Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Top 10 best selling cars in Britain


 * 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.. On their own, the WP:USEFUL arguments are unconvincing. Also, every article is a work in progress, as this is a wiki; it does not follow from this that we must keep every article. WP:NOT, on the other hand, is policy. Sandstein (talk) 07:36, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Top 10 best selling cars in Britain

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Long, unsourced page that recently survived a Prod. Major problem: even if you source this (it currently has no sources, but apparently did have reasonable sources in the past, which is of course bizarre), it is still a pure violation of Wikipedia is not the place for "Long and sprawling lists of statistics". Fram (talk) 14:50, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Weak delete. I put the prod on it due to lots of OR commentary. The commentary was removed so I didn't take it further. Some, but not all, of the lists are sourced but I am very sceptical of Top 10 lists in general on Wikipedia. I know that list articles can be useful but I think that Top 10s are often arbitrary. Why not Top 7 or Top 13? I don't think that this is a particularly egregious example, but I think there is a strong case for getting all the Top 10 articles and deleting or rewriting any that can't show that the Top 10 list itself is notable (independent of the items listed). Rather than keep lots of stats in Wikipedia (where they are prone to vandalism) lets just reference other sources when we need to. --DanielRigal (talk) 15:37, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Eight of the 33 years are sourced, so where did the stats for the other 25 come from? I'll have to throw in a WP:IDONTLIKEIT caveat, because I don't like the way this is organized anyway.  The "little flags" option gets overworked on Wikipedia, and this one takes up a lot of space.  However, "I don't like it" isn't a reason to delete.  Mandsford (talk) 17:08, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep useful encyclopaedic information Ijanderson977 (talk) 20:11, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions.   -- Fabrictramp (talk) 02:09, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Transportation-related deletion discussions.   -- Fabrictramp (talk) 02:09, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep.  This information may be available in specialist libraries, but it's not generally available  elsewhere on the web.   Those of us with decades worth of specialist magazines in the cellar  probably have most of it ... somewhere, but would need six months of unbroken digging to dig it all out and correlate it.   The information turns up year by year in press releases, but is ever more heavily spun (posh word for distorted) by interested parties, making the very simple truth ever harder to distill from the resulting press archives.   The information is nevertheless of much interest to wiki contributors.   Entries under the wiki automobiles project frequently refer to sales volumes of individual models.   Such references are generally inadequately sourced and are quite often plain wrong - presumably (again) indirectly sourced to ambiguous press releases from interested parties.   Wiki has an equivalent entry on the US auto market - though there the interest seems to be in sales by brand rather than by model (which I find less relevant, since it's the individual models for which the design and marketing investment take place - though that's a personal thing slightly off topic for this para.)   There seems to be a sort of quiet snobbism that finds anything so sordid as which cars sold best somehow unencyclopaedic.   But if the cars hadn't sold well you wouldn't have heard of them, and cars such as the Mini and Ford Escort - it for that matter the VW Golf - wouldn't get the high number of edits (presumably reflecting a higher number of readers content to leave the entries unimproved).
 * There are very obvious things about it which need to be improved.  Past disputes seem to have left aspects of the entry pruned down to a lowest common denominator level in terms of quality.   But if something needs to be improved, that is an argument for improving it: not for deleting it
 * Regards Charles01 (talk) 09:08, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Whatever the reasons for my AfD nomination (and looking back at it, I'm no longer so strongly convinced that I should have nominated it, but I'll let the discussion run its course), I can assure you that "snobbism" wasn't one of them :-) I do believe that "which cars sold best" is a truly encyclopedic subject, but we have List of bestselling vehicle nameplates and List of automobiles by sales for this (those really should be merged, as suggested). A similar list, but for only one country and per year, seemed to me to go away from the encyclopedic and towards the purely statistical though. I've worked a lot on List of best-selling books and List of best-selling fiction authors: I think these have their place here, but I would vehemently oppose an inclusion of a weekly bestseller list (worldwide or by country), even though these get published in many newspapers and so on. We have to draw the line somewhere, but opinions can obviously vary as to where to draw it. Fram (talk) 12:17, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I've no wish to impugn (nor even to impute) individual motives - yours or anyone else's.  My 'quiet snobbism' impression is more a general one which derives, I suspect, from the way that wiki contributors seem disproportionately to have academic / scholarly backgrounds:  the ones most directly concerned with 'doing commerce' - sordid or otherwise - are mostly too busy doing commerce to have too much time for reading / contributing to Wikipedia.   Hard to 'prove', but it's an impression that is a part of where I'm coming from with this for all that.   I guess I'd probably better 'stop digging' before I get myself into trouble....
 * On which 'best sellers' lists ARE beyond the pale for inclusion, clearly weekly best sellers' lists of anglophone fiction are a long way the wrong side of any 'scope' line you care to set down: for annual lists there's most probably a good justification.   Especially since wiki users are almost certainly more bookish than the wider population.   For my money, the UK top ten auto-sales by YEAR are comfortably within the scope for inclusion here, because of the number of other article subjects for which they are relevant.   As I wrote already, it seems to me that the commercial success or failure of individual auto models is a whole lot more relevant to other subjects than name plates, which for many multi-nationals have been little more than marketing tools for several decades now, starting with the Japanese automakers whose domestic language is pretty unfathomable to huge cohorts of their most profitable customers, e.g. in the US and Europe.   By the same token, unless you are particularly numerate and have a detailed knowledge of how auto sales evolved over the years, knowing that the DKW F5 was one of the top three best selling cars in Germany in 1936 (if it was:  I don't know though I suspect it was) probably puts it into much better context for the non specialist reader  than being told that 60,000 were produced in slightly under two years.
 * Regards  Charles01 (talk) 13:04, 6 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep/merge This is obviously a work in progress and can be left to mature over time per WP:IMPERFECT. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:06, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete, per entries 2, 3 and 6 at WP:LC. Stifle (talk) 21:05, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete - both listcruft and quite an obvious exemplary case for WP:NOT - just because stuff exists, we don't put them in encyclopedias, do we? PrinceGloria (talk) 17:58, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom, Stifle, and PrinceGloria —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 18:45, 8 May 2008 (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.