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I have converted the EU Framework Program for Research and Technological Development article into a redirect page that leads here as the article contained on this pagecorresponds to all Wikipedia standards whereas the other one is simply redundant and "unencyclopaedic". RedZebra 16:48, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I started removing the over-promotional language, removing PR jargon to make a more effective discussion. This in an encyclopedia, not a promotional web site. There's still some more to go. I added subheads, but references are needed for the criticism section, and a few key terms need internal links. DGG (talk) 23:19, 5 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Apart from being quite sceptical of Muldur et al.'s claims of returns on investment (I doubt the reliabilitiy of a prediction of returns on a current, i.e. 2006, research investment 25-30 years in the future, especially as it pertains to overall impact on GDP growth), I believe this article still needs revision.
Passages such as:
"There are also the intangible result of providing incentive to face the intrinsic complexity of international collaborations."
("Sounds like it's good, why? Because we say so." And btw, what exactly is the point of this claim?)
"Changes triggered by research policy directly affect people and enterprises, which experience broader horizons and experience the advantages of international collaboration."
(Well the fact that changes caused by research effect people and businesses is hardly surprising... Apart from that: the "advantages" of collaboration could actually be downsides/failures, if the collaboration goes awry?)
"Diversity introduces additional costs, but it facilitates addressing competitors in an even more diverse world."
(How exactly does diversity facilitate addressing competitors? And again what exactly is the point of this passage? And what does it actually mean?)
"This complements the institutional activities of the EU, building a community united in diversity capable of facing the challenges of a globalized world."
(Well hurrah, bring out your blue & star banners... Why is this here? It sounds more like a promotional slogan than an encyclopedic entry) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mojowiha (talk • contribs) 23:03, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like government-speak justifying the political correctness of the grants favoring collaboration across countries that speak diferent languages and have different cultures. This is probably worth mentioning, because indeed diversity had both advantages and challenges. But needs to in plain English and not obfuscated promotion. W Nowicki (talk) 18:05, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The projects - articles for deletion, merge or keep[edit]
When I saw a few of the projects up for deletion, I started merging the one line about each that had some info into this article. The articles generally read like the promotional language of the grant applications, not appropriate for Wikipedia. It seems there are many more projects that have articles but do not seem notable, and even more projects that never had articles. See Category:FP5 ProjectsCategory:FP6 Projects and Category:Seventh Framework Programme projects (note inconsistent category naming). I then thought about a table, but if there are hundreds of projects that could get unwieldy. Perhaps one idea would be a general discussion of the thrusts of each program, if we can cut through the government-speak. For example, I noticed many projects on "Grid computing" which was trendy at the time. There was even a FP6 Grid Computing Projects list article with a table already. And the List of grid computing projects list which should probably go, since the term quickly got untrendy. Any thoughts? W Nowicki (talk) 18:05, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Many articles analogous to ISTAG exist, including Webinos and SUPER. Many are currently flagged for deletion, and the discussions I have seen, especially on the two pages mentioned, are converging towards deletion or, where the possibility is mentioned, merging with Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development. Most or all of the articles seem to reflect these instructions. Many more such articles exist but have not been flagged. All these articles are peers and should be handled in a consistent way; in my opinion by merging them here. Naming all the constituent projects in a table is probably not necessary. Appropriate External References would suffice. After all, this topic is about FPRTD handling its own publicity rather than leveraging Wikipedia. Ornithikos (talk) 03:55, 5 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this way of handling them, except of course, for any projects which are actually notable, though I'm not sure what the criteria should be. At the least any projects with substantial discussions about the project by 3rd party RSs will meet the GNG. I doubt this applies to most of them.
