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. There is Cleary no consensus to delete are arguments are reasonably split between merge or keep. Neither option requires an AFD so further discussion belongs on the article talk page. Spartaz Humbug! 17:56, 22 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Frontiers in... journal series[edit]

Frontiers in... journal series (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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This page in Wikipedia is just serving as a proxy for the company website; the only source for this list is the company website. Fails WP:LISTN as well as WP:PROMO, which says "...All article topics must be verifiable with independent, third-party sources.... Wikipedia articles about a company or organization are not an extension of their website...." This page grew out of a discussion here about whether this list belongs in the main Frontiers Media article; I and others have said it doesn't belong there. It doesn't cut it as a standalone article either. Jytdog (talk) 17:44, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This is clearly a WP:ABF nomination, not even giving time for the article to be built. This article is most certainly not a 'proxy for the website'. While Jytdog and others did indeed said it didn't belong in Frontiers Media, many others said that it did, or that an article on the series would be an acceptable alternative. In any cases, this is a notable series of journals, which easily meets WP:GNG, and should be kept. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:48, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Neither !vote above addresses the reasons for the nomination. If you want to IAR that is fine of course but please be explicit about that, and acknowledge that this an extension of the company website (the only source for the complete list is the company's website) so fails PROMO and fails LISTN (what independent sources talk about all the journals, distinct from the publisher which already has an article?). Jytdog (talk) 18:00, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is not an extension of the website, and never will be, nor is is in violation of WP:PROMO or WP:LISTN. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This diff for example just pads this page, with content about the publisher. We already have an article on the publisher and N is not inherited. Jytdog (talk) 18:03, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In this case, both the series and the publisher are intertwined and inherit each other's notability, and the series also inherits its constituents' notability. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:22, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I think that in this case, notability is inherited. The publisher is notable, what the publisher does is publish journals, and so the "group or set" of journals is, jointly, notable. Given that the original article rather thoroughly documents the controversies surrounding the publisher, listing their journals is hardly an advertisement. (In fact, having a separate page for the list is suboptimal from this point of view.) XOR'easter (talk) 18:24, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Again you can IAR I reckon but please be explicit that this is your argument. I am not going to keep replying here, so as not to clutter the discussion. So bye for now. Jytdog (talk) 18:26, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I prefer the list in the publisher article myself, but Jytdog (among others) opposed that. Shows there's just no pleasing some people. I can live with with a merge back to the publisher, or a standalone list, but the content is relevant and should exist somewhere on Wikipedia. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:28, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
So you're saying it's a fork to get around consensus? --Calton | Talk 02:32, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Not really no. It's a possible solution that may make more people happy than the old one. I'm entirely fine merging this back at Frontiers Media like it was, but some folks are just categorically against this content in whatever form it is, regardless of reasons. You'll never be able to please those. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:45, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In other words, yes, it's a pointless fork to get around consensus. --Calton | Talk 07:27, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In other words, no, it's exactly not that. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:55, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. XOR'easter (talk) 18:31, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academic journals-related deletion discussions. XOR'easter (talk) 18:31, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That it is beloved by cranks and charlatan is one further reason to keep the article. Regardless of your personal opinion about the reputation of these journals, the fact remain that Frontiers journals are have high visibility, and relatively high impact. You wouldn't catch me dead publishing in them, and I'd seriously question any research that was referenced to Frontiers, but we deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And given the extent that Frontiers journals are cited on Wikipedia (see #78) ... we badly need this article. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:12, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is worth commenting on. I totally get it, that some people think it is important for WP to be a sort of card-catalog for journals -- that there be this library-like function in mainspace. But Wikipedia is not a catalog. Wikidata could definitely serve that purpose; it is within its mission to gather up all data. If folks want something text-based, I wonder if there should be something like a "WikiCardCatalog" project where people who want to do this, can do it. But WP mainspace is not a place for cataloging.....Jytdog (talk) 03:32, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The article is nowhere near a catalogue entry. As for sources which discuss the journal series as a whole, you'll find this to meet exactly that criterion. An analysis of predatory publishing with and without Frontiers journals.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:26, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That it is beloved by cranks and charlatan is one further reason to keep the article. That rationale has nothing to do with this list, and is a rebuttal to an argument not even being made.
