Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of official languages by GDP per capita


 * 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. Bradjamesbrown (talk) 00:03, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

List of official languages by GDP per capita

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No sources cited for the information, appears to be WP:Synthesis. As an aside, the methodology leaves much to be desired. For example, the fact that many countries have multiple official languages appears to have been ignored, e.g. Canada does not appear in the row for French.  Lord Pistachio  talk 01:44, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete per nomination. This is a list of two variables with no clear relationship between them. Nick-D (talk) 02:01, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom as original research in the form of a synthesis. No evidence has been provided that the relationship between official language and GDP per capita has been recognized as meaningful by other sources. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:10, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. It's a simple matter of mathematics, rather than synthesis — take the GDPs for the countries that have X as their official language, combine them, and you have your total.  Such simple mathematics are permitted by the synthesis policy.  However, this is definitely not the sort of information that belongs on Wikipedia; it's trivia and not at all encyclopedic.  Nyttend (talk) 15:13, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Not sure exaclty what function this serves. Not notable either.Slatersteven (talk) 16:18, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 19:41, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete OR by synthesis. Resolute 23:46, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete as it strongly appears to be Listcruft with multiple ways in which it is untenable for any encyclopedic use. Not only are there not WP:Reliable sources that the formula is useful for anything, but it's unlikely that the criteria is even logical; this would have become clear if the table had been based on actual official languages, instead of some editor's opinion of what should be the official languages.  Take, for example, the Swedish language: if I remember correctly, Sweden is a full official language in two countries, Sweden and Finland.  Only 5% of Finland speaks Swedish as their mother tongue, but it's official in 100% (see, for example, Mandatory Swedish).  The worthlessness of ranking Swedish-language GDP using 100% of Finland's population is clear, and would have been obvious if only the table followed its own criteria instead of just assuming that Swedish must not really official anywhere but Sweden.  This same problem recurs throughout the table, and will continue to be a problem because co-official languages are based on the domestic political situation, not objective numeric proportions, and in many cases a country does not even have a specific single list of languages.  Even if the article criteria were changed (defeating the whole point of the article name), and even if a country's population numbers separated by mother tongue were available for some countries, it still remains that GDP reliably separated domestically by mother tongue is almost never available.  Furthermore, in contrast to Finland, many countries, such as China, go out of their way to minimize acknowledgement of certain widespread languages, so not only are their official languages not a proportional reflection of the mother tongues used, but the language statistics for each of those countries are often non-neutral as well, so neither the official language method nor the proportional method yields anything other than mathematical entertainment, and this affects even several countries with large populations, making accurate ranking impossible even if it would have been useful in the first place. --Closeapple (talk) 18:20, 26 May 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.