Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/List of people by name


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellany page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result of the debate was No consensus, defaulting to keep. ^ demon [omg plz] 17:32, 19 May 2007 (UTC)


 * DRV overturns to delete. (NB: As a commenter below, I didn't close the DRV; I'm just noting it.) Xoloz 15:03, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

List of people by name and subpages

 * Request - I would like to request a bot be used to list, on a single page all the articles listed on these pages (unless there are simpler methods). This would allow comparison with existing lists and categories, and allow gradual progression from this system to a more maintainable one that would, ultimately, use the transclusion list of WPBiography to generate an alphabetical index of all the biographies on Wikipedia. That index would then be our equivalent of the index found at the back of biographical dictionaries, such as the Dictionary of National Biography. While such discussions were proceding, these pages would be kept, as they are not actively harming anything. Once the new system was in place, these pages could be deleted or put up for MfD/AfD again. Carcharoth 14:29, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm sorry, but that would create a page that would be far to large to effectively load or edit, unless I am misunderstanding what you are proposing. A better way would be to request that some back-end gap analysis be done via direct queries against the database in order to scope out the problem.  If I were experienced in this particular database's details, I'd offer to do these queries myself (hmm, I should get that knowledge under my belt sometime ...). --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 23:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I guess what I am asking for is a way to query Wikipedia and get back the result: "List of people with names beginning with B", or whatever letter you want to chose. Or even "Ba", or "Ch" or "Fra". This is not an unreasonable request, and I suspect it can be done fairly easily. If we can have Category:Living people, why not Category:Biographical articles? The closest we have at the moment is Category:Biography articles by quality. The subcategories of that should, theoretically, contain all the articles that transclude WPBiography. Let's have a quick look... No. I forgot the "200 articles" display limit. But I did find that Category:Unassessed biography articles has a similar set-up to the pages used here. It has links to the "Fr", "Go", "Ff", etc. sections of the category. So both systems (list and categories) are trying to do similar things, but as far as I can tell, both systems are failing. The list is out-of-date and practically impossible to maintain. The category system doesn't have a single overarching category for Biographies, but splits them up by assessment. Carcharoth 01:31, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * It might put a big load on the servers, but I'm going to ask if Category:Biographical articles can be added to WPBiography. Then that category can be created and the largeCategoryTOC used to browse it. That is one way to access the Biographical articles by name. Then there is only the small problem of pipe-sorting to fix... Carcharoth 01:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Discussion Suspended

This MfD/AfD process involves procedural irregularities too extensive to either
 * tolerate in light of their potential for functioning as de facto precedents, or
 * enumerate clearly in the time i have left to edit in the next 24 hours or so.

Until i can find time to explain thoroughly and propose remedies, i am protecting this page, lest those too hurried to catch this notice, or too impatient to respect it, waste their own or others time and effort by continuing to pursue the discussion in this tainted present context.

Please keep the discussion of these measures on Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion/List of people by name. Unsigned by User:Jerzy


 * Struck out; over-ruled. Sorry, but you cannot suspend an xfD which you are a participant in under poorly-explained "procedural" grounds and contextual objections. You protect the page for three days, promise to come back in 24 hours, but you do not even provide us with a brief summary as to what is going on?(!) Your comment below reads, in part: Procedural comment: It is quite true that the many Keep votes do not establish a binding precedent in the way that precedents function in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Nevertheless, if this process should end with a Delete result, i will insist on its review via WP:VPP, for the following reasons that AFAIK would each make this case unique on WP...[list follows] Well, procedural violations are contested on WP:DRV, and much of the rest of the comment is, frankly, somewhat less than intelligible. And what is up with the odd capitalization, by the way &mdash; would you mind using normal capitalization? It makes reading your thoughts difficults. At any rate, I am taking it upon myself to unprotect this xfD so as to permit the discussion to resume. I strongly caution against wheel-warring (I certainly do not intend to revert if the page becomes re-protected), but I urge Jerzy to re-evaluate his or her approach. Please limit discussion of this protection/suspension to the talk page, everyone. Thanks. El_C 10:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment I have to agree with El_C in principle that it's not a good idea to suspend discussion just because there are some procedural concerns. If there is concern that the outcome of the discussion has been compromised by a procedural lapse, that is what Deletion review is for. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 23:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


 * – (View discussion) (View AfD log)

