Talk:The Christie

Blanking of The Christie NHS Foundation Trust

I may have missed it but the article on The Christie NHS Foundation Trust seems to have been blanked and merged in here without any discussion at all. I do not express a view on the merits of merging it in here but there should have been discussion first. Also this article seems to have been turned into an advert for the hospital starting with a list of how it is "the largest provider of radiotherapy in Europe", "has one of the largest clinical trials units in the United Kingdom for phase I/II cancer trials" etc, all sourced from primary sources i.e. the Trust. This is not what Wikipedia is for. Dormskirk (talk) 00:26, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Feel free to argue the case for de-merging the two, and I'll happily contribute to rolling things back if there is a good case for doing so, but I follow the guidance of WP:BOLD: we don't discuss everything first.

I'll also happily argue the case in full for why they should be merged, if anyone does want to have that debate, but in brief it's that:

1. The vast majority of content that was on The Christie NHS Foundation Trust was not about The Christie NHS Foundation Trust (an organisational unit that manages stuff), it was about The Christie (a hospital that delivers care). It duplicated (in different words, and actually in more detail than on the hospital page) the history of the hospital from long before it was run by the NHS at all, let alone the NHS Foundation Trust.
2. It makes sense to have separate NHS Foundation Trust articles when that organisation does/runs multiple things. If it just runs one hospital, the organisation effectively becomes synonymous with the hospital in terms of encyclopaedic potential – demonstrated by the fact that the content of the 2 articles were effectively WP:REDUNDANT.
3. In terms of which article to merge it to, WP:COMMONNAME is fairly straightforward: people talk about the Christie hospital far more than the organisation. "The Christie" is now the name in common usage, but it's currently not possible to move to that title because The Christie has edit history, so I've opened a WP:RMT for that.

As for the "advert" content: that section is a pre-existing one that is merged in, which looks from the history to date from 2007, very early in the NHS Trust page – indeed, I can see that you have edited that section in the past. I have no particularly strong attachment to it as is, but I would expect an article like this to go into some detail about what the hospital actually is and does. Who and what it treats, how, and with what facilities are kind of the top things you need to know to understand what The Christie is, which is why I put this section first. Certainly it's very out of date, and I have begun trying to at least replace a few of the very old facts and figures with more recent equivalents. But you're right that this section would benefit from a more systematic approach to describing what the hospital is for and what it does with less reliance on just those few headline figures. It would also be nice to base it on good independent secondary sources and be less reliant on citing The Christie itself, but that's going to need time so not in my quick fixes.

(That said, I don't think that the facts that you cite as "not what Wikipedia is for" are necessarily unencyclopedic. For example, it being "the largest provider of radiotherapy in Europe", when accompanied by specific numbers and reliable sources, could tell the reader a lot that is encyclopaedic -- it concisely conveys that the radiotherapy is a big part of what it does and also that is a major organisation in its field, things which are entirely salient to an encyclopedia article.)

Joe D (t) 01:50, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for that. I think you have made the case for merging the material from the Trust article well, and I now support what you have done. I also agree that, if the claims about being "the largest provider of radiotherapy in Europe" etc, were accompanied by specific numbers and reliable sources, they could be useful. However, I am still not sure that they should be given such a prominent place at the start of the article, and placing it there is not consistent with the section order of other UK hospitals. Dormskirk (talk) 09:39, 18 August 2024 (UTC)