Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Uncertain data

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 no consensus. Cirt (talk) 04:37, 3 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Uncertain data

As the editor who removed the {{prod}} tag from this article noted, "uncertain data", generates more than 50,000 Google hits. But "suspect data" generates more than 60,000 hits, as does "questionable data". "Bad data" generates more than 850,000 hits. And "yellow paint". An adjective commonly paired with a noun does not make a notable topic. While this article claims that there is more to the term than the adjective modifying the noun, it was created a month ago and nobody (including the creator) has filled it out, despite the request for expansion on the day of its creation. If this is genuinely a term beyond the obvious, then someone rescue it--not with comments on AfD, but with an improvement of the article. Bongomatic (talk) 21:45, 28 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. About 8000 academic papers contain "uncertain data", many of them in the title. Some randomly chosen titles from the 1st Google Scholar page:
- "Working models for uncertain data"
- "Efficient indexing methods for probabilistic threshold queries over uncertain data"
- "Rough-Set Reasoning about Uncertain Data"
- "Indexing multi-dimensional uncertain data with arbitrary probability density functions"
- "A design methodology for databases with uncertain data"

It's quite possible that this article's topic is too general, in which case it should become a dab, but deleting this stub seems quite unreasonable. VG ☎ 22:31, 28 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. The title of the article seems hopelessly vague, and at first I thought it should be deleted for the same reason I would vote to delete good data and crappy data. However, after looking at the article, I see that it has a much more specific scope than I imagined, and is about handling of uncertain data in computer science. As such, it could still be a reasonable topic after all, but I'm not sure because I'm not a computer scientist. I'd rather give it some time to see if it can be expanded into something useful. Perhaps a rename could help as well, but again I have no idea.--Itub (talk) 09:27, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as the creator appears to have abandoned it (i think a month is long enough to wait) and it's unclear what the scope of this article was intended to be, so it seems unlikely anyone else is going to take over. Googling the title of the single reference finds both a workshop presentation and a workshop paper (both clearly linked to the article creator) but neither mentions the subheadings in the article "tuple uncertainty" or "correlated uncertainty", so aren't much help in expanding the article. That reference title involves "imprecise measurement values", which would be a considerably less vague term than uncertain data, but sounds like a synonym for measurement uncertainty or measurement error (which redirects to observational error). Maybe in future someone might want to recreate this uncertain data as a disambiguation page, but the content of the present article isn't going to be any use for that. Qwfp (talk) 11:28, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep I've tried to expand this to make it clear what the scope should be. From the references I've found (I've added a citation to one), it seems to be particularly about the representation of uncertain data in database systems, in terms of probability, and that's what I've concentrated on in my expansion. I think we need an expert on this area to help with this. I've studied probability, and have some knowledge of database theory, but hadn't come across this particular subject before this AfD. Silverfish (talk) 13:04, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Listed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing and Wikipedia:WikiProject Databases. -- Banjeboi 15:58, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Until / unless someone edits this who knows what it is (if it is indeed a real field), there is no reason to keep it. An expert who comes along (before or after this AfD closes) can add to / re-create the article with equal ease. As it is, the article is useless, and as Qfwp points out (and in contradiction to Itub), it's been long enough to wait for someone to come complete the basic information originally outlined). Bongomatic (talk) 16:14, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment. Just to clarify - your nomination of the article on top of the page seems to make this a second vote - not sure if that was intended. -- Banjeboi 04:41, 30 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Abstain/comment I tagged this article for expert attention since I suspect none of us have any clue about the subject matter :) Themfromspace (talk) 03:35, 1 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Good point. It is not a useful encyclopedia entry where after reading it a bunch of intelligent people have no clue as to the subject matter. Hence the delete vote unless the entry is meaningfully improved. Bongomatic (talk) 07:10, 1 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Keep. Found 8000+ hits on Google scholar[1], including nearly 400 with "Uncertain data" in the title. Google books has nearly 900 hits[2]. Per WP:AfD if an article can be improved through regular editing it is not a good candidate for deletion. Clarity, sourcing and expanding are all considered regular editing. AfD and rescuing does not require other editors to fix an article but to show that it is fixable and sources exist. -- Banjeboi 19:31, 1 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, too general a term to write a properly-cited article about. Stifle (talk) 15:50, 2 October 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.