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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. The article has been expanded from a dicdef since the AfD started and the discussion has moved from a preference for redirecting towards one for keep/merge, so I'm closing the AfD to remove the ugly red box from it since clearly there is clearly no consensus to delete. The decision of whether to keep the content as a standalone article and expand it, or merge it into another article, is one that can be made through discussion on the article talk, without a deadline. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 22:05, 22 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Religious assimilation

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Religious assimilation (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Dicdef, no sources found, article untouched since 2009 Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 18:23, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the Article Rescue Squadron's list of content for rescue consideration. —Syrenka V (talk) 21:06, 2 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Religion-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 21:01, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Distinct enough from cultural assimilation that it merits its own article. The fact that it's stubby at the moment doesn't keep anyone from fixing it--nothing here strikes me as OR, more like not much more than DICTDEF... Jclemens (talk) 22:52, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I searched for this term and found relatively few uses, but did find an example like this [1] that begins by specifying it as the religious aspect of Cultural Assimilation. The term Religious Assimilation seems to be always accompanying Cultural Assimilation. Mr. Magoo (talk) 01:00, 1 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Jclemens: It is a longstanding practice to merge stubby content into supertopic articles, and then break it out again when the material is sufficiently expanded within the supertopic. Merging now would not bar breaking it out into a separate page if the necessary expansion occurs. bd2412 T 20:36, 7 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
These sorts of organizational decisions are really best left to article editors to work out. ~Kvng (talk) 20:45, 7 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to Cultural assimilation; no sources have been presented at this AfD to indicate that the subject is independently notable. None are present in the article, and my searches have not produced anything amounting to SIGCOV. The term gets used link, but it's unclear whether it's been a subject of study independent of cultural or ethnic assimilation. No prejudice to restoring to a full article if can be done with sufficient RS. A redirect works for now. K.e.coffman (talk) 21:42, 2 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and do not redirect. I've narrowed the definition to avoid the WP:DICDEF problem (syncretism is a separate concept). I've also added a major reference (a Princeton University doctoral dissertation) that makes the point that dominant cultures treat religion differently from other aspects of cultural assimilation. A specific focus on religious assimilation, documented in sources, warrants a separate article—even though of course the more general concept of cultural assimilation will be discussed, if only to distinguish religious assimilation as an important special case.
There is a severe problem with access to sources due to copywrong and paywall issues, as well as old paper-only documents. For example, I cannot use the following, simply because I have no access to it:
Farr, Eugene (1948). Religious assimilation: a case study of the adoption of Christianity by the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi (ThD dissertation). New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
The same is true of the books on Rwanda and on Eastern European Jews that show up at the top of the Google Books search. Nevertheless, WP:NEXIST states: "Notability is based on the existence of suitable sources, not on the state of sourcing in an article." By that standard, the warrant for a separate article on this topic should never have been in the slightest doubt.
—Syrenka V (talk) 11:00, 5 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I've added two more references, with inline citations and further discussion of the relationships between religious assimilation and other aspects of cultural assimilation. Although still a stub, this article already establishes notability.
—Syrenka V (talk) 21:09, 5 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, J947(c) (m) 19:05, 7 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions. North America1000 01:35, 8 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to cultural assimilation, with no prejudice against a selective Merge. Of three sources in the current version, two are unpublished. A dissertation and thesis can be good sources, but (a) both talk about this in the context of cultural assimilation, and (b) in the context of this article, both are primary sources, the point of which is to make a novel claim. When a dissertation is published and/or other people start to take up that idea is when Wikipedia covers it. Cultural assimilation is a huge subject, too, so I'd want to see a great deal of sources to justify a stand-alone article for a subtype. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 02:01, 8 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • The size of the topic of cultural assimilation is an argument for, not against, splitting off separate treatment of subtypes, particularly those seen in the sources as significantly different from the general case. As noted above, there are many more sources behind paywalls; these are the ones I could easily access on the timescale of an AfD. Of the sources cited, only LeMay 2010 is being used as a primary source, and then only as an example to show that a particular kind of viewpoint is in fact held by some researchers—not to attest to the validity of that viewpoint. Both citations from Connor 2010 are from discussions of the prior literature, and Yang and Ebaugh 2001 is likewise used to attest to the views of Will Herberg and other religious pluralists in the earlier literature. WP:NOR, section WP:PRIMARY: "A source may be considered primary for one statement but secondary for a different one, and sources can contain both primary and secondary source material for the same statement." Except for LeMay 2010, these sources are being used as secondary.
