Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of universities in India/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was not promoted by Giants2008 22:17, 4 November 2011.

List of universities in India

 * Nominator(s): Muhandes (talk) 14:56, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured list because I think it is comprehensive list and it fulfills the other criteria (to the best of my limited knowledge as first time nominator). I also think a featured list will be a good starting point for more efforts in improving the state on articles on the higher education system in India.

The list is a comprehensive list of universities in India, along with key information (location, formation year, type and specialization). The higher education system in India is quite complicated and therefore a lot effort had to be put by several members of WikiProject Education in India to reach consensus on inclusion criteria and then create such a huge comprehensive list. Lucky for us, sources for the criteria of inclusion were readily available. Not all entries have articles, but all entries have at least one inclusion source and another source for additional information about the institute. A summary table at the top helped in verifying the correctness and comprehensiveness of the list. Due to technical problems about 200 additional source (individual entries in the UGC deemed university database) had to be omitted. This is my first nomination and I hope it goes well. Best regards to all. --Muhandes (talk) 14:56, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

– HonorTheKing (talk) 22:27, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * You shouldn't start the list of the "This is a list of....", as it's WP:MOS issue.
 * Forgot to remove that sentence. Done. --Muhandes (talk) 22:34, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Comments
 * Re: Tamil Nadu
 * "St. Peter's Institute of Higher Education and Research", their website (ref [513]) gives the name as "St. Peter's University"
 * Both names are correct. If you look at their banner you will see both names mentioned. As a rule, the article follows UGC lists, unless an institute has changed its name since the list was published. In this case, as the institute still uses this name, I thought it was more appropriate. If we have evidence that the name no longer applies we should change it.--Muhandes (talk) 11:27, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The reference you have used is titled "St. Peter's University", their contact us page also lists it as such; the chancellor's page says the "..Under Section 3 of the UGC, Act 1956 from 2008-09 onwards in the name and style of St.Peter's University." &mdash; Spaceman  Spiff 
 * Changed. --Muhandes (talk) 15:10, 13 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I understand that this is a list of universities, but if IIT/IIM are included, then Institute of Math Sciences, IGCAR etc which fall under the DAE ought to be included as they are also authroized by UGC to award PhDs. Or at least it has to be mentioned that these kind of institutions are not included. (I'm guessing this will be the case for other states too). I found this on the UGC, which states that IMSc falls under the Homi Bhabha National Institute, I can't figure out how this works because as far as I have been able to find out IMSc is the one awarding the PhDs and not HBNI, but this would mean that mention of one or the other with a footnote is required.
 * I appreciate that you have an opinion about whether a certain institute should be listed or not. Our practice was to resolve such questions by consensus. You can see in the talk page and in the archive that we had quite a number of discussions about whether to include a specific institute or group of institutes or not, e.g. we discussed NISER, Agriculture Universities as a group, Serampore and more, and the current state of the list represents that consensus. If you think we missed a certain institute I think the right place to discuss this is the talk page. --Muhandes (talk) 11:27, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Then the inclusion/exclusion criteria has to be more clearly defined in the introduction. While talk page discussions are effective, the criteria needs to be on the main page itself and in this case given that DAE runs many such institutes, it is imperative to discuss them on the main list when other autonomous institutes are discussed. Also, as I've shown in the link above, UGC considers IMSc and IGCAR (among others) to be constituent institutes that are part of the Deemed University status of HBNI. If talk page consensus is not to include such institutes, then that needs to be explained on the main page.&mdash; Spaceman  Spiff 
 * Clarification:I've used DAE run institutes as an example, there are similar autonomous institutes under Ministry of Health that come to mind (possibly others too). So clarification on all these would be required, especially since some autonomous institutes are included in the listing. &mdash; Spaceman  Spiff  14:31, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * To clarify the inclusion criteria issue I added two notes to the lead. First, I clarified that when the UGC grants "deemed university" status to an institute which covers other institutes in the grant, only the major institute is listed. This covers IMSc, IGCAR and many more. Second, I added a note clarifying that affiliated institutes are not listed. This covers NISER and many other institutes. For the specific case of DAE I added a section to the talk page to demonstrate how each and every DAE institute is addressed. As you can see, they are all covered by the inclusion criteria now clarified in the lead. I believe these criteria should be enough for other cases as well. --Muhandes (talk) 15:10, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I am also a contributor to the article. The inclusion criteria that we adopted for autonomous institutes was its equivalence to a university. So any autonomous institute which is a constituent of another Institutes/University or is affiliated to a university/deemed university was not included in the list. Therefore IMSc, NISER were not listed and IITs, IIMs and IISERs were listed. I suppose clarification added by Muhandes to the lead will be sufficient for a reader to understand the scope. - abhi (talk) 05:55, 15 September 2011 (UTC)


