Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of railway stations (2nd 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   no consensus. Ron Ritzman (talk) 03:01, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

List of railway stations
AfDs for this article: 
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Unmanageable list; almost totally incomplete (it has a pretence of listing railway stations in every country in the world). In some cases the "stations" are actually wikilinks to randomly chosen cities which have stations in them. No sources. Overlaps with lists of stations in individual countries which are, themselves, unmanageable/incomplete in many cases. bobrayner (talk) 03:27, 30 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete per WP:NOTDIR. The intention of this page is to keep a comprehensive list of all the railway stations in the entire world; there have got to be thousands of them. I am fully in favor in a more reasonable list of railway stations in a particular location for which it makes sense to list them. Sebwite (talk) 04:46, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete The article appears to be repetitive and overlaps other more focused list articles by city or country. Eudemis (talk) 05:44, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  -- Jclemens-public (talk) 04:52, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Transportation-related deletion discussions.  -- Jclemens-public (talk) 04:52, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - Indisciminate list. - The Bushranger Return fire Flank speed 06:48, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete, unmaintainable list - there are just way too many railway stations in the world - and duplicates country-specific lists. J I P  &#124; Talk 07:26, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep This should be kept as a main disambig page and contain only the high level links to the country sub-lists (eg, List of railway stations in Australia, List of railway stations in Italy, List of railway stations in Chile, etc. This is a very plausable search term that the casual browser would probably expect to yeild a postive result and not a red-link.  Lugnuts  (talk) 08:12, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Don't we already have other content which does that much more accurately, and in a more readable/manageable way? For instance, categories, and navboxes such as.
 * I think you have a good point about plausible search terms, but Wikipedia cannot cater to every search term, and especially some of the more popular ones. Few sane people really want a list of all railway stations in the world; if they actually want a list of railways stations in one particular place then - should this article get deleted - the searcher will get a list of other articles listing railways in particular places. Who knows, this might even prompt them to use search terms that actually correspond to what they want.
 * Considering the number of countries we'd have to add to a disambig (including the bizarre profusion of space-filling articles which list stations in countries that, in real life, have no railways), plus lists of stations on specific networks (there are many like this),even the disambig would be impossible to maintain - it would have, what, 300 or 400 entries? Even then it would be incomplete, as a large number of stations don't make it onto such national or network lists. bobrayner (talk) 11:31, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The comment about the job being done with categories and navboxes goes against WP:CLN. I don't think the overal list would be impossible to maintain - one link per country - we already have dozens of country based lists (list of countries, being one).  Lugnuts  (talk) 12:05, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * A policy of one-link-per-country would make the list easier to maintain by deliberately excluding even more entries for a reason which bears no relation to the article title. (Thousands of stations are in national lists; thousands are in non-national lists; and thousands are in neither). That might be a good approach on an article called List of incomplete lists of stations by country but on this article, whose remit is not qualified, it would not solve the original problem. A reader arriving at the article expecting a comprehensive list of stations would still be - as they are now - either misled or disappointed. bobrayner (talk) 12:20, 30 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep - there is scope for this to be a "head" list, similar to List of windmills. Mjroots (talk) 13:02, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Using it as a head list would be fine if the sub-lists were themselves encyclopedic, but I still see no value in List of railway stations in Australia or even List of railway stations in Sydney. The only possible use of such lists is in the fashion of a directory, and Wikipedia is not a directory. - DustFormsWords (talk) 00:13, 1 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep - It needs a lot of improvement though, ultimately it should just become a bunch of nav boxes brought together, for the time being it's a mess which needs to be tidied up and trimmed down. 86.7.168.223 (talk) 20:55, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry if this seems like badgering - that's not my intention - but I would point out that it needed a lot of attention at the last AfD 4 years ago and nobody seems to have been able to address the problem in the last 4 years. Which is not entirely surprising given the very large amount of new content which would have to be created, either here or in other articles, before this list could even approach 10% completion. For example, in June 2006 the article listed 7 stations in France; now it lists 14; in reality the list of French stations is a 53 page PDF. And that's just one country. I would love to see this article made accurate through normal editing, but it's just not possible. The article is full of huge holes.
