Talk:National University of Singapore

Reverts of incidents

I have removed the two incidents which were recently added by WezSchultz. Per WP:BLPCRIME, we have to be very careful not to include any material which suggests an innocent, non-public figure, is guilty of a crime.

In the first alleged sex-for-grades incident, the source makes it very clear the professor is a non-public figure that was acquitted and cleared of all charges after initially being convicted. In the eyes of the law, he is innocent and has committed no crime. Including the name of his student is also potentially a privacy violation.

In the second alleged case of academia fraud by a visiting professor, she is also a non-public figure and has not been convicted of a crime. The source is clear that she's being investigated, but there has been no updates on the results of the investigation. Whether the case will spur any significant policy changes in NUS is still unclear and its notability has yet to be established.

I wish to make my reasons clear for the reverts and am willing to have this be subjected to the review of other editors. Seloloving (talk) 14:22, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Trimming the article

Much of the old article consisted of sections such as:

The School of Computing (SoC), established in 1998, has two departments – Computer Science and Information Systems and Analytics. The department of Computer Science offers two undergraduate degree programmes – Computer Science and Information Security, while the department of Information Systems and Analytics offers the other two - Information Systems and Business Analytics. The School of Computing also offers a Master's program in Computer Science, with the option of completing it via coursework, a significant project, or a dissertation.

A section like this, comprising nothing but the name of the faculty, its individual departments, and some of the degree courses offered (especially undergraduate degrees) existed for every one of NUS's faculties, dormitories — and even for the school's shuttle bus. I have tried to remove everything that falls under such a category. It is not necessary for every faculty and centre to have a short section of its own dedicated to describing what the thing is. Wikipedia is not a directory. I think it might be important to list out the various schools to showcase the kinds of research and teaching NUS does, but I don't think paragraphs these are appropriate:

The NUS University Town (UTown) opened in August 2011. Located across the NUS Kent Ridge campus, it was built on the site of a former golf course.This is where 2,400 undergraduate students, 1,700 graduate students and 1,000 researchers work, live, and learn in close proximity. There are four residential colleges: Cinnamon College, Tembusu College, College of Alice & Peter Tan, and Residential College 4 – initially named Cinnamon, Tembusu, Angsana and Khaya, respectively. An Education Resource Centre, the Stephen Riady Centre and a Graduate Residence are also located here.

The Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at NUS was first established as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School in 1905. The School comprises departments such as the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, Anaesthesia, Anatomy, Biochemistry, Diagnostic Radiology, Epidemiology and Public Health, Medicine, Microbiology, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Ophthalmology, Orthopaedic Surgery, Otolaryngology, Paediatrics, Pathology, Pharmacology, Physiology, Psychological Medicine and Surgery. The School uses the British undergraduate medical system, offering a full-time undergraduate programme leading to the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS). For Nursing, the Bachelor of Science (Nursing) conducted by the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies is offered. The department also offers postgraduate Master of Nursing, Master of Science (Nursing) and Doctor of Philosophy programmes.

The NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme was started in 2001, giving students the opportunity to experience, live, work and study in an entrepreneurial hub. Participants of the programme either spend 6 months or a year overseas, taking courses at partner universities and working in start-ups. The program is offered at twelve different locations: Silicon Valley and New York in the United States, Toronto in Canada, Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen in China, Stockholm in Sweden, Munich in Germany, Lausanne in Switzerland, Israel, Singapore and Southeast Asia (Jakarta and Vietnam).

Also, there was a lot of copyright infringement in those paragraphs. Even if you think that these are somehow noteworthy of inclusion, it would be important to rephrase before reverting my edit. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 14:26, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

You wholesale removed entire sections on perfectly legitimate topics. It is NOT a mere directory and it is NOT forbidden by WP:NOTDIRECTORY to provide information about residence halls, research institutes, and faculties and schools. You can trim and revise some of this content, but the bulk removal is inappropriate. Sections on the faculties is exactly what university articles should have, but your removals leave no information at all about these departments, without even a mere mention of them: NUS has subarticles for its Law, Medicine, Music, and Public Policy schools, but now this article fails to even mention them (or any other school) and make use of WP:SUMMARYSTYLE. Category:Harvard University schools has entire articles about its faculties, yet now this article is stripped bare, so that an educational institution has just two short paragraphs in the Education section and nothing at all about any of its academic organization! Pointing out that the articles about these topics for Harvard, Oxford, and MIT are list articles is utterly irrelevant – they are subarticles because there was enough content on them to warrant separate pages from the main article. In your case you have not moved this info to subarticles but rather deleted it outright! Why in the world do you think the school's shuttle bus should not be mentioned? There are entire articles on university transportation at Category:University and college bus systems, yet you've decided this page can't have two sentences that this large campus has this kind of important feature? Maybe it doesn't need a section header, but it should be mentioned as part of the campus – oh wait, you deleted every word about the campus so the page has zero content about its buildings and layout.

