Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of communities on U.S. Route 66


 * 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   delete. L Faraone  03:42, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

List of communities on U.S. Route 66

 * – ( View AfD View log )

As a stand-alone list, this isn't notable. The majority of entries should be in U.S. Route 66 or its state-level subarticles. The title is an unlikely search term.  Imzadi  1979   →  03:03, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - Do not need a canonical list of every town on US 66.  Dough 48  72  03:05, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Categorify Delete - Might be a useful category, but not a list. --Rschen7754 03:06, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 *  Merge  and redirect to U.S. Route 66 (or appropirate state-specific subpages). Admrboltz (talk) 03:06, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete redundant to category. --Admrboltz (talk) 03:15, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Categorify and Merge per Rschen and Admrboltz; we can have a large category for this and also have these cities mentioned in the route description of US 66 as well as US 66 in [State] articles. – CG Talk 03:10, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment - We already have Category:Communities on U.S. Route 66.  Dough 48  72  03:10, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete as redundant to Category:Communities on U.S. Route 66. –Fredddie™ 03:13, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:58, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Other than the ones mentioned in the famous song ("...St. Louie, Joplin Missouri, Oklahoma City is mighty pretty, etc.") the communities themselves aren't famous for being on Route 66. This doesn't require a separate page, and the only reason that it takes up so much screen at the moment is the dim-witted method of assigning a separate line for each blue link.  The page of Illinois towns could be incorporated into a section of the U.S. 66 article, if need be, in one paragraph.  Mandsford 15:29, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong keep - most of the delete rationales here are very poor. Merging this content into the main Route 66 article is a possibility, but it might be excessive detail in the route description, in which case this is a valid spin-off - I'll leave that for the raodfans to describe. But the following grounds to delete are complete bunkum: (1) "not a likely search term" - same is true for all sub-articles that are spun off on length grounds. (2) "redundant to category" - no, please read WP:CLT. It's not redundant if it can do something a category can't - and in this case it can, because it can put places in the order they lie on the road. Similarly, this list could be used to give a little detail about each town - even something basic like it's population. Categories can't do that. "Redundancy" is an utterly invalid argument, there's nothing wrong with having both a category and a list, as they serve different organizational purposes. (3) "Lack of notability" is arguably invalid - this is basically a spin-off subarticle. As with the fact that spin off articles don't usually have likely search terms, we also give them leniency in terms of standalone notability: the important thing is whether the page contains useful, organised information that would naturally be part of the main article, but would add excessive length so is better as a subarticle. This does seem exactly the sort of material that it would be natural to include in the main article, but may not wish to do so for length reasons. TheGrappler (talk) 17:58, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Let me reply. 1) No, this isn't a likely search term, which is why the title shouldn't be retained as a redirect if the list is merged. 2) You're right, the list can do things a category can't, but it's still a bit redundant because 3) most of the cities listed aren't notable for being on former US 66. WP:USRD deprecated lists of cities in roads articles for the US because a properly written route description will already list the cities through which a road passes. Add to that the inherently subjectivity of determining which are "major" enough to be listed at the exclusion of others, and the side boxes were killed. This list itself is a spunoff list that would be that "small" infobox on the side of the main article. All of these cities should be included in the by-state subarticless route descriptions, which should already be describing more detail than what this list contains.  Imzadi  1979   →  18:31, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for a decent reply. I can appreciate that in your opinion all this material should be in the main article, in which case it ought to be merged. I can see a lot of delete !votes - is your opinion that this page should be kept until merger is complete, or do you feel the merger has effectively already been done? As for the title post-merge, what you said about it being an unlikely search term is reasonable. However, leaving redirects for merged pages has the benefit that it doesn't produce dead links on other people's sites or on their bookmarks; I can't see what harm outweights this benefit.
 * You do seem to mix up "notability" with "non-triviality". In a thesaurus the two are synonymous, but unfortunately they appear to have developed different meanings in Wikispeak! "Notability" usually refers to whether something deserves an article in its own right. "Triviality" is to do with a fact is worth including in an article, or as a means of categorizing. For instance, if lying on US 66 is a trivial fact about a place, then there should be no category for settlements on that route (that's a CFD issue, not AFD, of course). Unfortunately there seems to be no clear consensus on how notability applies to lists, although it is true that not all items in an list need to be notable in their own right (i.e. a list isn't like a navbox), so long as they are non-trivial or the list is meant to be exhaustive. It is, however, clear that a list of settlements that a road passes through should be complete, particularly since it is only a finite number of settlements (it's the "potentially infinite lists" which are the headache). The fact a particular road passes through a settlement might be a trivial fact about that settlement, but a non-trivial fact about that road. If you are correct that the main road article will include all of the information currently in this list, then a merge seems in order.
 * The only reservation I have about that, is whether the list actually has an advantage as a supplement to the article: a straight list, possibly annotated in some way (e.g. with population size of the settlements, their co-ords, and distances between them along the road) might make it easier for a reader to extract information, than having to pull it out of continuous prose. This is why we have, for instance, list-like "Timeline of X" and prose "History of X" articles - all the information in the timeline may lie in the prose article, but the timeline itself isn't redundant because it presents certain key aspects in a more comprehensible way. There is therefore nothing about a "Route outline for Road X" that inherently breaches Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, as it's not necessarily redundant to the main "Road X" article (depending on how the two are written). Of course, it may be consensus that such route outlines are not a good idea! But somebody obviously thought they were, or this article wouldn't exist, and they do have an arguable case. I'm just pointing out that this argument exists, and that you could try to make articles like this distinctive and non-redundant (analagous to the "timeline" articles), but I'll leave that to the "roadier" editors to think about. TheGrappler (talk) 23:21, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep I do not think the guidelines of the Wikiproject are necessarily accepted here--Sometimes wikiprojects specify more articles than the rest of us want, sometimes they are too selective. In any case the essay at WikiProject U.S. Roads/Notability does not discuss this particular type of article. Personally, I find this much clearer than the usual route description--and, in any case, that does not seem to have yet been written in the necessary detail. Sometimes wikiprojects specify more articles than the rest of us want, sometimes they are too selective.  I think it's appropriate geographic content--whether it should be incorporated into the main article is another matter, but I would suggest not, because it is a very long list.& would overbalance the rest of the article.  The key thing this does that a category cannot is present them in geographical order, which is essential context information. (I assume this list does do that--I have not checked).    DGG ( talk ) 22:39, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * A category would work fine to document towns along US 66. A list of these towns is way too long and is simply listcruft. Should we create lists of towns for other routes, such as US 50? For precedent, we have Articles for deletion/List of Towns Along I-95 by County and State, which was deleted.  Dough 48  72  02:19, 18 December 2010 (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.