Talk:Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education

Notability concerns

Hi @BhamBoi! Thanks for creating this page. In order to be retained, we'll need to establish that it meets the notability guideline for organizations, which is commonly interpreted to be a heightened version of the general notability guideline. I did some research attempting to establish that, and unfortunately came up somewhat short.

I first checked the existing references in the article, but basically all seem too closely connected to me — they're either from AASHE or from an organization directly partnering with it.

Next, I checked Google News. There's a flood of press releases from universities bragging about their ranking, e.g. [1][2][3], but those likewise are not usable.

Removing .edu sites from the search yields some slightly better coverage of individual universities' ratings that are at least published by independent outlets, e.g. [4][5][6], but I think some editors might still find those insufficient — they're too closely based on press releases and not enough about AASHE as an organization.

As a last step, I checked two outlets that I'd expect might have coverage, Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. IHE had nothing good and the Chronicle had articles that quoted AASHE, [7][8] but nothing that would meet WP:ORGDEPTH.

Are you able to find other sources? Such sources will be needed, or unfortunately it won't be possible to retain the article at this time. Best, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:22, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

I'll look deeper later tonight, but I think the very large amount of relevant incoming links should show they have a pretty wide influence. BhamBoi (talk) 16:44, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Narrowing a search on Google News: "aashe" OR "Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education" -site:*.edu -site:aashe.org returns a lot (around 2000) of results from middle-quality sources (obviously excluding edu domains and aashe themselves), I think something in there could be used... BhamBoi (talk) 16:49, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

@BhamBoi, I don't doubt AASHE's influence, but on Wikipedia, "notability" has a technical meaning, as defined for this case by WP:NORG, and incoming links aren't sufficient for establishing that; sources are required.

Lmk when you have time later which sources from your search you'd put forward as notability contributors.

If we can't ultimately establish notability, one possible alternative to deletion would be to merge into Sustainability at American Colleges and Universities, an article that has some major issues but for which AASHE would be within scope.

Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:57, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Also if you look at sources from Google Scholar there are a lot more which I think notability may be proven from. BhamBoi (talk) 20:34, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

@BhamBoi, which Google Scholar pieces are you seeing that might contribute to notability? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:53, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Bonney, Makayla J. and Duram, Leslie A. "Applying AASHE STARS to Examine Geography’s “Sense of Place” in Sustainability Education." Journal of Sustainability Education 11 (Apr 2016).

This is reliable (peer-reviewed), in-depth, and is independent because they are not affiliated with AASHE, although AASHE did republish it, but I don't have access from AASHE so I cant tell what they had to say about it or if they only provided a link.

Tisdale, J. K., & Bielefeldt, A. R. (2021, July), Sustainability Incorporation in Courses in Mechanical, Civil and Environmental Engineering: Insights from AASHE STARS Data Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference.

[9] or [10], from ASEE not ASHEE. BhamBoi (talk) 05:47, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

[Non-commercial] organizations are usually notable if they meet both of the following standards: (WP:NONPROFIT)

1. The scope of their activities is national or international in scale. (Y)
2. The organization has received significant coverage in multiple reliable sources that are independent of the organization. (THREE+ (even with the refined search, I still am not including sources directly associated with a member institution): [11][12] (CBC and Higher Ed-related articles related to the ratings of colleges, but covered independently. I found many sources of a college's rating being covered by local news, but these seems to be the most notable of these cases) [13] (AASHE awards covered by an independent source) [14] (having multiple articles on AASHE on this magazine) [15] (Mentioned a lot in this Sierra article) [16] (Coverage in The University Network))

BhamBoi (talk) 17:21, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

They also have their own article on this website: [17] BhamBoi (talk) 18:44, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

@BhamBoi, thanks for doing all that research! I'm satisfied that you've found sources establishing notability. In particular, the two Google Scholar papers look excellent. For some of the others, I still have concerns, which I can enumerate if you're curious, but several seem at least usable as sources, even if not notability-contributing ones.

I've removed the notability tag and replaced it with one indicating that the secondary sources need to be used more in the article.

Also, I notice that you've made a draft for AASHE's journal; I've redirected Sustainability and Climate Change (journal) to here and I'd suggest merging the content from there to this article unless you're confident you can establish notability for the journal, which would likely be even harder than for AASHE.

Please let me know if there's any other way I can help. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:43, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! I'll work on adding the journal to this article. BhamBoi (talk) 18:46, 26 March 2023 (UTC)