Since this is an index page rather than article content, I'm listing it on MFD (it's on AFD too). This page and its subpages purport to be a list of all people with articles in Wikipedia. In that, they're hopelessly outdated since, unlike categories, they need manual upkeep. In previous discussions, it was kept on grounds that it's useful and that some people like it, but as indices go we really have a lot better to offer than this. Wikipedia contains about 400,000 articles on people, making this list unwieldy at best and original research at worst.  &gt; R a d i a n t &lt;  13:50, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete The scope of these lists is about 25% of Wikipedia, and if that's not indiscriminate (WP:NOT) I don't know what is. They are, however, nowhere near complete, making their usefulness moot and possibly even entering the realms of original research. --kingboyk 14:03, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. It's a year later, we have 1.7 million articles, an index that needs manual updating simply won't work. -Amarkov moo! 14:52, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|16px]]Delete The page is extremely hard to understand, I agree with Amarkov's comments, it would be too hard to maintain if kept. Regards - The Sunshine Man 17:13, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I agree with the justification for listing this at MfD. Even though the main page is an index, collectively, this is a list not too much different (except in size) from other lists, and I tend to think that AfD would be a better place for the debate.  However, whereever its debated, I agree that it's certainly unmaintained, almost certainly unmaintainable, and fully deleteable.  Xtifr tälk 00:25, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Since double transclusion hurts little, I'm going to go ahead and transclude this on AfD too. I leave it up to somebody else whether this should extend the closing date. -Amarkov moo! 00:32, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - Delete - Delete At last guess-ta-ment I believe there were over 3 “Billion” individuals.  Does Wikipedia have enough space to list everyone.Shoessss 02:07, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Of course it would not include everybody, only people whose inclusion is merited by notability guidelines. When I am adding people to the list, I consider anyone sufficiently notable to have a WP article that survives, is notable enough to be included in the list. --Slyguy (talk) 15:47, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete That's what the search bar is for ROASTY  TOAST  02:22, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, no reason for deletion. The list is indeed useful to readers (let me know when we are no longer attempting to make a useful encyclopedia). This is a perfectly reasonable list of well-defined scope. It is no harder to maintain than any other article on Wikipedia. Christopher Parham (talk) 02:33, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * And the claim that this is original research seems utterly unfounded. Christopher Parham (talk) 02:36, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Of course this is harder to maintain. The pages required to host this list fill two pages of Special:PrefixIndex.  And it's terribly incomplete.  Few if any of the ancient Roman consuls are included, or the Chaplains of the United States Senate or any of probably a thousand other lists of people in the encyclopedia already.  And that doesn't begin to touch all the one-off biography articles scattered about the article space.  Simply, it is not successfully being maintained, and probably could never successfully be maintained to any degree of completeness in regard to the rest of Wikipedia.  Serpent&#39;s Choice 02:51, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * If by "maintain" you mean preserve in an complete or close to complete state, then we aren't maintaining more than 1% of our existing articles. This page remains functional and useful despite being incomplete, just as history is useful despite being seriously incomplete and not very well done. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:01, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. I know that a lot of work has been put into this, but the problems seem insurmountable.  At its core, this does not meet the needs of Wikipedia's lists.  From WP:LIST, lists are for information, navigation, and development.  Because this system of lists includes roughly 25% of the encyclopedia's scope, it seems unlikely to serve a purpose for information.  It is too close to being wholly indiscriminate.  Because it cannot hope to be complete, even against existing articles, it is of questionable value as a navigation tool.  Additionally, the category system already serves to allow navigation on a large scope.  And both of these problems &mdash; incompleteness and scale &mdash; prevent it from being valuable for development.  Additionally, there may be BLP problems.  One redlinked entry from this sublist reads "American criminal".  Maybe he is.  Maybe he isn't.  I have no idea how long it has been there (it predates the last subpage-shuffling on 24 Mar 2007) nor who added it.  How many other entries present this same problem?  How would we know?  I'm not a deletionist, and I'm always hesitant to recommend deleting old or large content, and this is both.  But I think its the right choice, for a lot of reasons.  Serpent&#39;s Choice 02:40, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete, per nom. Gobonobo T C 03:41, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment This has been up for deletion and kept at least 8 times. It appears that this page set is going the way of other perennially nominated pages and it will, eventually, be deleted simply as a matter of time.  Radiant's bringing it here is pretty much a death knell for the page set as this is a highly respected contributor and admin.  Therefore, though I personally find the pages useful in anti-vandalism efforts, there is simply no way it can be kept for the long term owing to continued attempts to delete by persons who vigorously oppose its existence.  