Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people by name/old

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 of the debate was keep. bainer (talk) 12:41, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

]

Nominate &
vote Delete: Original Research, Not Suitable, Redundant
wikipediatrix 21:37, 3 December 2005 (UTC) (added the word 'delete' for those who weren't sure of my vote, despite the fact that I am nominating this article for deletion)

• Keep. There is no original research, and you have not explained why the list is unsuitable. In a couple of weeks, if you nominate it properly, I'll reconsider. Superm401 | Talk 09:40, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
• ] This afd nomination was orphaned. Listing now. —Crypticbot (operator) 15:39, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
• Comment. I'd like someone to explain the value of this before I vote either way. It seems to be little more than a variation of Wikipedia's search engine. I'm hesitant to cast a vote yet because deleting this would appear to require the deletion of hundreds of related list articles. The question to ask is would someone actually USE this page? 23skidoo 16:25, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
• Abstain. Both sides make good points, but unfortunately they cancel each other out for me. As a result I cannot support keeping this, yet at the same time I cannot support deleting it either. I still think Wikipedia's search engine renders this useless, and I personally find it far more efficient (and I rarely get the "out of order" message others claim always occurs) than this list. But both sides have failed to convince me one way or the other as to which way to vote. 23skidoo 16:45, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
• Comment I also would like further explanation on this before I vote. I do think the title and introduction seem 'dumb' because they do not clearly announce that it's a list of notable people by name. Obviously, a list of people (in general) by name is a silly idea. If the list is to be kept, the title and intro should be changed. PJM 16:56, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
  • _ _ As that was a comment rather than a vote, i risk a gratuitous remark in noting that while occasionally a rename is part of the best followup to a failed AfD nom, an AfD process is neither needed to justify a rename, nor empowered to mandate one name to the exclusion of the current name or others: renames are routine editing operations limited (i would guess) by the three rv rule and protection procedures, but not in general by any voting measure.
  • _ _ That being said, the LoPbN tree and Dabs may be the only cases in the main namespace where a single approach to so many pages is anywhere near necessary. And (in contrast to their contents, which deserve a common fmt) dab pages have a naming scheme so simple that there is almost no point in discussing it. IMO, changing one or more names in the tree rather than the nearly 700 would irresponsibly make a mess, and changing them all would in practice be irreversible except with a bot -- which would cripple our ordinary "checks and balances". I would therefore argue that a name change without a vote (but not a vote on AfD!) would be unreasonably aggressive editing.
  • _ _ That being said, i think brevity rather than explicit precision is the most important improvement that could be made, and e.g. that "by name" does a very poor job of capturing the difference between "... people by religion" and "... people by name"; "alphabetical" might be better. "Notable" has been discussed previously somewhere -- probably on the "Whole Tree" LoPbN talk subpage, in an immediately obviously named section. My recollection is that i found presuasive an arguement that "notable" would be redundant bcz other factors make it implicitly obvious; i would cite the statement that it's a list of bio articles as implying notability, since bio articles require notability. (It is less formal in the general case but IMO clear that notability of the topic is always a requirement, so BTW i don't consider LoPbN different from non-bio lists in that regard.)
    --Jerzy•t 19:05, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
    
• Keep of course. I feel like the victim on Candid Camera having to justify the existence of this list. Are you serious, wikipediatrix? This list has been lovingly and carefully maintained for ages by Jerzy, I use it all the time, as probably do lots and lots of people. I just don't believe it. <KF> 23:54, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

• Comment: I just found this at Talk:List of people by name, and I'm adding it here:

  In recent months, I've witnessed a number of lists being questioned and called for deletion, usually on the basis that such lists serve no real purpose, and that the subject matter is so open-endedly broad that the list could (and will) stretch on forever, endlessy growing into a ridiculously lengthy and unwieldy article if left to follow its stated mission. (One good example is the recent brouhaha over "List of Sexual Slang" and "List of Sexual Slang terms", an article which has been deleted and locked up despite passing an AfD vote with the overwhelming vote being "keep".) So, in keeping with what is apparently the generally accepted standard here, I nominate this "list of people" as being especially unencyclopedic, and collation of which constitutes original research. Who would come to Wikipedia specifically to consult such a list, and for what purpose? The subject is, again, so broad that it almost seems as if someone started it as a joke, to see how much of Wikipedia's bandwidth could be wasted. wikipediatrix 22:02, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

