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 MERGE to Sentence (linguistics). TigerShark (talk) 12:21, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sentence length (linguistics)

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PROD was placed on the page after a previous PROD had been disputed. The original PROD rationale was, "Article is on one facet of linguistics and should be merged into that article." Disputing editor noted, "let it develop. Separate facets of major subjects get separate articles." The second PROD rationale was, "Unencyclopedic assemblage of Google hits, not an asset to the encyclopedia." Cnilep (talk) 03:37, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Cnilep (talk) 03:44, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I gather this is a technical nomination by Cnilep upon encountering the second prod. The first delete reason was given by ScottyBerg (and I removed it) the second by PamD; I see Cnilep notified both of them. DGG ( talk ) 04:59, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, DGG. That is just what I had in mind. Cnilep (talk) 06:56, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep No valid reason for deletion. The first deletion reason given was and said it was actually an argument for merge, not deletion. They second is not the case: there is a forum post on a professional forum, two tweets in response to it -- which taken together are by themselves very dubious in proving notability , and 2 good articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, which are not at all dubious, or random. By random must have been meant, the contributor looked for sources and found some on the internet. That's a first step, to be continued in professional indexes and books. But random to me means taking items where the word occurs, but nothing substantial is actually said about the subject--a chronic method of doing bad referencing here and elsewhere. In this case, however, all of the items are directly on the specific subject of the article. DGG ( talk ) 05:18, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Sentence (linguistics), which already has two External Links about length and could perhaps benefit from a section entitled "Sentence length". PamD 07:54, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Yes, I should probably have checked the history and spotted the previous PROD before I PRODded this stub. But I came by it to stub-sort it and had already (a) moved it to a correctly formatted title (lower case "l" in the disambiguator), (b) observed that the creating editor had not provided any link from Sentence length, which at that time redirected to Deterrence (legal), and (c) lost heart over the general sloppiness, absence of any wikilinks, etc, which characterised this editor's work at the time this stub was created. That lot may have coloured my judgement. I created a slightly WP:IAR-ish dab page at Sentence length to replace the redirect: if this article survives AfD then it needs to be linked from that dab page. (And it also needs links to and from Sentence (linguistics) if my merge suggestion, above, is not taken up.) PamD 08:33, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge - whatever the procedural history, this article has two kinds of citation: a) non-notable (forum, twitter); b) primary sources. That makes this non-notable Original Research (WP:OR). However the material could form a brief paragraph in Sentence (linguistics) where it belongs; perhaps one day secondary sources will emerge to increase its notability, but at the moment it falls well below threshold. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:39, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The non-forum/twitter sources are certainly not primary. Primary sources for this subject would be corpora of actual sentences of various lengths. Articles in peer-reviewed journals are the very best kind of secondary sources. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:50, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge per PamD. --Legis (talk - contribs) 09:35, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge anything verifiable and non-original to Sentence (linguistics). Angr (talk) 13:04, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge anything salvageable to Sentence (linguistics). ScottyBerg (talk) 17:09, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The sources are definitely out there, and although the actual maths behind it all is a bit confusing to understand, I have made an effort to add other sorts of information from a variety of sources to help show the scope of what information is out there.--Coin945 (talk) 00:41, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Sentence (linguistics). The target article is relatively short, and would be helped by having any relevant material from this one made into a section there. Readers would be much better served at this point with one comprehensive article. When that article gets too long (WP:Article length), a WP:Summary style article(s) could be split off. It might also attract the attention of people who know the subject enough to make this content readable and relevant. First Light (talk) 16:52, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

...I'm just not convinced that this is the right path to take. Once two concepts are joined together, I wonder if they ever really do split apart again. Granted in this case it's not two similar but different concepts stuffed into the same page, but can you provide a few examples of where this course of action has worked successfully? I just have doubts that a merge is the best thing for this budding article.--Coin945 (talk) 23:57, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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.