Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of autobiographies


 * 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 no consensus‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. A discussion on whether to split is one that can be handled editorially. A further consensus on removing content appears unlikely Star   Mississippi  16:41, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

List of autobiographies

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Article had an attempted PROD in 2007 ("Listcruft - we have categories for this."), which still seems accurate. I contend that "autobiographies" is much too broad a topic to meet WP:LISTN. The current article says it will list "notable" autobiographies (presumably an attempt to narrow the WP:LISTCRITERIA) but most of the listed books do not have their own articles. Even if we restricted ourselves to notable autobiographies, many hundreds of titles would merit inclusion, creating an unwieldy collection of items which are not actually discussed as a set. (People write about, e.g., German wartime autobiographies, but not all autobiographies.) "Autobiographies" should be a category, not a list-- and indeed, it is. (Note that even the category breaks things down more granularly into autobiographies by nation, LGBTQ autobiographies, etc.) It might be justifiable to spin this out into some sub-lists, e.g., sports autobiographies, or autobiographies by heads of state, though even then I'm not sure appropriate sourcing would exist for the set. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 06:19, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Literature and Lists.  ~ L 🌸  (talk) 06:19, 26 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Split into about a dozen other lists based on topical notability. Individual kinds of autobiographies are notable, not all biographies ever. After splitting the original page should become a list of lists. And yes I openly hate “navigational” lists (i.e. internal non-disambiguating link farms) but most readers seem surprisingly clueless about the existence of categories based on pageview statistics. Dronebogus (talk) 18:47, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Bobherry  Talk   My Edits  01:35, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Split There are too many things on this list that shouldn't be. Category:Autobiographies shows plenty of notable autobiographies could be listed, however those should be sorted into sub-categories as a larger number already are. There are over a thousand in Category:American autobiographies divided into subcategories there as well.   Lists are far more useful than categories since you can find information easier, for example if you can search for the writer's name instead of just the name of their biography.   D r e a m Focus  03:21, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I notice that the current list shows notable people who have an autobiography, but anyone can publish one, doesn't make it noteworthy. Many of them probably have book reviews that can be found and articles written about them if anyone cared to bother.  If the person is famous in recent decades, they have coverage for their books such as Michel J Fox for his autobiography Lucky Man .   D r e a m Focus  03:30, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Relisting comment: Anyone volunteering to do this proposed "split"? Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 03:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep Discussion about split should be on talk page. NavjotSR (talk) 16:04, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * As the nom, I have no interest in organizing a split, since it would take actual research to go out and find sources justifying any particular sub-list. I was only speculating that there might be WP:LISTN notability for some better-defined subset of these, but honestly, on reflection, I'm not convinced that preserving this material would even help with those new lists. To write a list of sports autobiographies, for example, one would want to go out and find some books/articles about "sports autobiographies"; after that, typing up the books in the sources is the easy part. I nominated because I think a clean delete is the way to go.
 * Also, I want to observe that the one keep !vote here has not provided a notability rationale. ~ L 🌸  (talk) 13:48, 11 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom as unmaintainable in this form and not really salvageable even in pieces. I don't think this is a notability issue -- it would be awfully hard to argue that "autobiographies" have not been the subject of extensive scholarship as a group or set -- but more of a WP:DOAL point 6 problem: Some topics are so broad that a list would be unmanageably long and effectively unmaintainable. DOAL isn't really framed in deletion terms (and point 6, added in 2014, seems like it should maybe be moved to WP:NOT somewhere?), but I think deletion is the logical upshot here. To the extent that it might be possible to have a great comprehensive list(s) of bluelinked autobiographies with value-added information for each title, this existing scattershot list isn't really moving us in that direction, so I would consider this a reasonable use of TNT. Finally, splitting this out into List of aerospace autobiographies etc. as possibly suggested above would likely raise some WP:LISTN problems. (But if anyone's volunteering to give that a shot, I'd be all for putting the deletion on ice to avoid attribution problems.) Splitting into national lists, as also suggested above, would likely require starting over from category membership anyway, so I don't really see a WP:PRESERVE angle here. -- Visviva (talk) 00:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. Full agreement with Visviva. -- asilvering (talk) 08:59, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in reliable sources. The subject passes Notability, which says, "One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources, per the above guidelines; notable list topics are appropriate for a stand-alone list." I will show below that "autobiographies" has been treated as a "a group or set by independent reliable sources". Sources     </li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> </ol> The list might never be complete, which is fine. It is fine for the list never to be complete per WikiProject Lists: Because of Wikipedia's role as an almanac and a gazetteer as well as an encyclopedia, it contains a large number of lists. Some lists, such as the list of U.S. state birds, are complete and unlikely to change for a long time.