  _ _ You are utterly mistaken if you believe this list does not serve any purpose. Each and every encyclopaedia lists people who have entries in alphabetical order. Wikipedia has to do so by means of a separate list, as the articles are entitled James Brown rather than Brown, James. Hundreds of new biographies and biographical stubs are added every week (maybe every day), so what we'd need is people who add all those new entries to this alphabetical list so that it completely reflects Wikipedia's scope.

  _ _ Also, a list can per definitionem never be "original research". Compiling things is not research, and a list is a compilation, nothing more. You are free to question the usability of any list of course, but deleting List of people by name would be the same as ripping out from a book the pages that contain the Table of Contents or the Index.
  <KF> 00:21, 5 December 2005 (UTC) ]

  Needless to say, I disagree. Unlike, say, "Wisconsin", "Hilary Duff", or "Sodium Bicarbonate", this list is not something that exists independently outside of the person(s) who put it together. Deleting this list would NOT be analogous to ripping out an index or a table of contents from an encyclopedia, because there are more articles in this encyclopedia than just "People". The analogy would be more apt if this article was "List of Articles on Wikipedia".
  wikipediatrix 01:50, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  I've yet to see any argument that indicates how this is any different from the Search engine which IMO is much quicker if one wanted to find a name. Unless you're trying to say there are people who actually get up and decide they want to see whose names start with M. I'm not yet ready to vote delete yet because unlike some of the other lists, there has obviously been s*itloads of work put into this. But at the same time I still fail to see the point. Search engines have rendered traditional indexes obsolete, at least online.
  23skidoo 01:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  _ _ This sounds as if deletion were the default setting here at Wikipedia and one had to make a special effort (at justification) to keep something. What else could "I've yet to see any argument" and "I'm not yet ready to vote delete" mean?

  _ _ Yes, there are people (lots, I'd say) spending hours browsing through encyclopaedias without any particular thing which they want to look up. And yes of course, there are people who are interested in names in general, similar-sounding names, names with similar spellings etc. etc.

  _ _ What search engine? Wikipedia's very own? The one which is out of order every other day "for performance reasons"? The one which gives you all kinds of results, but never complete ones and never in alphabetical order? The one whose results you cannot edit if you find a mistake? That one?

  _ _ Search engines have rendered traditional indexes obsolete, at least online? When did you last read a book? All the best,
  <KF> 01:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  More than anything else, I'm trying to determine what the standards are for Lists around this place, and so far I've found that there are none. I've seen useful lists deleted while this one, king of the useless lists, remains intact and growing exponentially. I find it SO useless, in fact, that as a subject, this does not and cannot pass any of Wikipedia's most basic yardsticks for inclusion. How many times have we seen articles deleted because the band/company/whatever in question was deemed "not notable" because they didn't perform well in a Google search? Well, I guaran-damn-tee you that "List of People by name on Wikipedia" doesn't Google well, either, aside from pages generated by Wikipedia itself.
  wikipediatrix 01:50, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  Comment. Hmmm is this nomination a violation of WP:POINT then? I do see your point though, wikipediatrix, and I am sympathetic.
  Herostratus 02:40, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  Comment. While I agree with the implication that 'crufty' lists escape deletion from time to time, I think the comparison of list articles to "band/company/whatever" articles (which can violate vanity policy) is a weak one.
  PJM 15:50, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  But any argument used for the deletion of a "crufty" list applies to this one even more, in my opinion. And while I can sort-of see why someone might want to peruse List of gay and lesbian resource centres in Ireland or List of sport associations in the Faroe Islands or even List of pop culture references to the 69 sex position, they're still less notable than half of what gets deleted from Wikipedia on a daily basis and they ALL, in my opinion, violate the Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information guidelines.
  wikipediatrix 20:05, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

