Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of brain tumor patients


 * 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. W.marsh 16:47, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

List of brain tumor patients

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Per the article description: "This list ... includes people who made significant contributions to their chosen field and who had a primary or metastatic brain tumor at some point in their lives."


 * Per WP:NOT (5): "Non-encyclopedic cross-categorizations, such as 'People from ethnic/cultural/religious group X employed by organization Y' or 'Restaurants specializing in food type X in city Y'. Cross-categories like these are not considered sufficient basis to create an article, unless the intersection of those categories is in some way a culturally significant phenomenon."


 * Per WP:NOT (general content criteria): "merely being true or informative does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia."

I'm sorry, and I note it is a featured list and interesting and created with effort... but it just doesn't seem to meet the aims of WP:NOT. Although the people are notable, and the condition is notable, this seems to fall into a list of non-encyclopedic cross-categorizations: "List of people in category X (people who made a notable contribution to their field) and who have condition Y".

WP:INTERESTING, much WP:EFFORT, and possibly of emotional significance for those fighting such conditions ..... but I'd like to double-check whether it's unencyclopedic. FT2 (Talk 07:46, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Weak delete as unencyclopedic. Lists have their place but I don't see this as being useful in any way. It's extremely well written and cited, though - A l is o n  ❤ 07:59, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep. The list being featured means that the consensus of the editors involved in the FL nomination was that this list was not only encyclopedic, but some of Wikipedia's finest. I see a list of notable patients as part of a good encyclopedic treatment of a disease. --Itub 09:00, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep. At the risk of stumbling on WP:OTHERSTUFF and WP:NOTAGAIN, it may be interesting to note two other related deletion debates on people with epilepsy and people with hepatitis C. In addition to this list and the epilepsy list, there are two other similar featured lists: HIV-positive people and polio survivors. Clearly, its featured status indicates a generally high level of conformance to WP guidelines and policy. In particular, it satisfies WP:LIVING by using only reliable published sources.


 * The introduction to this list gives the impression that this is a cross-categorizations when in fact, all lists on WP must restrict themselves to notable people. Few of the people in the list are notable solely for having had a brain tumour. This is true of many lists on WP. Featured List examples include Eagle Scouts, Alpha Phi Alpha brothers, and the alumni of Dartmouth College, Athabasca University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Jesus College, Oxford.


 * Lists of people with a medical condition tend to invoke some WP:IDONTLIKEIT reactions. They appear (usually unsourced) in many medical articles. Guidelines for handling such information have been incorporated into WP:MEDMOS, which encourages editors to spawn off such lists from the main medical article, when they get big enough.


 * The information can be considered encyclopaedic to at least two audiences, in addition to the casual reader. The first audience is advocacy groups such as charities working with patients or their carers. These groups are keen to find public figures to increase awareness, act as ambassadors and be "an example" to others. Knowing that "you are not alone" is an important psychological help that such groups recognise and so they often publish similar lists on their own web sites, in opening chapters of lay books on the condition, etc. The second audience could loosely be described as journalists, who are writing about the condition but want to find a human angle. Such newspaper/magazine articles often contain the stories of notable individuals, which helps the article come alive. The desire to enliven a dull medical article is not restricted to lay journalists. I know from my research on the epilepsy lists that writers of medical articles and books can't help namedropping and speculating on historical and contemporary figures. I believe this WP list is a useful tool for serious (non-trivia) research, worthy of inclusion in an online and wikilinked encyclopaedia.