It is not original research, it is not useless, and it is not unmaintainable but it is unpopular - and that is the reason why it is ultimately doomed to deletion. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 04:10, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Honest question. How do these lists assist in anti-vandalism work?  They are very, very large and change regularly, so it would seem that their related changes lists would be unwieldy?  Is there some way to employ these for anti-vandalism that is more efficient or effective than watchlisting articles?  Serpent&#39;s Choice 06:05, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * responding comment actually, the number of related changes is quite modest for each terminal page as biographical articles are not heavily edited as a class. There is a balance to be struck in keeping the pages to a particular size range that helps in this respect (though I've personally not given much thought to the mathematics that could be used to determine optimum size).  Take a look at some of the related changes pages, such as Dj-Dn and Willa-Willh and San (these were chosen randomly based on using hte random_article feature); I find the related changes pages to be reasonably sized morsels for compartmentalized and directed anti-vandalism surveillance in an area - biography - where vandalism has a magnified impact. Thank you for asking for some explanation. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 00:52, 16 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete per my same argument in the last AfD at the end of December: Wholly indiscriminate list, completely impossible to maintain. Categories and lists of specific groups serve as a much better means of organizing and indexing articles about people on Wikipedia. Resolute 04:51, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - It seems to me that deleting pages such as this, which people probably put a lot of time into, and that could be seen as fitting into Wikipedia were some of you to have a different outlook and be more familiar with different guidelines, such as list guidelines, the community might not risk losing editors by deleting their good faith contributions. Furthermore, many of these pages have been updated recently. Additionally, there are not 6.5 billion notable people to list on Wikipedia. There are only so many notable people, and in fact, the list might actually be rather manageable, relatively speaking. It may not actually be as amorphous as some see it as being. Eventually, it could be relatively complete, or at least stable to the point of only newly notable people are being added and non-notable people being taken off. And as another user comments, it will be useful to at least one of the other, maybe 6.496 billion, non-notable — people probably many more. --Remi 10:46, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete Too grand to be useful. After eading all the comments above, I tested the pages with Neville Duke, a page that has existed since October 2006. No link. OK, that's only one, but if an article that is seven months old has not found its way how many others are there? Well, here's a few more Nevilles: Neville Cardus, Richard Neville (singer), Richard Neville (writer), Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury. That's six missing references found in less than six minutes. Unmaintainable. Emeraude 11:44, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Regarding the time-to-entry in this list, the earl's article linked above has existed since June 2003. Serpent&#39;s Choice 11:48, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, strongly. The notion that the fact that editors have found a page "useful" is considered by some to be a weak reason for keeping it is so wrongheaded that it shocks the conscience.  It may be that the maintenance of these pages is a task best suited for a bot of some kind.  But indexing and reader friendliness remain weaknesses of the project in general.  Search functions not only eat up resources; they also are unhelpful to people who need to see a list in text to remind themselves of what exactly it was they were looking for.  Lists like this serve that purpose.  - Smerdis of Tlön 13:46, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * We could, in theory, use a bot to slap everything from Category:People onto a list. But that would be a much worse waste of resources than using the search function is, and we still wouldn't be able to get uncategorized articles, making people think that we don't have an article when we do. Oh, and I have never met anyone who honestly prefers to manually look though a big list, when they could type the thing they want into a box and have a computer look for them. - Amarkov moo! 15:14, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * There are many occasions where a text list is more helpful than a search function: it next to impossible to find "quahog" or "leukocyte" or "Psammetichus I" in a search engine unless you already know how to spell them, but on a text list you can recognize what you are looking for. If I'm trying to find out what's out there, I'd rather read a text index than try to formulate a search query that will call forth the desired result.  - Smerdis of Tlön 15:28, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem is that you will not necessarily find what's there; you will find what's on an incomplete list of things which are there. If someone actually got a bot to update the list, I might change my opinion, but I find it highly unlikely that such a bot would be allowed to run. Anyway, as it is, this list misrepresents what we have. -Amarkov moo! 15:34, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * People who don't know how to spell something won't be able to find it in a list either. If you look in the list for "Cuahog", "Reukocyte" or "Sammetichus I", all perfectly plausible mispelings, you won't find them either.  &gt; R a d i a n t &lt;  08:51, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete on the basis the list requires manual updating, which isn't realistic. If someone created a bot to maintain this, it could be a useful navigational aid. Addhoc 15:22, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. I am unsure how a list of this nature could ever truly be maintainable.  