Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/List of Disney characters' names in various languages


 * I wasn't aware we had to appease Finnish users as well. It's called interwiki-links and redirects, dude. Regardless, number of editors DOES NOT indicate verifiablity. Sources do. '  (Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!) 07:26, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * So what is the appropriate interwiki-link or redirect in this case, cowboy, and how is a user supposed to find it? --Lambiam Talk 12:20, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * My thought would be the intralanguage sidebar on List of Disney characters or something, generally, and specifically Fi:Pikku apulainen, which exists and is the right place for the Finnish user to go. If they don't speak English, they aren't going to get much from the English Wikipedia... and if they're interested in translations, this one isn't a good source because it's only translations between English and other languages.  I really don't follow your argument here: why should we care about users who don't know English on the English Wikipedia?  There are wikis in so many other languages.  Mango juice talk 15:54, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * First, you might want to cut down on the xenophobia a bit. As a WP editor you're providing a service, and it doesn't behoove you to place expectations on the readers other than they read English. Whether they're American, Finnish or Xhosa is none of your business. (Note: a lot of Finns speak English.) Second, WP:NOT clearly allows for lists as quick reference, so the criterion whether there are possibly other ways to retrieve the info is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether the material is verifiable, noteworthy and non-arbitrary. I don't see how anyone has refuted this so far. I can't stand lists and I can't stand Disney, but this list clearly falls within the scope of WP. ~ trialsanderrors 16:27, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Apathy towards a hypothetical Finnish user who can't bother to look on the left side of Fi:Pikku apulainen for a link that clearly says "English", isn't xenophobia, trails. Nor do any of Mango's other arguments indicate the such. Assume good faith, as others would say. '  (Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!) 00:00, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Now the reader who got acquainted with the inhabitants of Duckburg by reading their adventures in Finnish is lucky because the Finnish Wikipedia happens to have such an entry. But this is not true for most languages. --Lambiam Talk 02:12, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * That's a problem for their Wikipedias, not ours. '  (Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!) 02:18, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Their Wikipedias? Us and them? We clearly have a difference in philosophy. I prefer to take the stance that this is not "the Wikipedia for and about the part of the world where English is an official language" (which, by the way, also includes the Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Cameroon, Fiji, Hong Kong, The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Rwanda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Swaziland, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe), but the Wikipedia for everyone everywhere about everything, which happens to have been written in English. I'd like that to extend to all Wikipedias: if a topic deserves an article on the Icelandic Wikipedia, it also deserves an article on the Tagalog Wikipedia, and vice versa. The sum total of all human knowledge, available in all human languages (and perhaps Klingon). --Lambiam Talk 06:49, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * How does this refute the fact that the English Wikipedia shouldn't have to make up for the fact that other Wikipedias don't have those articles? '  (Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!) 06:58, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think it is an issue of "making up for". The Finnish-language Wikipedia has an article on this subject giving you (for example) the names in French. Is that making up for the lack of such an entry in the French-language Wikipedia? Obviously not. Apparently the Finnish editors thought it might be interesting information for a reader. The English-language Wikipedia has an article on the grammar of Lithuanian. Is that to make up for the lack of such an article on the Lithuanian-language Wikipedia? Should we delete it, and leave the Lithuanians to fend for themselves? Should we perhaps also delete the article on Lithuania? --Lambiam Talk 11:51, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I see it like this: The articles in the English Wikipedia should be in English, but can be about any appropriate subject. Sure, I think it's interesting, occasionally, to talk about other languages, and the translation of things is not an automatically inappropriate subject.  See Harry Potter in translation for what I consider a good example of an article about translations.  However, we have to cut this business of translating off at some point: it's clearly not a Wikipedia-like goal to talk about translations of everything, and I don't see why the names of Disney characters and the titles of Harry Potter books would be the only ones that are appropriate: Why not List of translations of Hamlet, Act I, Scene i, into various languages?  Or List of New York Times front page headlines in other languages?  Or List of Magic: The Gathering card names in other languages?  To me, these are all bad ideas for articles.  Translation is not inherently interesting enough that we should have lists of translations.  I see the following things that are interesting among the Chinese translations, for instance: Tinkerbell is translated as "Little Ding Dong", Roo is translated as "Little Bean", and Tigger is translated as "Jumping Jumping Tigger."  The rest seem interesting ONLY as a guide to translating the terms from one language into another: there's nothing interesting about them.  Mango juice talk 12:44, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

ARGH, I wish I had had that article on my watchlist so I'd have known it was up for deletion. The problem here is that without the List article as a sort of sink, the Disney character articles just continue to get pummelled with people making lists of what Donald Duck or Goofy is called in their native tongue. It's one of the worst kinds of cruft, and they will fight you tooth-and-nail to have it included. With this article, we were able to direct them away and let them add to their hearts' content. Sigh. I guess when (not if) this happens again in the future, I'll just point to this deletion debate and say that lists of foreign names for characters are not encyclopedic per consensus. — BrianSmithson 12:55, 22 June 2006 (UTC)