, 2 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep, obviously. This is a valid, significant joint program providing Ph.D. education in the Netherlands.  Secondary schools world-wide are recogized as Wikipedia-notable.  It was (and I presume is) an accredited program, per this accreditation re-application document, which provides much detail useful for developing the article.  The accusation in the nomination, that this article is somehow a "coatrack" to support recognition of Nova Publishers as a top publisher, is not supported by the article, which does not mention Nova.  To the nominator, could you please explain how you derived your opinion that way?


 * But I will surmise that somewhere else there is a battle about Nova Publishing, and the ranking here is cited as support for Nova being a good publisher. That would be perfectly valid support, although it is not relevant for evaluating the Wikipedia notability of this higher education program.


 * The current version of the article does have a relatively long passage about a quality rating system for evaluating academic book publishers which the school supports, which is probably intended for use in evaluating academics for hiring, tenure and promotion decisions in the multiple programs participating in SENSE. That is an entirely appropriate endeavor of a research school, to make such a list, but like other such rating systems used in evaluating publications of academics for tenure and promotion decisions, it is not the purpose of the school per se.  By the way there is a quite large literature on Journal ranking and Impact factors and so on about academic journals;  it is often relevant to say what any respected institution officially recognizes about journals and also about book publishers.  This version of a rating system about academic books is perhaps more significant, as a joint, nation-wide consortium's opinion, than the published ratings of any one school.  It would be okay for an article about any one of the higher ranked publishers to cite this SENSE rating as documentation that the consortium of Dutch environmental research departments rates the publisher highly.


 * However, that passage does not detract from the validity of this article article, which is pretty much a stub otherwise, but which is obviously valid as an article, being about a higher education entity. I look forward to the nominator explaining their view and I could change my opinion about the following.  But as of now this AFD smacks of the same kind of nefarious thing that the nomination asserts about the article;  it appears that the AFD is an attempt to influence something else somewhere else, and is not about the explicit topic. -- do  ncr  am  01:06, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment: this is not an ordinary secondary school as you think. Dutch "research schools" are more comparable to "graduate schools" in the US, for which we usually do not create articles separate from the particular institution to which the school belongs. The one thing particular to the Dutch system is that often several institutions collaborate in one of these grad schools. Also, these schools are not necessarily enduring: after some time has elapsed, it may be closed and replaced by another entity. This can be done easily, because in contrast to an ordinary school, this is not a physical entity (even though the institutions participating in it are physical entities themselves). Also note that, in contrast to what is suggested by the article, these schools are not consortia of whole universities. Rather, fromp each participating institution, just one or a few research groups/departments participate in such a "research school" (Dutch: "onderzoeksschool"). (BTW, I think that puts the book ranking issue in quite a different light, too). So I could see a separate article on the Dutch concept of "research school", but I don't think that we should create articles on each and every one of these "schools", just was we don't do this for grad schools in the US. Hope this doesn't sound too muddled... As for the Nova connection, Andyjsmith has removed the coatrack part, so I'll let that rest for the moment. As the article currently stands, there are hardly any sources, which is rather what I would expect, given the foregoing. --Randykitty (talk) 14:54, 3 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Okay, thank you for explaining. I agree about this being a joint venture of departments, not whole universities, which could be clarified in the article.  And I have heard that courses for European Ph.D. education programs are loosely cobbled together, in order to offer courses for students spanning across schools from different countries, because their schools are smaller than large U.S. universities which can offer multiple Ph.D. courses.  So [at least in one case that I know about] students literally fly in from other countries to attend a class or a few days of classes, then return home, and come back again for the next class session.  The Netherlands is a small area and I speculate that students could commute in easily from anywhere in the Netherlands to a Ph.D. course offered in Amsterdam.  Perhaps an important difference for this one, vs. other Dutch or pan-European joint ventures, is that this program is formal and accredited.  It was accredited for 1997-2001 initially, then reaccredited for 2002-2006, then applied for reaccreditation for another period from 2008 to 2012 or 2013, which it apparently received.  This makes it a major formal endeavor and appears not temporary at all.   And covering it does not fit within just one university's article like how U.S. Ph.D or masters programs can be covered.  About number of sources, I don't perceive that there are a lot of sources used in covering any U.S. graduate program either, even for ones that in fact are of pretty major importance, we just don't cover them much AFAIK. (I don't think we have anything like "List of Ph.D. programs" or "List of environmental sciences graduate programs" type articles.) We often/usually do not create sections about graduate programs within university articles and thus they are not incubated and eventually split out to separate articles.  Here, there is no one university article to serve as host for a section that could eventually be split out;  it is proper to open it as a separate stub. -- do  ncr  am  16:37, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
 * All these programs have to be accredited, otherwise they cannot hand out PhD degrees. Each university will be part of several of these grad schools. Grad schools are hardly ever a section in university articles, at best they're just mentioned. There are some international programs, but they are few and usually located in border regions. I don't think any students fly in for a "few days". Some schools/universities/institutes organize a summer course which can be attended by students from all over Europe, but those are generally a couple of weeks, so flying in is economic (but that is not really relevant here). Schools like SENSE are temporary in the sense that their funding depends on performance (i.e., number of grad students trained successfully within a certain limited time period) and renewal of funding is anything but automatic. Should funding not be renewed, the school is not continued (I'm not using the word "closed" deliberately, as this is not a physical entity). There is something weird about the accrediting, but as they don't have a Dutch version of their website, I cannot see whether this is due to an incorrect translation or something else. ("Accrediting" is done at the institutional level and not by the KNAW but by the Education Ministry). --Randykitty (talk) 16:55, 3 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep - although there's nothing obvious about it and I note the somewhat checkered history of doncram's interventions. I've taken a knife to the article - one section is a probably copyvio and the other is incoherent, largely irrelevant and a clumsy coatrack attempt (both sections added by doncram, btw). If this material is restored my !vote changes to Delete. Have a nice day. Andyjsmith (talk) 10:41, 3 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Huh? I think the school / joint program is a large-size Ph.D. program which is obviously to be kept as a Wikipedia topic, as it is much higher level and larger in scope than tiny, obscure high schools that we routinely cover.


