Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fastest-selling products (3rd 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 delete. Eddie891 Talk Work 20:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

List of fastest-selling products
AfDs for this article:


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

This list is a coatrack for WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. Unlike the family of "highest-grossing" lists, where the superlative is a concrete measure, speed is by definition a relative measure. There is no such thing as an objective speed. This definition is cruelly tortured in this list, which includes sales "speeds" at a variety of unconstrained time points/time intervals and compares them across a variety of unconstrained sales domains (e.g. comparing sales of an album across markets in countries with wildly different populations). There is no assurance that any of the items in this list are actually the fastest-selling anything, since purported record holders are listed alongside (purported) previous record holders with alternate time scales, and there is no reliable third party tracking authority to confirm that an unlisted entry is the true record holder.

The video games section is its own SYNTH horrorshow. It does the classic OR trick of multiplying sales with MSRP to arrive at "gross revenue" and then further subdivides speed by a dozen different time scales into a nightmare table that is legitimately impossible to glean any meaning out of.

Some of the domain specific lists (e.g. Lists of fastest-selling albums) have more concrete and well-defined criteria. This one does not. If there's the heart of a wikipedia-acceptable list in here, I'm not seeing it. This is a WP:TNT situation at the very least (and replace with domain-specific lists) and I don't see a domain-general version of this list ever being appropriate. Axem Titanium (talk) 17:39, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Post-nom addition: Ah, it appears that this list has been nominated twice before, but those AFDs were not linked on the talk page. The 2nd nom was a procedural close because it was nominated just hours after the first nom's close. The 1st nom was more substantive, ending in "no consensus", but highlighting many of the same problems that this list still suffers from, 10 years later, namely untenable and potentially limitless inclusion criteria and disordered apples-to-oranges comparisons which are inherent to the nature of this list. The previous result was no consensus, but by a hair, as noted in the closer's comment. I think 10 years of accumulating coatracking have not improved any of these core deficiencies. Axem Titanium (talk) 18:02, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Literature, Film, Music, Video games, Products,  and Lists. Axem Titanium (talk) 17:39, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete - per nomination. As the template at the top of the article suggests this list is the work of Maestro2016 who was known for misusing sources. I actually thought about cleanup this page in the future but after looking at the page further this is too much of a headache even for me. Timur9008 (talk) 21:11, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Split Lists of fastest-selling albums makes sense since it shows the albums that sold the most copies their first week of release. List of fastest-grossing films has specific criteria as well.  This article has a lot of things that shouldn't be there.  In the vehicle section, the first entry makes sense.  Bestselling car of all times by pre-order or first week, that'd be something to list.  The other three entries there don't show the actual sales figures or time period counted.  The video game section could be its own article just like the one for albums is.  List of video games that sold the most preorders.  A game selling 30,000,000 copies from preorders is quite impressive.  Listing which video games sold the most copies their first week would make sense also.  List_of_fastest-selling_products has information that should go somewhere.  If not enough things to make their own article yet, this would be the place to have it.  Just need to eliminate all the bad entries in the article.   D r e a m Focus  19:08, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I have no problem with narrowly defined sublists on this topic in fields where data is plentiful and verifiable. The music industry is perhaps one of them since it publishes detailed sales data. The video game industry is absolutely not, since sales data is often deliberately obfuscated, misrepresented, and selectively distributed, preferentially shared when it's positive. Pre-order data is very rarely shared. It's hard enough sorting through the sales data for the best-selling games list. I think trying to maintain a verifiable list on "fastest selling" games, which is just an ever so slightly different take on best-selling games (they're both about essentially the same topic), is not a good use of time and energy. Axem Titanium (talk) 20:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the Article Rescue Squadron's list of content for rescue consideration.  D r e a m Focus  19:11, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Worth noting most of this article was by /, so even if it was to stay, it'd require a full WP:TNT. JOE  BRO 64  20:24, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete Per nom. WP:INDISCRIMINATE, very hard to verify this information. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 21:16, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete per excellent nominating rational from nom and TheJoebro64. Don't have anything to add to what they've said here. Nomader  ( talk ) 15:53, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete Due to WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:SYNTH. Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 21:41, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete with no prejudice to forking into other articles if they are well-sourced. "Products" is just too unwieldy. - Cukie Gherkin (talk) 02:46, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete - Clear-cut trivia. Azuredivay (talk) 06:49, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete then Burn whatever remains. WP:INDISCRIMINATE. A coatrack for WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. RS do not define what "fastest selling" means, and "products" could only be more INDISCRIMINATE if it was changed from "products" to "things". Without meaningfully defined criteria, it is impossible to tell if this meets LISTN.  // Timothy :: talk  11:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. I am afraid to !vote that way, because so much work appears have been done, but it's still a mess. Bearian (talk) 18:58, 11 April 2023 (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.