I don't see issues with this phrasing above, as it provides appropriate mention of what educational programs and buildings a university has. You are welcome to remove copyright infringement and make selective updates, but I am restoring (WP:STATUSQUO) the sections that were wholly removed. Continued removal of longstanding informative content without consensus will constitute vandalism. Reywas92^Talk 15:23, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Just because you say that it's vandalism doesn't make it so. Your opinion, by the way, does not constitute 'consensus'. I will not revert the edit to prevent edit-warring, but you are being unnecessarily combative without giving any reasoning behind your reverts other than the fact that it's 'obvious'. What constitutes notability for inclusion within a single article differs from what is notable for inclusion in a main page. For example, whilst a concept like the neutrino is noteworthy, not every physical concept is appropriate to be included in the page physics because the article is meant to be a summary of the main and salient features of the subject matter. I don't see how a free shuttle bus system or a list of the faculties is apt for a university page like this when it is so peripheral and unnotable. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 03:42, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

I would also note that none of the paragraphs that I removed actually said anything at all except for the fact that a specific faculty existed and the kinds of undergraduate courses it offers. Whilst providing information on the faculties is relevant to the university, this can be done in merely a couple of sentences, which is done in the Harvard University article. The current article as is is completely inappropriate.

On the bus issue, it is completely inappropriate to have an entire section (indeed, any mention at all) of a school bus system. This is an extremely tangential to the subject matter of the university. I cited the other examples of universities because those articles cover what a university article should actually have: a discussion of salient history, research, education, and so on. The current article as it stands is merely a list. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 03:57, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

"except for the fact that a specific faculty existed and the kinds of undergraduate courses it offers" YES this is what an encylopedia article about a university should have! You could have reorganized it into a different prose form but instead you deleted them entirely! "this can be done in merely a couple of sentences, which is done in the Harvard University article" Again, you did not do this in a few sentences, you removed literally every word about NUS's faculties, to the point that a reader would learn nothing at all about the university's educational divisions. And again, this is a poor comparison because while there are only stand-alone articles for a few of NUS's faculties (law, medicine, public policy, whose description you scrubbed), Harvard has articles on all of its schools.

"extremely tangential to the subject matter" Wrong. A university is not just research and education, it's a campus with academic, residential, and other buildings, as well as transportation bewteen them and the community. If the Internal Shuttle Bus is notable enough for its own article, it's notable enough to include mention in the main article. Other examples of university articles that discuss campus transportation are Nanyang_Technological_University#Transportation, University_of_California,_Davis#Transportation, University_of_Hertfordshire#Uno_bus, Campus_of_the_University_of_Massachusetts_Amherst#Campus_bus_system, University_of_Maryland,_Baltimore_County#Transportation, University_of_Maryland,_College_Park#Transportation, Princeton_University#Transportation, Columbia_University#Transportation, University_of_Virginia#Transportation, Stanford_University_student_housing#Shuttle_service, and University_of_Minnesota#Getting_around, and to suggest this should be excised from the article is simply absurd. Reywas92^Talk 05:05, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Response to third opinion request:

I tend to lean towards well written prose sections and succinct summaries of departments; in essence, I think that a very careful weighting of WP:DUE is required here. So while these all may be appropriate to mention, only one or two sentences are needed; especially when referring to the bus. The overall importance of the transportation system relating to the rest of the entire university is incredibly low, and only a brief summary of it is required. Same with the sub-colleges; they can warrant a brief paragraph, but the current information reads like it's directly copied from the articles that the {{main}} templates link to. The information about rankings of degrees and all the minute ones they offer are inappropriate and can even read like promotional material to some; it does to me. The integrative sciences and engineering section, for instance, should only be its first sentence, and a prose summary of the its research and PhD programs. A similar treatment should be given to the rest of the article, with its content being weighted in its overall importance and careful editing of tone, quoting, and wordiness to not be either spam or copyvio. Since I see copyright concerns; the copyvio must stay out, period. Do not restore copyvio. If you restore content, please do so selectively, as restoring the copyvio with it may be seen as disruptive and is a blockable offense if consistently repeated. Sennecaster (Chat) 21:23, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Tagging both @Dawkin Verbier and Reywas92. Sennecaster (Chat) 21:24, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Residential College 4

Residential College 4's curriculum is focused on Systems Thinking [1] It is the newest RC and all the rooms have air conditioning. CherryMochi25 (talk) 02:01, 13 March 2023 (UTC)