Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Donald Dewar (disambiguation)


 * 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 was   keep. (non-admin closure) Tim Song (talk) 05:38, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Donald Dewar (disambiguation)
AfDs for this article: 
 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Delete Clearly meets Template:db-disambig criteria - redundant page. Scot clearly primary by Google hits and page views. As per MOS:DAB guidelines, The recommended practice in these situations is to place a hatnote on the primary topic article to link directly to the secondary topic. This is now in place, so the page serves no purpose. Boleyn2 (talk) 06:55, 19 November 2009 (UTC) However, the fact that the disambiguation page is not currently being used does not mean that it must be deleted, merely that it may be deleted. Human names are usually ambiguous, and as an editor mostly working with human names I find that quite it is quite common for a 2-entry dab page which I have started to be expanded within a year or two to include people from countries or fields of endevour which I have little knowledge of. A pre-existing dab page helps to ensure that any additions can be done easily and accurately, and while it may not always be appropriate to create a dab page in such circumstances, its existence causes no harm. This is a contrast to the situation with articles, where an article on a non-notable person clutters the namespace with irrelevancy ... and while the nominator does great work in cleaning up dab pages, she is showing excessive zeal in finding ways to delete them. This dabpage-deletionism does not benefit wikipedia, and in several cases which I have tried unsuccessfully to discuss with her, it has resulted in breaking the work which other editors have done to disambiguate articles. In the case of people involved in similar fields of endeavour, the resulting tangle can take a lot of work to undo. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)  Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Tim Song (talk) 00:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. No article pages link to Donald Dewar (disambiguation), and the only two non-article pages that do are User:DumbBOT/TimeSortedAfD and Articles for deletion/Donald Dewar (disambiguation) -- Eastmain (talk) 07:47, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. The Scottish politician Donald Dewar is indeed clearly the primary article, and in those cases the recommended practice is indeed to place a hatnote on the primary topic article.
 * Keep. Lots of other people with this name can be found at this search, which is restricted to 1975 and earlier to screen out most of the references to the Scottish politician. I think we need a moratorium on deleting valid dab pages. – Eastmain (talk) 23:56, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. Strongly support the moratorium. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:25, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ... and note WP:2DAB, which says this this sort of "disambiguation page is not strictly necessary, but is harmless". Why delete something harmless? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:25, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.


 * Keep While acknowledging that WP:HARMLESS isn't usually a good argument, in this case, we're talking about a disamb page and not an article. I view this as having infrastructure for the third person with this name already in place, rather than a useless disambiguation page.  Bradjamesbrown (talk) 01:14, 26 November 2009 (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.