Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lists of people with specific surnames


 * 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. L Faraone  04:57, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Lists of people with specific surnames

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I declined a speedy but feel that discussion is needed about this list of lists. I can see good points, but wonder if it's workable. Peridon (talk) 21:00, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions.  czar   &middot;   &middot;  21:15, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Workable in what sense? I agree that keeping the list sorted will be difficult. -dav4is (talk) 21:26, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Depends on what you actually have in mind for it. 'Specific surnames' is not clear to me, or, I think to ItsZippy. Peridon (talk) 21:40, 6 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete - So, taken at its best, this would be a list of all the surname pages we have on Wikipedia? To me that seems far to vague a topic for a list (do we really mean every surname in existence?). We already have the lists of most common surnames and lists of surnames in specific country (such as list of surnames in Ukraine) which serve the same purpose but much more effectively. ItsZippy (talk • contributions) 21:38, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah, but it is not just a list of surnames, but rather a list of the lists of people who HAVE those surnames. That is, wikipedia has somewhere a list of the people bearing the name Smith and another list of the people bearing the name Starr. Now the titles of those two lists may be (are!) completely different in form, but my list would point to each with the simple names Smith and Starr.
 * Delete. The list would have to be over 40K entries long, just a tad WP:INDISCRIMINATE. Clarityfiend (talk) 21:49, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete- Not worth the effort as we already have many comparable(ish) pages and if created would be drain on resources

Note that not every surname in wikipedia has such list of occupiers.

-dav4is (talk) 22:07, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Most do. Let's very generously say that only half do. It's still way too many. Clarityfiend (talk) 03:37, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Reviewing the specific links which seem to be causing the disambiguation problems, I see that the targets of these links are all disambiguation pages without the word disambiguation in the title, which nevertheless contain content not available elsewhere. It is to this content that I wish to link. For example, the Sands page contains an extensive list of people named Sands, exactly the sort of list I wish to include in my page. So, my question is this: How should I link in cases like this, and avoid being picked up as having too many links to DPL.

---dav4is (talk) 11:56, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete. Agreeing that this falls under WP:INDISCRIMINATE, even if it's, as -dav4is says, only a list of surname lists. I cannot imagine anyone would ever need or benefit from such a list. And even if there was some benefit to being able to find all the lists of people sharing a surname pages, why not just use Category:Lists of people sharing a surname? Having something that needs to be manually updated when we already have a category that does the job automatically seems like a tremendous waste of resources. Ethraen (talk) 18:26, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:INDISCRIMINATE. To answer the question from User:Dav4is above, the link should be piped through the (disambiguation) page. For example, if you want to link to Hawley, but don't want it to show up as a link that needs to be fixed by the WP:DPL folks, you link it like this: Hawley, to get Hawley. -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 06:24, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

OK, I was unaware of the category mentioned above, which satisfies my needs &mdash; even if User:Ethraen cannot imagine such a need!

---dav4is (talk) 09:00, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep How can a list of WP list articles possibly be indiscriminate? it excludes all lists of surnames that are not in WEP, and all WP surnames that are in WP but not in lists. Everything in WP has been selective discriminately by the notability guidelines. whether it's useful or necessary may be another question, but I am reluctant to predict what people will want to use. DGG ( talk ) 06:05, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete or redirect to List of most common surnames, which I think is what people might really be looking for. I'm not sure I understand what DGG is arguing. Bearian (talk) 17:15, 13 May 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.