Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of French people


 * 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. No prejudice towards repurposing as a list of lists. Mark Arsten (talk) 03:02, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

List of French people

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Unmanageable list because the criteria for inclusion is far too vague and also extremely broad. eh bien mon prince (talk) 03:47, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep No policy-based rationale has been given by the nominator. This is part of a larger scheme of Category:Lists of people by nationality.  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 07:56, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There might be no specific policy against unworkably long lists but there is a similar case from a few years ago: Articles for deletion/List of famous women in history.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 09:49, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That list has nothing to do with this list.  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 12:13, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I disagree, it's a similar case, so the motivations that led to the deletion of that list are also relevant here.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 12:21, 22 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep The list contains obvious entries such as Joan of Arc and Napoleon so we seem to be managing fine. You could nitpick about both cases - France was divided at the time of Joan and Napoleon came from an Italian family in Corsica.  But arguing about corner cases is to be expected in any large list or category and we can't go deleting them all for this reason. Warden (talk) 10:46, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Defining the nationality is not the issue, the problem is that any inclusion criteria for a list of "French people" will simply be too broad. Even limiting the list to the most famous of French people (which itself would be an arbitrary choice) would still leave thousands of names, and we already have List of French actors, list of French writers etc, so that this older and excessively generic list no longer serves any purpose.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 12:21, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Being a big list is not grounds for deletion. This could easily become a list of lists article - IE broken down into subsections with links to List of French actors, List of French sportspeople, List of French curmudgeons, etc (OK, so that last one was a joke, but you can see my point).  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 06:46, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of France-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:24, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:24, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete We have lists of "Norwegian Americans" and "African Americans"...etc, and other smaller, more finite groups -  but a list of French People is just too massive. Is there a precedent for having a list of people from a large country like France? Deathlibrarian (talk) 04:09, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * List of Americans
 * List of British people
 * List of Chinese people
 * List of Zimbabweans
 * Warden (talk) 07:59, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please can you point me to the policy that states we can't have a list because it will be too big. Thanks.  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 07:25, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please can you point me to the policy that states we can't have a list because it will be too big. Thanks.  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 07:25, 26 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete this list. (and delete all the other similar lists where the only criteria is nationality), such lists are not notable in themselves and are not much use as navigation aids. Currently there are 55,000 entries in the ODNB assuming that 80% of those are English this implies that the list would contain around 44,000 entries for List of English people if only those biographies are includes and presumably there are a lot of other English people in Wikipedia who are not in the ODNB, one can assume that in time the numbers of French people listed on Wikipedia will be in the tens of thousands, which will make the list too large, and a selective list of notable French people is a POV list. -- PBS (talk) 15:43, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please can you point me to the policy that states we can't have a list because it will be too big. Thanks.  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 07:25, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There is no such policy. Actual policy says that there is "no practical limit".  All that happens if a page gets too large is that you split it.  You can see this at List of minor planets which has about 400,000 entries and counting. Warden (talk) 08:00, 26 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep, if you agree with having smaller lists like list of French aviators (which this is home to) it should at least be kept until it's been split into a list of lists. Siuenti (talk) 11:28, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Mark Arsten (talk) 00:54, 30 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep but delete sections like "actors" (which is already covered by List of French actors) and consider converting sections into break-out lists. This is maintainable using sublists: divide and conquer, don't just throw your hands up and say "this looks too hard" without thinking about how to solve the problem. --Colapeninsula (talk) 14:07, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep as per Colapenninsula. No need to be redundant, but list becomes manageable when this action is taken, and is likely to be useful to someone, somewhere, sometime.    78.26   (I'm no IP, talk to me!) 14:25, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Break into sublists and keep as Lists of French people. This is the approach taken for Lists of British people and similar lists for nationalities which are too well-represented on Wikipedia to be contained in a single list. Robofish (talk) 22:58, 4 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep but restructure as Lists of French people.--71.167.157.25 (talk) 09:48, 5 October 2013 (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.