Third-party sources must be used carefully. Those that I've seen so far in this connection look like press releases from the same sources that created the nonqualifying articles. I think the plan is to create a furore about each project, then justify each component of the furore by citing other components as independent sources. Perhaps "substantial discussions ... by 3rd party RSs" excludes such bootstrapping; I don't know what an RS is in this context. Ornithikos (talk) 01:34, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I must say that I deeply disagree with the reasons expressed for deleting project articles in general, and for some specific reasons stated; in my opinion they show a misunderstanding of the rules and purpose of wikipedia, and they will prevent to document the way things work for EU projects (or worked for the past 10 years). I might be the one at fault though, so I'll elaborate the concept. I stumbled on the issue as I discovered the recent deletion of a project which is not even mentioned in this talk page. I also state in advance that I'm no english native speaker, so ignore the "tone" of my writing where it seems odd, offensive or whatever: I apologize in advance. --Max-CCC (talk) 04:17, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that some projects have articles and some others have not is no good reason to discard all project articles; similarly, the practical issues of creating a summary page is no good reason to remove the project pages. While creating a standard is good, wikipedia is based on user contribution: you don't rule out useful contribution cause it doesn't fit your standard, you discuss the standard and convince contributors to adopt it.
That some projects have self-advertising pages IS a good reason to delete them; however, this is to be discussed and done on each project page, and motivated on the ground of the specific page. Just placing a redirect and summarizing as you see fit places one criteria of notability and importance (which it was noted it is quite difficult to state what it should be) above that of the contributors of many other pages. Not all of them will be wrong, especially if pages have been around and updated for years.
We are all underestimating the value and strength of wikipedia: as each project page was subject to the scrutiny of the wikipedians, it was possible to reach an unbiased corpus of information on EU projects which was much more useful that a simple list of project names with links to their web site (those ARE definitely self-biased). Previous pages for FP5, FP6 projects were evolving, or had the opportunity to evolve, into a form of history of the research in Europe. If instead of discussing the issues of each page, they are consistently removed, we save a lot of our time but we will actually decrease the usefulness and quality of wikipedia content.
The above is obvious from the comment that many project were based on the Grid buzzword. While the statement is entirely true, this is no reason at all for deleting information. We can discuss how to provide the information, e.g. if a separate list of project related to grid computing still makes sense when there is already a full list for ICT, but the information is factual and useful to evaluate what was the conduction and waht were the outcomes of FP6; how much that buzzword affected the FP. If you remove too much information on the ground that Grid is no longer an active buzzword, you are introducing a recentism. I.e. Grid was a buzzword and wikipedia shall document it some way, as new buzzword are around now, and more will be in the coming years.
One thing is to forbid overambitious, self incensing statements in a page, which I fully agree; another thing is to remove the page cause the project was financed and run, but it did not achieve its utopic target: this is hiding the facts, it should be stated that a grand challenge was failed and to what extent.
In summary, I do not see fit that pages are redirected or voted here skipping a discussion for each one on their talk page. It is too easy to flag one hundred pages for deletion, wait a week and start almost from scratch. IMHO this conduct should be avoided as it fails at matching the spirit of wikipedia as much as self-promotion does. --Max-CCC (talk) 04:17, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Your English is execllent, and input appreciated. However, if you will excuse an idiom, I think you are presenting a straw man argument: what you are arguing against is not what anyone is proposing. Do have any evidence that "one hundred pages" have been flagged for deletion without discussion? There has been discussion for months on many individual articles, and when projects do have evidence of notability they are kept. A merge generally does not require as much discussion since the history is still around, so can be easy retrieved and the article restored without administrator intervention. A claim that articles on "FP5, FP6 projects were evolving" does not have much evidence. Most of the deleted articles were created by single-purpose accounts in the present and future tenses and never updated. For example, the Fifth European Community Framework Programme article history shows almost no improvement to the body from 2006.
It is also odd to accuse me of recentism. I tend to focus on long-term history, so the computer articles I have worked on range from the 1940s and 1950s through the 1970s and 1980s, with anything beyond about 1995 I would consider "recent" in terms of an encyclopedia that is supposed to cover all of recorded history. W Nowicki (talk) 20:48, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
1) I did not accuse anyone personally. What I stated is that the whole operation is built on a wrong assumption IMHO, and as far as I understand several editors are involved, so I had no clue it could be understood as personal. If it seemed so, despite my good will, I apologize here.
2) My statement about FP5, FP6, FP7 was a bit longer, please do not answer to part of a truncated sentence, other wise I'm not the straw man here ;-) . Last time I read it, the FP6 page was a list of projects financed by the EU community, with summary information and links to short pages explaining the topic of the project (advertising stuff was normally evicted per wikipedia policies). That was useful information for anyone willing to understand the evolution of EU-sponsored research in ITC. This is something involving quite a large number of people in EU, there is people accessing the pages long after the projects are gone. If e.g. FP6 project pages were no longer evolving, but they had useful content, deleting them is a for of recentism IMHO.