 * Andysmith is incorrect in believing that I was the one who contributed the material about SENSE's rating scheme for academic book publishers, the material that the nominator finds controversial. I commented above about it but it was not mine.  I tried to be clear before that it is not the purpose of a school to do rankings like that.  It does somewhat appear from the sources that the publication of its ranking is unusual and useful, but the material is not about the school per se.  And is best used somewhere else in articles about journal ranking and academic book ranking, and I do not object to it being removed from here.  I do now see over at Talk:Nova Science Publishing that the SENSE ranking was indeed used (perhaps over-used) by one or more persons in arguing about the quality of that publisher.  I agree with editor DGG there that "It is not a general rating scheme for publications, but a rating scheme for publications to the extent relevant to the Dutch Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment-- that is, in one particular (but fairly wide) subject area." Simply it is not very important, it is one school's ranking scheme devised for its own purposes which happens to be published and seized upon by others.  It is fine for editors over there to argue about Nova;  it is not relevant to this article about SENSE.


 * I restored two inline references that I had added but Andyjsmith removed. About one, yes the website is included as an external link but it was the specific source about the fact of accreditation so the inline reference is appropriate.  About the second, apparently Andyjsmith did not see that the 600 phD student count was sourced from it.


 * Also I just restored, but moved and revised, a couple sentences based on the second source about use of Ph.D. students in a crowd-sourcing effort. It is factual and I find it interesting and I think it is unusual, worth mentioning.  It could only happen because of the scale of the program, because most Ph.D. programs have only a handful of students.  I believe that is one of two passages that Andyjsmith states is a "coatrack" and a deal-breaker for him somehow.  I fail to see how addition of an interesting factoid like that makes someone think an article must be deleted, but a closer could choose to interpret Andyjsmith's view as a Delete vote per his instructions.  It is not a "coatrack" about anything, anyhow...it does not support adding any material anywhere else in Wikipedia which is what a "coatrack" would do.


 * I also re-removed the "third-party" tag, as I do not see a single assertion in the article that is questionable [at least now after the ranking passage was removed], and it is fine to use an organization's website to support basics like whether the program is accredited or not. If someone else wants to argue that sources used are biased somehow and that an outside source is needed to support something, I won't remove it again without discussion on the Talk page, but I hope you will please explain which assertion you think needs more support. -- do  ncr  am  15:18, 3 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. per Randkitty and doncram, who explain it in detail. Its a European pattern to have  these cooperative doctoral programs, especially in smaller countries, which can be very extensive and very important. I agree we should not automatically have every one of them as a matter of course, but this is an example of the ones we should definitely have. 6000 PhD students is a very major educational institution by any standards, there's no way of covering this otherwise, for there is no plausible merge or redirect. Their rating of book publishers was coatrack, and was properly removed--its inclusion was   part of a campaign to justify a particular rather low quality publisher    as being important by the very strained application of bibliometric data outside their area of validity, but it has been removed.  DGG ( talk ) 09:59, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep. Article needs further development and improved use of reliable, third-party sources, but is worth keeping in my opinion. Thanks, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 17:10, 5 November 2015 (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.