Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of acronyms and initialisms


 * 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) → B  music  ian  01:33, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

List of acronyms and initialisms

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Per "WP is not an indiscrtiminate collection..." and following the fate of "Lists of TLAs", as well as the likes of "List of all single-letter-double-digit combinations", move the article and its 26 sub-articles into the "Wikipedia" namespace and delete the remaining cross-space redirects. As I understand it, all these lists of TLAa, ETLAs and whats not were created in the early days, along with many other things whose utility in the main namespace has long been expired. Currently they are useful only as a list of redlinks/articles for creation, i.e., mainly as a Wikipedian's tool. It is grossly undermaintained: every item contains only one decoding, even where there are 17 of them and growing; urban-dictionary style entries, such as NORWICH for "(k)nickers off ready when I'm coming home", etc. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:33, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom and as an article of no use to readers. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:59, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep The nomination statement is factually wrong in every particular. Most of the items are not red links: only about 5% of them are. Nor are they indiscriminate: the list is limited to those which have corresponding articles. Nor are most of the links to disam pages. Lists of this sort have always been highly important references works, and therefore form a natural part of an encyclopedia. As for uselessness, that they are useless to one or two editors is not an argument. I can say "useful": I find such lists suggestive for browsing, which is one of the purposes of an encyclopedia. The only criticism I agree with is that they are undermaintained, but the solution is to maintain them. WP is a work in progress. DGG ( talk ) 04:57, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Maintain. 5% redlinks and "limited to those which have corresponding articles" are contradicting, though. But one can say, "limited to those which have or used to have corresponding articles". Not a useless list IMO. And...
 * Comment Shouldn't there be an entry, LAI = List of acronyms and initialisms" then? 217.251.152.109 (talk) 07:30, 26 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Speedy Keep The nomination proposes to move the page in question rather than deleting it. And proposing to do anything to major sublists such as List of information technology acronyms is not acceptable because they have not been tagged in any way so watchers of those pages will be oblivious to this discussion. Warden (talk) 08:42, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * List of IT acronyms is not its subpage: it is a reasonably narrow and searchable list. Staszek Lem (talk) 23:46, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep Most elements in the lists are notable, and the rest could be deleted. These may be useful to people looking for content on Wikipedia.  List of all single-letter-double-digit combinations is different as it's not limited to notable content and has a lot of redlinks; it has a clearly different purpose.  This list doesn't violate any policy, and I see no reason to remove it.  --Colapeninsula (talk) 10:39, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 19:12, 26 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep because it is useless. If utility is not an argument for retention, then lack of utility is not an argument for deletion. Not my fault WP rules suck. Anarchangel (talk) 13:26, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually, there is a rule WP:NOT I cited, which does not suck. By this rule a huge number of lists was deleted, such as List of songs about death and the likes. I am not especially against this list; I just thought that its fate must follow that of the very similar List of TLAs. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:55, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
 * that was an omnibus AfD back in 2007, covering a good many lists of songs about [topic], Articles for deletion/List of songs about weather. thank goodness Wikipedia doesn't follow precedent, for this is 5 years later and I very much doubt if the same conclusion would hold today, especially because the closing nominator used the criterion "I will delete all lists in this nomination except those that at least one person in this discussion recommended keeping or that have survived a previous deletion discussion". For an AfD of that scope, the procedure today would be to relist individually. In fact, it might be good to restore some of the articles, suitably edited. DGG ( talk ) 22:55, 28 April 2012 (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.