Talk:List of lists of people

Deletion of a related page
Hi,. You'd asked where the page had been deleted. It was actually a very similar page but had roughly the same content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Lists_of_people. Also I'd created the redirect in error. This page doesn't link to a list of lists of people, it links to a list of lists of lists of people. In other words, if you're looking at the list, you should have to click through 1 link to get to the entries. But with the list linked, you have to click through 2 links. Happy editing, Jam. Jamgoodman (talk) 18:25, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

PS. The redirect arguably violates Wikipedia's WP:NOTDIR policy. That is to say the site shouldn't be used as an exhaustive directory for all lists of articles. Only the most pertinent lists - i.e. ones that would actually be used in practice - should be made or used as articles. Consider a set of articles: Elvis (E), John Lennon (J) and Ben Franklin (B). We could have a list of people: {E, J, B}, list of musicians: {E, J}, a list of Americans: {E, B} and a list of people who wore glasses: {J, B}. So our directory of possible combinations of the articles would be {{E, J, B}, {E, J},{E, B},{J, B}}. This is the power set * of the original 3 articles. The number of branches in the directory is the size of the power set, which is approximately 2^n, where n is the number of articles. This is a manageable size when we have only 3 articles but Wikipedia has around 6 million articles! So the size of its power set would be around 10^1800000, which is insanely big. That's a number with around 1,800,000 digits.

The crux of my point is that there are a heck of a lot of possible lists on Wikipedia so we have to pick and choose which ones are actually relevant, notable and would be used by people reading the site.

(*) Technically, the full power set would include single-element-sets and the empty set.

Happy editing, Jam. Jamgoodman (talk) 18:47, 13 April 2019 (UTC)


 * NOT DIR refers to actual content, not navigational devices. Lists of articles are merely navigational devices.  There were various arguments in the earlier MfD:  The ones that make sense are that "Lists of People" is merely a unneeded  and poorly defined subset of WP:List of lists. I disagree, & since MfD  is a little-watched part of WP,  and I think very few of the people who would have defended the earlier list noticed it, it could usefully be taken to DelRev, or even further to RfC.    Maybe that MfD is worth it, but generally I'd rather deal with actual articles.


 * But nothing there applies to whether we should have a redirect. An XfD can close with "redirect,", "delete, and  redirect", or   "delete and do not make a redirect",  but a plain "delete" does not rule out a possible redirect, since   most XfDs do not fully consider the possible alternatives to deletion--and this one did not.


 * Incidentally, your set theory argument is not in my opinion a reasonable approach: That some members of a set are not-A doesn't imply that all members are not-A.    It is certainly true that not all such subsets would make sense, just like not all lists would make sense. That does not show that this particular subset or lists does not makes sense. The overwhelming number of conceivable lists or combinations certainly have no semantic meaning:   "List of articles with 150 words in them." or "List of lists with 17 items in them" . The question is, which of the possible combinations are first,  meaningful, and then, useful.   Similarly, not all redirects are even meaningful, let alone useful, but each one needs to be separately considered.   DGG ( talk ) 23:14, 13 April 2019 (UTC)