Even then I fail to see how it is even remotely encyclopedic.  Ark yan  &#149; (talk) 15:51, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom and per Serpent's Choice. wikipediatrix 16:06, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. Two main points. As another user noted, this article (and those like it) has been up for deletion countless times in the past.  Is there any sort of rule as to how many times an article can be proposed for deletion until it is finally decided that it will definitely be kept, or how much time must elapse from one deletion proposal to the next?  (I did a brief search for such a rule, but cannot find one.)  The last time this article was up for deletion, in December-January, numerous detailed, sound arguments were given for keeping in the discussion.  Secondly, as for this list being "unmaintainable" manually, in the past few months I have added several thousand names to the list.  Now, if at some point, we could get a large enough group of people to work together, the list could be populated relatively quickly (with names of people who satisfy notability guidelines and have an article on WP).  Lastly, no one has yet explained how this is original research. --Slyguy (talk) 16:07, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * You do understand that WikiProject Biography has identified nearly 400,000 biographical articles, and that there's possibly many more than that? How could a list of that size possibly be maintained manually? What use is an incomplete list? Finally, it doesn't matter what happened in previous deletion debates; times change and the makeup of the community changes, and thus consensus can change. Probably now that we have some numbers people will see how unmaintainable this is. --kingboyk 17:01, 15 May 2007 (UTC) (e/c)
 * There is no Wikipedia guideline or policy that limits either the number or timeframes for deletions. The only guideline I know of is that a FA cannot be nominated for deletion while it is a FA. Slavlin 16:58, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Really? I didn't know FAs were exempt... --kingboyk 17:01, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * He probably means that they are exempt in practice if they are being displayed on the main page. There's no explicit policy for this, but (again, in practice) all such nominations are bad-faith and are quickly closed (and the afd templates get taken off, since they are seen as vandalism). It's not blanket protection for all FAs; that's just imprecise language. Gavia immer (talk) 17:08, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I concur with the nominator and per Serpent's Choice above. There are BLP concerns here too. So let's delete it.--Docg 17:17, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator. Waiting for someone to nominate this. Didn't want to do it myself. Horvat Den 18:36, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Lara  Love  T / C  19:17, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete as hopelessly unmaintainable. Spend your time adding to the encyclopedia instead. Punkmorten 20:17, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete as per nom. Lemon  flash  (t)  /  (c)  21:13, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep. The retention arguments i & others have made before are still valid, and i think it is appropriate to "include them by reference" here (see first box on Talk:List of people by name) and expect that unless each of them is specifically refuted by Del voters, the nomination will fail via ignoring of Del votes on grounds of low quality of their arguments. --Jerzy•t 21:33, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Procedural comment: It is quite true that the many Keep votes do not establish a binding precedent in the way that precedents function in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Nevertheless, if this process should end with a Delete result, i will insist on its review via WP:VPP, for the following reasons that AFAIK would each make this case unique on WP:
 * A mandate for such a page that goes back further than WP:WikiProjects, and (tho i think it has been moved, or omitted in a rewrite of the page) was on record in WikiProject Biography for years, from soon after the concept (of WikiProjects) was brought forward.
 * The number of non-Rdr main-namespace pages involved, which is approaching 1000 (including both name-bearing pages and pages that serve only for navigation within the tree). (One aspect is the effort required to cleanly delete it, or to restore it if undeletion should be mandated; in this regard one must note that while LoPbN's template-namespace infrastructure is also significant:
 * _ _ a couple hundred of them are lk'd from Template:List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned) by (almost always) a minimum of three name-bearing pages,
 * _ _ nearly as many are (for now, tho they could be phased out at any time that that became a priority), and
 * _ _ another couple hundred template-talk namespace pages are important for supporting modification of their accompanying template pages to support growth of subtrees below their corresponding index-only pages.)
 * The number of LoPbN AfDs that have failed: a successful AfD would purport to have been the single process to make the right decision among a probably unprecedented number of deletion debates with the same substance; that would be an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence.
 * The quantity of content and effort devoted to the tree in good-faith edits.
 * The importance of its function of facilitating access to a central portion of the project: the bios
 * _ _ are (it seems safe to say) the single largest topic area at over 20% of articles,
 * _ _ tend to be significant tools for studying every area of human knowledge (and crucial for many important areas), bcz human knowledge is added to and structured by people, and
 * _ _ contribute to the connectedness among articles (an issue i haven't heard discussed lately, tho one whose importance was recognized early on and has not likely receded).