  I think that's a much more effective way of putting it - valid point.
  PJM 04:40, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

• Comment. This looks like a fancy duplication of Categories, which function in essentially the same way. However, I don't know enough about how this is used to make an informed vote. I guess if you like compiling and maintaining lists, you've come to right place! Just wanted to put in my two cents.
  -,-~^R'lyehRising~-,- 04:40, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Addendum. This appears to be nothing more than an overly-complicated list of notable people. Moreover, it looks like a working example of bureaucracy—that is, taking a fairly simple concept and making it as complex as possible. Other than a fun exercise for list-o-phile Wikipedians, I can't honestly see how this would be of practical use for the typical Wikipedia visitor (other than perhaps as a curiosity). Am I missing something here?
    -,-~^R'lyehRising~-,-05:27, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
    • Yes, you are. All the arguments in favour of these lists on this talk page.
      <KF> 11:30, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
    • It is easy to point at complexity (which in this case actually is probably substantially greater than you realize, since you don't seek the credibility that would go with mentioning the fact that each parent page other than the root is one in a suite of at least three (and by now in most cases four) pages, the rest being outside the main namespace. What is much more difficult is to identify the over-complication that you imagine here. What makes that difficult is that to the difference between complexity and over-complexity is demonstrating the possibility of an adequate simpler approach. Complexities have been added in response to real problems that are not obvious to the casual user. One fine feature was jettisoned for over a year bcz it was a complication that got in the way until MediaWiki features caught up with LoPbN maintainers' designs. There are significant problems, not yet addressed by the nearly 700 main-space pages and 250-ish infrastructure pages, which are the reason for the first detailed proposal re LoPbN infrastructure in a long time, and by far the most, uh, complex one. I have it in preparation for consisderation via LoPbN talk; if i'm mistaken about the armchair-quarterback nature of your criticism, watchlist that page & give feedback.
      --Jerzy•t 19:49 & 19:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
      
