Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of finance topics

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 keep. — CharlotteWebb 01:08, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of finance topics

The stated rationale of the list is "This list is an attempt to categorize all financial topics." That's what categories are for. adavidw 18:02, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

• Keep I may agree w/ you but do not forget that we have thousands of lists and we also have a guideline for them. Please refer to Wikipedia:Lists in Wikipedia to have a concise explanation of the purpose of lists in Wikipedia. -- Szvest - ^{Wiki me up ®} 18:07, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm very familiar with both guidelines you reference, but I'm not finding them too helpful in this specific sense, since they're mainly concerned with things like POV, verifiability, or notability. I've been looking for a guideline that says something like "Don't use lists to duplicate a category" or "Lists that offer no information beyond what a category provides are still totally awesome!". So, I can't really see how the guidelines justify either delete or keep. Lists vs. categories is an age-old debate, and I'd like to educate myself more if there's some guidelines I'm missing, or possibly help draft policy if there is some hole in the existing policy. If you know anything I'm missing, let me know here or on my talk. --adavidw 20:38, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep, a category can not feasibly contain the same degree of structure and information as that list shows. Mathmo ^Talk 18:15, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree 100% that a list can contain more information. However, this list doesn't contain any more information than a category would. The list is just a list of Wikipedia articles without any expansion or clarification. As to the degree of structure, categories could offer just as much structure with the judicious use of well named sub-categories. However, the current category implementation in Wikipedia seems designed to discourage this sort of tree organization, so I will concede the point that a list can structure things in a tree better than a category could, and this list is indeed well-structured. However, it's not well-maintained, and provides no more information about the articles than a category would, so I would argue that it's only marginally more useful than a category. If someone maintained the list and expanded the entries or at least the headings with a little bit of context, I'd vote "keep" myself. (Note, although I nominated, I haven't actually voted "delete" myself. I nominate what I feel are bad lists because if they really are bad they should be deleted, and if they're not, the process & consensus will help spur to make them better). --adavidw 20:38, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
• Speedy keep - The Transhumanist   21:31, 5 February 2007 (UTC)       This page appears at Lists of topics#Social sciences and society, and is a prominent member of that collection of lists. Removing it would put a hole in that set, which is part of the Wikipedia:Contents navigation system which is accessed from Wikipedia's Main page. It is also accessed through Wikipedia's main navigation bar:

• Comment - Being a member of Lists of topics which is one of the contents subsystems on that bar (and on Wikipedia:Contents - Wikipedia's Table of Contents), makes the Finance list one of Wikipedia's sub-tables of contents. Another example of such a list is the List of mathematics topics, which is comprehensive -- it has grown so large as to have expanded to about 200 lists, and some of those are huge. The Mathematics department takes pride in its lists, and their lists are much better maintained than the corresponding categories. One of the main reasons for having lists is that they can be centrally maintained (that is, on the list itself). Categories can't. You can edit lists directly, but with categories you can't, which makes lists much easier to work with (and a heck of a lot faster). Lists can include planned pages (as redlinks), categories can't. Lists show when a page has disappeared (it's link goes red). Categories don't have this feature. Lists have histories, so you can see when someone has removed a link from the list, and this gives you the option to revert (to get it back). Changes to the contents of Categories are impossible to track, and can't be reverted from the category page. It is therefore easy for removals from a category to go unnoticed. Subject lists like the one on Finance are especially important to Wikiprojects, and are used by them with the Related changes command on the toolbox menu, which allows them to monitor for changes (and vandalism) to each set of pages, without worrying that they are monitoring a partial list (due to removals). List entries can be annotated, varibly formatted, and further organized on the page. Category entries cannot. Lists can be compiled by collecting terms from the field (via cut and paste) and then simply linkifying them - you'd be surprised how extensive Wikipedia's coverage is nowadays - often times most of the links turn blue! Categories are much harder to build (one link at a time). Tree structures can be displayed on list pages. Lead paragraphs can be added to each section, if desired. Images can be added to enhance the presentation, as is done on some of the math lists. There are so many reasons to keep lists. The Transhumanist   21:31, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
• Keep categories don't replace lists and lists don't replace categories. If only for visibility of editing (changes in lists are detected by watchlist). Also a list includes subtopics signalled by a redirect to more comprehensive articles, and thus which are not present in categories. --Pgreenfinch 21:57, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletions. -- SkierRMH 00:58, 6 February 2007 (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.