Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Lists of airline destinations

Are lists of all the current and former destinations of airlines acceptable content for Wikipedia? 16:00, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Many articles on Wikipedia include lists of every current and former destination of airlines. Examples include, , and. An RfC on the stand-alone (SA) lists was held in 2018, and the closing summary stated that Wikipedia should not have them. A subsequent AN discussion advised editors to follow the AfD process and closers to take the RfC into account. From May 2023 to February 2024, 26 AfDs resulted in the deletion or redirection of over 260 SA lists. In March 2024, however, an AfD to delete 153 SA lists was closed as No Consensus. At DRV, some people raised concerns about the age and limited participation of the 2018 RfC and described the recurrent AfDs as a timesink. It was suggested to run a new RfC as a de facto AfD or DRV, with every article tagged with a link to the discussion.

I am going to tag the talk pages of all the SA lists to ensure proper notification, but I favor uncoupling this RfC from the AfD process. This discussion is not about whether it's acceptable to write articles about airline destinations. That is a notability issue and is article-dependent. Rather, this RfC concerns the actual lists of every past and present destination. Sunnya343 (talk) 16:03, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Didn’t we have an RFC on this a couple of months ago? BilledMammal (talk) 16:17, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I came here to say that. Thryduulf (talk) 16:21, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * It turns out we haven't, quite. We have had three lengthy related discussions though:
 * November 2023 Village pump (policy)/Archive 187 asked "Should airport articles include tables that display all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to?" and the answer was "sometimes".
 * March 2024 an AfD of 153 stand-alone lists ended in no consensus
 * April 2024 DRV endorsed that no consensus outcome. Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * There was Village pump (policy)/Archive 187. It started as a discussion specifically about airport articles, not airline articles. Maybe the discussion and consensus also apply here? Pinging, the closer, in case he'd like to weigh in and/or watchlist this page just to watch the tomats number go up. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:25, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * It's basically the same question for the same type of articles wearing a fake nose, mustache, and glasses. 🥸 Bytes for the byte god, words for the word throne! ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:14, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * It was discussed at that some people consider the airline and airport lists to be distinct and that an attempt to address both at the same time would be inappropriate. Sunnya343 (talk) 17:36, 20 July 2024 (UTC)


 * To answer the original question Yes, sometimes. If the content is verifiable and there are sources demonstrating notability then there is no justification to exclude the content. I imagine this will be more common for small airlines than for large ones, but that does not preclude exceptions. Curated lists of notable destinations are normally going to be appropriate - but how large a list and what the inclusion criteria should be can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. Thryduulf (talk) 16:32, 20 July 2024 (UTC)


 * RFCs or the village pump are not policy-compliant venues to delete a class of articles. If you tag the talk pages instead of the articles, it will not be "proper notification"; any "delete" result would need to be followed up by something that actually is compatible with the deletion policy. See also WP:LEOPARD. TLDR: if you want to suggest deletion of an article, use WP:AFD. —Kusma (talk) 16:35, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Maybe I worded the RfC question and context confusingly (again). This discussion is supposed to be about the practice of listing all of an airline's destinations on Wikipedia, not about whether one can write an article about those destinations. WP:N doesn't apply here since we're talking about the content of articles. Ultimately, the outcome of this discussion cannot directly lead to the deletion of any article. It may have an indirect effect on those standalone lists that only contain lists (e.g. List of British Airways destinations), but people would have to go to AfD next for that. By the way if this discussion is found to be too confusing in the first day or so, I'm willing to withdraw it to avoid what happened with the airport list RfC. Sunnya343 (talk) 17:27, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok, so the answer to the original question is yes, especially for historical lists. Certainly no article about a typical airline should be FA without a discussion of the airline's destinations, as that is necessary for a comprehensive treatment. This does not mean that we should include lists of all destinations in all airline articles or that we need to always have an up-to-date list of current destinations. But the list of destinations of, say, Euroberlin France (a Cold War era airline that was founded with the express purpose to get around the ban on German airlines flying from West Germany to Berlin) seems important, and listing all of them is easier than saying "at first, they flew to some of the major West German airports, later, to all major West German airports". Any overly specific rule outlawing lists of destinations seems to have major potential drawbacks for article writers and I can see no advantages that would counter them. —Kusma (talk) 19:46, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I will withdraw this RfC now rather than drag it out for the following reasons:
 * Of course we can have these sorts of articles on Wikipedia. They're encyclopedic content. SportingFlyer  T · C  16:41, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * No Exhaustive lists of all past and present destinations of airlines is not acceptable since these can be changed at the whim of the airline, and rarely are the full list of destinatations covered by third-party, independent reliable sources (eg like those outlined at NCORP). It is acceptable to write about, when covered by reliable sources, things like when airlines have established central hubs, or what may be representative destinations when an airline expands to a region for the first time. --M asem  (t) 17:05, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Past destinations cannot be changed at the whim of any airline. It is for example an interesting piece of airline history that several major US carriers used to have routes within Europe, in addition to Pan Am flying from Frankfurt to Berlin (no German planes were allowed to fly to Berlin during the Cold War). Some of this information is best presented in prose, some of it better in list form; outlawing the list form arbitrarily constrains article writers for no gain that I can see. —Kusma (talk) 20:04, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, though I don't think articles for any given airport should actually be required to contain this information. How could you understand an airport without knowing things like how well it's connected to the flight network?  I think this is particularly important for smaller airports, and it's usually very easy to find Independent sources covering this.  In fact, despite Masem's assertion above, it's usually easy to find the full list of destinations for smaller airports.  A newspaper article probably won't list every destination for a massive airport like Heathrow, but it's very easy and common to see a newspaper article that says something like "Airflow Airline will be adding service to Lake Woebegon Regional Airport from Smallville next month, joining Big City, Metro Airport, and Erewhon as destinations for local travelers."  Most airports are small enough that a full list is feasible in prose.  Mid-sized airports may not get their lists in a single sentence, but consider scholarly journal articles like this one, which contains a table of 21 destinations for the Indianapolis International Airport.  Their data is taken from https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-airports/origin-and-destination-survey-data which looks like it would be useful for anyone who wonders whether a list is truly up to date.  (It'd probably be a good idea to set a Wikidata bot to incorporate that into Wikidata, as that would make it easier for us to check locally.)  WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:16, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I think this was specifically about airline destination lists, not about whether there should be destinations on airport pages (which is also an "of course.") SportingFlyer  T · C  18:58, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Several people are talking about articles (rather than just the lists) and WP:N, which is my fault for not explaining the RfC well enough.
 * Some comments are addressing the format of the information (list, prose, etc.), which I did not intend to debate.
 * Some thought this is about the airport lists, not the airline ones.
 * Ultimately I want to avoid the confusion that arose in the 2023 airport list RfC, where it seemed like people were answering different questions.
 * Some editors understandably feel that this is the 50th discussion on the same topic.

Regarding the last point I would note, however, that there are problems with the past discussions. The closure review of the 2023 RfC on airport lists yielded no consensus. The situation with the airline lists was discussed at the top of this page.

I believe it would be useful to address both types of lists in a single discussion some day, since I see them as being essentially the same, just two different levels of detail: one is a list of airline destinations, the other a list of airline destinations from individual airports. But I'm unsure how to frame such a discussion and probably wouldn't do it right based on my past attempts. My aim was to achieve some sort of clarity on the lists and I regret that these discussions have become tiresome for editors.

If people wish to continue discussing the matter here that's fine, but I'll remove the RfC template. Sunnya343 (talk) 01:36, 21 July 2024 (UTC)