 * These are all factors not anticipated in the deletion policies, and rare enough that the failure to consider them has had little chance to be identified as a problem; it is fair to say that there is no settled policy that AfD is competent to decide this question. --Jerzy•t 21:33, 15 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is not a court of law, nor is it a democracy. Consensus can change as times change. Quite simply, Wikipedia has outgrown this list and no number of big words alters that "fact". --kingboyk 16:03, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment regarding maintainability: There are at any given time a (large but) finite number of notable persons in history.  During any period of time, a small number of persons become notable.  At present, articles on notable persons are being added to Wikipedia faster than persons are becoming notable.  However, this trend cannot be expected to continue.  Over time, the rate of new notable person articles will approach the rate of new notable persons.  I submit that the rate of new notable persons is low enough that, although it may be difficult to 'maintain' this list now, in the future maintaining it will become trivial. — The Storm Surfer 00:10, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep And I want to point out that the nominator seems to have deliberately misrepresented the contents of the previous deletion discussions. Rather than take the noms word for it, I went through and read the discussions myself.  There's a lot more than "I think it's useful" and "I likee" going on in those previous discussions, in fact these were very heavily discussed deletions with many valid and interesting points on both sides, and I think it was downright dishonest to suggest otherwise.  This discussion amounts to "what are appropriate ways to index content in Wikipedia" -- this isn't just some list about Family Guy episodes. --JayHenry 00:28, 16 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep for now - delete if and only if currently existing categories can be used to generate an equivalent list. Seriously, I see people saying that categories serve the purpose of this list. In fact, categories and lists have always been separate things. Can anyone, right now, create a full list from Category:People and its subcategories, or a list of all articles linking to the WP:WPBIO talk page template? If so, can they (a) post that 'category' list somewhere; (b) do something similar for the 'list' pages nominated for deletion here; (c) cross-reference the two lists. The annotations on this list can be deleted as far as I am concerned, but the fundamental reason behind this sort of list is the limitations of the category system. See what I did in the blurb at Category:Earthquakes. That is an incredibly clunky and outdated way of generating a list, but it was the only way I could think of listing all the earthquake articles in that category and its subcategories. Something similar needs to be done for the biographical articles. I agree the current set-up of pages is not it, but please preserve and compare the two sets of information before assuming that one duplicates the other. Carcharoth 01:58, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strange. Is this really saying that WPBiography links to over 2,000,000 articles (see the "from=2052537" bit of the URL)? Regardless, can anyone tell me how many article talk pages transclude WPBiography, and how many people are on this list that is proposed for deletion? If not, then information is being lost. Carcharoth 02:06, 16 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep Until the Wikipedia search function is improved to find pages that users cannot spell correctly, this will be a useful list. It seems very tedious to maintain, but obviously there are people willing to try. The notability of biographies which are not yet included on the list will continue to decrease over time as we approach the deadline. The fact that new articles may not be included on the list for quite some time is not a reason to delete it. -RustavoTalk/Contribs 02:39, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * A list won't help users locate something either if they don't know how to spell it.  &gt; R a d i a n t &lt;  08:51, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom, kinboyk and Amarkov, among others. --Iamunknown 02:48, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep per Carcharoth's and Jerzy's concerns. Seems inherently incomplete and unmaintainable and indiscriminate to me, but the idea of deleting this kind of critical mass of good faith contribution is also boggling.  And the fact that it's already survived numerous AfD's makes me reticent to vote for deletion.  I get that consensus can change over time, but at a point I think repeated noms can kind of be like trying and re-trying a criminal for the same offense until you find a jury who'll convict.  My larger concern is this: the idea that this list is useful to people on Wikipedia who can't spell is contingent on people actually being able to find this index.  I've been typing away at Wikipedia a solid year now and this AfD is the first time I'm hearing such a thing exists.   And I think it's safe to say that the same thing goes for the attentive wikipedians I know who can't spell their way out of a wet paper bag.  I am in no way convinced that this index is even remotely useful, but I'm also not convinced that it's not.  And in a case like this, I think doubt has to equal retention of the article.  