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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/EHealth

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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 keep. Nominator has withdrawn so there are no arguments for deletion aside from one outstanding delete !vote. The issue of merging can be discussed on the article's talk page. (non-admin closure) Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:09, 16 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EHealth

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EHealth (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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Neologism with no well-defined definition. (otoh, see http://www.jmir.org/2005/1/e1/ for a detailed review of usage of the term.) SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:12, 9 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Change recommendation to Merge to health informatics. This is an ambiguously defined neologism that in its various meanings either means health informatics or a subset of health informatics. While there may be nuances, I find it is sufficiently synonymous. At present, the article is a collection of definitions (dictionary entry). Unless the term actually reaches a widely accepted definition that is distinct from health informatics, the article will only have the potential to be a content fork. Per the principle of least astonishment, eHealth redirecting to health informatics is less unusual than a collection of definitions.
I am impressed by the improvements that were triggered by the deletion discussion, but I still do not see that there is a discrete topic that is unique from existing content. A term with variable meanings that are either the whole of or some subset of a better established topic should be discussed in the context of the established subject.Novangelis (talk) 15:59, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Both this article and health informatics are in a poor state and I wholeheartedly support Novangelis' attempts to improve them. I just don't feel a merger is the right approach. Bondegezou (talk) 10:54, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. As Bondegezou points out, it's an extremely widely used term which has been in common use for at least a decade. There are 488 Medline hits for ehealth and 760 for e-health, including reviews focusing on the topic going back to 2001 (eg [4], [5], [6]). Terms which appear in the titles of academic journals (per above) and international societies ([7]) are in no way neologisms. There are also around 60 incoming wikilinks. There is an element of a fuzzy definition at the moment, but I see no reason why the article can't be used to explain the different areas that the term encompasses and point to more detailed articles on obvious sub-areas, such as telemedicine. In my experience this is a rather poorly covered area in the encyclopedia. Espresso Addict (talk) 12:32, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I'm afraid eHealth clearly is a neologism. The academic sources, to which you refer, call it such. Any article that begins, "X is a relatively recent term..." is about a neologism. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. The purpose of an article is to discuss a specific topic, not to assemble lists of the ways a term has been applied. We need to wait for a generally accepted definition before there can be a topic upon which to write an article.Novangelis (talk) 14:15, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Yes, "e-health" is a neologism in the sense that it's a term that no-one used in the 1980s. However, the term has over 11 years of documented use now. The point of WP:NEO, Wikipedia's policy on neologisms (a sub-section of Wikipedia is not a dictionary), is not to ban articles on any term that was once a neologism, but to be careful about very new terms. WP:NEO states, "Some neologisms can be in frequent use, and it may be possible to pull together many facts about a particular term and show evidence of its usage on the Internet or in larger society. To support an article about a particular term or concept we must cite reliable secondary sources such as books and papers about the term or concept". In other words, it's basically WP:GNG: "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article." The article cites multiple reliable secondary sources about the term: I've just added some more and yet more are available. We do not "need to wait for a generally accepted definition before there can be a topic upon which to write an article". I can't see any policy that says that. What we need is "significant coverage in reliable sources", which we've got. And there is a generally accepted range of definitions for this term; there's just an ongoing debate over how specific the term should be. Bondegezou (talk) 16:55, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment There is a fundamental definition: an article has to be about something. The term "podcast" is newer, but it is has a clear subject for an article. As it had been written, this article was about eight things, six of which had articles. That is how content forks develop. If there were a predominant definition that did not duplicate another term for which there was an article, at least there would be a topic for an article. JMIR calls itself "the leading eHealth journal", so it may not meet the criterion "independent of the subject". As of the latest version I have seen, I find the following problems:
  1. too much use of a single journal (five of six references) which has linked itself to the neologism;
  2. too much reliance on a single source (Oh, 2005);
  3. too much copied directly from that source (this gets into plagiarism issues);
  4. reliance upon the source for the citation of copied definitions (copyright/fair use issues);
  5. no sources more recent than 2006 (how do you show that the term hasn't become archaic without ever having become defined?).
