Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paderborn method

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. – Joe (talk) 17:48, 23 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Paderborn_method[edit]

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All of these sources are unreliable or do not support the claims made in the article, possibly save one or two, and I don't think better sources exist. I haven't found evidence that this effect is accepted by the general linguist/educator community, or that this technique is actually used anywhere. Therefore, it suffers from WP:1SOURCE and WP:FRINGE. Justin Kunimune (talk) 11:32, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Language and Education. Shellwood (talk) 11:52, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy Keep; I highly doubt that you have evaluated, or even read, "All of these sources". As such, I must disagree with your off-hand assertion (and I don't even get where the WP:1SOURCE is coming from, since the article is clearly not based on just one source). I get that the article isn't in its best shape, but in such cases we should fix the problem (since you have initiated the deletion of the other article dealing with this topic, you should know that there exists enough material to at least fill one article about the topic, but that so far, nobody has performed the necessary merging and copy editing—including myself, I must add. However, a lack of interest or work on Wikipedia doesn't automatically translate to a lack of notability of the topic, see WP:INTROTODELETE: "Generally speaking, notable subjects will be those for which sufficient sourcing is available,"). I do not believe the current reasoning is sufficient to justify deletion of the article, and propose that any issues be dealt with on the article's Talk page. TucanHolmes (talk) 13:51, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

On a side note, I also find the way in which this article was proposed for deletion quite hasty: No preliminary tags highlighting the problems, no calls for editors to address these issues, not even a talk page entry, just a straight AfD. TucanHolmes (talk) 13:59, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not terribly experienced with the deletion process, so I apologize if the way I went about it was abrupt, but I do think this page fails WP:N, and don't think it can be revised in a way that would solve the underlying problem. While I wasn't able to find all of the sources listed in the "bibliography", I've read and evaluated almost all of the ones in the "references", and accordingly do not think the available sourcing is sufficient to justify an article.

The bulletin from the Italian Ministry for Public Education is questionably reliable since it's a nonscientific government report that reads as quite promotional to me. It also misrepresents the results of most of the studies it cites (it's the basis for most of the article, so it misrepresents them in the same manner described in these subsequent bullet points).
Fischer's study was inconclusive according to the relevant report from the Universal Esperanto Association to the League of Nations.
Eaton's study included one experiment that demonstrated that the Paderborn method works and one that demonstrated that it does not, and Eaton declines to draw firm conclusions.
Halloran's study did support the efficacy of the Paderborn method (albeit only for certain children).
Williams's study was also fine and also supported the method's efficacy.
Vilkki and Setala were not linguists by training, published their work in a magazine, and did not give the details of their methods or results, so it's not reliable.
Kovacs only considered whether Esperanto was easier to learn than natural languages, not whether Esperanto would help with learning natural languages.
Sonnabend's study is irrelevant for the same reason as Kovacs's.
Frank's is the only one on this list that both seems reliable but that I can't find at all.
I have tried but can't figure out who Formaggio was or where she published her work, so I don't think it's reliable.
Piron's source is just a personal blog.

The other page whose deletion I initiated did not have any reliable and topical sources that this one doesn't. As far as other relevant sourced material, the only things that come close are Tellier's work, which considered children's metalinguistic awareness after studying Esperanto but not their proficiency in subsequent languages, and Bishop's work, which was not peer-reviewed or formally published. There are also some secondary sources like Maxwell's and Fantini's, but they all describe the Paderborn method as an unverified hypothesis in need of further testing.

Williams, Frank, and Halloran are the only sources I would consider both reliable and in favor of the idea that this method is real. I acknowledge that the bibliography section contains many additional sources that I haven't read, but only because for the vast majority of them, I can't even verify that they exist, either on the internet or through my university's library. Given that plus the fact that this bibliography is basically copy-pasted from the Ministry bulletin I don't think they should be considered reliable. Though to be fair, Lobin and Markarian both seem to be reliable secondary sources in favor of this method, citing Frank and Halloran, respectively.

I'm realizing I was probably using WP:1SOURCE too loosely when I applied it here, but I still think this falls under WP:FRINGE. Very few studies have been conducted on the topic, and most that have are inconclusive. Most secondary sources echo that sentiment. I suppose this article could possibly be kept and reframed as a description of a handful of experiments studying a hypothetical effect, and cite Eaton, Williams, Frank, Halloran, Tellier, and some secondary sources. Smideliusz's lexical analyses on the topic could then be included to flesh it out a bit. But I just don't think there would be enough material there to justify a full article. Though now I consider it, redirecting to the couple of paragraphs on the Esperanto page probably is justified. Justin Kunimune (talk) 15:12, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Seems reasonable to me :). We could redirect and include some of the more reliable materials in the relevant Esperanto sections, although that will make the main Esperanto article even more massive, which I'm not a big fan of. While I agree that the notability is an issue, I would be quite careful with applying WP:FRINGE to this, especially given that We [Wikipedia] use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe an idea that departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field. For example, fringe theories in science depart significantly from mainstream science and have little or no scientific support.; the ideas about L2 learning/teaching behind these studies don't significantly depart from the mainstream views, namely that learning subsequent languages becomes easier after the first L2 language, that of course languages that are "simpler" are easier to learn (compare French and Spanish orthography, and even phonology for that matter, and resulting differences in early reading/listening comprehension for L2 learners)—and that, in combination, these ideas could be used to ease language learning. Of course, using Esperanto to do this type of instruction is not a mainstream tool of first resort, but that is not a reason to dismiss it, and scientific studies (not blog articles, of course) looking into whether this could work are not fringe, but simply open-ended research.

TL;DR So, what would I propose doing with the article? Trim the article radically, add new sources, reorganize, then write out what we have and what is supported by reliable sources, and then see if deletion is still necessary. Describe the Paderborn method as a proposed method of language-teaching, then explain the different studies/scientific works underpinning the idea (but also that many of them came to no conclusion, neither affirming nor disproving it), and also include the Springboard to Languages project and its evaluation as an additional, more recent pioneer project and source. TucanHolmes (talk) 14:24, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep @Justin Kunimune please notice: in the list you gave 2-8 are not supporting the experiment of Paderborn; if you read the article more carefully, they are just presenting other experiments done before Paderborn. They probably were not done with very scientifical methods, so what we need is just a prove of their existence. They are anyway important as prove that the mechanism was already known and somebody was trying to demonstrate it since long time. The Paderborn experiment took place in Late 1970s to early 1980s as clearly exposed in the article. The scientific method used in Paderborn is the reason why the article has name Paderborn Method and not Bishop Auckland Method. That's because the experiment done in 1918 in Bishop Auckland was probably not done with scientific methods; anyway it was done, and there is Fisher's article that proves that. Other sources you can find in the bibliography: Lobin, Halloran, Frank; I would say these 3 sources are the columns of the article. Francescost (talk) 07:06, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I'm looking at this solely from the point of view of reliable sources and I do see this "method" discussed in some depth in both articles and books. That some of these determine that the method does not work doesn't negate the attention. I second the suggestions by TucanHolmes. Lamona (talk) 14:34, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep iaw Lamona. @User:TucanHolmes, please WP:AGF. Springnuts (talk) 08:48, 23 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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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.