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Recent edits have greatly altered this article. Rationale given was that the prior version was 'full of non notable gruft'; WP:NOTDIRECTORY is cited as the justification of these edits. Was, in fact, the previous version of this article 'full of non notable gruft', as stated? Or, alternatively, was the prior version more useful to the reader? Thank you in advance for your input. DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 15:14, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Support reverting to original, longer list. This list was more useful to the reader, and WP:NOTDIRECTORY was misapplied here. People confuse "notable" with "has a Wikipedia article" far too easily, and lists of respectable academic journals, notable or not, are in line with the purpose of Wikipedia; for much the same reason we set a low notability bar for schools. --Sammy1339 (talk) 14:13, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  Actually, it seems like you are confusing how Wikipedia and its users use the phrase "notable" and how the rest of the world does. Having an article here does equate to how WP's users use the phrase "notable". When a topic doesn't have an article is when you can get interesting with the word "notable", but generally our benchmark is whether there are reliable sources which discuss in-depth the topic in question. Using the phrase notable to mean something else just confuses people on Wikipedia. --Izno (talk) 00:35, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Support reverting to original, longer list for foregoing reasons. An encyclopaedia is for reference, not for boosting celebrity, and notability is not the same as notoriety. Taking WP:NOTDIRECTORY too literally or self-indulgently, we logically could land up with no periodic table, but with a table of media stars. JonRichfield (talk) 04:59, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Lists of links to articles within Wikipedia are intended for internal organization or to describe a notable subject. Currently, there are 'no media stars' but entries of articles in Wikipedia. The proposed form is a non-encyclopedic categorization that provides not really useful information other than a random directory. I suggest the user may concentrate in creating the relevant articles.Mootros (talk) 14:40, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment. I'm sorry Mootros, but with all due respect, your explanation does not make sense. "Lists of links to articles within Wikipedia are intended for internal organization..." Really? I thought Wikipedia articles were intended to provide useful information for the reader. This article was arguably much more useful before all the 'non notable gruft' was removed, leaving, indeed, a "list of links to articles within Wikipedia", barely more useful than a Wikipedia category (or is it?). Something seems upside down here. Regards, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 16:46, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  Our guideline on lists actually enumerates that list articles have the explicit advantage of being able to provide list items which are not notable. See WP:AOAL #8. It is clear to me that comment does not have a consensus. --Izno (talk) 00:29, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Usually my criterion for whether lists are listcruft is whether they are likely to grow. If they are likely to grow by a lot, limiting the entries in the list to those entries with Wikipedia artices is often a useful tool to help provide understanding to the user. (One such list might be the one on List of multiplayer online battle arena games, since video gaming is a popular subject and that particular genre experiencing a large growth now.) In the other two cases, "grow a little" and "not grow at all", I see little issue with retaining a more complete list.

  Given that the topic of this list has such a small scope ("forestry journals"), and indeed has very few entries, and is academic in nature (and thus certainly about something Wikipedia is about), I would expect this list to fall into "grow a little/not all" and so would support reverting to the original list. --Izno (talk) 00:25, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Support reverting to the older version. However, I would recommend the removal of some "references": some journals have a "reference" that is only a link to their homepage, others don't. If this were done systematically, this would become an indiscriminate linkfarm. I also recommend to have a look at some featured list articles. Just a list of titles is not very informative, I think, and even when such a list contains some redlinked/unlinked entries, that is barely more useful than a category. Note: I usually tend to apply WP:WTAF to journal list articles, because those lists tend to become veritable spam magnets for all kinds of shady journals. This list, however, has a regular and active maintainer, so I can live with ignoring WTAF here. --Randykitty (talk) 04:39, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Support in the same terms as Randykitty. Publications are their own sources for their existence. That a paper journal can be verified to exist and examined via normal university or public library methods, like any other paper source, is sufficient. We should not be linkfarming URLs to their websites. Just provide sufficient publication information to identify the source, and use journals' own URLs when they're online-only. It's totally pointless to try to limit a list like this to only entries that pass WP:GNG; that defeats the purpose of the list, which is not to duplicate a category but supplement it. PS: The word is "cruft", not "gruft", and doesn't apply to the extented content of the list. Cruft is, e.g., trying to include any entry in a list for every character ever glimpsed in any Star Trek episode. Cruft is failure of encyclopedic relevance. "I don't consider this journal important enough to have an article" isn't a cruft problem, it's a failure to understand what stand-alone list articles are for.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:58, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I am OK with including journals that have sources, but preferably not just self-sources, due to spam concerns. Also, having secondary sources makes it less of a directory IMHO. Also, "notability" is a policy about which topics can have standalone wiki articles and not about which journals can be listed on a journal list - that is WP:LSC. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 11:39, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose reversion. There must be a criterion for inclusion: the obvious one is notability in Wikipedia's sense. Maproom (talk) 07:53, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Support restoration of content, as the removal was based on several misconceptions. WP:NOTDIRECTORY indicates that our pages should not have the style of a commercial directory; it doesn't forbid us from having lists. WP:N does not apply because WP:LISTN says explicitly that "the individual items in the list do not need to be independently notable". The idea that list entries must be articles to be valid is incorrect because Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Because Wikipedia is a work-in-progress, we may have gaps in our coverage and, per WP:LISTPURP, " lists are useful for Wikipedia development purposes ... the articles that have yet to be written." If we consult a more reliable source such as Ranking forestry journals using the h-index, we see that, by this measure, the third most significant journal in this field is Tree Physiology. This was a red-link in the previous version of the list along with other high-impact journals in the field. Removing such entries disrupts reasonable development and, as there seems to be no consensus for this removal, I am reverting. Andrew D. (talk) 12:25, 21 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Extended discussion[edit]