 * "#" takes us to a separate article, it would be preferred to have a note below the table like with the † and link the note to the other article.
 * Done. --Muhandes (talk) 11:27, 13 September 2011 (UTC)


 * General comment: I'm a bit concerned about the scope of the list -- the geographic area covered (and therefore number of listings) is too high and poses difficulties (as a reader). Given that each state has a different system of governance for universities, it will be very beneficial to understand those, but a lede for every state is not possible in this list. e.g. Tamil Nadu changed from the public universities from general universities by region to subject universities (which keep changing to by region vs not) and so on. This kind of information adds to the value of the information provided within the individual lists and is missing.
 * The geographical scope of the list is the entire country of India, and the list aims to provide a wide view about universities in India, without focusing on the system in each state. Specific lists for each state are already in the making, see WikiProject Education in India/Lists of institutions of higher education in States. I believe the eccentricities of each and every state will be better suited there. Once these are created, cross links will be made. --Muhandes (talk) 11:27, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * IMHO this is a concern. The lists are currently divided by state, indicating that the state is some obvious form of demarcation but does not provide sufficient context for that. The intro sentence states "...which are supported by the Government of India and the state governments." and the list goes on to divvy up by states, but the context of the support mentioned within the first sentence is completely missing for states -- the lede does a good job on explaining the same context with respect to those supported by the Government of India.&mdash; Spaceman  Spiff  12:43, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I see your point, though I don't necessarily agree. I believe a large table with the state as a column will resolve this concern, but I'm not sure our readers are better served this way (it is also less maintainable, though maintainability can be achieved by dividing alphabetically). I still think a better solution would be to keep the dividing by state and add a "see also" that directs to the article on the higher education system in that state, which are in the making as we speak. I think adding large discussions on the education system of each state to a list which already borders on the limits of size is impractical. I'd appreciate the opinion of other reviewers on whether they think this is a big concern, and whether to keep the current table for each state or move to one large table (alternatively, divided alphabetically). --Muhandes (talk) 08:47, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Division by state is simply as per the geographical location rather than the support by central government or state government. The actual support for universities will not be straight forward to express in this list as a single university can be receiving support from UGC, multiple departments of state and central govt, other organizations, etc. So IMHO how each of those universities is supported is beyond the scope of this article. - abhi (talk) 06:14, 15 September 2011 (UTC)


 * &mdash; Spaceman  Spiff  10:09, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

– HonorTheKing (talk) 23:21, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Support - Well done, good list, but just need to fix the ALT texting, with descriptions of the buldings look that are in the picture, and without the wikilinking in them.
 * I removed the wikilinks from the alt text. --Muhandes (talk) 10:13, 25 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment: the main thing I noticed is that in the citations, the publisher/work is noted as just the url when it should be the name of the site itself. For example, I have no idea what baddiuniv.ac.in. means, but I know what Baddi University of Emerging Sciences and Technology is. I'm not sure if this is considered an MoS issue or just an opinion thing; if it's the former than i may have to oppose until it's fixed, if it's the latter than I won't worry about it. Wizardman  Operation Big Bear 15:15, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I must say I am not certain. Issues with lack of publisher field were raised above by Giants2008 and they seemed to be happy enough with either the website or the explicit publisher. Nevertheless, for all sources which are not clearly primary ones (source from the university website with information about the university) I added the publisher field. Please let me know if this is sufficient. --Muhandes (talk) 16:36, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.