The article is nowhere near a catalogue entry. Based on what? It's (almost) literally just a list of titles, with no notes, no explanations, no links, no details, and no organizing principle other than the alphabetical. If readers want a company catalog, it's not Wikipedia's job to provide that, it's the company's. --Calton | Talk 07:27, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the article. Did you even read it? There's plenty of analysis, history, commentary, sourcing. It goes well beyond a simple listing (which would be completely fine to have on its own, btw), and easily passes WP:GNG. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:55, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That is exactly what I do not state. My prefered solution is to include this in the article. This is a compromise version. This is not an attempt to 'dodge inclusion', this is an attempt to maximize satisfaction.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:46, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note, with the recent expansions, my preferred solution is now a standalone article. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:58, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There wasn't yet a consensus to get around. I'd prefer to keep everything in one article; a separate list page was a not-great but not-bad-sounding alternative. Failing that, I think the sources turned up in the course of building this page (e.g., footnotes 11–17) should be incorporated into the main Frontiers Media article. Generally, I just think that when I look up a publisher in a reference work, one thing I'd like to be able to find is what they publish. XOR'easter (talk) 05:25, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That is exactly what I do not state. Nope, that's the only reasonable interpretation of what you wrote. If you want this -- frankly -- pointless list, get consensus to include it in the actual article. If you can't get, well, too bad, people will just have to go to the company website. --Calton | Talk 07:27, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@XOR'easter: Luckily, for those who want to find out what Frontiers Media publishes, they maintain this website. It is a clear pass of the criteria at WP:EL, and should be included as an external link on the Frontiers Media page. It is also the only actual source for the content of this list, so exactly 0 encyclopedic value is lost by chucking the list for the link. (And if any individual journals are notable, there can be a reasonable-size subsection called "Notable journals" or something.) --JBL (talk) 13:04, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It might be the only static source for the full content of the list itself (the only other sources I could find were partial, e.g., [1], or directory search results), but other references discuss the collection as a unit. And, as I mentioned in the original discussion, having a list of our own means that we can indicate if a journal changes its name, ceases publication, etc. This is the kind of information that, in my experience, is difficult to find from a publisher's catalogue because it gets buried or elided and has to be sourced from elsewhere. XOR'easter (talk) 14:21, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
We can only do that if there are reliable sources that allow us to do that by writing about it. And if an individual journal has reliable sources writing about it, then it is independently notable and can have its own article. --JBL (talk) 15:09, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
We have plenty of reliable sources writing about the journal series. It easily passes WP:GNG. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:14, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If an individual journal is only covered in one or two niche-but-reliable sources (as is the case for several in the list here, I've found), then I'm sure an article on that individual journal would be brought to AfD, and I bet a common sentiment would be to merge and redirect it to the article on the publisher, and we'd be right back where we started. XOR'easter (talk) 15:24, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I invite you to test this theory, rather than use a hypothetical with no supporting evidence as a reason to include an indiscriminate list of non-notable journals in a publisher's article when precisely the same service can be provided to readers by an external link without violating any important guidelines. --JBL (talk) 23:51, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's not all that hypothetical; it's what happened with History Matters, for example: mentioned only briefly in niche-but-reliable sources, and so merged into the article on the university that publishes it. Microbial Genomics was redirected to the Microbiology Society. Similarly for Hurly-Burly, which was merged to the article on its founder. In the case of Catalyst, the article on a new journal was redirected to that of its more-established sister publication, per WP:TOOSOON. The argument has also been made in discussions that ended up with deletion, e.g., IEEE Transactions on Emerging Health in Computational Intelligence. XOR'easter (talk) 00:35, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: This is now just a fork of Frontiers Media. The encyclopedic content belongs in that article (and that's what all the substantive references are about). The list of journals is not encyclopedic content and doesn't belong on Wikipedia (but would make a fine external link). --JBL (talk) 12:50, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep or Merge with Frontiers Media. This AfD nomination was made within 20 minutes of the article's creation while it was actively under construction, which to me does not assume good faith, and is fairly malicious. I know there's no rule on how soon an article can be nominated, but I'm tired of running into AfDs which were nominated while obviously still under construction. Just assume good faith people! I know there are draft forms and sandboxes for this, so the article's creator is more at fault, but in any case nominators should be able to tell when a page is under construction and should practice patience before getting a quick AfD stat. Ok, off my soapbox.. In its current state the article is well-written and well sourced with reliable and verifiable references. Since the AfD nomination the page has been completely overhauled and has a lot of material that is specific to the Frontier Journals that warrants a nice spinout article from the main page. My recommendation would be to change the name to "Frontiers journal series" as it is on the Frontiers Media page as that's how more people would likely search for it, but as it stands right now the page meets WP:GNG and should be kept. SEMMENDINGER (talk) 17:39, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Frontiers journal series redirects to the article btw, as do a few other aliases. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:52, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just for the sake of clarity, the above isn't a criticism of jytdog, who is an exceptional editor, it's more of my frustration in the current AfD policies. Just preemptively stating this as the above was not to be inflammatory! :) SEMMENDINGER (talk) 17:45, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