Much of the above "analysis" is confused, and we can avoid further confusion by avoiding use of "notable" in any sense other than WP:Notability when it comes to list inclusion criteria, to which the word should almost never be applied. An exception: When a broad topic list is in summary style, it might list only notable, even only the top 10 most notable of something in each subsection, and have ((Main)) going to subarticle that are less exclusive on each subtopic, e.g. each subgenre of a video game or whatever. WP:SUMMARY is a guideline for a reason. If this journal list gets too long, divide it into subarticles by subfield, obviously. It's standard operating procedure!.

On Wikipedia, "notable" means in effect "sourceable enough to have a Wikipedia article that would not be deleted", and in particular "the subject of substantial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable, secondary sources". There is no point to limiting a list of forestry journals to only those that already do or absolutely should have their own Wikipedia article; Category:Forestry journals provides a list of those that do, and a thread on its talk page or this talk page, or the forestry wikiproject talk page, can list those we think are missing from that category (that latter list, of redlinks, is of no use to readers, only to editors). What an article of this sort is for is listing forestry journals of encyclopedic relevance. Please see WP:CLNT, WP:LIST and WP:SAL. One of the primary purposes of lists is the ordered retention of encyclopedic information that doesn't rise to the level "notable" and thus should not all be separated out into a long string of pointless, non-notable stubs. Any journal, past or present, that would qualify as a WP:RS – one that is peer reviewed and from a reputable publisher – is fair game for inclusion consideration in this list. Something like Vanclay (2008) is potentially a way to limit list overgrowth, but that's one reviewer's opinion, and his impact research is a primary source, so it has to be use "with caution". We have no idea what his biases are, nor how quickly his statistics, if they're really valid, are dating (2008 was a long time ago in modern journal publishing). A) The reader-side purpose a list like this serves, and b) the audiences it primarily serves, are a) providing the names of publications relevant to forestry research, for b) students (by which I mean doctoral candidates as well as schoolchildren) and researchers (by which I mean journalists and avocational orchardists as well as laboratory/field botanists and forestry policy makers). While the word "notable" need not be "banned" from Wikipedia except when used in reference to WP:Notability, it's a fool's errand to use it in list inclusion criteria (in the lead of a list or in back-channel inclusion discussions on talk pages), because in the end it predictably and provably confuses many editors into believing that anything that doesn't have its own article now, or shouldn't have one immediately, should be removed from the list. It does not matter that readers who are not editors will not interpret the word so narrowly; editors will, and they are the ones who muck up articles like this when the get the interpretation incorrect.

This is not even close to the first time this discussion has happened. See the talk pages of other list articles, and list-related discussions on many other talk pages, and you'll see the same "just not getting it" cognitive dissonance about notable vs. encyclopedic in inclusion discussions, going back at least a decade. We really, really need to just fix this, and spread the fix, and stop this endless pattern of rehash. Ultimately this is probably a discussion for WT:LIST (not even WT:SAL, since it affects embedded lists, too). But we should get it correct here, now, in this case, and then go have that discussion there and fix our list-related guidelines to clarify, and to stop making any reference to "notability". We mean relevance.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:07, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• My first question is this: what makes "Forestry journals" (as a group) notable? (My feeling is that every list article should have an introductory sentence or two to establish that the topic of the list is really notable enough to have its own separate list article) Establishing what makes the group notable may help us better define which potential members of the group should (or should not) be included in the list. Blueboar (talk) 11:15, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Thank you SMcCandlish for your thoughtful input! Are you saying that one of the purposes of an encyclopaedia is to provide a "directory-like" overview of a collection of things? If so, what would be a good way to evaluate the underlying classification upon any such list is drawn up? Envisage a list based on Jorge Luis Borges discussion in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, as cited by Michel Foucault (1970):

This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.