  • Category:People duplicates a few aspects of LoPbN, but it cannot presently substitute for LoPbN -- even tho the differences may become less important with enhancements to Cats, & may then justify supplanting LoPbN. Important current differences:
    1. LoPbN simply & easily provides for multiple entries like "Twain, Mark" and "Clemens, Samuel"; AFAIK, Cats make them impossible. (Twain has a clearer need than many pseudonyms and alternate spellings: he is known under both names bcz he wrote different genres under one or the other.)
    2. You can know the article title accurately enough to find it on LoPbN quickly, without being able to find it at all on Cats: if you don't know that lawyers are a species of jurist, or that "athlete" in Britain refers to a small species of what is called an "athlete" in the US. If you don't know both the nationality and occupation of the person you seek, you have to exhaustively search the People Cat-tree for all nationalities &/or all occupations, which is impractiable.
    3. _ _ From the top of the LoPbN root page, a new user can follow 2 no-brainer lks (via outline index) or (presently) at most three (via square index) to the page with the name, and one more to the screen-size section of the page.
    4. _ _ From Category:People, i was surprised to find it was now a portal page, and waded down to the "Categories" box on the right halfway down, almost chose "By nationality" instead of "Category:People by nationality", and equally stupidly clicked U, bcz i'm so used to using the US-bio-stub tag. Don't count that click and the return one. 1 click. Read most of 18 sub-cats, starting with the Ws, then forward from the As, and on to the Os. 2 clicks. No authors or novelists, on to Ws. 3. Novelists, passing up humorists. 4. Hmm. Only 6 authors, i should back up & try humorists. No, wait, those are sub-cats & there are articles. List ends at F, backup? No, that's too wierd, there's got to be a way to find the rest of the alphabet; if not the bottom, maybe the top ... 5. (Ah, neat, there's been good work done on Cats-support.) That's just up to... R...back to top. 6. Bingo, Mark Twain, a Cat unto himself. 7. Bullet at the top with no letter; "Mark Twain" sounds good as a bio. 8. I like a man in a full beard.
    5. _ _ Using Cats for another case, i tried Georg Ohm, being sure he was a physicist, and guessing probably German, maybe Austrian or Swiss, maybe Scandinavian. 6 clicks.
       • From Cat:People to bio:
         • Twain: (Nat'ty & occ. known) 8 clicks (and a lot of scrolling & scanning)
         • Ohm: (Occ. known; nat'ty vague) 6 clicks, the minimum, bcz i my first guess was right; otherwise add two for each wrong guess before succeeding.
       • From LoPbN to bio:
         • Twain (as good a break as LoPbn can get): 2 clicks via square, 3 via outline.
         • Constantine (a hand-picked worst case): 5 via square, 4 via outline.
    6. You can add a name to LoPbN and go on about your business, leaving it to someone else to start the article. You have to create the bio page before you can add a Cat tag to it, and if you don't happen to take time to assert notability (or even tho you think you did, the first admin to look at it may disagree) its eligible for speedy. (I review a substantial fraction of the new LoPbN entries; if i or the originator comes up with 1 date and a word each of nationality and occupation notability, retention is likely, unless the data suggests vanity or unfounded promotion; this should be so, bcz a bad entry is not as bad as a bad article, and waiting for the bad article means having a better basis for recognizing non-notability.)
    7. Even if the bio article already exists, a new user wanting to help make it accessible needs to learn that LoPbN orCategory:People exists. A Google search is not likely to take you to LoPbN (except if you search for a rd-lk'd name, with the name inverted and in quotes), bcz few pages lk to LoPbN and WP's article probably ranks higher), but it will never, AFAIK, take you to a Cat page. I doubt newcomers notice Cats -- unless they do so while editing the bottom of a page -- bcz the Cats are boxed off at the end. The first time you look at what-lks-here for a bio (that isn't swamped with inward lks), you'll spot LoPbN.
    8. A new editor will easily find the right place to put a name on LoPbN. They probably will enter it wrong, especially since they don't grasp what the piping on the adjacent entries is for, and they don't preview, or give up without figuring out the pipe trick. But any editor with an hour's experience can fix the problem the new editor leaves behind. A new editor who knows that Cats exist still has to navigate the People tree to the depth of the appropriate Cat, to get the name of the Cat; fortunately second and subsequent Cats (not that rare) are likely to come at a discount, tho the new editor may not realize they should work back up via the "nationality" "ancestral line". They may not fail to pipe, despite the fact that there are no adjacent examples there to take the hint from: if they haven't seen Cats before in other bios, they almost surely won't get so far as to manage to add the Cat.
    9. Oh, right one more: the expectation when Cats were introduced was that every descendant of Cat Person was either a person or a sub-Cat all of whose descendants....etc. That was expected to eventually obviated LoPbN, bcz you could search by eye for approximate names by just collecting all the articles in People and its descendants. As it is presently being used, such an automatically generated list of people would include articles about books by Twain & apparent Dick and plenty of others. So your resulting list includes the fictional characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and surely plenty of others.

  That'll have to do for now; i'm not sure i've even included all i in mind when i started, but i'm tired for now of explicating this familiar ground.
  --Jerzy•t 23:35, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
  

Comment: I've only just found this list. I think, as a source of biographies it should be very useful, and Kept - even though the author I was looking for - the late John Masters - was not listed. G. N. G. Tingey.

• Well, as I said, lots of names will have to be added, including that of John Masters. This leads me to another point which hasn't yet been raised: List of people by name is just one page (the "root page") in an elaborate system of alphabetically ordered lists of people, such as List of people by name: Mas, which, unfortunately, does not yet contain John Masters. Would all of you who propose deletion or who "can see the point" or who are at least "sympathetic" also want to delete all lists of people or just this one root page? The former would be the end, or near end, of Wikipedia as a biographical encyclopaedia; the latter would be the decapitation of a hierarchically structured filing system. What are your choices? <KF> 15:55, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

By nominating deletion of the root index, I am so intending for all its alphabetical sublists. But tell me, how would it be the end of Wikipedia as a biographical encyclopedia? There IS a search function, you know. And where does it end? List of structures? List of concepts? How about List of everything that ever existed? Any argument made for maintaining List of people could be applied to that! wikipediatrix 20:11, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

• Keep. Reasons follow.
  --Jerzy•t 10:29, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
  
• Comment. Since the nominator has not explicitly disclaimed the normally implicit Del vote, i'll start by responding to the stated reasons for nomination, before studying the voluminous other commentary.

