Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of cemeteries in the United States (2nd nomination)


 * 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) DavidLeighEllis (talk) 01:54, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

List of cemeteries in the United States
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A potentially infinite list. There are more cemeteries in a single region of a single state than there are currently on this list for the entire country. This should be left to a category and not a list. Gamaliel ( talk ) 00:24, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete Per nomination as an indiscriminate and potentially enormous list. A category makes far more sense. A list of cemeteries is inappropriate. Edison (talk) 03:10, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * keep This would leave the US as the one country of 30 or so major countries that would lack such a list. See Lists of cemeteries.  That there might be many items in the list is not a reason to get rid of it, but only a reason to subdivide the list by US state. Hmains (talk) 04:51, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep Most of the items on the list have their own entry and the argument for having the category and not the list fails WP:CLN.  Lugnuts  Dick Laurent is dead 07:40, 7 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep per WP:NOTDUP. That said, the notion of limiting the article to only entries that have Wikipedia articles or at least to only include content that is verified would be beneficial. As this list grows, WP:SPINOFF articles can always be created per state, which addresses the notion of it becoming too long. Northamerica1000(talk) 09:53, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep Includes many notable cemeteries. Topic is notable per books such as The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History by David Charles Sloane (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn and Reed Yalom (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), etc. --Colapeninsula (talk) 12:09, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Split into individual states?  ayc li ffe talk 12:42, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep or Split per state per arguments above. VMS Mosaic (talk) 13:50, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * delete Montgomery County, Maryland alone has upward of three hundred known cemeteries ; it's a safe guess that the tally for the whole country would head into the hundreds of thousands. The argument that we have these for other countries only proves that they are kept to a reasonable length because nobody here knows enough about them to populate them, which would also be the limiting factor here. The English list in particular is (the creators hope) held to a reasonable length by excluding all churchyards, an arbitrary and questionable cutoff. It's also a problem that the quality of documentation varies wildly from place to place; that map I linked to is a testimony to the thoroughness of county planners, but two other Maryland counties I checked had no similar level of documentation (e.g. there's no way that neighboring Howard County has only twenty-five cemeteries as found listed on one site). I don't see a way to do this that doesn't involve the kind of arbitrary limitation we already see, and indeed I propose that all other comprehensive lists of cemetery-by-place be deleted as well. Mangoe (talk) 15:41, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there some reason you think this can't be broken into sub-lists (per state/county)? And/or restricted to notable cemeteries? --Colapeninsula (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I would imagine that lists of notable US cemeteries already exist in the form of subsets of NRHP listings; I could certainly be wrong about that. If lists that contained significantly better information than categories could be constructed, I wouldn't object, but I don't see how any division larger than a state would work, and some states (e.g. NY) might need to be broken down by county. There's also the question of what information to record.


 * Looking at the construction of this thing already, I see wildly differing levels of detail. Many state section list only name and location; Maryland has blue-linked articles with links to major burials. Montana on the other hand has comprehensive lists for each county e.g. List of cemeteries in Beaverhead County, Montana. If we go the latter route, List of cemeteries in Montgomery County, Maryland gets three hundred-plus entries, impeccably sourced, and it would be possible in some counties, I imagine, to not only source every cemetery but the text of every stone and perhaps even all presently unmarked burials.


 * I went along with making list articles of lighthouses in each US state only because it did seem to me that a tabular presentation of the major data was meaningful; the full list of lights for the country has in practice served as a checklist of article to create, and is mostly sourced to lists for each state maintained by the Coast Guard that other sources agree is largely comprehensive if not absolutely perfect. It's also hugely pushing the limits of what can be practically presented in a single list. Here I'm not seeing the same kind of certainty; instead I see a huge difference of opinion as to how much to include. As I said above, I do not believe we can source every state to the extent that apparently is possible in Montana. I could be wrong about that too, of course. But I just do not see the utility of of a unified nationwide list. Mangoe (talk) 19:25, 9 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom- shove all in to a category. - →Davey 2010→ →Talk to me!→  16:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Why is a category better than a list? A category with 1000 entries is just as hard to navigate. --Colapeninsula (talk) 16:23, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * If the category were to be in alphabetical order it would be a whole lot easier to navigate and alot quicker to load compared to this article. - →Davey 2010→ →Talk to me!→  16:35, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. Martin 4 5 1  23:53, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Martin 4 5 1  23:53, 7 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep Ample blue links in the article. This list is useful for navigation.  And it doesn't list every single cemetery in the nation, obviously, it list the notable ones.  If it doesn't have its own Wikipedia article and isn't on any historic registry, then no reason to have it on the list.   D r e a m Focus  00:28, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep The "infinite" argument fails WP:NOTPAPER and the category argument fails WP:CLN. Andrew (talk) 18:19, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep per Edison, Hmains, Lugnuts, Northamerica1000, and Colapeninsula. Remove the red links (or create artilces on those), and make sub-lists, but don't delete a perfectly useful list.  Until very recently, perhaps the last generation, visiting cemetaries in America was a major entertainment. @Davey, some people will likely need to navigate by state. Bearian (talk) 18:49, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep or Split - it's certainly not infinite, but it probably should be split. Greg Bard (talk) 19:34, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep, then Split & Specialize - I think a separate list for each state / territory is in order, plus a speciallized list, List of U.S. Veterans Cemeteries. Peaceray (talk) 23:40, 10 January 2014 (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.