Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Prem C. Pandey

This discussion was subject to a deletion review on 2008 July 31.
For an explanation of the process, see Wikipedia:Deletion review.

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 delete, and allow for possible future re-creation. --Bongwarrior (talk) 02:22, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Prem C. Pandey

An academic who verifiably exists but who does not appear to meet even one of the criteria set out by Wikipedia:Notability (academics). It's conceivable that he meets the sixth, reception of "a notable award or honor" (which of course leaves the meaning of "notable" open to dispute). Certainly the article claims that he has won a variety of awards, but there's no straightforwardly presented evidence that he has won any that look more as if they might be "notable", while those that look less as if they are "notable" (such as Hari Om Asharam Prerit Vikram Sarabhai Award) tend to have recent edit histories that show considerable input from the users and/or IPs that have so vigorously contributed to this article on Pandey.

I hope that I am not in breach of "CIVIL" if I say that, its subject aside, this article strikes me as a godawful mess. I fully realize that godawful messiness is not a reason for deletion, and that messy articles on worthwhile subjects should be improved, not deleted. The article's history will show that on 25 January I made a concerted effort on just one part of the article: its references. These were a grotesque and incomprehensible mishmash before I set to work; I pruned out the obviously superfluous and came up with a list that I venture to say is understandable. However, in doing this I found that most of the links I left in did no more than quote Pandey as the person answering a reporter's inquiries. As I understood it, he's a respectable but minor academic who once ran a research institution.

Since then, the article has deteriorated considerably. More particularly, one or two editors have let nothing -- automated messages from bots, personal messages from humans such as me, lurid CSS coloring of my personal messages -- dissuade them from adding shovelfuls of links. The greatest number are in the form exemplified by *[[www.ncmrwf.gov.in/imsd/myweb/meso2002 web.htm - 82k]]. This suggests to me that the person adding them not only is clueless about the mechanics (as well of course as rights and wrongs) of adding external links but also may not even have looked at what's (incompetently) linked to, instead simply pasting this stuff in from lists of ghits, all in a desperate and undiscriminating effort to demonstrate more and more significance for the subject of the article.

Since the "contributors" to this article seem uninterested in any advice that they're given, I have no reason to expect that the article will improve; and, as I've said, the subject of the article seems on the "nn" side (though a respectable academic who I hope and expect would be horrified by the promotional activity). -- Hoary (talk) 10:32, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions and in WikiProject Deletion sorting/India. -- Hoary 10:41, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. However, I may reconsider if the article is cleaned up during the AfD period. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 14:01, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as non-notable academic. ~~Some of the claims also seem fictitious, including that he is the founder or director of the NCAOR, as no mention of him is made on their website [1].~~ Teleomatic (talk) 16:06, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: I was the other editor, working with Hoary to clean up up the article and to try to coach the actual contributors to this article. As Hoary stated, none of this coaching was paid any attention to or even acknowledged. (One has been blocked) I have no reason to expect that the article will improve. Toddst1 (talk) 16:16, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
delete thanks due to Hoary & Toddst1 for trying to fix this article, despite their efforts, it's unacceptably poor. It seems like the path to improvement is through deletion. Given the veracity problem raised by Teleomatic I'm unable to take the claims made in the article at face value, and the article's sourcing is just too nutbar to expect the general WP readership to deal with. Pete.Hurd (talk) 21:25, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Several of the pages that were also created by the same persons look like they need cleanup aor deletion. See, for instance Exceptional Scientific Achievment Medal, which even cites NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal!! --Crusio (talk) 22:17, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment:Telomatic, followed by Pete.Hurd, doubts the veracity of the page, and in particular whether he has been the founder or director of NCAOR. It seems he was Director until January 2006, and The Hindu was calling him "founder-Director of NCAOR" in early 2005.Dsp13 (talk) 01:54, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch - it seems I was a little hasty in drawing conclusions. I still feel notability is an issue however.Teleomatic (talk) 00:26, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. Also, a duplicate article was created with the inexplicable title of Imtial. JuJube (talk) 06:11, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Update One of the main contributors has just wiped out the vast majority of the article -- including the that part of the references that I'd spent twenty minutes rewriting (sniff!) -- and within a few minutes also made such edits as this. Mysterious. Incidentally, the text of that editor's user page comes as a bit of a surprise, though of course he/she may just have been using it as a "sandbox". -- Hoary 06:43, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. There seems to be some serious WP:COI issues attached to this page, not to mention the issue of notability. The edit history suggests that it was created by Dr. Pandey himself (see the user names), and if User:Ekbal_anuj is, as the user page suggests, simply another account creation for Dr. Pandey to promote his own article, that's wrong as well. J Readings (talk) 07:26, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Er, not quite. Yes, the article was first created (as this incomprehensible stub) by somebody whose name suggests he was Dr Pandey -- but a different Dr Pandey; this one. -- Hoary (talk) 07:38, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the well-argued nom. AfD is not cleanup, but when an article is this bad, the creator is apparently unwilling or unable to take advice on improving it, there's no real prospect of another editor fixing it in the near future, and the subject is marginally notable at best, I think it's reasonable to make an exception. Deletion should, of course, be without prejudice to an experienced editor writing a more coherent article which establishes notability. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 21:07, 7 February 2008 (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.