3) I've said that it's quite easy to delete a hundred pages, (you mentioned a list of hundreds of projects before), it's good to know they are not all deleted. However, I still believe it's wrong to run through the list and try to delete all of them, and I have the impression that this is happening. I noticed that many FP6 and FP7 projects I knew something about lost their page, regardless the page content, and more are nominated, that's the reason of my statement. Although I don't think so, I will check more thoroughly to see if I my impression was wrong, as you have made very precise statement. Thanks for the answer in the meantime, I'll be back when I have a more thorough understanding of what happened, besides the projects (not hundreds) I had the time to check so far. --Max-CCC (talk) 00:00, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The comment about hundreds of projects refers to the fact that that is the number of projects (if not thousands) that exist/have existed. For only a handful of those have articles been created. Even fewer of those have actually any independent sources and meet the notability guidelines. One really wonders why people want to create all these articles for EU-funded research projects. As far as I know, the same does not happen for projects funded by other international programs (such as the Human Frontiers Science Program) or by national programs of comparable size (or even much larger, such as NSF and NIH in the United States). Part of the explanation is probably that researchers are pushed by EU funding agencies to publicize their projects. The existence of canvassing sites telling people to create an article about what their projects hope to achieve (instead of what they have achieved: WP is not a crystal ball) probably also explains the generally low quality of these project articles, which are written in opaque EU-grant-writing language, mostly unsourced, generally hugely overcategorized, full of puffery ("funded by the European Commission"... Why not also add "and 27 national European governments" to make it complete... :-), etc. etc. The reality is that research projects in and of themselves are only seldom notable. Of course, the researchers and institutions participating in these projects can be highly notable and the results of the projects are often good (albeit primary) sources for building WP articles. Given the huge number of (non-notable) projects, I think that the effort of listing them all in some article is unencyclopedic and goes against the letter and spirit of WP:NOTADIRECTORY. The EU Cordis database does all this and there is no need for WP to duplicate Cordis. --Crusio (talk) 11:29, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I may have just stumbled on one 'bad apple' but if one consults the 'Impact' section of the REMPLANET Project (Resilient Supply Networks) I think one may get the gist of the criticism:
'Impact
Both manufacturing enterprise networks and society in general are expected to benefit from the results of REMPLANET. This project will enable manufacturing enterprise networks to be more competitive in an ever increasing globalised economy, through shorter times for innovation, decision taking and manufacturing processes. Society in general will benefit from having more efficient and effective manufacturing enterprises, which will reduce time and resource waste.'
I would say that this is definitely crystal ball material and contains empty stock phrases ('be more competitive in an ever increasing globalised economy') that don't actually tell the reader anything. That a project is conducted in an EU framework and (partly) EU funded is not noteworthy in and of itself; otherwise we ought to flood Wikipedia with similar entries on common Nordic, international, and Latin American research projects etc. etc.
POV: Some of this research is, in my oppinion, pretty obscure, and some is rather thinly veiled industrial policy, not to say indirect subsidies for industry. Note, for instance, the strong focus on applied (natural) science, and the scarcity of basic research and arts/humanities projects (that are not related to such marketable features as improved user interfaces etc.)
I reported there several considerations, and IMO we should
define a criteria of independent sources that can work with EU or other large, international research projects. See there why each own intuitive definition may not work, people and large organizations are not the same.
define a criteria of notability, and associate it to the space given in this page, or to the fact that the project page will still exist in wikipedia. Of course each editor works in bona fide, but there's no line we can draw between (contributing text to the page vs summarizing it) and (edit war).
