Overnight, one other person voted for deletion of the Spirit of Librarianship article I put on Wikipedia as well. So now it's four votes to delete, none to keep and so if you're going to look at the original article, you should do it soon since I'm not sure if it'll exist “behind-the-scenes” once it's deleted.
Let's summarize…
REASONS FOR DELETION
– “Internal award within a University faculty”
– Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
– possible Vanity page
– not (encyclopedically) notable (three votes including one comment that it belongs on the University server”
(MY) REASONS WHY IT SHOULDN'T BE DELETED
– there's basically unlimited space on the site
– there are small villages in rural England that probably have less people than have been nominated for this award over the years yet they have stub entries of a single line at least (my SoL page had three sections, historical background, a description of the process and a photo)
– there are entries for things like reality TV shows and celebrities that are also inconsequential to most people. But because they're widely known via their media exposure, articles about these things aren't challenged and instead are considered “notable”. As an experiment, I created a page for a contestant on a current reality show and as of this typing, it hasn't been challenged in any way.
– although it would seem that a page for the Spirit of Librarianship Award would have a very limited audience, there is potential that someone, somewhere, someday might find the information useful (ie. students at another library school wanting to set-up a similar award.) As a librarian, I always think of the anecdote from a Nicolas Basbanes book about a researcher at Harvard who finds the perfect book for the project he's working on. He opens it up and sees that it was purchased in 1893 and based on the paper “date due slip” sleeve inside the cover, sees that it has apparently not been checked out once since then. He comments to the librarian on this and says “I wonder who the librarian purchased this book for, nearly 100 years ago?” The librarian serving him that day replies, “Why, for you, of course.” Doesn't that sum up librarianship right there?
– they have pages for library-orientated awards (though this one has a connection to ALA and Harvard so I guess that makes it more notable. But again, how do you decide that? At least SoL doesn't have big gaps of 2-3 years where it wasn't awarded unlike the one I link to. That says something as well, I think.)
– …and the most important reason why I think it should be kept. Wikipedia has a stated goal, expressed many times by its founder Jimmy Wales, of capturing the “sum of all human knowledge“. You can't do this if you delete articles. Wikipedia's guidelines say they don't want entries about “your neighbour's dog” but I think they're erring on the side of too much caution when they delete legitimate entries like this one. They say too many non-notable entries will clog or confuse the site but I don't think that's really the case at all.
Some library students (the ones who like cataloguing 
) might fall on the side of deleting it to help maintain “bibliographic control” or something. But I'm a library student who's a big fan of the principle: “maximize access to information” (tm – Elisabeth Davies) so I really think articles like this one should be kept, even if they don't meet the strictest interpretation of Wikipedia's guidelines. Rules are rules but there should always be room to bend them, especially when it makes you err on the side of inclusiveness.
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