 * Oh, and before anyone suggests replacing it with a category, please see the people with epilepsy deletion discussion. Colin°Talk 09:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Comment. At the very least, this article should be renamed. "List of brain tumor patients" doesn't inherently imply any required notability. &mdash;gorgan_almighty 13:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It used to be List of notable brain tumor patients but was renamed in keeping with WP:NOTE and WP:MOSLIST, which specifically discourages the use of "notable", "famous", etc. in list titles. See also this debate. Colin°Talk 13:46, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep this sort of thing seems to be accepted on WP. JJL 14:28, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment. Could this list somehow constitute a violation of HIPAA? Smashville 17:26, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No. The HIPAA concerns the people involved in healthcare who have a responsibility not to leak private health information. Our sources are newspaper obituaries and other public documents, not personal medical records. The information is already "out there". Colin°Talk 18:10, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Good one, Smash. I got the joke.  Regarding this list, Keep per above and below.  Celebrities who have battled cancer, Parkinson's, AIDS, brain tumors, etc., aid significantly in the attention that is brought to these misfortunes; often, they're an inspiration to a smaller group, those persons who are fighting the same thing.  Mandsford 02:23, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletions.   —Espresso Addict 22:25, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Well organised and referenced list which provides substantially more information than a category could. Per lucid explanation by Colin, such lists are of use to patients, patient advocate groups & journalists. There seems to be no contravention of the living person policy if the information is wholly sourced from public sources, as quick scan of the references shows to the case here. Espresso Addict 23:12, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep - The nominator is splitting semantic hairs. The phrase "people who made significant contributions to their chosen field" is almost entirely synonymous with "notable". Only notable people can go on a list of people, and that's not a cross-catorization, but a fundamental requirement of Wikipedia.  See Notability.  I've removed the phrase which has offended FT2.  This nomination is worrisome, because it shows a tendency to delete pages with minor problems rather than simply fix the problems.  Ten seconds of editing is all it took to fix the article.  AfD should be a last resort after every effort has been made to discuss the problems on an article's talk page, and editing the article to make it policy compliant.  Deleting this page would be another example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.   Th e Tr ans hu man ist    00:25, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't believe debate centres on only a "minor problem", though the lead sentence may have been problematic if it makes it appear the list is an arbitrary cross-categorisation. [BTW, the grouping within list does introduce cross-categorisations: Musicians with brain tumours, Writers with brain tumours, etc. However that grouping is done merely for convenience due to length, and the list could simply be rearranged alphabetically or chronologically.] The fact that this and two other similar lists have had and survived AfDs shows the fundamental question of whether such lists belong on WP is not an obvious one. Generally, people-lists whose entry criteria are tangential to the notability of the subjects are discouraged. That doesn't automatically send them to the rubbish heap; each list should be judged on its merits and our guidelines and policy need to be interpreted by humans, not robots. I have no problem with FT2 raising this AfD, which was done in the spirit of "let's discuss" rather than "this list must die". If we are going to debate whether WP should host this material, I can think of no other forum (despite its flaws). Additionally, I don't believe that featured lists and articles should be exempt from AfD. It might imply that such an AfD is unlikely to succeed, but the discussion can be useful. Colin°Talk 08:38, 18 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep Per Colin and previous deletion discussions of similar lists. Garion96 (talk) 13:22, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Keep it please. The George Gerschwin entry was very good in particular. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vicdd (talk • contribs) 23:48, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep with request for WP:SNOW. In additon to the the excellent reasons provided by Colin above, I affirm as the creator of this page that the original pre-wiki list (which contained only about 100 sourced listings) was actually sought out by a major brain tumor charity who contacted me with a request to use it for public relations, and that parts of that list - usually appearing in the same order I had assembled the name and mirroring the original descriptions - were reproduced in other sources.  There is a demonstrable need for this type of reference information, for the reasons Colin stated plus educational purposes: brain tumors have overtaken leukemia as the leading cause of childhood cancer deaths in the United States so parents and educators have a need to put a human face on the ailment.  This list provides a resource for innovative teaching methods for what must surely rank among the most difficult challenges they face.  The growth of this list since I started it and the high standards other Wikipedians have maintained are a testament to the wiki process.  Durova Charge! 18:19, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep per Durova. This article has over 200 hundred references, a textual introduction asserting notability and placing the list in a context, and is presented and organized well with the table and images.  Sincerely, --  Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles  Tally-ho! 16:21, 23 October 2007 (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.