Ford MF 07:14, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - so, is anyone up to the challenge of making a single list from these pages and a single list from the category system and/or the pages transcluding WPBiography? Surely someone, plus a computer, can do this? It can't be that difficult can it? Carcharoth 09:46, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. Way too long to be any use to anyone in finding a biography. Sam Blacketer 11:15, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - completely unmaintainable, and so unwieldly it's untrue. Users here are saying it's "useful", but there's very little insight as to what it is actually useful for. - fchd 14:54, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete it all as per above comments. Bearian 16:54, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, there is some additional information provided by the lists vs. a category "People", that is some immediate biographic detail: "German swimmer (b. - d.)" which is not possible in a category. Carlossuarez46 20:51, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. It would seem to me that the huge effort that would be required to make this complete (and maintain it as such) would be far better spent on the articles themselves. There may be some use to it but I think it is decidedly limited. Petros471 11:01, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominater, too unpractical. Garion96 (talk) 11:02, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete this useless bunch of articles. Once upon a time they may have had a purpose but by now they are simply an unmaintainable morass that duplicates functionality much better served by subject-specific lists and categories. Guy (Help!) 12:23, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - Amarkov says above "We could, in theory, use a bot to slap everything from Category:People onto a list" - I would love to be able to browse such a list, but unfortunately that is not possible at the moment as no-one seems to want to provide this funtionality for Wikipedia readers. As an example, consider someone who wants to browse the articles Wikipedia has on earthquakes. They can try and browse Category:Earthquakes, but the earthquake articles there are hidden away in separate subcategories that are many clicks apart. Now consider the (now-outdated) list I generated and deposited here. My point is that sometimes browsing a category is the best option, sometimes browsing a list is the best option, and sometimes browsing a set of search results is the best option. Now apply this to people. I would love to be able to click "X" in an alphabetical index and see a set of biographical articles on people who's names begin with X. Currently, that list is at List of people by name: X. The category system, however, can't (at the moment) produce anything like that. Carcharoth 13:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - too much effort for something marginally useful. Renata 14:58, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep - per Carcharoth - CarolGray 20:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment It would not be unreasonable to propose a major revision to the way in which disambiguation of personal names is done such that LoPbN becomes the default disambiguation point for personal names. For instance, the page William White could be retired in favor of a reference to List of people by name: Wh. (P.S. I do know it's not as simple as this (for instance, what to do with fictional 'William White's), but I think the concept as a whole has merit though the implementation would need sigificant thought.) --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 01:04, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * That is an excellent point. I knew I'd seen lists like this already somewhere. All the "name" disambiguation pages look like these pages already, though many disambiguation more than just the names of people, so that would be a problem. Carcharoth 01:34, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: If this page were deleted, would we go through and add all the Fry, Firstnames, for instance, to Fry, the DAB page for the term? If they weren't re-added somewhere else, Wikipedia would lose a valuable listing. Also, a comment above mentioned that this article, unlike categories, must be maintained manually. Why not create a Category:Surnames beginning with F or Category:People named Fry? That could easily solve the problem of manual upkeep. PaladinWhite 01:14, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Responding Comment The issue of whether to disambiguate on first names has been a contentious one for some time. I think the current consensus is that one typically doesn't list all persons with first (given) naems that are identical except under those circumstances where they are colloqially referred to by their first name. For instance, the cases of 'Arnold' (er, 'Ahnold' perhaps) and 'Bill' come to mind for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton; on the flip side, Johnny Mathis isn't colloquially known simply as 'Johnny'.  It's a grey area in the "dab canon". (P.S. it says something weird that I could type Arnold's last name correctly the first time) --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 01:50, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Responding Comment No, I meant all persons with the same surname, not first name. PaladinWhite 01:54, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Hey! I just noticed you moved some of those names from the disambiguation page to the LoPbN list. See this edit. That led me to believe that LoPbN in that case had important information. The arguemtn still holds, because undoubtedly there are other pages like that. It is partly my fault, but creating that impression during a deletion discussion is misleading, and it would be better if you mention edits like this, as otherwise people misunderstand the history of the pages in question. Carcharoth 14:42, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Responding Comment Actually, I made the edit and then followed the links to this discussion, not the other way around. That movement of names was one thing that motivated me to post here; I thought, "How would the deletion or permanence of this article affect what I had just done? Would the names be lost?" PaladinWhite 02:15, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - I actually use Wikipedia regularly to look up names of obscure historical people. Sometimes the name I type in or search for is not there. But I don't give up. I try combinations of the Wikipedia search results, Wikipedia disambiguation pages and Google results. Sometimes I find that disambiguation pages are woefully incomplete, and