Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Books about George W. Bush

 This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page, if it exists; or after the end of this archived section. The result of the debate was keep. Sjakkalle (Check!)  30 June 2005 10:52 (UTC)

Books about George W. Bush
Unencyclopedic list. the wub  "?/!"  13:00, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. Needs expanding but certainly encyclopedic. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:07, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment: Just now I trawled the Category: Political books and listed all those that dealt wholly or mainly with Bush or his Presidency. As most of the conservative writers these days tend to be writing about the twin evils of liberalism and Islam, this may give the list a somewhat lopsided appearance. There aren't a lot of articles about hagiographies of Bush around, that I can see.  I suggest that this could be remedied by writing such articles. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:43, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. As far as lists go this one is fairly useful. Pburka 13:33, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. Legit and useful list - if your concern is POV, then list the right-wing books as well. The solution to bias speeched is counter-bias, not censorship. -- BD2412 talk 14:05, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)
 * Keep, allow for expansion. -- Lochaber 14:46, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, enough there to be useful, enough books about Bush to be encyclopedic topic. In most cases I would have thought "Books about X" belong in the article on X but in the case of Bush where the article is so long, a separate article is justified. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:02, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * keep but expand to more than a list of books, give both pro- and anti- and contrast their viewpoints, and talk about their social and political significance. Dunc|&#9786; 16:03, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Strong Delete. - This information should go on the George W. Bush article. This is why we have References/Further reading sections. --Tothebarricades 20:27, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment. That article is rather large at the moment.  It's probably better to have this list. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:34, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment - just an afterthought - shouldn't this be a "List of..."; or if not, shouldn't the article delve a bit into the fairly recent phenomena of dozens of critical (and some laudatory) books being written about sitting presidents? I may be too young to speak wisely on this, but it seems to me the phenomenon only began when Reagan was in office. -- BD2412 talk 20:57, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)
 * Keep. Worthwhile spin-off of the main article. In some cases there are simply too many works to comfortably accommodate in an article's references list. I agree the list should include pro- and con- books to be NPOV. 23skidoo 22:09, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * keep Yuckfoo 23:47, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge contents into appropriate articles and delete. Separating the references from the article is a bad precedent.  If an article is too large, the remedy should be to split up the article, each piece carrying appropriate references. An unannotated bibliography does not stand alone as an encyclopedic article.  --Tabor 00:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Exactly...I was just imagining having hundreds of "Books about" pages. Messy, messy, messy. There are many topics that have a more extensive literature than Mr. Bush (French Revolution, World War II, Chess?). It is indeed a very bad precedent, and I don't see why a long references section is necessarily a bad thing. --Tothebarricades 01:00, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment: It seems unlikely that all these books are actually being used as "references" in the GWB article. Books that are actually used to verify facts in that article should also be mentioned there, but as I understand it this is a general list of books about George W. Bush, not even implying that anyone here has actually turned a single page. Christopher Parham (talk) 05:03, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)
 * Delete. Merge into relevant articles if someone has the energy. I generally dislike lists and prefer categories but this one would set a precedent for lists of books about everything, and there are books about everything.-Splash 02:27, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment. Why would this be a bad thing? --Tony Sidaway|Talk 07:52, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Because if you want a list of books about George W. Bush or chess or sausages or whatever, go to Amazon.com. (other online and offline bookstores are available yadda yadda) the wub  "?/!"  09:05, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * ...or Wikipedia. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 10:34, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Amazon.com is great, but it has no ambition to be NPOV and I can't edit its pages. Kappa 22:44, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Amazon strives to achieve NPOV by balancing - which is an acceptable way to do things on the Wikipedia too. It does a more thorough job of it, and maintains its NPOV better by adding everything within a narrow remit (books only) with nothing taken away, reverted, blanked, scrambled or vandalized. Such flexibility is important in WP, as is a wider remit, but there's no need to duplicate other, far more authoritative and comprehensive sources. WP:NOT a web directory, and by the same token it should not try to be a ISBN listing service. -Splash 00:41, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * You just made that up. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 01:24, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Ummm....? Ok, it's not Amazon's stated policy, but they must surely try to get as many books to sell as they can and they don't seem to have a POV to push in the meantime. Was that what you meant?-Splash 02:35, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * I meant that the statement "Amazon strives to achieve NPOV by balancing" was a fabrication. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 11:21, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't suppose they do it as a matter of explicit policy, no, but as a matter of implicit final-result I'm fairly sure they're pretty NPOV. -Splash 13:54, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. A very encyclopedic list, could use expanding though. Kaibabsquirrel 22:42, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. In addition to agreeing with Tothebarricades, I don't think that "about George W. Bush" is a specific enough topic to keep it from falling within category 2 of WP:NOT An Indiscriminate Collection of Information.  As previously noted, "Books About George W. Bush" would make a great category, but as a list, it doesn't work because it doesn't type the book: are they purposefully pro- or anti-Bush, are they about one term or both, do they even address his Presidency at all or just his Governorship of Texas, do they address one specific policy/event only, etc?  To even be a useful list, the list would have to get broken up, and I don't feel right voting to keep an article that'd have to become nothing but a categorized list of books under such an "umbrella" topic, especially not when that list's better placed in the George W. Bush article and best placed in the form of a category. The Literate Engineer 04:45, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep but annotate the list with a short comment for each book, and remove all the redlinks. I think the Literate Engineer is wrong in saying this would make a great Category.  The big trouble with Categories is that they can only list books that have Wikipedia articles about them.  It couldn't include books of borderline notability: important enough to be listed, but not important enough to be the subject of a whole article.  And, or course, it's even harder to anotate a category than a list.  Face it, categories are totally useless for this sort of thing.  Give me lists any time.     &mdash; P Ingerson (talk) 11:31, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * ''The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be placed on a related article talk page, if one exists; in an undeletion request, if it does not; or below this section.