Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of video games considered the best


 * 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 keep. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:02, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

List of video games considered the best

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By combining reviews in this way the article is creating a new list, exactly as prohibited by WP:SYN: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources". This is not an obvious or non-controversial combination; it is shaped by rules arbitrarily chosen for the purpose and therefore constitutes Original research. RichardOSmith (talk) 22:32, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

I am also nominating the following related page for the same reason:


 * I would keep this, as this is somewhat standard on Wikipedia, unless you also want to remove List of video games notable for negative reception, List of films considered the worst, List of films considered the best, List of music considered the worst et cetera. Some of these are also of much lower quality - with less specific guidelines - than the two you are nominating. ~ Mable ( chat ) 22:47, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Those other articles appear to be quite different: they report reviews from notable organisations and ranked lists devised by notable organisations, whereas these two articles have created Wikipedia's own ranked list - and that is pure original research. RichardOSmith (talk) 22:52, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It doesn't seem to me any of those do. List of songs considered the best, does, though that list has a slew of its own problems (I suppose we could change the list of best games so it would no longer be considered WP:SYN like this, by the way, if that would be an improvement? At least there's no reason to delete). List of films considered the worst, for example, lists films based mainly on the amount of negative reception received, much like how these lists list games based on the amount of positive reception received. The main difference is the amount of prose explaining the choices. ~ Mable ( chat ) 22:56, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Everymorning (talk) 22:57, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. The list isn't saying "These are the best"; it's saying "These have made the most appearances on lists of the best".  WP:SYNTH is for a completely different situation: it prohibits making statements that aren't derived from any source.  Here, we're simply counting sources.  "A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H include this game on their list of the best, so this game's gotten eight 'best' reviews, and it's more commonly considered among the best than that other game, which only appears as 'best' on seven lists".  Please read WP:CALC; routine mathematical calculations, including addition, are not a violation of this policy.  Nyttend (talk) 23:35, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
 * But this is not the sort of calculation permitted by WP:CALC (which only includes trivial things like calculating someone's age) because the numbers computed depend on some arbitrary rules devised for he article. Furthermore the whole premise of the article, as explicitly stated in the lead, is to act as a review aggregator and produce a new and unique list based on its arbitrarily-produced counts, which is a synthesis because no individual source has produced a list ranked in the same order. RichardOSmith (talk) 09:49, 23 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment / Keep. Originally this article was horrible and I was ready to nominate it for deletion myself - just a list of Wikipedia editor favorite games.  I attempted to reform it and model it off of List of important operas.  Crucially, similar to that list, it used a FINITE "canonical" list of games journalism top 100s, and then included a short and succinct list based objectively off of those.  You can see the last version of "my" version of the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_video_games_considered_the_best&oldid=627732052.
 * Editors have since worked on the article other than me - some very diligently - despite me not really agreeing with the new direction, per the talk page, and I didn't want to commit a WP:OWN violation by fighting them. A criteria of "found 6 sources saying the game is great" is not good because the number of sources is endless and this could be used to make a thousand+ entry list, which would defeat the whole point.  This isn't supposed to be "list of well-regarded games," this should be a short and sweet list of truly toweringly lauded games.  But, to be clear, I think the current version isn't deletable; it just needs a proviso in that I'd strongly suspect a "complete" spreadsheet of all these lists would include far more 6-20 entry games than are currently listed, so there's some bias in which of those were selected to show up.  But oh well. SnowFire (talk) 03:36, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It would be pretty great if we could discuss any lists included in the article(s), so we could really have a finite list of sources to work with - new sources only being added after discussion. This doesn't really fall in the scope of the deletion, of course, but I would be open to help dig through some of the more questionable sources. ~ Mable ( chat ) 07:27, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * "Your" version of the article would not have been nominated by me for deletion. What it demonstrates well is that the only problem I have with the article as it has since become is that it produces new, synthesised, rankings of the games in the list, and resolving that issue could be addressed by editing rather than deletion. I think this is an important concern that needs to be discussed but this has probably become the wrong forum for it. (That is, I now think the article should be cleaned up or at least reverted back to an earlier form, rather than deleted.) RichardOSmith (talk) 10:06, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree in that producing a list ranked by number-of-lists has problems in elements of OR. I'd happily endorse if people want to restore a sorting by release date rather than number of lists.
