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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 no consensus. This is clearly expandable, although it may be worth revisiting in the future. I was considering a soft redirect in the meantime but I think it'd be more likely to be improved if left in its current state. Tagged for expansion. Black Kite 22:00, 16 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Performance report

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Performance report (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)
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Completing nom for IP per request: IP'S reason was: The page is patently a dicdef, and clearly has no potential for expansion. There is one other article linking to it, and even that is not referring to the subject of said "article". ThaddeusB (talk) 02:18, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Strong keep - as I tried to explain to the IP, we don't judge articles by their current state, but rather their potential. The idea that a performance report is non-notable seems down right absurd to me. The performance report is a major, significant part of the modern business world. It affects millions of peoples lives every year. Entire books have been written on the subject - both from the employer and the employees prospective. There is massively possibility for expansion here and deleting the article because it is currently barely more than a definition would be flat out wrong. --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:22, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • [citation needed]. I've not seen, heard of, or been able to find use of, the term "performance report" to represent the specific context of this article, i.e. a qualitative government report. It appears to be incorrect - it is suggesting that qualitative reports are called "performance reports", and quantitative ones "financial reports". The government's "financial report" will include details of its finances, not data such as the crime rate, etc. At best this stub is misinformed, at worst it's Sokalesque. If the topic is so important, it stands to reason that it would be linked from all sorts of places - mainspace-wise this page is an orphan. It has some random talk page links arising from it being on the {{admin dashboard}} as a result of being prodded for 7 days, which will disappear once the relevant bot has updated it. In summary, there seems to be no reason to keep this article as it is. 81.110.104.91 (talk) 02:52, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A quick search reveals that "performance report" is indeed widely used to describe, as you put it, a "qualitative government report". The second part of your argument is invalid - a topic is not judged by how many incoming links it has (but if it was, I have already demonstrated below that this one would have 100+ if every usage of it was wikilinked). --ThaddeusB (talk) 03:05, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A quick search reveals no such thing, as you'd know if you even bothered to check the results before posting them. Result #2: "Iraq utilities falls short of prewar performance: report". Most of these results refer to quantitative reports, measured against previous numbers or targets. If we believe the article as it stands, these are "financial reports". For future reference, incoming links is actually a very good measure of importance. Important topics invariably have lots of them (there used to be something called Special:Wantedpages which kept track of non-existent articles that were redlinked from lots of places). Yes, we consider potential state, but your argument is based entirely on potential, without any hint of how it develops. 81.110.104.91 (talk) 03:48, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. The article currently only talk about performance reports in context of the government, which is obviously not the only usage.
For the record 174 articles use the term (with some false postives). --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:36, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: this is the IP who requested this listed and thus is not a different opinion than the nomination statement.
Another invalid argument here - that it hasn't been edited much is completely irrelevant as to whether it is notable or not. --ThaddeusB (talk) 03:05, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
According to you. Activity is a sign of interest, which is a sign that someone has something to say about it, which is a requisite of notability. 81.110.104.91 (talk) 03:48, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Keep as boring and unvisited as the page may be, that fact that no one is working on it is not ipso-facto proof of non-notability nor reason to delete, as there is no deadline for improvement. And yes, pointing to g-hits[1] is not an ipso-facto proof of notability, but as guideline allows, it might be used as a simple indicator that sources toward expansion might exist. For reason of expansion, the term is not limited to governmental usage. The subject is covered in The stage management handbook, Professional Practice for Interior Designers, Financial and Business Statements, Schaum's outline of theory and problems of cost accounting, Airman's Guide, Performance measurement explained, and literally hundreds of other books. Boring? Certainly. Expandble? Definitely. Notable? Yup. It may take a lot of work to bring this article to Wikipedia's encyclopedic standards, but its being in need of expansion and cleanup is not a vaild reason to delete. MichaelQSchmidt (talk) 04:11, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yet again, check your damn results before posting them. They refer to three different contexts. You appear to be confusing "significant coverage" with "happens to contain the words". That nobody is working on it doesn't usually say much. That nobody has ever added content to it in the three years it's been here, however, is pretty damning. 81.110.104.91 (talk) 04:31, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • Wow. Advising me to check my damn results seems a tad harsh, as my search results were offered to specifically show the term having uses other than what is currently in the stub, thus showing that the stub may be improved. And though you are free to disagree, I find that in so many books, finding entire chapters devoted to explaining the term in detail and in its various contexts to be most assuredly significant. In addressing your opinion that the article would be impossible to expand, I wished to share my own opinion that expanding the article to encompass the term in its various contexts, would improve the encyclopedia. And again, the fact that no one is working on it is not a valid reason to delete. With there being nearly 3 million articles on Wikipedia, the project accepts that not every article is perfect and does not demand we all jump over and fix it simply because it needs work. Thank you. MichaelQSchmidt (talk) 06:01, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Performance reports are used in the public sector because government bodies usually do not operate commercially and so their financial accounts will just show that they spent the money that they were allocated. To establish whether this was money well-spent, measures of output or performance are required. I shall add a citation to nail the matter. Colonel Warden (talk) 06:50, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • "Performance" is important to any organization, commercial or otherwise. Wholesalers and distributors will want to know how effective their sales force is. An IT support business will want to know how quickly issues are resolved, and how the hardware they manage is holding up. A piecework factory will want to know how low their turnaround times are. An assembly line will want to know how consistent their turnaround times are. We can start by saying the "Performance reports are reports measuring performance", but then we break down for lack of a coherent definition of "performance". This means we end up with either a seemingly-endless list of things which can be considered "performance reports", or a very short (possibly empty) list of examples that are unequivocally "performance reports" and nothing else. Finally, nobody has suggested that these documents, as a class, are notable in and of themselves, independent of other aspects of the reports, and independent of related fields of endeavour - metrics, indicator selection, business intelligence, reporting software, etc. So, we at least have "Performance reports are reports on an organization's performance", which tells us nothing we didn't already suspect. One cannot slay the demon one does not recognise. 81.110.104.91 (talk) 00:18, 10 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - This should be in Wiktionary me thinks as it just reads like a definition -- Cabe6403 (Talk•Sign) 14:50, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete I would not ordinarily want to delete an expandable article--but every dicdef is in principle expandable, and unless we merge wikitionary in Wikipedia (which personally I sometimes think might not be a bad idea) there is no point in merging something as minimal as this. DGG (talk) 15:34, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
but yes, I suppose it could be expanded, changed to Weak Keep' DGG' ( talk )
  • Dictionaries catalog words not topics. Our topic is not any particular word but is described by phrases such as performance report, performance reporting, performance review and the like. These phrases do not appear in the OED at all and are about as unlike a dictionary entry as they can be, for a starting stub. There are hundreds of books and government documents which discuss this topic at great length so if our article is compartively short this is just because no-one has yet fleshed it out. Please see our policy, WP:DICDEF, "One perennial source of confusion is that a stub encyclopedia article looks very much like a stub dictionary article, and stubs are often poorly written. Another perennial source of confusion is that some paper dictionaries, such as "pocket" dictionaries, lead editors to the mistaken belief that dictionary articles are short, and that short article and dictionary article are therefore equivalent.". Colonel Warden (talk) 23:56, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Dictionaries catalog words and phrases also, or at least they ought to. At least in english, the names for some things are not single words, but phrases. But I suppose the article is expandable. DGG ( talk ) 13:35, 11 August 2009 (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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