  _ _ As to "Original Research,..." it should be clear that "original research" in our context means something entirely inapplicable to this list: OR is about information proposed for inclusion in spite of not yet having established itself any place in the marketplace of ideas; OR is less appropriate to an encyclopedia than is the controversial, bcz it is so far from being part of the body of human knowledge that almost no one knows of its controversial claim to become part of that body.
  --Jerzy•t 10:29 & 10:40, 6 December 2005 (UTC) (2nd edit re breaking up to aid comment by 'graph)
  

  _ _ As to "... Not Suitable, ...", that is to non-specific to make a focused response to. But as LoPbN's charter (at Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography, IIRC) implies in calling for it to be a list of bio articles, it is a navigation tool; by its alphabetical nature it is one tailored for use by those who have a rough idea of the name of the person but either lack the exact spelling of the title or an existing rdr, or the patience to keep trying wider and wider variations on that rough idea until they strike it lucky or decide we don't cover the person. Formal nav tools (lists, dabs, rdrs, & Cats) are inherantly suitable to an encyclopedia, despite the unique value of our hyperlinks as often informal and even sheerly serendiptous ones.
  --Jerzy•t 10:29 & 10:40, 6 December 2005 (UTC) (2nd edit re breaking up to aid comment by 'graph)
  

  _ _ As to "...Redundant.", now there's some meat. I do anticipate a time when we really do have to weigh whether the LoPbN tree has a further purpose, but i consider it clear that it will be carrying its weight until such time as new users can go to Category:People and find not just a list of its sub-Cats and a few not yet sorted bios. To make LoPbN redundant, the Cat sub-system needs to be able to provide an alpha list of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of bios that are in Cats descended from Category:People. In theory that's a SMOP, but in practice it's a big matter of scalability (just as this list is, despite casual assumptions to the contrary and the snide remarks based on them), and perhaps a big matter of server acquisition, and a matter of architecture in the sense that it is potentially best implemented with an eye to the whole worthwhile feature set of a more powerful Cat system. (E.g., i'd like to be able to get a list of people of a any of several given nationalities whose descent from Category:People is not solely via, say, entertainer and/or athlete Cats. Again, one thing delaying even plain descendant displays may be the challenge of guaranteeing that the Cat system remains (uh, i probably mean becomes) a directed acyclic graph.)
  --Jerzy•t 10:29 & 10:40, 6 December 2005 (UTC) (2nd edit re breaking up to aid comment by 'graph)
  

  _ _ Beyond those responses, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of people by name: Db-Dd had a vote of 3 Del, 10 Keep, 1 Merge, on deletion of a page with no names and no clear reason to expect future names. If deletion had been agreed on, and extended to all similar pages, it would still have been a far less sweeping change than what this proposal implies. If this vote (i read it as for now 3 Keep, and 1 probable but ambiguous Del) 5 Keep, 1 Del as of 21:20, 6 December 2005 (UTC) develops to a point that seems to demand it, i will

  1. copy here the debate regarding Db-Dd, which responds to arguements made here,
  2. request consensus to extend beyond 5 days, in view of

     -- the conflict between deletion here and the precedent established by that VfD,

     -- that precedent's, so far, much wider participation, and

     -- the long history of the nominated page (further back, i think, than the revision histories have been preserved),

  3. notify the 14 voters from that vote who have not yet participated here, and
  4. argue for counting as votes here (unless the respective voters opt out)

     -- as keeps, in the cases of the 11 non-delete votes there (which clearly imply keep votes on this), and

     -- as dels, in the cases of the del votes coming from those arguing there for deletion on grounds of disapproving of LoPbN as a whole.