User:Semmendinger thanks for your kind note. The additional content is padding and is about the publisher; this was entirely predictable. The creator is focused on getting the full list of Frontiers journals somewhere in Wikipedia under the (in my view) mistaken notion that WP should be a catalog for journals. That is what this is about, at base - they created this only after getting resistance to including the list in the publisher article. The list of Frontiers journals is not notable; the publisher is. Jytdog (talk) 22:57, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Right: none of the encyclopedic content added to this article is about the "Frontiers in ... series" as distinct from the publisher Frontiers Media; the two subjects are synonymous for all practical purposes. There should be one article, it should have the union of the encyclopedic contents of these two articles, and it should not have the list of all journals because that's just an indiscriminate list and is better provided as an external link. If anyone is engaging in bad faith here it is Headbomb, creating and then padding this article to avoid the consensus here to delete the list of journals. --JBL (talk) 23:46, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for the delay in response. The way I see it now (after reading much more into the resulting conversation since I've initially voted) is that this page might be a proper WP:SPINOUT article for the main Frontiers Media article, but at this point in time that main page isn't large enough to warrant a spinout. I agree that the list of journals alone does not meet notability, but the rest of the information that's been included in the current state of this page is actually pretty well-sourced and would be a nice addition to the main page should this one fall under deletion. For now, I've changed my vote to Merge with the main page. SEMMENDINGER (talk) 00:02, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Semmendinger: Have you seen [2]/[3]/[4]/[5]/[6]/etc... which all treat or talk about the series as a whole, distinctly from the publisher? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:30, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I do not know the strength of the first ref you listed, but the other two are really good. At this point I just don't see the need to make a spinout article for the journals when this all would fit so well in the main page. Without the journal title section the rest of this article fits nicely in Frontiers Media. I think you've done a lot of excellent work in creating this page and am pretty much sitting on the fence because both sides are bringing up fair points (I feel bad for whoever has to make the final decision here). I'm 100% against deletion on this, but when this information fits perhaps better in the main article I can't strongly vote keep, so merge seems like a happy medium in light of arguments made here. SEMMENDINGER (talk) 01:39, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Semmendinger: The first ref addresses specifically how the picture of predatory publishing changes depending on whether or not you consider the Frontiers journal series to be predatory. As for the list itself, it's of rather paramount importance, otherwise readers cannot know what journals are in the series, which also runs the risk of confusing a slew of journals and book series named Frontiers in/of... such as Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology (Elsevier) which a reader could easily assume is part of the series when it's not. Or even a worse situation, dealing with Frontiers of Physics (Springer/Higher Education Press journal) vs. Frontiers in Physics (Frontiers Media journal) vs Frontiers in Physics (Princeton University Press book series).Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:44, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Consider this situation, Alice applies for a job, with Bob being in charge of the hiring process. Alice published a paper in Frontiers in Diabetes. Having heard colleges having debates about the Frontiers in... series before, Bob decides to check the Frontiers Media/Frontiers journal series article to see what the fuss was about, but it doesn't mention which journals are parts of it, nor is the information available on Wikipedia. Since the journal is named Frontiers in..., they assume it's part of the Frontiers in ... series, while at the same time learning its publishes a lot of quackery, AIDS denialism, anti-vaccines crap, and the like. Bob then judges Alice negatively for publishing in quack journals, and hires someone else instead. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:58, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I get your point, but that argument doesn't have a place on Wikipedia and I can't use it when i'm deciding how to vote. Maybe Bob shouldn't be checking Wikipedia when he can check the main Frontiers site instead? Who knows - all I know is we need to go off policy and not contrived hypothetical scenarios. SEMMENDINGER (talk) 14:33, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Gutting an article to the point of near-uselessness is not a policy-based argument. This easily passes WP:GNG or WP:NJOURNALS. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:46, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
To the extent that any sense can be made of this !vote at all, it appears to have the sequence of events that led to the creation of this article precisely backwards. --JBL (talk) 23:46, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If this article is going to be made into a substantive, encyclopedic article, separate from Frontiers Media (which sounds like a silly fork to me but otherwise is not objectionable) it is still the case that the list of journals in the article is unnecessary and should be replaced with an external like to the publisher's webpage, which is the only place it is ever going to be sourced from, anyhow. --JBL (talk) 21:42, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If you make an article about a series of something, telling what people what is in the series of something is rather important. that's like saying the Forbes Celebrity 100 shouldn't say who the 100 are, because it's sourced through the Forbes Celebrity 100 official list. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:51, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The article Forbes Celebrity 100 does not, in fact, list the 100 in question. --JBL (talk) 22:01, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
