Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (2nd nomination)

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. Consensus is that the book is notable. Discussion about changing book notability guidelines can take place elsewhere. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 02:30, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements[edit]

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Fails WP:GNG and WP:NBOOK. Unsourced since 2005 in spite of a very cursory deletion discussion in 2007 in which no further evidence was provided. Book itself appears to have been produced by a non-notable publisher/imprint and to have run only to one edition. —Brigade Piron (talk) 18:45, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. —Brigade Piron (talk) 18:45, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. —Brigade Piron (talk) 18:45, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Russia-related deletion discussions. —Brigade Piron (talk) 18:45, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Passes the (rather low) threshold for book notability per the following reviews: JSTOR 40404159, doi:10.2307/2697534, doi:10.1353/imp.2005.0027, ProQuest 213179863, ProQuest 196824835. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 20:08, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Eh, it's still harder to pass than you'd think. On average the typical book needs to have about 3-5 good sources to establish notability. Most books, especially academic and scholarly ones, are unlikely to have this level of coverage. I know that the rules say 2, but they would have to be reviews in very major publications to really make the average editor see that as enough. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 08:47, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- I'd also note that WP:NBOOKS is only a SNG and is not a substitute for WP:GNG ("Satisfying this notability guideline generally indicates a book warrants an article.") There is a clear lack of WP:SUSTAINED coverage. —Brigade Piron (talk) 16:06, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  Do you really expect a book to have consistent coverage over time? Books get reviews when they're published, and then they are cited afterwards; they don't appear in newspapers every couple months, like notable people often do. This book has 200+ cites on Scholar, indicating sustained scholarly attention. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 16:20, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 20:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- - AleatoryPonderings I don't think it's unreasonable in principle. There are plenty of scholarly books, even articles, which become notable in their own right because of the effect they have on particular areas of debate ("The Imperialism of Free Trade" and Orientalism (book) are two random examples that come to mind). This is a book which has not even gone to a second edition and does not appear to have had a notable impact. I have recently written two reviews myself for peer-reviewed journals notable enough to have their own Wikipedia articles and can tell you from personal experience that the motivation to write a review usually has more to do with a free copy being presented to the journal by the publisher rather than its own worthiness. Besides, WP:SUSTAINED is pretty unequivocal. —Brigade Piron (talk) 19:34, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Brigade Piron, I stand by my original assessment. I have offered two objective indicators of notability: five reviews and a large number of citations. You and Peterkingiron have offered vague speculations about the reviewers' motivations, and have not cast doubt on any of the reviews in particular. I can say from my own personal experience looking for reviews to establish notability of books that finding five reviews in notable journals, even for an academic book, is actually quite unusual, so my own anecdotal evidence weighs in favour of notability.
    
    Moreover, WP:SUSTAINED is both (1) an explanatory supplement to GNG (which I have demonstrated by showing significant coverage in multiple, independent reliable sources); and (2) quite equivocal—it says Brief bursts of news coverage may not sufficiently demonstrate notability. However, sustained coverage is an indicator of notability (emphasis added). I hang my hat on the reviews and the citations. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 21:02, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'd also add to this that WP:SUSTAINED has a very limited scope, dealing only with events, people involved in events, and other topics in relation to which WP:NOTNEWS might apply (and, in passing, companies). SUSTAINED is not saying that sustained coverage is required for notability in all instances, it's summarising the other guidelines we have which require sustained coverage in particular contexts. If there was a consensus that SUSTAINED applied in any way to books one would expect it to be mentioned somewhere in WP:BK. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 15:27, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- - - AleatoryPonderings, I don't deny at all that reviews are a factor to consider. However, we also need to accept that there has been a total absence of any coverage of the book since then. As noted above, it never even made it into a second edition. The number of citations is, with respect, entirely irrelevant because they can just as well be citing facts from the book as discussing it and so can hardly count as address[ing] the topic directly and in detail as required in WP:GNG. —Brigade Piron (talk) 09:57, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Very dubious -- The book did get several reviews, but these are likely to arise as part of the publisher's marketing. Google scholar records 202 citations. However the book provided a look from its time in 2001 towards the future as to how Russian politics might develop. I do not know the book, but guess that (apart from its new analysis as to what fascism is) it will be somewhat dated. Peterkingiron (talk) 20:38, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Reviews count towards notability as long as they are from a reliable source and are reasonably in-depth. Saying that reviews shouldn't count towards notability is honestly a fairly slippery slope. There are thousands upon thousands (if not millions) of non-book articles that are reliant upon reviews to establish notability. By proclaiming reviews to be unusable to establish notability we throw the notability of all of these other articles into question as well. This is not something that should be approached lightly.

Most of these outlets - even the ones that seemingly review everything - are actually pretty selective. As someone who has worked on and created multiple book and author articles, only a very small portion actually gain any sort of reviews. Academic and scholarly outlets are particularly selective, as there are only a limited amount of outlets that fit a book's topic and would have the space in the given issue to review a work. I've seen books by notable academics and put out by notable publishers get zero reviews from the scholarly/academic world. It doesn't mean that the books or authors are wrong or bad, just that there were too many books and too few outlets willing to review them. Basically, if an outlet only publishes quarterly and can only review 10-15 books out of the 100 that were published in their field each quarter, well... it means that on average 85-90 of those books won't be reviewed. Depending on the field, the number of books is probably far larger. Now if we extend this beyond the academic and scholarly world, the number of outlets willing to review and books for review go up, but there will still be an astronomic amount of books that will never get reviewed - even if we only limit it to those put out through mainstream publishers like Penguin and HarperCollins.

