Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Drum RNA motif

Drum RNA motif

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Primary source only. No secondary sources for this scientific claim. Too soon for wikipedia. rsjaffe 🗩 🖉 02:59, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Biology-related deletion discussions. rsjaffe 🗩 🖉 02:59, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - @Rsjaffe: How is an academic journal a primary source? --awkwafaba (📥) 13:12, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: @Awkwafaba: academic journals are a weird case. They are refereed and therefore carry approval by a professional independent of the author (a characteristic of secondary sources). But the first time a scientist discovers a new concept, and thinks up a name for it, it's their personal new idea, albeit approved by a referee as professional, interesting and valuable. There is no guarantee that a particular idea will turn out to be important, and there's no guarantee that the terminology used by the idea's inventor will actually be adopted. In this sense, the article that first described the idea, or introduced new terminology, is primary. When other articles write about the same ideas, and people write review articles discussing the concepts that the first author described, and the review articles use the same terminology, then we have secondary sources. The point is this: academic journals are considered reliable sources, but not everything that appears in an academic journal is automatically notable for WP. If it makes it through to review articles and genuine secondary sources, notability is much more likely. RNA structure isn't my thing, so I'm not going to hazard a guess at this one. Elemimele (talk) 14:45, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I'm only finding three instances where a paper cited the article that apparently introduced the "drum" term and actually used it. By itself, that wouldn't be enough to justify a page. I'm also concerned about a possible conflict of interest, since the article was created by Zashaw and the first author on the only reference is Zasha Weinberg. XOR'easter (talk) 17:41, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
And Zashaw has created what seems to be 100s of pages that are based on original research from his/her/their lab that has not been verified/duplicated elsewhere. See WP:SCHOLARSHIP. rsjaffe 🗩 🖉 18:44, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment It gets worse: Category:Non-coding_RNA has DOZENS of "motifs" with the same single-author source. Either they're all notable, or NONE of them are. This needs attention from an expert, I think. PianoDan (talk) 18:29, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I couldn't agree more. RNA structure is desperately important and interesting, but it needs to be dealt with in a balanced manner covering the global state-of-the-art, and we need one or more experts who can sort out the genuinely notable from the TooSoon and the trial-ideas that will fall by the wayside. Elemimele (talk) 20:46, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I have responded to these concerns here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Hundreds_of_RNA_motif_pages . I believe that rsjaffe added this issue at that location in response to the comments raised here in this nomination for deletion (specifically the perceived conflict of interest, and the fact that it affects multiple Wikipedia articles). I think we might as well continue the discussion in one place. Zashaw (talk) 14:03, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment As the current head of Rfam, I would like to voice my support for keeping this article, as well as other articles authored by Zasha Weinberg (Zashaw). These articles accompany the entries in the Rfam database of RNA families that capture the data reported in the scientific literature and create computational models to enable identification of these RNAs in any sequence. Rfam staff include trained bioinformaticians and RNA biologists who carefully review all entries and provide additional verification that these RNAs are important (Rfam is not affiliated with Zasha Weinberg or his institution). For example, this Wikipedia article about the Drum RNA is part of the Rfam entry RF02958 and includes an infobox showing metadata from Rfam. Many RNAs discovered by Zasha Weinberg have been later shown to serve important functions, so it is important to have Wikipedia entries that describe what these RNAs are. Having scientists like Zasha Weinberg provide starting points for Wikipedia entries about different RNAs is valuable because these pages are then edited and expanded by the community. In fact, Rfam pioneered the integration with Wikipedia over a decade ago (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013711/), and we found that connecting the scientists and the community through Wikipedia has been very successful. Antonipetrov (talk) 14:46, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]