Other lists are missing entries and are called incomplete lists. Incomplete lists should be immediately preceded by the Incomplete list template, or one of its topic-specific variations. For example, List of people from Italy likely never will be complete. It was discussed at Articles for deletion/List of Italians, where there was a strong consensus for retention. It is fine to have overlapping categories and lists. From Categories, lists, and navigation templates: It is neither improper nor uncommon to simultaneously have a category, a list, and a navigation template that all cover the same topic. These systems of organizing information are considered to be complementary, not inappropriately duplicative. Furthermore, arguing that a category duplicates a list (or vice versa) at a deletion discussion is not a valid reason for deletion and should be avoided. Redirects of list articles to categories are highly discouraged: list articles should take the place of the redirect.

Consider that lists may include features not available to categories, and building a rudimentary list of links is a useful step in improving a list. Deleting these rudimentary lists is a waste of these building blocks, and unnecessarily pressures list builders into providing a larger initial commitment of effort whenever they wish to create a new list, which may be felt as a disincentive. When deciding whether to create or avoid a list, the existence of a category on the same topic is irrelevant. Advantages of a list From Categories, lists, and navigation templates: The benefit of this list is that it includes "further details" through having the autobiography's title, the author, and the publication year. A list allows readers to look up whether a particular notable person has written an autobiography. A category does not have that functionality. Disadvantages of a list From Categories, lists, and navigation templates: I don't consider a list of notable autobiographies to be "unmanageably long and effectively unmaintainable". The list currently has fewer than 1,000 entries. If non-notable autobiographies are pruned, it will be an even shorter list. Once the list gets very large, it can be split. How to split the list From Article size: "Very large articles should be split into logically separate articles. Long stand-alone list articles are split into subsequent pages alphabetically, numerically, or subtopically. Also consider splitting and transcluding the split parts (for example with Template:Excerpt)." The list can be split alphabetically by author's surname instead of by subtopics like "sports autobiographies" or "aerospace autobiographies". An alphabetical split by author's surname addresses the deletion concern that a split would give rise to Notability concerns. There could be articles titled:<ol> <li>List of autobiographies (A)</li> <li>List of autobiographies (B)</li> <li>List of autobiographies (C)</li> </ol>See List of acronyms: A, List of PC games (A), List of Latin phrases (A), and List of diseases (A) for how other lists have been split alphabetically. General notability guideline There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow list of autobiographies to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 00:21, 17 July 2023 (UTC) </li></ul>
 * 1) Good for exploratory browsing of Wikipedia.
 * 2) Can be embellished with annotations (further details).
 * 1) Some topics are so broad that a list would be unmanageably long and effectively unmaintainable.
 * 2) * For example, a list of all people from a particular country who have Wikipedia articles
 * @Cunard Liz asked if anyone was going to offer to do the proposed split. Are you making that offer? -- asilvering (talk) 06:05, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I am recommending keeping the article as is, not splitting. List of autobiographies is not long enough where it has to be split. Once it gets too long, per Article size it can be split alphabetically by author's surname. Cunard (talk) 06:42, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. The page, while passing general notability guidelines quite well, is so desperately in need of long-term organizational restructuring that a clear and decisive direction isn't obvious - and besides, the utilization of page categories, split lists and/or functional inserted identifiers suggest that deeming the notability of a book versus the individual(s) who wrote it is rather unrealistic to manage. Additionally, in and of itself, a split may not allow the verifiability of existing autobiographies to qualify for notability down the road; as it stands, however, the page is difficult to maintain, and it would be hard to justify the existence of certain sub-lists, overlapping genre lists and/or a list of categorical compilations of lists. In other words, even creating splitted lists can present problems for the development of satisfactory coverage concerning the inclusion of future autobiographies... and a split may not be as worthwhile as creating a Category:AutobiographyAuthors category, which I suggest as an alternative solution. ^^ TheMysteriousShadeheart (talk) 17:55, 17 July 2023 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.