 * Maplestrip, I have a Google spreadsheet with the original lists I compiled - happy to share it and put it in a common location. If that spreadsheet is kept up to date, it's possible we can restore this to a more "objective" list as far as these things go so that we can be sure that whatever threshold is set, games don't slip out unnoticed. SnowFire (talk) 02:10, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Sharing the spreadsheet should probably be useful for future editors in general :) Is it up to date right now? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maplestrip (talk • contribs) 04:02, 24 August 2015‎ (UTC)
 * Definitely not! It 'only' has the ~13 sources used originally (and was quite a bit of work for just those), while the article is now using 40+ lists.  Anyway, created a new account and shared it (with EDIT permissions to all, so you might want to make a personal backup if you make some changes in case somebody comes along later and erases your work or some such): https://goo .gl/a1R9Lk (separated due to link filter)
 * There's also a conversion of places to weights in the "adjusted" section. I'm not super-tied to what I used, so something like "appears in top 100 = 1, doesn't = 0" would be fine too since that's what the current article used, but up to you.  (I'd used top 5 = 5 points, 6-15 = 4 points, 16-25 = 3 points, 26-100 = 2 points.)   SnowFire (talk) 05:48, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd definitely support ranking by date rather than number of sources. I don't think lowering the number of sources is a good idea though, as a large pool of lists minimizes bias and increases the sense of a real consensus. Wouldn't it be better to raise the number of required sources instead? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cdesco (talk • contribs) 19:46, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
 * More sources are good, yes, but it's important to keep the overall list "balanced." For example, the EGM top 200 list excluded computer games entirely, while the likes of PC Gamer's lists exclude console games entirely.  It's *extremely* easy to introduce bias by adding a bunch of lists that exclusively cover a single era / platform / genre, or even just favor one.  This is even ignoring the known geographical bias towards the English-language media!  This would cause the results to be more about which lists were picked.  Additionally some publications just spam out new top 100 lists every year, which is in some ways great (more data!), but it doesn't necessarily mean that their opinions should count 5x as much as a publication which only publishes a list once every 5 years.  When I set up my canonical list of sources, I tried to spread as widely as possible - a variety of publishers, a variety of dates created, and balance out PC-exclusive & console-exclusive lists.  Now, we can go ahead and take in more sources, but then if you want to get really technical about it you have to get into "weighting" the lists so that IGN 2006, IGN Readers 2006, IGN 2007, IGN Readers 2007, IGN 2008, IGN 2009, etc. don't cause IGN's editors to have undue relevance.  Or make sure that we don't have all the PC games get buried beneath console lists, or 80s games get buried beneath more recent lists (something already mentioned in the methodology of the article, actually).  SnowFire (talk) 22:09, 24 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep - I think it is generally fair and comparative to List of films considered the best. I do not see an issue with saying "We are sorting this based on how many times the title appeared in specific publications' Top 100/Top 25 lists", since that is not a violation of WP:SYNTH or basic math, as long as we have a well-defined list of what sources we're going to use for that. (That it to avoid RandomVideoGameFan's personal Top 100 list that fails all RS becoming a source.) And the MetaCritic and GameRanking tables are good reasonable snapshots to avoid bias (letting however those aggregators handle the bias on their end) --M ASEM (t) 16:29, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep, but how about only giving credit for games placing in the top 10/20 of a list? Any old game can place 99th on five different lists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.30.114.84 (talk) 21:25, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of video game-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 20:09, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Albums and songs-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 20:09, 26 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. Meets notability requirements. Rreagan007 (talk) 02:46, 29 August 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.