• The point of this excursus here is that creating lists ---beyond merely organising/ linking existing articles-- requires defining underlying principle of inclusion and exclusion. I am not saying that this is not possible, but it ought to be clear how we do this. Pointing to the "fact" that forestry journals exists seems not a sound argument; saying that forestry studies is an established academic disciple, may than confront us with other well-established groupings that are not necessarily as rational as (natural) scientific classifications. I have no direct answers or solutions but would like to sensitise collaborators to the difficulties this may entail. Mootros (talk) 12:18, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• I find myself in complete agreement with Mootros, wish I could ever have voiced it so clearly. Most journal lists are just copies of categories, but I have given up on trying to take them to AfD. As I said above, all I do is enforce WP:WTAF, to avoid at least that those "lists" becoming spammagnets. None of the journal lists come even close to the featured list articles we have on WP, most don't even have a single reference (or they "reference" just homepages). None of them serve any purpose that isn't done better by cats... --Randykitty (talk) 18:31, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• @Mootros: WP:NOT#DIRECTORY would preclude such an approach, and I made the point earlier that we should not be linking to journal websites except perhaps for online-only ones, but providing publisher and ISSN information for identification purposes, along with encyclopedic details. This would obviate any use of such as list as a DMOZ-style directory (the entire approach of which verges on pointless today, because our search engines are better). My overall point is that WP:SUMMARY exists for a reason. When a list like this gets too long, it gets split into sublists. It's entirely reasonable for a list like this to be rather exclusive, but only if more topical lists are less so. The top 25 industrial forestry management journals, or top 25 forestry and ecology journals, or whatever (maybe instead categorize it nationally), might be relevant in a list of such, narrowly defined, but maybe only the top 5 in each category are in this article itself. This list is presently so short as to imply that there are hardly any forestry journals, that it's not the subject of much academic or industry publishing. All the forestry journals we know about for now could probably be listed here without the list being excessively long, anyway.

  This list would probably ultimately best serve as where to list general, international forestry journals, and (in sections with ((Main)) linking to sublists) the most prominent of more topical or regional ones. Our coverage of forestry journals in such lists should be encyclopedically comprehensive, without including entries for which we have no information about their impact or editorial practices (not everything with "Journal" in its title is a journal in this sense, after all, and not every publication by a university or other institution is, either; I was being imprecise when I suggested existence is sufficient; I meant indications in RS that the journal is considered reputable), while not being structured as a "lookup" directory, but also not just a rehash of the associated category, since the main utility of lists is that they're more inclusive than categories. This isn't covering any new ground; it's how we approach lists in general, whether stand-alone or embedded. PS: I think the main rationale for not linking to the websites of paper journals in a list like this is it effectively doubles the length of the list w/o adding information: ''Journal of Foo'' (University of Bar, Toronto; ISSN xxxxxxxxxxxxx<ref>((cite web | same details here))</ref> is redundant. The titles being linked in the refs section wouldn't really be a big issue, but including them in the prose of the entries, as in [http://uniof((var|bar)).ca/journalof((var|foo)).html Journal of ((var|Foo))] ... is precluded by WP:EL, so it's kind of a self-fixing issue if we don't redundantly cite. If there's no way to drive traffic with links, there's less incentive for people with a WP:COI to add entries for things that do not actually qualify for the list like "journals" that aren't really journals but student publications or logging industry house organs.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:50, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• @Randykitty: The fact that most of our journal lists are effectively just copy-pastes of the associated categories isn't improved in any way by rigidly enforcing the idea that their contents should not deviate from what's listed in the categories. A simple starting point would be to see which are recommended as resources useful to students by university forestry/botany/ecology programs, and another would be to see which ones are cited in literature reviews. I.e., do multi-sourced assessment of reputability. The kind of influence-assessment paper mentioned above is also a good source for this sort of material, but one such paper alone being used to determine what WP will or will not allow in List of forestry journals is WP:UNDUE weight. Take the "part of a complete nutritious breakfast" approach, as it were.  :-) Being rated among the top X journals in the field by Y and Z, providing N percent of the citations in last 5 years of literature reviews in the field, and being recommended as a research source by prominent institution names here, are all good indicators of encyclopedic relevance and examples of encyclopedic facts about the journals to include in the list.

