Talk:Eli Whitney Students Program

Merge to Yale College?

First, I removed the {{notability}} from the article, since the coverage in the New York Times is sufficient for the general notability guidelines. I agree that additional independent sources would be useful to the article.

That said, my concern is whether this should really be a stand-alone article, or whether it should be merged into Yale College. Since there's a section on residential colleges at the YC article, it would also make sense to mention this program, which parallels the colleges. It would also beef up a short article at YC—a medium-sized article would take the place of two short ones. This title would remain as a pointer to the section there.

Accordingly, I'm formally proposing a merge. Please comment here. —C.Fred (talk) 22:39, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your help with this page. There are two main points of contention which I would like to discuss here: 'independent' sources and a tentative page merger. Regarding the supposed independence of sources, there really is none at the absolute level. Are we to fool ourselves for a moment that the NYT or WSJ are truly independent, that being a publicly-traded, for-profit newspaper doesn't to some degree (no matter how remote) color integrity? Of course it would be ludicrous to posit that these venerable syndicates do not do quality reporting, at least as we are accustomed to in the mainstream. But there are most certainly conflicts of interest arising frequently in such places and they do indeed affect the product. Likewise, is the Yale Daily News really a part of Yale University? Technically the answer is yes, the YDN is not a truly independent news outlet. However, the YDN and Yale University deliberately disconnect themselves for the sake of preserving freedom of speech. At Yale, upholding free speech is perhaps one of the university's most (even thee most) sacred tenets. As a result, the YDN reports daily on topics which have the potential to harm Yale's reputation. It is the oldest diurnal college newspaper in the country and is a springboard for the careers of many future editors and journalists at NYT and the WSJ. So overall its a slippery slope for you and other editors to impose demands upon contributors requiring "independent" sources when the term has an ambivalent connotation. Yes, there are some more articles out there from outside Yale (I will shortly be adding a citation from the WSJ) that can add further quality. But for now we must be content with the fact that the program is small, has little outside coverage, but nonetheless remains an important facet of Yale (just as it has been for 25 years). As editors and contributers it should not be our position to try and change this reality. So I'd ask that editors question whether some of this speaks to the unfortunate dark side of Wikipedia: small/obscure topic bias. When there are few articles and few collaborators on a topic one is tempted in an open-source forum to treat it with disdain in favor of topics that allow for larger collaboration. But as I said before, collaboration is not necessarily truth and Wikipedia needs to be self-critical in that regard.

On the issue of merger, I think this may be a bad idea. First, the EWSP is a distinct program in Yale College and as such it merits its own page in which key characteristics and facts can be appropriately enumerated. Tying it into a larger Yale College article takes away from this distinction (as well as a need to disseminate new information on Wikipedia about this program-info. that has been missing for too long). That said I would not be opposed to a merger at a significantly later date, after further input from others and after greater exposure of the page as a stand-alone piece.