Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people named Jacob


 * 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 both List of people named Jacob and Jacob (given name). Wikipedia is not a directory and the previous deletion discussions of this kind have shown that such lists of common names are too indiscriminate. So we should focus on the name itself in terms of etymology, ancient references, etc. This has already been done at Jacob (name) which page name serves as a generic disambiguation and shouldn't need any refinement. De728631 (talk) 16:50, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

List of people named Jacob

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This page was at Jacob (given name), but I recently moved it to this title in order to better describe the contents. The anthroponymy page for this name is currently at Jacob (name). Where there are relatively few notable people with a given name, we list then on the anthroponymy page, but in the case of a popular name like Jacob, we just provide a link to all pages beginning with that name. There are about 800 pages in this case, too many to list; see. I once proposed at WP:WikiProject Anthroponymy that it might be possible to seek consensus over a list of the most notable out of a large number with a name, but this approach was rejected. Rather than include a woefully incomplete list in the encyclopedia, the page should be deleted. Note that the listed persons known by the name Jacob alone are already also listed at Jacob (disambiguation) in accordance with MOS:DABNAME. I should also disclose that, in accordance with that guidance, I recently split some content from the disambiguation page to this list. – Fayenatic  L ondon 14:39, 18 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep and move back to Jacob (given name). Incompleteness is not a valid reason for deletion; if it were, a whole lot more articles would be fearing for their wiki-lives. This is no different from thousands of other name lists. (The entries on the dab page should be moved to the list.) Clarityfiend (talk) 02:47, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
 * As for the page name Jacob (given name), the current anthroponymy article Jacob (name) should be moved there.
 * As for other name lists, if they are very incomplete lists of people with common names, then they too be deleted; they are not a justification for keeping this one, see WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS.
 * In response to your comment in parentheses: on the contrary, the entries on the dab page for people known by "Jacob" alone should stay there, per MOS:DABNAME, because editors might link to Jacob meaning any one of them. They should of course be repeated in this list, if it is kept. – Fayenatic  L ondon 19:38, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * In response to those three indented points, my numbering reflects your order:
 * * Foo (name) should be used only on an article/SIA that concerns both the surname and the given name; Foo (given name) should be used whenever only given names are discussed.
 * We all seem to agree that we must cover the surname in this case; in the absence of a clear guideline that the given names must not be listed, they should be. But see my "Comment[s]" below regarding whether 1, 2, or 3 pages are needed where Foo=Jacob.
 * * OK, i looked at WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and learned it's not policy. Nor is it a guideline. It does reflects the views of some of the few dozen editors who've contributed to it, and citing it as if it were a policy, and devoid of caveats at that, is far from helpful.
 * In fact it counsels, "Trouble arises when legitimate comparisons ... are disregarded", and it seems to me that the claim that "This is no different from thousands of other name lists." is the kind of claim the essay warns against dismissing as you did. My experience suggests to me that what Cf asserts is true, and probably reflects wide agreement that there is no problem with including such names.
 * I don't know which entries Cf meant by "(The entries on the dab page should be moved to the list.)" I agree w/ FL that the surnameless Jacobs belong on the Dab page; i see no one questioning their place on any given-name SIA.


 * --Jerzy•t 10:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

--Jerzy•t 10:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Indeed, per Cf, "Incompleteness is not a valid reason for deletion"; the existence of Incomplete list (AKA Expand list), Inc-up, and Dynamic list, is prima facie proof that incompleteness is an invalid reason.


 * Those templates encourage editors to make the list as complete as possible. One problem with incompleteness is WP:NPOV, because some people will add their favourites. Anyway, the rationale for deletion is not that the list is incomplete, but that it would not be useful if it were complete. – Fayenatic  L ondon 19:12, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep and split several ways: at its creation, Jacob (given name) was an orthodox given-names SIA, but it has been corrupted (in large part by the nominator, who renamed it only after i complained that the PROD request misrepresented the content) by moving in from the Dab what we (i & at least some other Dab-CU regulars) routinely
 * leave on the corresponding Dab page (i.e., the given names of fictional characters whose fictional activities are described by their creators, at least in large part, via unaccompanied given name, so that those characters are legitimate senses to be disambiguated, for the same reasons that Mowgli would be the primary title even if Kipling had mentioned his surname in the story or in his own memoirs), or
 * split to (e.g.) Jacob (surname) (another clearly specified form of SIA), since being spelled the same way does not mean a particular surname is a given name, any more than we should treat The Cloud with the water-vapor structures treated in the article Cloud.