The other issue that can come up if we were to see reviews as unusable or routine is that it could have a detrimental impact on our coverage of women and minority authors and works. Things have gotten better, but it's still pretty common for a minority author to fly solidly under the radar as far as non-review coverage goes but still gain reviews from major RS outlets. This is also the case in other non-book areas as well.

I do think that there's an argument to be made for increasing the amount of reviews needed to establish notability (increasing it to 3 reviews would likely halve the amount of books and authors that gain articles each year) but I think a more important discussion needs to be made about which review outlets should or shouldn't be seen as reliable sources, by which I mean that individual sources are discussed and either deemed reliable and in-depth or not. We can't judge all of the sources by the same standard, as brevity in say, an academic and scholarly source is not the same as brevity in a trade publication like Publisher's Weekly. An academic review has the capability to be in-depth with just a handful of sentences whereas PW's reviews are weak water with the same amount. This is not a discussion to be had in an AfD and eliminating reviews entirely as a source of notability would just be shooting ourselves in the foot. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 04:55, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You misunderstand my argument. Reviews are clearly relevant but are not sufficient in their own right. Also, I think you are way too kind about the reviewing processes. There are a huge number of specialist peer-review journals around. Literally every book published by any university press - there will be literally thousands each year - will be reviewed on multiple occasions and will not go on to make an objectively Wikipedia-worthy contribution to a particular field. In any case, we can deal with particular academics far better by addressing their (individually non-notable) works on a (notable) biography page which can deal with the subject more sensibly. The argument that we should have low notability standards to favour minority writers (on no evidence, I would add) is, frankly, bizarre are clearly not relevant to this particular AfD. —Brigade Piron (talk) 10:12, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
What do you propose that book articles should base notability on? Non-review coverage? If so, then the vast majority of books will not pass, as they almost never gain the coverage that a mainstream film or person would. That would pretty much limit us to the authors who do gain this coverage, which are predominantly white and male. I mean, people of color already have a hard enough time getting published to begin with, so it's not surprising that they have issues gaining coverage of any type, even reviews. Women have similar issues with gaining coverage. As far as peer-review journals go, there are still far fewer of them than there are books needing review and only a portion of each journal entry will focus on book reviews, assuming that they have a review section at all. Not all do.

Also, if we argue that book reviews aren't enough on their own to establish notability then we're basically arguing that they cannot be used to establish notability. No one is arguing that a single review would be inadequate to establish notability, however multiple reviews can establish this. Either reviews count towards notability or they don't. We can't give them "half notability". They're not like say, awards where we can point towards large awards like the Nobel Prize or the Hugo and say that those are major awards that can establish notability on that basis alone, whereas an award from a notable but relatively minor festival would only count towards notability without giving notability for that alone. There's a huge difference between major award granting institutions and news outlets.

My point is this - reviews are a necessary way of proving notability for books because books typically do not gain the coverage or in the same way that other types of media would. While yes, I do think that the number of reviews required to establish notability could be a tick higher AND I think that we need to more firmly establish what outlets are usable, I think that eliminating them as notability granting would just cause irreparable harm to both Wikipedia's coverage of books and women/minorities.

However this is a moot point in a deletion discussion. This is not the avenue to argue that reviews alone cannot establish notability - you need to argue that at the notability guidelines page for books and to be honest, I don't think that such a measure would pass. You'd be better off trying to lobby for specific sources to be seen as unusable for notability granting purposes than you would for a measure that would effectively remove them as notability granting sources. As it stands this book meets notability guidelines. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 03:54, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Also, Routledge is far from a non-notable publisher! ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 04:56, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify, Routledge republished a second edition in 2015. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 05:14, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that's true. It seems to have issued a reprint, not a second edition. And, frankly, Routledge is a publisher which produces some highly notable works but also a huge number of very specialist studies with tiny print runs. —Brigade Piron (talk) 10:12, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The publisher page itself lists it as a second edition and it's printed on the cover. We have to go by what information the publisher has released, hence as far as we know it's a second edition. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 10:53, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I also wanted to point out that while outlets such as Routledge do put out large amounts of work, this just hammers home my point earlier that only a small fraction of this work actually receive reviews. As such, if only a small fraction receive coverage then reviews shouldn't be seen as routine coverage. Routine means that it's extremely common.

As far as the publisher part goes, I wasn't making that point to establish notability, but rather to show that there was a general lack of WP:BEFORE done here. If a search was done and improvement was attempted, then it would have been fairly easy to discover that Routledge put out a second edition in 2015. They also would have discovered that a fairly well respected and notable scholar in the field (Andreas Umland) called the work pioneering and while Google Scholar isn't a reliable source, it's still being cited even in 2020 and 2019. It could probably be seen as dated, but the point is that it's still seen as important enough to bring up even if the person were to bring it up to showcase its shortcomings.

Finally, I must note that the reviews were published between the years of 2001-2005, which goes against the argument that they were all put out after its initial publication. This isn't super common, although it is a bit more common in academic/scholarly outlets than it would be for popular press. This shows a depth of coverage as far as time goes. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 11:27, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: significant coverage in reliable sources, sufficient to satisfy WP:GNG and WP:BK, has been clearly shown to exist. The nominator's rationale is based on an argument about what they think the latter guideline ought to say, rather than what it actually says. Their repeated claim that no second edition was published appears to be simply false. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 15:20, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: Reviews in Europe-Asia Studies, Slavic Review, Science & Society, Journal of Peace Research (plus others) are WP:SIGCOV from respected academic journals. One review could be a outlier, but all four of these plus others is strong evidence of notability. M. E. Sharpe is a reputable academic publisher as evidenced by it being purchased by Routledge. // Timothy :: talk 11:52, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Improvements made by AleatoryPonderings show this book is notable Spudlace (talk) 01:55, 25 November 2020 (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.