Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people on the postage stamps of Netherlands New Guinea


 * 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 merge to Postage stamps and postal history of Western New Guinea.  Sandstein  10:53, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

List of people on the postage stamps of Netherlands New Guinea

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

Very small, finite list (country as such no longer exists) with no sources showing that this is a topic of direct interest (information extracted from a general stamp catalogue), and with little interest for the biographies of the persons involved (royalty shown on stamps of country they rule, yawn). Fram (talk) 07:21, 2 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Lists of people and Asia. Fram (talk) 07:21, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

I collect stamps of South and Central America and some European countries (including the Netherlands). I use general and specialized catalogues as my sources for this hobby. These are paper editions which are sometimes hard to use to organize a collection (small print, missing pictures, minor errors, etc.). I found the Wikipedia “Lists of people on postage stamps” to be very useful. It provided both reference data and education about people honored on stamps.

I found that many of the lists were either missing or incomplete. I decided to try to update those in my areas of interest. I looked at the format of each page using the overall guidance used in the top level page: Intro, table of contents, list of names, and sources. I did a first round of updates to the Latin American countries in 2013 and a second round this winter. I tried to update the notability aspect of each person listed show why they were portrayed on a stamp. I particularly wanted to ensure that the sources were fully listed. I also chose to update the entries for some of the European countries. When I came to the stamps of the Netherlands and associated entities, I saw that there no pages provided for Netherlands Antillies, Netherlands Indies nor Netherlands New Guinea. The link colour was red. I wanted to provide completeness in the main list so, using the standard model, I created the pages for the 3 entities and published them.

User Fram noted in a post on 12 April 2022 that the list for Netherlands New Guinea is only 2 items long and only lists the king and queen of the Netherlands. I responded that I agreed that the list was short. However stamps were only issued for this entity from 1950 to 1962 with only those 2 people featured (see Talk page for details). Each entry in the list points to a detailed bio of the person and there is a source listing. Netherlands New Guinea became part of Indonesia in 1962. The page was marked for deletion and I manually removed the markup text and stated why on the talk page.

I do not know if there is a prescribed Wikipedia definition for the length of a list to make it valid for inclusion. To me, a list is as long as it needs to be!!

There is precedent for short lists. See Abkazia (3 entries), Central Lithuania (5 entries), French Congo (0 entries), Portugese Africa (0 entries) and possibly others. As far as I can tell, there were no objections to these short lists.

There is also a precedent for combined short lists. These generally group together colonies of other countries ex. Belgian Congo is combined with Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire.

I want the data on the page to remain in Wikipedia. I would therefore propose to combine Netherlands Indies and New Guinea into a single page with the appropriate #REDIRECT code in the other. They were both governed by the Netherlands. Both became part of Indonesia. As stated in the previous paragraph, this appears to be acceptable for many other related countries.

I apologize if I do not know the correct markup code to indicate my preference to have the page data stay available. Bill Blampied (talk) 20:12, 3 May 2022 (UTC)
 * No one disputes that the persons are notable, the problem is that the combined topic of people on NNG stamps isn't notable. And I'm sorry to say that many of the other similar lists aren't notable either (see WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS) and should be deleted as well. I'll perhaps make some group nomination for all the problematic ones, like List of people on the postage stamps of Bushire. Fram (talk) 07:39, 4 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Merge? The Postage stamps and postal history of Western New Guinea probably included a variety of subjects including people, places, and animals. Merge that there or a new list of stamps of Netherlands New Guinea in general since the people specifically is not a notable topic needing a separate article. Reywas92Talk 13:46, 4 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Merge This first page on this topic (List of people on postage stamps (LPPS)) was created in 2002, one year after the start of Wikipedia. I have to believe that the issue of notability of these types of articles has been discussed and resolved more than once in the past 20 years. I say this because the whole LPPS page tree is still part of Wikipedia and available for updates. With regard to the reference to Bushire above, a comparable list article would show 2 people being portrayed on their stamps. It has just happened that one editor created the link but no-one has created the article itself. Creation would re-raise this discussion. With regard to adding the data to the postal history page, those articles do not have lists but provide the history of the postal service in a country or territory. A few significant people are listed but not every person pictured on a stamp is listed. As I stated above, I feel that merging NNG with Netherlands Indies is an appropriate action. Bill Blampied (talk) 11:10, 5 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Correction: Bushire does have both a link from the main page and the short article with 2 items in its list. Note also that Bushire had the same discussion as NNG in 2009; the article remained. Bill Blampied (talk) 14:32, 7 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep Information and navigational list. Completes a set. Category:Lists of people on postage stamps Can merge shorter list together perhaps, all small island nations.   D r e a m Focus  10:18, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Except that it doesn't provide good information ("Note that many of these people have been featured on multiple stamps": many of these two people, that is?), nor navigation. It doesn't "complete" any set, it is part of a category with presumably some useful or acceptable articles, many very poor ones (unsourced or WP:OR, incomplete, ...), and many missing ones. Merging tragically bad information doesn't magically turn it into better information. Finally, you shouldn't have copy-pasted your keep argument from the similar Mauritius list AfD, it gives the impression that you haven't properly looked at the article. "small island nations", LOL. Mauritius is only 2000 km², Netherlands New Guinea is half an island and is about 400,000 km²: the complete island is the second largest island in the world after Greenland. Apart from that, very good arguments! Fram (talk) 10:33, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I was thinking small nation as in population not physical size. If they had a larger population surely they'd have more stamps and more people on them.   D r e a m Focus  10:38, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Not really, no. The subject of the list here was a relatively short-lived and poor country, which is the main reason for the lack of stamps (well, and the time: this was prior to the main boom of stamps-as-source-of-income for many small countries). Nothing to do with being a small island nation (no idea where the concept comes from to group these by "island" nations, what has being an island or not to do with the subject of the list? Nothing at all surely.) Fram (talk) 10:13, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete Lacks sources establishing that WP:NLIST is met. MrsSnoozyTurtle 10:07, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge. Some contents are a welcome addition to the short Postage stamps and postal history of Western New Guinea. As an ultra-brief and finite list, it should not exist as a standalone article. gidonb (talk) 13:41, 10 May 2022 (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.