The sources cited are all unequivocally published by Wikipedia's standards, which are very broad. WP:V, section WP:SOURCE including footnote 6:
Source material must have been published, the definition of which for our purposes is "made available to the public in some form". This includes material such as documents in publicly accessible archives, inscriptions on monuments, gravestones, etc., that are available for anyone to see.
Availability on ProQuest or on Sophia University's website would definitely count. WP:RS, section WP:SCHOLARSHIP, explicitly allows use of publicly available, completed doctoral dissertations.
—Syrenka V (talk) 07:54, 8 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The size of the topic of cultural assimilation is an argument for, not against, splitting off I think I get what you mean by this, but what I mean is, effectively WP:NOPAGE. It's a minor subtopic of a subject we already cover.
Source material must have been published, the definition of which for our purposes is "made available to the public in some form". We're not looking for verifiability, which is what this sense of "published" means (literally everything on the Internet meets this definition). We're looking for notability and the reliability of sources to establish notability. That requires sources to be published in the sense of a third party determining that the content meets standards for quality and has merit/is worthy of notice. That's why it matters if an article about a subject was on someone's blog or in the New York Times. Granted, a dissertation is better than a blog, and I think it could be used in the article, but I don't think it contributes much to WP:GNG unless it's been published (in the sense of a press). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 05:04, 9 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
From WP:NOPAGE itself, within WP:N: "an article may be a stub even though many sources exist, but simply have not been included yet. Such a short page is better expanded than merged into a larger page". "Is", not "may be". A generalized preference for merging stubs goes against the GNG, except in the case where they cannot be expanded for lack of existing sources. And "minor" is not a reasonable description of the scope of the topic by any stretch of the imagination, as even the few sources already in use demonstrate, let alone the many others easily found by search but not easily accessible as full text.
WP:NOPAGE also mentions cases where merging with a larger topic provides context needed to understand the more specific topic, or where many similar topics are better handled together because more or less the same things need to be said about all of them. In this case, even the very brief stub I have (re)written already demonstrates that there are fundamental differences between the sociology of religious assimilation and that of other forms of cultural assimilation. A treatment of religious assimilation that considers it first and foremost as a subcategory of cultural assimilation would, by that fact alone, be actively misleading.
As to reliability of dissertations as sources: although WP:N does have some additional requirements for sources to establish notability (independence, and at least one secondary source), nothing anywhere in WP:N supports a different or higher standard for reliability of sources than the general standards of WP:RS. The scrutiny provided by Princeton University's sociology department—which must approve any dissertation used to support conferral of its doctorate—is likely more rigorous than that provided by most book publishers (although likely less rigorous than that applied by Princeton University Press). WP:SCHOLARSHIP within WP:RS does mention citation in the literature as further confirmation of the reliability of a dissertation; Google scholar shows that Connor 2010 has been cited 7 times.
—Syrenka V (talk) 02:39, 11 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, J947(c) (m) 20:18, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Cultural assimilation. The content quality here is better than that at Cultural assimilation (much of which should be reduced). Syrenka V has significantly revised this article since the nomination. Power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:23, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • I appreciate the complimentary remark as to content quality! I could do better yet if I had more expertise in interpreting the hundreds of pages of Connor 2010, and access to more of the existing paper or paywalled sources—indeed, a real sociologist with in-person access to a large university library could probably make a Featured Article from this little stub, whose modest size conceals a vast topic. Because of that topic size, however, as well as the very different sociological behavior of religious assimilation versus other forms of cultural assimilation that I mentioned above, I continue to oppose merging with Cultural assimilation.
—Syrenka V (talk) 00:27, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
OK. I'm not opposed to a keep. Power~enwiki (π, ν) 03:08, 17 September 2017 (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.
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