there are 5-6 people with the same surname missing from the list. If I could reliably get a list of all the articles with "Fraser" in the title, that would be fine, but that is difficult at the moment. I could look at Fraser and see if the A. W. Fraser I want is there. I could look at A. W. Fraser, or I could try searching for A. W. Fraser, or I could Google A. W. Fraser and Wikipedia, or I could look at List of people by name: Fra-Frd. In fact, the A. W. Fraser I want is the oil contractor from the 1890s (see History of the petroleum industry in Canada, part one), and not Alexander William Fraser (17-year-old who is 231st in line to the British throne). But this sort of thing demonstrates some of the problems inherent in maintaining disambiguation for names in Wikipedia. Carcharoth 02:03, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - It's simply a waste of resources. The amount of maintenance that would be necessary to make it a valuable resource would be unbelievable. -- Sophia™ [ talk 03:04, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * What about the disambiguation information on many of these pages? Deleting all these pages would lose that information. Look at Fry and note the link to List of people by name: Frf-Frz (one of the pages proposed for deletion). Now, without looking at the page being proposed for deletion, can you easily find the 20 people named Fry who have Wikipedia articles? Bonus points if you can find any extra people called Fry with Wikipedia articles. Carcharoth 08:55, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * But we could load that information back into the disambiguation pages themselves, explicitly, rather than simply referring to part of LoPbN. Also, how many "bonus points" do I earn for: Arthur Fry, Barry Fry, Bertha Fry, Birkett D. Fry, Caroline Fry, Cecil Roderick Fry, Chance Fry, Colin Fry, Daniel Fry, Douglas Fry, Edward Fry, Hedy Fry, Jacob Fry, Jr., James Barnet Fry, Jeremy Fry, Joan Mary Fry, Johnny Fry, Jordan Fry, Joseph Fry, Jr., Joseph Storrs Fry, Joseph Storrs Fry II, Joshua Fry, Margery Fry, Martin Fry, Matt Fry, Maxwell Fry, Nick Fry, Peter Fry, Ryan Fry, Scott Fry, Sherry Edmundson Fry, Russell Fry, Taylor Fry or the fact that William Fry itself links to a disambiguation page? LoPbN is not working.  Serpent&#39;s Choice 10:37, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * LOL! You get 15 bonus points! :-) I agree, LoPbN is not working, and I agree that the disambiguation information should be put back into separate disambiguation pages for each name (though in some ways that is less efficient). Question is, how do we do that if the pages are deleted? Carcharoth 12:28, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * They were worth one point apiece? Sweet!  Seriously, though, my real suggestion for dealing with this is to disassemble it.  There is useful information in LoPbN; it's just the format that's a real problem.  The "Fry" information, for example, can be moved over to the Fry disambiguation page.  In some cases (the "van ..." people, below), the people may need to be split off into one or two sub-disambiguation pages.  That's an editorial issue, and its fairly complex, but its neither here nor there.  Obviously, even assuming that this M/AFD finds for deletion, the pages won't literally be deleted immediately.  Just like the closure/deletion of Esperanza, there would be a transition period wherein a team of people (impromptu Wikiproject formation?) section the content up to distribute it to standard disambiguation pages.  In the process, this will also greatly improve the status and structure of WP's sorry-state disambiguation system.  Serpent&#39;s Choice 13:29, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. That is reassuring to hear. And those Fry's you found mustn't be left out in the cold. Just how did you find those ones anyway? Carcharoth 14:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I spent the bonus points I earned in a previous AFD to buy psychic powers. Or ... failing that, a couple of highly targeted Google searches.  "+Fry +born site:enwikipedia.org" and "+Fry +died site:en.wikipedia.org" get all but the worst-written of biography articles, although there are about 20 pages of results to fish through.  You may note that there are a couple in my 15 Fry list that don't show up on those Google searches; I got lucky with wikilinks to those from other articles.  This process still may not find all the appropriate articles, and it's very, very slow, but it's better than nothing.  Serpent&#39;s Choice 21:55, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Now, I wonder how many Fry's there are on the list of just under 380,000 articles that has been produced using AWB and discussed at Template talk:WPBiography? At that discussion, I've also come up with my own list of Frys. Only living ones, I'm afraid. What I did was go to Category:Living people and use the two-letter index there (produced using largeCategoryTOC) to look at the Fs section. I then clicked back one (an argument for a three-letter index allowing someone to navigate straight to Fry), and found a list of 21 living Fry's: Abi Fry, Adam Fry, Arthur Fry, Barry Fry, Bertha Fry, Chance Fry, Charles Fry, Colin Fry, Hayden Fry, Hedy Fry, Jordan Fry, Ken Fry, Nick Fry, Nina Fry, Peter Fry, Russell Fry, Ryan Fry, Scott Fry, Shirley Fry, Stephen Fry, Taylor Fry. I wonder how this list compares with yours? (I only get three bonus points - Abi Fry, Nina Fry and Russell Fry were not on your list or in LoPbN). This method does rely on the pipe-sorting of the articles to be correct, but already, I think, we can see how one simple edit to WPBiography to create a super-category, will produce something with much of the functionality of LoPbN, and that will be far more maintainable (just add DEFAULTSORTED articles to Category:Biographical articles to automatically insert them in the right place in the super-category). What do people think? Carcharoth 00:22, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * As an aside, even that didn't get them all. Don Fry, Doug Fry, Dustin Fry, Fred Fry, John Fry, another John Fry, Leslie Fry, Nan Fry, Paul Fry, and W Fry were all missed by LoPbN, my first pass through Google, and cross-referencing through the Living People category (although most of these 10 new entries are living people).  