Talk:The Prevention of Genocide

Notability

Hi, and thanks for reviewing The Prevention of Genocide. I was a bit surprised that you queried the book's notability. It seems to me to meet Wikipedia:Notability (books)#Criteria 1 and 4 (and arguably also 3, if genocide studies is an "art form"). If you still think the book fails Wikipedia:Notability (books), please could you let me know why? Alternatively, if you now agree that it does meet Wikipedia:Notability (books), please could you remove the notability template you added to the article? Thanks! zazpot (talk) 21:14, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Basically, the book might be notable but no one can tell from the article because it's three sentences long. You verify that it appears in four course syllabi and it is summarized in two books, but the conclusory statement that it's a notable work is WP:SYNTH, which is you making a conclusory statement and hence is not an adequate claim (a neutral third-party source saying it is might be). You have to provide more material and flesh out the article. Look for things like book reviews, citation in peer-reviewed literature, WorldCat lists of how many libraries carry it and so on. Also, it is useful to explain something about the book itself. (For an example, The Power Elite might be an article that shows you how a nonfiction book article might be structured). The notability tag is an aid to show you where the article needs improvement. Montanabw^(talk) 21:22, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, Montanabw, I am still puzzled by your take on this! I think you might be conflating two distinct matters:

1. Whether the subject of the article is notable.
2. Whether the article is encyclopaedic.

As far as I can tell, these are unrelated matters. My question to you was solely about the former. I hope this makes sense! With that context, I will address your key points:

• "You verify that it appears in four course syllabi and it is summarized in two books". Yes, and according to Wikipedia:Notability (books)#Criteria 4 and 1, respectively, that suffices to establish that the book is notable enough to have an article in Wikipedia. This addresses the first matter in my list above.
• "the book might be notable but no one can tell from the article because it's three sentences long ... You have to provide more material and flesh out the article." This is where I feel you have conflated the two matters in my list above. I agree that the article is not yet encyclopaedic and needs fleshing out - that is why I marked it as a stub - but I respectfully disagree that the article's comprehensiveness has any bearing upon the notability of the subject of the article. Specifically, Wikipedia:Notability (books)#Criteria does not require the article to be of any particular length or depth. (See also: WP:DEMOLISH.)

If you still think I am mistaken about this, please could you point to Wikipedia policies or guidelines that corroborate your point of view? Thanks, zazpot (talk) 21:40, 12 December 2016 (UTC)