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Political change

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Political change (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Page earlier deleted. Recreated with near-empty content. Concept per se does not exist as a subfield of political science; all political science is the study of political change. Please note that a google test obviously will not work for something which is a common phrase but a non-notable subject for an article. In the absence of a common definition or field of study that this article would encompass, any contributions would obviously be OR, like it is now. Has been a stub since creation 10 months ago. Prod removed by creator. Hornplease 06:14, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

  • Neutral. It does appear to be a common term in political science. I don't see how contributions would be OR when Google Scholar alone finds 91,400 uses of the term (examples). I'm sure it can be reliably expanded. Part of the problem seems to be it wasn't tagged as part of any Wikiproject (I have now done this). Dbromage  06:38, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Err, I did mention that Google is not a reliable indicator for a common phrase, right? Hornplease 07:50, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Err, I did mention its use in Google Scholar which is a good indicator of scholarly usage rather than overall Ghits. Dbromage  08:00, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Naturally, I include Google scholar in my concerns that "hits" are an inappropriate indicator. Using a phrase is not an indication that that phrase deserves an article. For example, "full strength" gets a similar number of google scholar hits. But naturally, it would not be a reasonable article title, as there is no coherent article that can be formed around all the uses of this phrase. "Political change" is a similar problem. Article titles in the social sciences are completely devoid of information in some sense; a doctoral thesis I just read was titled "three articles on structural change", but of course that was a catch-all phrase and one of the articles was about decolonisation in Algeria, one on postcolonial theory, and one on linguistic modification. Hornplease 08:14, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
And every single book you cite will have a definition of political change for the purposes of the book. It is the sort of phrase that is a free-floating signifier which people use to clarify their arguments. For example "a conception of political change" should be read as "a useful concept, which I shall henceforth refer to as 'political change'". The author would be surprised to learn that we think it has external validity. Hornplease 08:17, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
That still doesn't support your assertion that some hypothetical future contribution to the article would "obviously be OR" when it hasn't happened yet. Any OR can be dealt with editorially. Putting it another way "If the article contains OR, trim it.". You also haven't explained why the subject is not notable (see WP:JNN) or which (if any) Misplaced Pages policies the current article violates. The nomination seems rather flawed. Dbromage  08:25, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
No evidence has been provided that there is a coherent article that can be formed under this heading. The first line of WP:N is that "..no original research is needed to extract the content." This is a poster case of where the only way that content could be 'extracted' is to write OR. Political change is too amorphous a phrase to be a reasonable article title. Any content - like the current stub - would be OR.Hornplease 08:40, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
No evidence has been provided that there isn't a coherent article that can be formed under this heading since it hasn't been written yet. As I said above, any OR can be dealt with editorially. We still only have your assertion that "any content" would be OR. "If the article contains OR, trim it" seems reasonable. Dbromage  08:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
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