I found these through another google search specifically intended to return stubby, malformed biography articles (some of these probably don't meet inclusion standards), but I cannot guarantee that I've caught them all even now.  Obviously, disambiguation pages as an entire category require more attention and development; they are inglorious, so they get ignored.  But I think this "Fry" exercise testifies to the insurmountable barriers facing any sort of comprehensive "index to Wikipedia", which is fundamentally what LoPbN aspires to be. Serpent&#39;s Choice 05:05, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * (unindent) I wonder how many were missed by living people because they lacked the tag, and how many were merely incorrectly pipe-sorted? Aren't we lucky we didn't take "Smith" as an example... :-) Carcharoth 07:51, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * None of the living people in that additional list are so marked. And there is no way I am going to manually extract all the Smiths from Google searches.  My sanity may be in question already, but at least I don't gibber.  Serpent&#39;s Choice 07:59, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Another example is here: Van (disambiguation). I was recently editing Paul van Somer I, and I looked around for a "van" people disambiguation page to help decide whether to list him under 'S' or 'V', and there are vast numbers of people named 'van...'. This might seem a trivial thing, but it really is the sort of thing people do ask ocassionally: "Oh, do you have a list of your articles on people named 'van'? I'm doing some research on Dutch/German names and such a list would be helpful. Hmm? What's that? You deleted it? Oh dear. Maybe you have a category with all those articles in it? You don't. Oh dear. Maybe you have a list of all pages stating "van"? Oh, not all those redirects have been created. Maybe you have a disambiguation page such as Van (disambiguation)? You do? Wonderful! ... What do you mean it links to the deleted page?? . Carcharoth 09:23, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I should note, of course, that neither Van (disambiguation), or the equivalent LoPbN page could claim to be comprehensive. Possibly a pipe-sorted category could be, but that depends on pipe-sorting being done correctly. Carcharoth 12:28, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Red-links in the list - an issue raised by Serpent's Choice. The example was Aaron McKinney, linked from List of people by name: Mch-Mcz. The deletion log shows that the article was speedy-deleted. Surely when an article is speedy deleted the deleting admin should clear up the red-links and remove them, or am I missing something there? Carcharoth 12:34, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment about red-links I think this is a valid topic for here because it gets to people's concerns about maintainability. My personal feeling is that LoPbN should have no red-links at all.  Those red-links associated with deleted articles should be removed.  Those red-links that are for not-yet-created articles should go into the Requested articles bin. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 00:05, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete It is always painful to remove content into which much work has been invested; however, this system is clearly considered too unwieldy to be useful, at least by most commenters here. I'm sure some valuable disambiguation information remains in this list, so it should combed before deletion, to ensure all useful material is extracted.  Given its burden on WP's resources, and the improbability of its being widely-employed for any helpful purpose, it is time for this system to be removed. Xoloz 15:04, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposed solution
My proposed solution is:
 * (1) Turn LoPbN into a single master list, in alphabetical order.
 * (1a) Preserve the annotations for possible use in disambiguation pages.
 * (2) Compare the LoPbN list with the list of approx 380,000 articles transcluding WPBiography (this is a 10MB file that is too large to be uploaded as a wiki-page), and ensure that any LoPbN articles lacking WPBiography on their talk page have that tag added.
 * (3) Use a bot to add a Category:Biographical articles tag to all articles with WPBiography on their talk page, plus an attempt at DEFAULTSORT or pipe-sorting.
 * (4) Create Category:Biographical articles.
 * (5) Design a new (three-letter) version of largeCategoryTOC for use on Category:Biographical articles.
 * (6) Initiate and maintain processes to ensure correct pipe-sorting or DEFAULTSORTing of biographical articles.
 * (7) Browse the new category using the index provided by the newly-designed three-letter version of largeCategoryTOC, and use this new functionality to improve Wikipedia's disambiguation pages.

Please discuss below. Carcharoth 00:48, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Advantages

 * This new system can be easily maintained.

Disadvantages

 * The annotations to the LoPbN lists are difficult to transfer.

Additional suggestions

 * One possibility is to create categories for the sections, e.g. Category:Surnames beginning with F; the advantage to this option is that it would be completely "self-maintaining" - once an article was tagged with the category, the list would self-generate. PaladinWhite 02:18, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * And then have an index page for the 26 categories. That would be easier than having a three-letter largeCategoryTOC. What about cases like Fry Family (Chocolate)? Carcharoth 07:49, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Possible problems

 * Automated DEFAULTSORT or pipe-sorting is difficult in many cases.
 * How much time and volunteer effort needed?
 * How much bot programming and running time is needed?

General comments

 * Please put general comments here.
 * 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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.