 * Even just linking to other lists of stations is no solution, as there are hundreds of them, of which many include fictional stations and/or exclude real stations, and other lists are simply missing from wikipedia. bobrayner (talk) 22:10, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * However, I'd like to avoid the impression of shoving a "Delete!" message down everybody's throat, so I'll back off for now. bobrayner (talk) 22:16, 30 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete - Railway stations are run of the mill. Wikipedia is not a directory and there is no encyclopedic value in maintaining a list, exhaustive or otherwise, which has an unmanageable scope and no obvious notability. - DustFormsWords (talk) 00:11, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Railway stations are generally notable enough to have their own articles, so they don't really fall under WP:MILL. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 00:40, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we could consider, for example, an article that I worked on yesterday: Moçâmedes Railway. The railway has 56 stations. We have articles for none of them. I haven't even found a source which names the stations yet, so how could all 56 pass WP:GNG? As often happens with railway stations, though, the lack of sources is not an obstacle - somebody else seems to have looked at a line on an old map, and used that to create a "list of stations" which comprises the names of 20 towns near the line on the map. That incomplete, misleading, WP:OR list of 20 is quite representative of what this article would link to if it was recast as a list-of-lists-of-stations.bobrayner (talk) 01:10, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * There are between 10 and 500 stations in every city in the world, plus any number of rural stations. They plainly can't all be notable.  I wouldn't have thought that even the majority are notable, and indeed a non-exhaustive survey of railway station articles suggests the vast majority are limited to information on the station's geographical location, year of construction, and which lines it services.  I'm not about to go on a crusade to prune the number of these articles back by a factor of 10, but at the same time I'm not prepared to concede that the number of notable railway stations is any greater than maybe seven per city in any but the most historic and romanticised of rail systems. (I speak with an Australian bias on this - the city of Perth, for example, has somewhere between 50 and 100 stations, many little more than a platform with a ticket machine, and I'd laugh at anyone who claimed that more than a half-dozen were capable of sustaining a meaningful encyclopaedic article.  Sydney has more history and more stations but still very little to say about the minutiae of its rail network.) - DustFormsWords (talk) 00:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Consensus indicates, and has indicated for quite a while, that railway stations are in fact all notable. Their articles aren't permastubs either; there are many railway stations which are average as far as railway stations go and have GA-class or higher articles. Every station on the Brill Tramway, for instance, has a featured article, even though the stations were mostly small and have been closed for decades. (For the record, the situation with US railway stations isn't that much different from Australia, and there are several GAs on average US stations.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 02:08, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Notability (Railway lines and stations) sets a much higher bar (ie. notability criteria which many stations cannot meet). If you've got a link to the discussion where people agreed that all stations are notable, that would be helpful, as I'd like to go there and ask why folk agreed on a threshold so different to WP:GNG and Notability (Railway lines and stations). However, this is a bit tangential to the current AfD so feel free to discuss this in a different location... There is no doubt that some stations are notable; but how on earth could we list all stations? bobrayner (talk) 02:54, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * TheCatalyst31, do you have any more information on this "consensus" that "railway stations are in fact all notable"? This is very different to policies and consensuses that I have read elsewhere on wikipedia, so I'd like to have a closer look. bobrayner (talk) 21:52, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, there's this AfD, for one, in which numerous stubs on train stations were kept, per WP:SNOW no less. Also, Notability (Railway lines and stations) is an essay, not an actual policy. This seems to be one of those cases where there's no standing notability policy but individual stations aren't put up for deletion very often and generally survive AfD if they're verifiable. (If the station is unverifiable, that's a different matter entirely of course.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 22:43, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete An impossible attempt to list non-notable things. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:20, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep While this would be impossible to maintain as an exhaustive list (there would be tens of thousands of bluelinked stations alone), it should exist as a head list for the numerous smaller lists of railway stations by country and by system. Railway stations are a notable topic, and the smaller lists (List of Amtrak stations or List of railway stations in the West Midlands, for example) are proper lists which should be indexed from this page. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 00:40, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not at all certain those lists are notable either. List of Amtrak stations, for example, doesn't link to any stations at all, but rather the localities in which the stations are found, which rather suggests that not a single item on the list is able to demonstrate its stand-alone notability. - DustFormsWords (talk) 00:48, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * List of Amtrak stations is rather badly organized in its current state, and also includes a lot of bus stations operated by Amtrak Thruway Motorcoach. Pretty much every operating Amtrak train station has an article; see the subcategories of . The other one, List of railway stations in the West Midlands, is a featured list; there are actually quite a few featured lists of train stations, which suggests the relevance of the lists is well-established. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 02:08, 1 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep but refactor into a list of lists, by country and/or by regional system. Whether or not all railway stations are notable is not a relevant question, so long as many are, and we have lists of them, and this list can organize those lists rather than trying to reproduce all of their content.  postdlf (talk) 15:16, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep as a list of lists per Postdlf filceolaire (talk) 20:28, 7 December 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.