(Also, of course, there is coverage of that list qua list. Which is not the case here. Which is the point.) --JBL (talk) 22:02, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There's plenty of coverage of the Frontiers series, if you don't like the Forbes Celebrity 100 example, then Alpha Phi Omega/List of Alpha Phi Omega chapters. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:10, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No, I like the example very very much: it shows that your vehemently repeated argument that it is absolutely and obviously necessary to include the list is entirely mistaken. It is a shame that you don't understand this; but I am not an evangelist, I do not need to convert you, I just want to get this piece of junk out of Wikipedia where it does not belong. (Of course, the fact that you have been so personally unpleasant makes me more committed to this goal than I would be under other circumstances.) --JBL (talk) 23:38, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This article is not a piece of junk, nor is the list. Go push your agenda elsewhere. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:02, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Take your personal comments elsewhere, thanks. --JBL (talk) 01:27, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Then I'll ask you to do the same. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:29, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Headbomb can correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the point of the Forbes 100 example was that it's OK to have a list whose contents are sourced directly to the organization who made the list. Since a new Forbes 100 comes out every year, it's reasonable to avoid overkill and report only the top 10 from each year, which is what our article does. Whether we include the whole 100 or not is incidental to the point that I thought Headbomb was arguing. (The "America's Best Colleges" list is also annual, but shorter, and we report the whole thing.) Again, perhaps I am mistaken, but that's my take-away. I can sympathize with the desire to keep Wikipedia from becoming a giant cruft pile; I have myself argued for the deletion of articles on academics who I thought did not measure up to WP:PROF, or recreational trivialities from pop math, and I've definitely seen articles on journals that I felt should be deleted (e.g., this one or this one). I don't think cataloging every thing that anybody has called an academic journal is a suitable use for Wikipedia. I simply think that in this case, the publisher is obviously notable, and recording what they do makes our article more useful, without imposing a serious burden on readers who don't particularly care. (I do not believe that the original discussion had arrived at a consensus yet before it spilled over here. Three editors felt that a separate list page would be an OK course of action, if it could be reasonably guaranteed to be kept up-to-date, and @Doug Weller: wrote, "List or whatever, I think it's important to have a way that readers can distinguish between those published by this company and those with just a similar name.") XOR'easter (talk) 00:13, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am not really very interested in what Headbomb thought s/he was doing (funny how someone saturating every aspect of an interaction with personalized hostility and unpleasantness will do that!) but it also does not show the thing you are suggesting: there are sources in that article about the list qua list that are not published by Forbes. That list article is a very good example of several appropriate things to do while making a list on Wikipedia: including secondary sources, restricting to notable elements of the list, etc. No one has ever written an article discussing the list of journals published by Frontiers, and most likely no one will ever do so; most of the journals are not notable now, and they may never be. And the correct thing to do under those circumstances is to stick to information that can be supported by reliable secondary sources, giving due weight to those aspects that are notable, and using an appropriate external link for related valuable but non-encyclopedic content. --JBL (talk) 01:38, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
References 2, 15, 16 and 17 in the article as it currently stands are secondary sources that all identify the list of Frontiers journals as a unit (saying that all of them together can be considered a megajournal). Restricting a list to elements that are individually notable is eminently sensible in some cases (e.g., List of people by Erdős number), but it is not the only way to go about listing (e.g., List of polygons, or closer to the topic at hand, the publications section of SIAM or APS). Per WP:CSC, a short and complete list "of every item that is verifiably a member of the group" is permitted "if a complete list is reasonably short (less than 32K) and could be useful (e.g., for navigation) or interesting to readers." I think that a 4-by-15 table of 2,098 characters is "reasonably short", that it can aid navigation, and that the relative proportion of bluelinked items to plain ones is itself indicative about the Frontiers business. I can't speak to whether it is "interesting to readers" in general, but if they've read that far into a page about a topic of academic interest (pun intended) they probably care at least a little.
The general hostility of this discussion has been remarkably high (I am reminded of Sayre's law). I would like to apologize if I have contributed to that atmosphere, and I will be taking advantage of the "opportunity" that work deadlines are giving me to step away from wiki-stuff for a few days. XOR'easter (talk) 02:19, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand the purpose of the main article anymore. This and that are basically the same thing, but that has a few corporate details that this one doesn't, and this one of course has The List. We basically have two chunks of content that we need to keep in sync which is just a stupid waste of time, especially on a journal that is controversial like this. User:DGG and User:David Eppstein your !votes make no sense in a meta-editing sense and are frankly disappointing. Headbomb pre-emptively did a SPLIT instead of just working the process (if we had gone to an RfC the list may well have stayed there_. Way to reward shitty behavior and make more work for the commmunity. We should probably just merge the main article here. Jytdog (talk)
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.
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