Copyright requires prompt action. The Oh article is covered under Creative Commons, so nothing is required other than keeping a proper citation. The quoted definitions may be under copyright. Satisfying these problems may not be enough to establish that there is a clear topic and not a vague neologism. At present, my recommendation to delete remains, but I will continue to evaluate. I want you to succeed, but I don't think the odds are in your favor.Novangelis (talk) 19:34, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
There are absolutely, definitely problems with this article. It needs work. If you see any copyright infringement issues, please do correct them a.s.a.p.; I can't see any myself. However, such issues do not pertain to the notability of the article topic and are tangential to an AfD. It seems to me that a Wikipedia article on a topic citing a leading academic journal on that topic is precisely what Wikipedia should do rather than a failure of independence, as you suggest. If you look at WP:GNG, it defines "Independent of the subject" as "excludes works produced by those affiliated with the subject including (but not limited to): self-publicity, advertising, self-published material by the subject, autobiographies, press releases, etc." The purpose of the phrase is to stop people or organisations promoting themselves. I don't see its role as being to exclude a reputable academic journal in a topic area. You might want to take that discussion to WP:Notability/Noticeboard given it's more general nature. Note, I have a possible conflict of interest in that I am an unpaid section editor for JMIR. As I indicated above, this is the field I work in.
As for the initial point of your last comment, e-health is about something. It's a broad term that includes a number of more specific topics. I remain befuddled as to why something with over 18,000 hits in Google Scholar remains up for debate. Bondegezou (talk) 13:46, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No one is debating that the term eHealth has been used. You define it as a broad term that includes several other topics, but there are other definitions out there. The difference between a term and a subject for an article is simple: if there is a synonym (not necessarily exact) for a term, and an article exists, you do not create a second article. The broad definition is virtually indistinguishable from health informatics, at which point this becomes a content fork. Your present discussion of the term is making me think of changing my recommendation to redirect (which should have been my initial recommendation), or possibly even merge (the collection of definitions illuminates the terminology problem), to health informatics. I recently tried helping an editor who wanted to use Wikipedia to standardize some informatics terminology. As I had to explain to him, Wikipedia reflects standards, but does not set them. I see this same problem repeating itself. I am not impugning JMIR as a reliable source, in general, but basing an article on one journal's attempts to define its own subject is not reflective of broad usage, especially when other definitions exist.
As for the copyright issue, some of the individual definitions in the article you copied from may be under copyright. I see no problem with using the definitions under fair use, but they must be attributed. I'm no expert on copyright rules. It may be that one reference to the article that compiled them is all that is needed. On the other hand, it may be that we have to attribute each definition to the source. This is not a crisis, but should not be ignored.Novangelis (talk) 15:16, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
To answer your points in reverse order... I did not add the material about which you have copyright concerns. As I said above, I'm not the primary author of this article. Until yesterday, I was mostly just keeping spam out of it. Such concerns should not be ignored, I agree, but the matter is separate from this AfD. Perhaps you should take it to the article's Talk page?
The key JMIR citation is the article by Oh et al. This is a systematic review of the term's usage. The whole point of a systematic review is that it is not just one author's or one journal's attempts to define a subject, but that it is a study spanning the entire academic literature.
If "e-health" was only ever used in its broadest sense, then it would make sense to merge it with health informatics and have some sub-section discussing terminology -- I would agree with you there. However, the term's usage is often more specific: there are examples given in the article, and there is discussion of the fluidity of the term given in the article. Bondegezou (talk) 17:41, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I initially did not propose redirection because some of the definitions are not synonyms. That was an error. No one would ever be shocked typing in "eHealth" and winding up on the health informatics page. Since eHealth can mean health informatics or some subset, a redirection would not be out of line. The content fork remains an issue. A collection of definitions is not the basis for a stand-alone article. The definitions might be merged into a section in health informatics called "eHealth" and read something like: "The term eHealth is used in several contexts. While it can be synonymous with health informatics,...". eHealth would redirect either to health informatics or directly to that section.Novangelis (talk) 18:08, 11 August 2010 (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.
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