  But I would urge inclusionism over deletionism on a list like this. And we need a lot more of them. It's unfortunate that there is no List of felinology journals or even List of veterinary journals (or List of veterinary medicine journals), much less ones with fairly permissive inclusion standards. My own efforts to improve articles on domestic cats and breeds thereof would be aided by them. All I can do is use the few journal search sources I have access to (and they're often not too good for this – JSTOR is mostly humanities, and PubMed is mostly human medicine, with little full-text access), or actually go all the way across town to a major library, to even get a sense of what the "likely suspect' journals might be, without any indication of reputability. Unless I do the "nutritious breakfast" analysis myself and actually write those missing journal list articles, a time-consuming task for one editor and one I'm probably not really qualified to do (I'm not an academic or even a private-sector professional researcher). All we have is Category:Mammalogy journals‎ and Category:Veterinary medicine journals, and they're paltry. We need broader rather than more exclusive coverage of journals here. Of course, we write articles for outside users more than for internal editors, but the research barriers I find as a WP editor are an approximation of those faced by off-WP students, whose main use of WP is source-hunting. PS: WP:WTAF isn't something to "enforce"; it's not a well-accepted essay, and runs counter to the widely supported view that redlinks lead to article creation. See Wikipedia talk:Red link#Proposal regarding redlinks in navigation templates for a surprising overturn of longstanding "don't redlink in navboxes" rules. (It's a consensus read I do not actually agree with, but the close is well reasoned enough that taking it to WP:ANI for a WP:CLOSECHALLENGE would almost certainly fail. It's just going to have to produce enough negative results that consensus adjusts the outcome again later.) As WP:CLNT, WP:LIST, and WP:SAL make clear, lists are not strictly a form of navigation, though often serve a secondary function as navigation; they're content, and their primary purpose is to be informative. Thus, the WTAF principle does not properly apply to all lists, even if that essay's lead seems to infer that it does.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:50, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• @SMcCandlish: I looked through the featured lists @Randykitty: mentioned and I noticed that most of these lists seem to directly relate to a specific article. For example List of 1930s jazz standards relates Jazz standards. I think, the difficulty here with lists like this (List of forestry journals) is that that these type of stand-alone lists are trying to do the impossible. There is no article of Forestry journals, but the MOS guidelines on Stand-alone lists has the same stringent requirements for lists as it has for articles. Especially the requirements of no original research and notability creates difficulties for Lists on topic X if Topic X somehow is not deemed worthy of an article itself. Again most featured lists I saw, focused on cross-linking Wikipedia articles and often given summaries of existing article entries. If we were to use list inclusion criteria based on what is "recommended as resources useful to students by university [...] programs [XYZ]" what precisely would we do with lists on topics that are not coved by rational academic curricula taught at universities in the Western world? Mootros (talk) 11:24, 21 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• I think it would be very difficult, or even impossible, to find sufficient sources covering "forestry journals" to make that a notable subject. Heck, I think it would even be very tough to do that for a more general subject (like "biology journals" or "agricultural journals"). There are a few sources around that present a ranking of journals in a certain field, but rarely do such sources have more text than "this is a ranking of...". There are a few and we use them in some journal list articles (I would have to search top come up with examples, though; perhaps economy journals or something like that). --Randykitty (talk) 11:36, 21 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Randykitty and Mootros: But "Forestry journals is not the putative parent article for this article. It already has two: Foresty and List of scientific journals#Forestry (in the latter, properly for summary style, the section includes a few of the most notable, but uses ((Main)) to link to this article.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:39, 22 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal[edit]

Here's a proposal for Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals)#Lists -- all within a given subject area. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:03, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• C0: trivial dump of a category is unacceptable (alphabetical listing of existing Wikipedia articles);
  • these don't add any further information and quickly become out-of-date
  • example: List_of_medical_journals
• C1: citations to external discussions about this group of journals (meta-literature) is encouraged
  • example: List_of_political_science_journals#Further reading
• C2: listing according to external lists is encouraged (e.g., ranking -- citation metrics (top-10 IF, h-index, etc.), rejection rate, volume (number of articles per year), etc. --; also white-lists (by universities and national bodies) and black-lists (predatory journals) -- remember: all within a given subject area
  • example: List_of_mathematics_journals#Top-ranked_journals
• C3: grouping by sub-discipline is acceptable
  • example: List_of_physics_journals#By_subject, List_of_environmental_journals (see contents), List_of_humanities_journals
• C4: chronological listing is acceptable (date of foundation); perhaps only few oldest
  • example:
• C5: redlinks are acceptable and encouraged (in conjunction with all the criteria above), as they point gaps in WP's coverage
  • example: List of forestry journals
• C6: trivial intersections are acceptable if it makes sense for the discipline
  • example: List_of_philosophy_journals (by language), List_of_law_journals (by country)
• C7: tables summarizing publisher, year, etc. are acceptable but discouraged (nightmare to maintain?)
  • example: List_of_botany_journals
• C8: very general listings (all of science or social science) need capped sub-listings (top-10) and need an objective criterion (either ranking or chronological) -- "only some of the most influential" is not acceptable at face value as it's subjective
  • example: List_of_scientific_journals, List_of_social_science_journals