 * --Jerzy•t 04:54, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

when a page with a name that accurately describes its contents, however dubious those contents, receives new content clearly belying that name (e.g., people with surname Jacob being added to Jacob (given name), the change interferes with its function if the page is kept and  degrades the accuracy, efficiency, or both, of the deletion process if it's deleted.  (This is not the place to characterize your succeeding attempt to rectify the disparity by unilaterally changing the name.)
 * I don't know what you mean by "orthodox given-names SIA". In my experience, including work on many name pages as a member of WP:WikiProject Anthroponymy, there is usually not a split between the etymology page and the list of people with the name. If there are enough entries with (i) the surname and (ii) the given name to justify separate pages, then the eymology, variants, diminutives etc are usually kept on the page called Foo (given name) and the people with the surname are listed with a briefer intro at Foo (surname). If one or both lists has only a few entries then they are usually combined on one page, Foo (name).
 * I also don't know what you mean by "corrupted". At first I moved all the entries that were improperly on the DAB page to the list, thinking that the list should be deleted anyway. I thought you were objecting on the talk page to deletion of the surname list, on the grounds that it was not too long; I accepted this objection, and as you did not edit the page for the next hour, I split the surnames to a separate page. As I understood your note, you were supporting -- or at least not opposing -- the PROD on the given name list.
 * I had not heard that rationale before for keeping the fictional-character-with-a-given-name entries on a DAB page. I routinely move such lists to given name pages, and believe that this is right following MOS:DABNAME (the Manual of Style). If character names were repeatedly linked within a fiction article, this would be WP:OVERLINKING anyway, and the links should be removed rather than helped via the DAB page. – Fayenatic  L ondon 18:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * (I follow here the same numbering convention i stated below at 10:25, 23 January 2013.)
 * * Well, my use of "orthodox given-names SIA" was unjustified, especially since (or except that??) i've continued editing human-name-related pages, blissfully oblivious of WikiProject Anthroponymy existing, for going on six years. I think that ignorance was nearly inevitable, since i followed reasonably closely the instituting or formalization of SIA, right or wrongly regarded it as a spinoff of keeping Dabs from being used (particularly in anthroponomy contexts) like SIA, and encountered little reason to regard SIA as anything more than a generalization from Naming conventions (ships) done for the specific purpose of remedying the misuse of Dabs for content like we're discussing. (But blush!)
 * While it's irrelevant to this AfD, i'll offer my opinion that it's perverse to act as if the derivation of the name belongs to the surname, just bcz there are fewer people surnamed than given-named with it. Do you use an about to link the given name page to the name or surname page? The anti-intuitive nature of asking users to ignore seems so strong that i suggested the 3-page symmetrical structure of my 2013-01-23 10:25:06 comment on this talk page without seriously considering the notion of letting the structure look like the one i would use if i believed the derivation was about the surname but not about the given name.
 * * As to "corrupted", i confused myself (jumping around within and between the histories of the two pages involved) & erred in saying "corrupted (in large part by the nominator, who renamed it only after i complained that the PROD request misrepresented the content)". If i'd realized you hadn't just followed suit behind someone else who seemed to have started the problem, but did it all on your own, i'd have had to find a word different from that one.
 * What i meant is that

Note that it in no way rules out entries for "[p]ersons who have the ambiguous term as surname or given name". In fact, it clearly anticipates that some such entries will be on some Dab pages, both by ruling out its own restrictive force in some specified circumstances, and more importantly, never ruling out anything but their being mingled in the same section with the Dab entries of other kinds. Your sentence beginning "If character names were repeatedly linked within a fiction article" would perhaps be more than a straw man if Dab entries existed only to compensate for use of links to Dab pages within articles. I presume you have never reflected on the plight of users -- forgive me if i've already alluded to this on this page; i just want to get to a stopping point, and being sure whether i did or not seems more onerous than forging ahead -- who have in mind a term describing their topic, but are not lucky enuf to have guessed either the article's title, or a redirect whose target is the article (rather than a Dab page). They will be taken to a Dab page even if every internal link from any article that formerly targetted to that Dab has been bypassed (i.e., had any ambiguity resolved). (There may a page with stats on how many user-typed Google or Wiki searches are served by a Dab page; the percentage could be small, and still justify the effort to accommodate those users smoothly.) There are plenty of fictional characters whose given names are more memorable than the titles of the works they appear in, and those names are likely search keys from users seeking info on either character, work, or less-memorably named characters in the same work.
 * * Thank you for the link to MOS:DABNAME; the relevant passage would seem to begin Persons who have the ambiguous term as surname ... and be ended by an unless ... clause.
 * --Jerzy•t 08:29, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

has Keep/Del contribs both before and after, and has direct responses to Keep/Del contributions both before and after. --Jerzy•t 05:02, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. &#9733;&#9734;  DUCK IS PEANUTBUTTER &#9734;&#9733; 18:50, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Procedural remark: I accidentally left the preceding notice before my Keep statement, then moved it to the end of the page in the next contrib, preceding it by white space to make it less likely to get lost between contribs. It seems logical to me to have it where it's easy to find (at start or end), in order to facilitate avoiding duplication or neglect of other relevant listings. I find it hard to imagine any logic for putting it where it
 * is out of chronological order with its chronologically ordered neighbors,
 * But my mileage has varied before.

