Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Outline)

 This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was - kept - SimonP 13:53, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Outline)
This is not an encyclopedia article. RickK 06:53, May 15, 2005 (UTC)


 * Keep This article is an outline of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Since it so long, instead of putting it on that page, I just made a separate page for it.  I think it makes sense to have something like this for such a long and complex work.  This is similiar to what I and others have done for The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, The Story of Civilization, and The Histories of Herodotus.  --JW1805 07:13, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, extremely useful. Kappa 07:43, 15 May 2005 (UTC). Also Wikipedia is not paper. If we can have Simpsons episode guides, why not an outline of the most famous book on the most famous empire ever? Kappa 08:30, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep Great Wikipedia Paper Shortage Klonimus 07:11, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep with a capsule introduction concerning the book and Gibbon to offer context. The Simpsons analogy is quite aprops. --Wetman 08:37, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * ''"Personal attacks" in the above statement have been deleted by RickK and restored by myself. Kappa 09:35, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * And I've re-deleted them. RickK 20:53, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
 * Nothing personal: it's always true. I didn't bother to see who was responsible for this particular tag. --Wetman 09:40, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Regarding the cleanup tag, yes it's easier for me to add the tag, and yes it's easier for someone who knows the book and the article to write the intro. Kappa 09:35, 15 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Keep for the reasons outlined by JW1805--Jjcarroll 08:57, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep There is no need to cramp Wikipedia on the basis of some obselete idea of what an encyclopedia is. Oliver Chettle 14:37, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * There's a simpler explanation, that assumes good faith. Uncle G 15:00, 2005 May 15 (UTC) (Responding to this version of the comment.)
 * The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire isn't that long, and (as Radiant! would say) "information does not want to be alone". As a freestanding article, this lacks context to explain that it is about a book, and it's a reasonable mistake to make to think that this is the beginnings of an actual wikibook on the history of the Roman Empire (which indeed would not be an encyclopaedia article, and I suspect is what RickK thought this was).  The title really doesn't give any clue, either, and indeed lends weight to the hypothesis that this is the draft outline for a wikibook.  There's space to Merge this into The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which, by putting the information in context, eliminates the need to write an introduction to give this article the context that it is lacking.  Note that in all of the other book articles mentioned, the outline is included in the main article.  If in the future you want to treat the contents of the book in detail, by the way, I suggest a  tag on the encyclopaedia article and a The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire book on the Annotated works bookshelf at Wikibooks. Uncle G 15:00, 2005 May 15 (UTC)
 * Delete as nonencyclopedic. It's not even an outline of the book, it's just the table of contents. (And even if it were an outline of the book, it still wouldn't be encyclopedic.) --Angr/comhrá 15:30, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep as Wikipedic. It's a forum to provide expansion on chapter summarys and context and relevance and information about abridgements and key ideas and quotes. If/when things progress, each chapter could be an article, just as we have individual articles on each line of the Bible. Personal notions of what an encyclopedia is, or isnt, are opinions. Stbalbach 16:10, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, Wikipedia is not paper. &#9999; Oven Fresh  2  17:59, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, useful. Wiki is not paper. --the wub (talk) 19:39, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep Useful guide to notable history. Capitalistroadster 20:40, 15 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Keep - outline of notable history and will merit a separate article as it develops --AYArktos 00:40, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep- it can grow gradually and become more useful than many other articles on TV serial characters, small Computer games, insiginificant places and more insignificant persons, and several such things which continue to circulate in the wikipedia, for want of proper attention.--Bhadani 02:20, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, Wikipedia is not an index --nixie 02:47, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * I think it is a mistake to see this as just an index. Decline and Fall is one of the great works of historical scholarship in Western civilization. It spans about 1500 years and runs about 2500 pages. It is not just a treatise on why the empire fell, it is an extremely detailed history of how it fell. A few paragraphs are simply not adequate to summarize this work. The comparison with the Bible is appropriate: there are pages and pages on Wikipedia about the Bible, including lists of chapters and books.  I think a listing of the chapter titles of Decline and Fall is an efficient way to summarize the text, and also provides a very useful reference for anyone who is interested in learning more about it.--JW1805 03:35, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Filiocht | Blarneyman 08:41, May 16, 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep as it is too long to merge. Though I would like to see a little excerpt on each chapter as in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World; that's really just because I would have thought as Outline would be a summary rather than (mostly) a list. That said this might be a wrong assumption on my part so just ignore me if it is! -- Lochaber 12:10, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * "too long to merge" ? Rubbish.  This article and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire combined aren't the length that Roman Empire is.  This is a breakout article, and one that that lacks context and is misleading to readers precisely because it is broken out of the main article. Uncle G 02:16, 2005 May 17 (UTC)
 * Keep !!!  It's a great encyclopedic topic but a poor initial article. I wouldn't remove the outline but it needs text and context. Put it up for community polishing. This work is one of the top 10 history books ever written and was a milestone of historiography. alteripse 15:38, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge per Uncle G. Radiant_* 13:41, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge. And remove the pictures. They can be accessed by links to their articles. We don't litter articles with pictures of every person mentioned in them. -R. fiend 21:32, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep --Rj 08:57, May 20, 2005 (UTC)


 * This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.