Talk:Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Engineering

Merger

Per [1] on WikiProject Universities, departments and degree programs within universities lacking non-affiliated citations generally do not fulfill notability criterion for organizations. Because Wikipedia is not a directory and this article is just an indiscriminate, incomplete, or outdated list of notable as well as non-notable faculty members and alumni, it should be merged into its entry on MIT School of Engineering. When the entry on that article has grown in scope or notability (by including history, research programs/centers and accomplishments, notable faculty and alumni), it may warrant an independent article at a later time. Barring any future debate, the merger will occur on August 28, 2007. Madcoverboy 05:27, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Strongly object. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is not "an indiscriminate, incomplete, or outdated list" or anything, nor is it about a "department[]" or "degree program[]". It does not list any unnotable researchers. Have you even read the article? 121a0012 00:17, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Not only have I read the article, but because I've likely read and contributed to more MIT-related articles than you, I know that the "state of the topic" is very poor and in need of dramatic improvement by centralizing and standardizing coverage, style, referencing, topical-links. If you want to make a case for not merging the article, you could have certainly cited the number of third-party publications about the lab(s) or the number of wikipedia articles linking there or made a case involving the compelling history, numerous research accomplishments, or quantity of accomplished researchers and graduates, but as these types of information are neither present in your argument, this article, nor the separate stubs, er, "articles" for LCS, AI lab, and CSAIL, I believe it is perfectly reasonable to merge the article into the MIT School of Engineering until such time the section can be demonstrated to need a separate article. Madcoverboy 02:11, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

We are obviously reading two different articles, since your description does not remotely match the contents of the article. It would be utterly pointless for me to recite the contents of the article. Now, you could certainly make an argument for merging , and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, since these are all names for what is today one organization, and the resulting merged article would probably flow better than the three separate articles currently do (since they all cover bits of the same history). It would be astonishing to a knowledgeable observer to find CSAIL and RLE mixed in with the numerous other (relatively unknown) labs and centers in the School of Engineering. If you are interested in news coverage of CSAIL, there's a collection of recent news stories at [2] (however, this listing mixes press releases and blog postings with actual news coverage). There is already a list of "accomplished researchers and graduates" right there in the article; I don't need to repeat it here. 121a0012 04:56, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

I have nominated MIT AI Lab and Project MAC to be merged into the CSAIL article and dropped the proposed merger into MIT School of Engineering pending the state of the newly merged article. Let's aim for a merge of the 3 lab articles by August 28 and then take up discussion of merging CSAIL into MIT SoE then. Madcoverboy 19:53, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

I strongly support merging most university department pages but not this exceptionally famous one, and I even ore strongly support merging most individual university interdepartmental laboratories, but to do one of the best known of them all, the AI Lab, would not normally seem not seem the way to go either.DGG (talk) 05:18, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Source Links, General Cleanup

The above conversations do not seem to mention at all that this article is completely devoid of actual content. While all of the programs and such are listed, the most they do is link to the actual MIT pages, with little to no additional content. This is not the purpose of Wikipedia. The overall formatting of this page is also in need of editing - if there is no content behind these programs or departments, they should not each have their own main heading that is then reflected in a Table of Contents. I am adding tags to reflect these issues, and hopefully some more Wikipedians will help add to this article. Kat Malone (talk) 20:47, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Deshpande center logo.jpg

Image:Deshpande center logo.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 19:44, 13 February 2008 (UTC)