There are about 800 pages in this case, too many to list; see. seems to me to deserve closer examination. An essay says "Wikipedia is not finished", so i don't mind saying "800 pages, too many to list today." And in particular i won't give priority to producing an alpha list of people (given-)named Jacob, not only bcz we have an automated one, but bcz an alpha list is not the most useful one: one by date of death (and decreasing age, for living people) is likely to be better (unless your problem is having a specific one in mind, but needing to guess at the exact spelling of the surname). In contrast: Except in East Asia, most people share given names with so many more others than they do their surnames that the corresponding procedure is seldom workable, and i'm not certain whether knowing what celebrities your infant's name would end up evoking (baby-name books are presumably used for such insight) makes that info "encyclopedic". I split to surname rather than delete (thinking WP:PAPER), but YMMD.
 * Comment: IMO, this page is not the place to settle the following related questions, but these issues may be worth mentioning for the attention of someone (perhaps the closer?) who cleans up immediately after Keep:
 * The remark in the nominating statement that
 * My reasoning for routinely splitting out (rather than deleting) surname entries that show up on Dabs is that even tho (e.g.) "Roosevelt" is not a true Dab problem (WP:NC would not permit a bio with that title even if it were unambiguous), a user is likely to encounter on Web or in books a bare surname that was unambiguously identified, but most recently hundreds or thousands of words earlier, and to use the immediate context of the ambiguous occurrence, and a small number of WP Roosevelt bios, to eliminate the ambiguity.
 * Seems like i've heard, perhaps recently, at least one editor worry about very short sections on lists getting lost among very large ones, implying the view that the ToC does not suffice to deal with the confusion or awkward navigation. So, where (as here) a surname and given name are spelled alike, and often transliterated/respelled to suit namer's or bearer's cultural context, does it make sense to split the content? (If so, the pages must link appropriately among themselves.) In the worst case, there could be a 3-way split:
 * origin, and a table of foreign equivalents (usually equally applicable for surname and given name use), at Foo (name),
 * a list of bearers of surname at Foo (surname),
 * a list of bearers of given name at Foo (given name)
 * --Jerzy•t 10:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

--Jerzy•t 21:59, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment: Precedents for deleting lists of people sharing a common name include:
 * Articles for deletion/List of people named bill (2005)
 * Articles for deletion/List of people named John (2007)
 * Articles for deletion/List of people with the first name Julie (2007)
 * Articles for deletion/List of people with the given name Sarah or Sara (2011)
 * Articles for deletion/List of fictional characters named Sarah or Sara (2011, longer)
 * Articles for deletion/List of people with the given name Darren (2011)
 * The central rationale in the "Sarah" debates was that for a popular name, (i) a complete list would be enormous and not useful, and (ii) if we were to attempt a selective list, there is no basis for consensus on who should be included. I used to argue for a short selective list, specifically this version of Sarah (given name), but I thoroughly lost the argument at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anthroponymy/Archive 6 – Fayenatic  L ondon 18:59, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment: The original proposal to delete this page was by user:Dangnad (talk) 03:44, 25 December 2010 at the top of Talk:List of people named Jacob. – Fayenatic  L ondon 19:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * To avoid anyone being confused by that statement, what our colleague Dangnad actually did (two years ago on each of the two talk pages, at a time when no deletion process had been begun) was to include "I vote to delete" Jacob (given name), along with some explanation of why. They remain unanswered on the respective talk pages.


 * Delete: I'll repeat what Fayenatic said above, "a complete list would be enormous and not useful". And, there should be discussion leading to policy that lists of people by given name are not encyclopedic or otherwise appropriate for Wikipedia. The only use I can imagine for such pages is to see how many people share a name, and a link to while clouded with other uses, is always up to date and excludes no one. Thank you. SchreiberBike (talk) 15:57, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment: I have no objection to the short lists that we have of people with relatively uncommon names, or rather, names where only a few people have achieved notability. It's lists of people who share a common name that are not justifiable. – Fayenatic  L ondon 18:37, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment: For the record, using such pages to gather name-frequency stats is a lousy idea.
 * Until WP is finished [wink], there will be a tendency for the many people named Frank to add missing notables to Frank (given name) at a faster collective rate than the few named Algernon to add to Algernon (given name). Nah, the redlink hints i'm right, but in daylight, i think i'm wrong.
 * There's much better data available from e.g. the U.S. Census; IIRC the three lists (by surname, by male given name, and by female given name) give data for enuf names to account for 90% of each of the three applicable populations. (Fewer sig digits for rarer names, but you can deduce at least 2 significant digits even for the least common names listed.) I'm not sure if more than the 1990 Census is available on line, nor whether any more is publicly available by other means. I'll try to remember to put a URL, & explain how to get the hidden digit, on User:Jerzy -- and almost certainly succeed if someone expresses interest via my talk.
 * --Jerzy•t 09:21 & 19:27, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Why did anyone think this was a valid encyclopedic topic? An article on the name itself is one thing, listing every person of note to ever have this name is just information, not knowledge. There is a difference people. A category is the most this needs as that is all it really is anyway. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:26, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * There is a specific guideline against using categories for such purposes at WP:OC. – Fayenatic  L ondon 13:07, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete - Utterly WP:INDISCRIMINATE list. "People named Jacob" is not an encyclopedic topic. - The Bushranger One ping only 07:59, 28 January 2013 (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.