Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of naval battles

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 no consensus. W.marsh 20:50, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of naval battles

Read expert discussion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of battles (alphabetical)

• Strong Delete as nom. It reads well. However, it is incomplete (and will remain that way for a long time), it is impossible to maintain. A category will do a much better job than this list. --Ineffable3000 04:45, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Reads well to me. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 04:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - Lists allow for discussion of the battles. Categories don't. Adam Cuerden ^talk 04:52, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
  • But listing all naval battles is impossible. Pages for the battles exist for the in-depth discussion of the battles. --Ineffable3000 05:04, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
    • It's not about listing every naval battle in the history of history, just the notable ones. --Hemlock Martinis 05:11, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment Now your triple voting on this one. Wikipedia is incomplete, yet we still maintain it. I don't get your rationale. Mathematically there is a finite number of naval battles worthy of having a name. And as always, you can't sort the categories multiple ways, only the lists. You can't have empty records waiting to get filled in categories. Are you philosophically against lists? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 06:44, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per reasoning in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of battles (alphabetical). MER-C 07:23, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, as per my reasons in previous AFDs of the same type. Terence Ong 11:36, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - The reason for this page is to give an idea of the chronological arrangement of battles, listed often under the title of the war they were a part of. A page of "category - naval battles" is a haphazard listing in no order making it impossible to tell if the "battle of Ecnomus" and the "battle of Cos" had any relation to each other or were even in the same milennium! It is NOT meant to list all naval battles, just all FLEET battles - usually large-scale battles which affected the course of the war or were interesting from some other point of view. As a matter of fact the page has not greatly expanded for a number of months now and is likely almost completed. The only things needed are to write some more battle articles and link them to this page, and perhaps get more precise dates for some of the earlier battles mentioned. I find it strange indeed that the people talking on this talk page are not people who have contributed to the page in question nor to any of its linked pages. Why are you here? You can find much more productive action in deleting all the "list of songs on album X by some obscure band" type pages. List pages are fine. They serve as a better variation on the category pages for the reasons given above. Thankyou. It's not an alphabetical list, either. That would indeed be pointless as it would duplicate the category - battles page. This is like an index page, not a random list. it gives form.SpookyMulder 12:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Lists and categories are not redundant with each other. Lists allow redlinks, and can be sourced. Lists also allow for things like alternate names, confusing names, etc. As SpookyMulder points out, a Cat:Naval Battles page would be quite difficult to navigate and potentially misleading about connections between articles. Dina 13:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Categories can't do chronological listings either. - Mgm|^(talk) 13:54, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Useful and encyclopedic. Edison 00:47, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. I fail to see anything wrong with this article. --Hemlock Martinis 05:11, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep Listing all information of any sort is impossible. That doesn't mean we should delete every article on wikipedia just because we can't list all human knowledge about it. On the contrary, we should list what we know and list more as we find it. The article reads well, it's content is useful, there's no reason to delete it, so I maintain strongly that it should be kept. -NorsemanII 06:21, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strong keep - We have even articles on wresting, porn, pop music weirdos here, and someones dares to list this entry for deletion? --Attilios 10:04, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment This article is only slightly less problematic than the list of battles. If it is practically impossible to develop anything close to a complete list of all naval battles, why not restrict the scope to something feasible? Lists of naval battles for specific wars are feasible, as are lists of major naval battles for a specific time period and region. I think it's foolhardy to create a single article that promises far more than any reference work in existence can offer. Instead of creating lists that are perpetually inadequate by design, we should restrict these lists to a scope where we can deliver what we promise. A substantially incomplete list would be a misleading reference, as it misrepresents the frequency and distribution of naval battles throughout history. Djcastel 19:53, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment - this page is doomed to be POV and impossible to fix. Read WP:SNOW. --Ineffable3000 22:35, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• strong keep There is the whole Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history to watch these things. You think they are bunch of videogamers ? `'mikkanarxi 23:47, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment - It appears as though some people have not read the title of the page they want to delete. It says "List of naval fleet battles". That means, battles in which (by my definition) more than 6 ships (ie 3 per side) participated. This distinguishes these battles from the famous "single-ship battles" because in many of those "single-ship" battles there were actually 2 ships on each side. There is a separate page for such single-ship battles, and that page will only list the notable ones, not all ship fighting ever, because that would likely be impossible and very lengthy anyway. But the fleet battle page isn't impossible. If you lok at the no. of ships in all these battles, incidentally, there really is no clear cut-off point. Any number of ships have taken part in battles, from 1vs1 through 3vs20 through 100vs100. And I picked 3vs3 as the cutoff. *shrugs*. And switched anything less than that to the single-ship battles page. I also agree that lists which can't be completed, or which might not be completed for a while are still perfectly OK. They do allow you to link to things which don't yet have an article, making it more likely that those missing articles will be created. You can't do this on a "category" page.SpookyMulder 10:17, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
• Very strong keep - The nominator's argument that this extensive list should be deleted because it is incomplete is disconcerting. Does this mean he believes we should delete all stub articles as well? (There are hundreds of thousands of them on Wikipedia). Most lists on Wikipedia are incomplete, because they are works in progress. In fact, most articles are incomplete for the same reason. If only complete articles were allowed to be posted on Wikipedia, how would the contributors who add a sentence here and there be able to help this fine project? And how would readers benefit if articles weren't displayed until they were 100% complete? Wikipedia would be a shadow of what it is now.  The Transhumanist   12:14, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep — Very interesting list. I disagree with the nominator's assertion that it would be impossible to list every naval battle, I believe naval technology has existed for only a small portion of the time that hominids have existed. Furthermoe, even if he were correct about his assertion, we would still be able to list the notable naval battles. Dionyseus 02:30, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Chronological lists are useful, not impossible to maintain. --- RockMFR 04:32, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. It will be incomplete, but what article is totally complete? Sbmcmull

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.