  --Jerzy•t 10:29 & 21:20, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
  

  • _ _ Jerzy, I appreciate you not only taking the time to write a lengthy and well-thought-out response, but also for not making the basis of your response simple outrage that someone would even nominate the article for deletion. I'm not sure that the Db-Dd precedent is much of a precedent, but it was interesting to read that I'm not the only person that would like to see the entire list of people jettisoned. I agree that this list is better served as a Category, but I guess I differ, in principle, that we should hold off on deleting this list until the Category system improves.

  _ _ If the precedent set by Db-Dd is really weighty enough to justify keeping this list, then the corollary would be that the precedent set by keeping this list would justify a multitude of other equally vague and sweeping lists, such as the ones I mentioned earlier. (Can List of Things be far behind?) My heresy is even greater than suspected, because I actually oppose Lists in general on Wikipedia. List of people by name sets a precedent that makes seemingly any list seem worthy, no matter how vast a topic and no matter how open-ended. List of recipes has nothing preventing it from growing to ridiculous proportions, practically becoming a website unto itself. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. And what about List of web poetry artists? List of types of seafood? List of terrorist incidents? List of films ordered by uses of the word fuck? List of notable people identified as probably syphilitic? Goofy and crufty as these lists may be, at least I can actually envision someone needing to know this information. I cannot envision someone having a need to know a complete (and it isn't even that!) list of everyone on Wikipedia.

  _ _ Your comments about the List being a helpful tool for people who sort-of know the name they seek but aren't sure of the spelling comes closest to changing my mind about the matter, but I must say it's certainly an elaborate means for helping the spelling-impaired. Perhaps Wikipedia will one day develop a Google-like 'smart search' that can query back with things like "did you mean Rudolph Valentino?"
  wikipediatrix 16:42, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

  • • Your 3rd 'graph abt searching may deserve some comment, but more importantly,

      _ _ It's easy among the 'Net-incivility that bleeds into WP to save one's first draft, and forget to edit out one's intemperate first reactions. Despite our disagreements on this debate, i think you've been conscientious about how you make your arguements, and i appreciate that. AfD exists bcz their is no clear criterion for inclusion; IMO, ideas like "it's just common sense that..." are terms of abuse that substitute ganging up on the dissenter shere the effort of convincing argumentation is worthwhile in the long run..

      _ _ I should say that WP has no rule of stare decis (and IMO needs none), and my claim of a "precedent" is just meant,

      • first, to draw attention to the relevant previous discussion, and
      • second, to suggest there is danger of a dilemma between, on one hand, indecent burdens on voters of coming back over and over into the same arguement, and on the other, miscarriage (not of justice, i guess, but) of our process's intent when previous voters with pretty clearly predictable positions don't return to the fray. And in any case, i don't think keeping this list would be much of a precedent for keeping those you mention; i'll try to return to that idea in a addendum to this post if i fail to address it in response to points higher on the page.
        

      --Jerzy•t 19:05, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
      

    • Regarding yr attention to LoPbN as a precedent (rather than precedents relevant to LoPbN): You suggest that if LoPbN is acceptable, so is a list for every trivium that exists or is proposed. I'm not sure why you think that, but i would argue that triviality is indeed a dimension, and that LoPbN (being about people) has the least trivial topic that can be imagined, since "man is the measure of all things" and our hallmark of "notability" means "eligibility to be noted by people". If that sounds extreme (and it has been argued on VfD that " people are inherantly notable"!), plz bear in mind that this is not a list of all people, but of people notable enuf for a WP bio. (If there were WikiPeople and WikiIdentities and i guess WikiCorpses sister projects (or even IPDb, IIDb, & ICDb), i would want our bios to interWiki-lk to those respective entries, but i see no sign of WP itself undertaking attention to n-n people other than statistically.)
      --Jerzy•t 18:17, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
      