I guess it's probably quite hard to find any 'objective' criteria for notability in research projects, but a comprehensive list of all projects would seem rather 'unencyclopedic', that's the stuff people should go to for instance the FP or other EU research instruments' websites for. One could in stead list for instance
A) the biggest projects (in terms of funding) as examples of priority research areas for the FPs, or
B) a representative sample showing the diversity of projects;
but we have to be careful not to fall into the 'wonderful, harmonious, world class, competitive EU future' lingo that is typical in the 'sales pitch' of much of this research. EU funded research has, in my oppinion, an important secondary goal of identity building (i.e. it's also EU PR), and as a previous contributor noted, there is often co-funding by states and third parties as well, so the 'funded by the Commission' label could be construed as misleading, if it means omitting other contributors.
But I'm open to arguments in favour of including particular projects, if a reasonable case could be put for their notability; I just doubt whether that is possible to do on anything but a case-by-case basis. The only 'objective' criterion I can come up with off the bat would be number of citations in peer reviewed publications (bibliometrics) which is a dubious proxy at best.
My hope is we can reach a compromise. There is a a minimal Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing which might be a place to have some guidelines for computer projects at least. Just a simple litany that duplicates the CORDIS database is probably not adding value (and would quickly get dated). One idea is to group the projects that are closely related. I put some for example into the European Grid Infrastructure perhaps more could go there. For example, often the same project will get a different name and acronym every few rounds of funding. For a while grid computing is trendy and they all use that, then cloud computing , then who knows what else. A reader then gets a historical narrative of what evolved into what. What I am hoping for is to keep the information only, not the promotion and crystal ball predictions. Although it is sometimes tempting to quote some outrageous predictions that turn out in hindsight be way off the mark. W Nowicki (talk) 20:10, 6 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like you're on to something. :-)
And regarding some of the 'utrageous predictions that turn out in hindsight be way off the mark' , I don't see why they can't be quoted in hindsight - except of course that it wouldn't be very nice. Of course the main reason to quote them would be to compare which parts panned out and which didn't, and that would probably be the dreaded 'original research', unless you happen to have third party sources doing exactly that. Anyway, good luck.
It would help readability if @W Nowicki: would indent his two replies appropriately. I'm tempted to do it (based on the time&date), but talk page rules don't seem to allow me. - Rod57 (talk) 14:20, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"Framework Programme projects are generally funded through instruments, the most important of which are listed below. The application form to apply for grants is formidable, it can take up to 3 months to fill in the forms which are not written in standard UK or US English, but in some jargon that the EU has invented. In many countries such as Sweden you can obtain a 3 month grant to write the grant. The application procedure is made deliberately difficult to employ an army of overpaid bureaucrats. Can the EU afford this? look at Greece."
have no place in a Wikipedia article, and hence should be removed at once. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.168.208.151 (talk) 14:02, 31 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You're right and I've just deleted these blatantly POV assertions (they've been added since I last visited this article). But since it was a simple "delete job", I wonder why you didn't just do it yourself? Also, why not put your complaint in a "new section"?
IClass redirects here, but is not mentioned anywhere in the article.--Fabrictramp(public) (talk) 16:24, 6 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
iClass is yet another FP-project. It belonged to FP6, but has long since been completed as it ran 2004-2008. Its website is no longer active, but a description can (so far) still be found here: http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/telearn/fp6_iclass.htm
Horizon 2020 is simply the 8th instalment of the Framework programmes and should briefly be covered there. No need for independent articles for each 7 year version of this programme, just cover the changes in a single paragraph in the overall article. Randykitty (talk) 13:17, 4 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It's actually already covered here, so I have gone ahead and redirected it. Any other content that might be worth merging here can be found in the article history of Horizon 2020. --Randykitty (talk) 13:23, 4 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Rather than suggest that another user go to the effort of analysing and merging the content from an article that you've just been looking over, perhaps you could have actually merged the content yourself? I don't know how that action was otherwise supposed to help the general reader of Wikipedia, when it essentially replaced an article's worth of reliably sourced content with eight lines of trash. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 22:42, 4 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Or, possibly better, update the summary here and just link with {{summary|...}} to Horizon 2020 ? - Rod57 (talk) 14:08, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
FROG (project) redirects here, but no project by that name is mentioned in this article or in any other article (according to the article previously at that location, "FROG" stands for "Fun Robotic Outdoor Guide"). Would some discussion of that project be a useful addition to this article, or should the redirect be deleted? (Pinging Randykitty who redirected it here.) – Arms & Hearts (talk) 15:39, 25 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
