Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of words ending in -ology


 * 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. Jayjg (talk) 02:29, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

List of words ending in -ology

 * – (View AfD) (View log)


 * Primarily Wikipedia is not a dictionary and is not a usage guide, even for suffixes.
 * Lists of words that end in a particular suffix are not sufficiently connected to be a valid encyclopedia article. In this case it's even worse, since it's only a subset of articles that end in -ology; not even all the -logy's are present (and there's little point in an article on that either, since the wiktionary already has a list of those.)


 * Article is unreferenced
 * Article is on a non notable topic (there is no evidence in the article that -ology words are more notable than other words that have a prefix, or suffix, or infix, and the wikipedia doesn't have those either). It seems to be a bad idea for the Wikipedia to start listing words with particular lexical features, all the words starting with the letter 'a', 'atypical' 'asynchronous' etc. etc. The wikipedia isn't a reference work for say, playing scrabble or filling in cross-word puzzles; there are specialist works that do that much better than the wikipedia can or wants to.
 * I'm certain that this article topic is not covered by other general encyclopedias like the wikipedia, but is probably covered by other types of reference works, dictionaries and thesauri etc.
 * The wikipedia permits glossaries, but article is not a glossary. Glossaries are lists of words for use with a particular discipline, but no discipline I am aware of requires a list specifically of 'ologies' and nothing else. I'm sure there is no such discipline.
 * Article has not done enough to be encyclopedic, and could not ever do enough.

Given the article is already covered acceptably in the wiktionary I'm calling for Delete. - Wolfkeeper  02:40, 30 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete per article is on a non-notable topic. For comparsion, a list of words and trademarked terms created during the space age starting with astro- may be notable from a historical perspective but only marginally so. This suffice doesn't even come close.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  02:52, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Agree with comments below, -logy would not make a good merge candidate. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  18:56, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete per the first sentence of the nom. However, unfortunately, this topic is not covered adequately in Wiktionary. Note that neither wikt:Category:English words suffixed with -ology nor wikt:Category:English words suffixed with -logy lists such well-known words as "biology" or "psychology". --Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:54, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * They are listed at -logy however, and the ology rule is also described there. I doubt the wikipedia lists everything either, and the effort being spent at the wikipedia would very probably be better spent completing the wiktionary coverage, which is doubtless a much better place for covering lexical topics anyway.- Wolfkeeper  03:03, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I didn't know where the information might be found in Wiktionary. But regardless of how well or how poorly Wiktionary covered the topic, I agree that this is the kind of topic that falls within Wiktionary's ambit, not Wikipedia's. If Wiktionary had been doing a poor job with this topic, the solution would have been to improve Wiktionary's coverage rather than take on the job here at Wikipedia. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:02, 30 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Userfy or delete. The current article is both original research and trivia. The topic of the word ending "logy" and its use in English is encyclopedic, but the article -logy covers that topic much better than this page (and better than wiktionary does, AFAICT). I think it might be possible to create a worthwhile Wikipedia article that expands upon the information in -logy with a large, sourced, alphabetical list of examples (similar to the list in -onym), but that would require a lot more work than has gone into this article so far. If the creator wants to do that work, then userfy it. Otherwise, delete it. --Orlady (talk) 04:57, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete as an indiscriminate list. There's nothing actually connecting the topics these words are about. J I P  | Talk 07:03, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ?Merge with the article -logy Suggestion: how about taking the list part (which admittedly still needs a lot of clean up) and merging it (as a section) into the article -logy? Is that a possibility? Invertzoo (talk) 14:49, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * IMO, the list is not appropriate for merger because it's largely original research. That is, to a substantial extent, the definitions on the list are no more than educated guesses as to what the words might mean. --Orlady (talk) 15:29, 30 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete - I have to agree with Orlady about the merge proposal. Too much WP:OR. It's more or less a vio of WP:INDISCRIMINATE, Lord Spongefrog,  (Talk to me, or I'll eat your liver!)  18:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete or Userfy, per Orlady. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:19, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep The general concept of how these words are formed is encyclopedic   and so are a group of examples..  NOT INDISCRIMINATE is important, and the fact that we follow it shows that  since the examples are Wikipedia articles the list  is hardly indiscriminate.    DGG ( talk ) 23:35, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Clearly we could have an extremely large number of different ways to have lists of words in the wikipedia. FWIW Articles_for_deletion/Common_outcomes has a blanket guideline against lists of words, and this has been there since the beginning of that guideline in 2005.- Wolfkeeper  00:22, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
 * If the article title and subject matter were -logy as a suffix, describing how the soffix is used and its historical development, using only a very few carefully selected examples to demonstrate particular points, then it would be much harder to argue that it doesn't meet Wikipedia's criteria for an article. As it stands, it's about as helpful as "List of people with green eyes."  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  01:19, 1 December 2009 (UTC)rela
 * As mentioned earlier in the thread, there is already an article -logy; that article does not have many examples in it however. Invertzoo (talk) 15:28, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment: The article only contains words with articles or words related to such words, therefore, WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:OR may not apply.  It's still not useful IMHO.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  01:21, 1 December 2009 (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.