• Keep Rrrrrrrr you kidding me??????? This is a no-brainer. KEEP!. Without meaning to offend the nominator, this is the most ridiculous nomination I have ever heard about. We need this list. The people in it are not just anybody, the list is a who is who of famous people from around the world. --AntoniotunosabesMartin 1:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep - if you don't like it, don't use it. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep - it's existed since 22 June 2003, and has contributions from many different people. There needs to be a very good reason to remove two years of good-faith review and work. --Interiot 22:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
  • That sounded wrong to me, and picqued me to finish researching something i've poked around the edges of before. The 10:19, 23 November 2001 revision of List of people by name: A shows the contents of what was then Biographical Listing/A (which was moved in several stages to LoPbN's A page and of course redirects there), then a roughly 200-name sub-page of Biographical Listing (which now redirects to Lists of people), then list of lists, with 26 lks to its subpages, now all part of the LoPbN tree. The earliest revision of Lists of people is 16:42, 26 October 2001, has lks to a similar sub-page structure, and has the summary "(more categories)". I submit that the page had earlier versions (never or no longer shown in its history), that that date was close enough to the Big Bang that the laws of (Wiki-)physics were different, and that the LoPbN tree began under titles like "Biographical Listing/A" (or some still earlier name), sometime in 2001: 49 to 59 months ago.
    --Jerzy•t 00:26, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
    
• Keep - I believe that it may be useful to some, even though I agree that there are some other total nonsense lists in Wiki. Tony the Marine 02:12, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete unmaintanable. EscapeArtistsNeverDie 01:33, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment: It has been faithfully maintained for years by those who remember placing the person in the list after an article about the person has been written. Antonio Unredeamable Martin 09:55, 8 December, 2005 (UTC)
  • _ _ It's well established that there are groups we can never fully enumerate, and it's true that this is an important criterion favoring use of a (somewhat self-maintaining) Cat instead of a list. However, this is not a list that exists for the sake of being a complete reference, as with e.g. lists of the rulers of a country. This is explicitly a navigation tool, and to the extent that it improves access to bios at all, it is succeeding in its primary task.
    

  _ _ It's also the case that it is regretably far behind the ideal of keeping up with the full complement of bios that we have. IMO reasons for this include the extent of ignorance and underappreciation of its role, and i hasten to add, the exquisite principle of many freely roaming eyes, which practically guarantee that many resources will be undervalued by most of the editors. My current focus is on usability e.g., for those adding names, making the process as self-explanatory as feasible, and for users of all kinds, making navigation within the list as intuitive and even unconscious as feasible -- the reason for the experimental format used on the pilot pages (List of people by name: Caa-Cal is probably the one pilot to view, if you're viewing only one) listed at User:Jerzy/Argus for LoPbN Templates#Pilot pages. There may emerge a bot-master with a mission to, e.g., detect admissions and expulsions from the descendants of Category:People, which would be a giant-step toward "maintainability", and i might personally turn into that bot-master, tho not this month.
  

  _ _ Bottom line: poorly maintained, but far from unmaintanability.
  --Jerzy•t 17:42, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
  

• Keep Could be maintained by a bot. Andjam 04:51, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

• Freeze, if that's an option; otherwise Delete. if people are correct that this could be handled by a bot, then it's possible, but this bot would have to be really smart and I would guess that it would at least take a long time to develop such a bot, with this page being unreliable in the interim. There must be scores of new "people" pages created every day -- some of them useful, some of them deleteable. some of them LOOKING like they talk about "people", but really talking about eponymous locations & objects, or about fictional characters, etc. Plus, when there's a "list of people by name", why shouldn't MY name be on it?--Mareino 19:14, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

This page has grown to 34 K, and there could be people who want to participate but lack the technical means. Few of them would think of appending "&section=new" to their edit URL, so here's a place where they can at the least wave a flag: put your comment here, with an indication, if relevant, of where you'd have put it if you could edit the foregoing, and no doubt someone will move it there for you.
--Jerzy•t 18:17, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

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.