Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of only children


 * 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. § FreeRangeFrog croak 21:17, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

List of only children

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Per WP:DOAL: "Some topics (e.g. a list of all people from a particular country who have Wikipedia articles) are so broad that a list would be unmanageably long and effectively unmaintainable." I submit that this list is a perfect example of something that should only be a category, instead of being a list. In the U.S., for example, more than a fifth of children born these days will be only children.Anythingyouwant (talk) 22:25, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions.  Everymorning   talk  22:19, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Twenty percent of humanity? massive list of no encyclopedic value. Govindaharihari (talk) 23:12, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
 * There is an encyclopedia page about only children, so why would a list of notable only children have no encyclopedic value? "twenty percent of humanity" doesn't sound like a valid reason for deletion, because by that argument, Christians make up 30% of humanity, Muslims make up 23% of humanity, therefore List of Muslims and List of Christians would also have no encyclopedic value, too, would you agree?


 * Furthermore, that the original objection linked to an article about the effects of raising only children implies that it's got some encyclopedic value. WACGuy (talk) 05:27, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The main argument isn't that the idea of being an only child isn't notable, but that mostly this would be so incredibly large that it would be unwieldy. Right now this list only includes people well known in the United States and even then it's an extremely short list. This has the potential to have hundreds upon thousands of names on it, which will be an extremely bulky and unwieldy list. That's not even including the number of names that could yet be added to it- ie, the people who are notable but do not yet have pages or have yet to achieve notability. I agree that this would work better as a category rather than a list, since that's more easily navigated. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  07:33, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Tokyogirl79, thanks for the insight. I guess it's up to the Wikipedia users now on whether to keep or delete. Cheers! WACGuy (talk) 07:56, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * You also have to argue, do we only include real people or fictional characters? There are a ton of fictional characters that would fit the list, like Lavinia. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  08:04, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Another thing to add is that the list of Christians and list of Muslims pages have been split into many subsections because one basic page would just be too big. If you want to try to split all of these into individual lists then that could potentially work, but that will take a lot of time. It's not something that could be done in a few days since you'd have to go through thousands upon thousands of articles- and those are just the ones where the article helpfully labels themselves as an only child. Right now a category is the best way to do this. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  08:34, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete/make into a category. I'm adding names to the list, partially to highlight how infeasible this would be as a page and not a category. A search on Wikipedia for "only child" brings up almost 100,000 hits. Even if we discard half of those as false hits of one type or another and then another half as otherwise unusable then that would still leave about 20,000-25,000 articles that could be listed in this article. That's just too unwieldy size-wise. I think that there's merit in having this in some sort of searchable format, but a page isn't the right solution to this issue. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  08:23, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm calling it quits a little early- I only got about 4-5 pages (about 60-80 hits) into the search results for the articles on Wikipedia before I got tired of adding them. My point in mentioning this is that there are a LOT of only children with articles on Wikipedia and this list would be massive. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  08:31, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * OK, I see what you mean. Wow you definitely expanded it! :) It's something that could get really really huge indeed. But....that's not unprecedented. There are dozens of lists on Wikipedia that have entries exceeding one thousand. But those lists of course cover specific subjects, and there are many people out there interested enough in those subjects who wouldn't mind maintaining and cataloging those entries in a readable format.
 * Categories are a strange thing because Wikipedia, or its users, are so strict about citation that how do you prove a Wikipedia page belongs in a category? WACGuy (talk) 09:36, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Mostly you just have to show a citation somewhere in the article. With some of these it shouldn't be too hard since the only child status is already listed in the article, but with others it may require some sort of searching. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  09:49, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete as trivia. As noted, this is rather common, and while we will note in someone's article the siblings they are known to have, we don't typically go out of our way to note that they had no siblings, a fact that may not have had any demonstrable impact on their life and may be for far too many reasons of varying significance to make comparisons meaningful at all. And seriously, DON'T make into a category. I don't remotely see how it would (or should) survive CFD. postdlf (talk) 15:10, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I wasn't going to start a category for it, though a category would be less inappropriate than a list. Cheers.Anythingyouwant (talk) 18:10, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Maybe on the maintenance side of it, but regarding the significance of the biographical fact we're far more strict with categories than with lists. postdlf (talk) 19:03, 20 April 2015 (UTC)\
 * ...sure enough, the category has failed CFD in the past... postdlf (talk) 19:07, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete - Too large to maintain and more importantly too trivial to warrant being in an encyclopedia. This is the kind of excess baggage that one must simply toss overboard in order to save the ship. Tarc (talk) 15:16, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete as listcruft; this is a non-defining trait. Snuggums (talk / edits) 15:29, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete as too large and trivial. I also cannot recommend it as a category per WP:CATDEF. As SNUGGUMS states it is a non-defining trait. Yes, I know that some will argue that there are traits that a single child has that those with siblings do not but that is subjective and there are numerous examples of people who do not fit that pattern. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 15:50, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete; clear violation of WP:INDISCRIMINATE on top of issues others have mentioned. –Chase (talk / contribs) 18:18, 20 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete OK, so I agree that the list will get unmanageably large, so should now be deleted as is. I created the page, but per Anythingyouwant's link to WP:DOAL and Tokyogirl79 demonstrating how the page will grow much too large, it makes sense to stop this page from becoming uncontrollable. I have no objections if that's a violation of Wikipedia's policy. WACGuy (talk) 19:17, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Would you be interested in userfying the content? If you're interested in creating a category the list thus far could be useful in knowing which people should be tagged. There's still a lot of names out there, but this would at least give you a head's start. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  03:51, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking probably not. It seems that if users aren't in support of keeping the content (which is fine, no objections) then it's best not to start something. I'd hate to invest energy into something that will probably get deleted. Take care. WACGuy (talk) 19:10, 21 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete not really encyclopedic and not really worth a category as very few if any persons are notable as "only children". MilborneOne (talk) 16:33, 25 April 2015 (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.