Wikipedia talk:Lists (stand-alone lists)

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See Talk:Lists of articles by category and Talk:List of geology topics for recent discussion of creating these lists of all articles that are related to a broad subject. GUllman 23:47, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)


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[edit] Standardising article names

In the Geography section of Tasmania, I have a small list of geographical features (both natural and man-made). Following this I have a line that reads:

See also: List of Australian islands, lakes, bridges, highways, rivers, mountains and regions.

Looks clear enough, but if this is expanded, you can see the non-standard form of naming such articles:

I was going to move, rename and split articles so that they were consistent; but thought I would bring the point up here in case there were any other preferences or ideas? I thought (feature)s of Australia like the Lakes article currently is, would be nice and simple? -- Chuq 01:47, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

For listing the features of Tasmania, I would leave out "List of" and go with what the second category is named i.e. "Lakes of Australia". Go with "Rivers of Tasmania", "Regions of Tasmania" etc. Leave out the "List of" part. Yes, and it seems the Australian part needs to be streamlined. Lots of Work ahead for you.WHEELER 13:40, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I actually hadn't considered separate articles for "Rivers of Tasmania", etc. - I have a small table of the most well known Rivers, Islands, Highways, etc. on the Tasmania article itself. It is unlikely that the smaller/lesser known ones would warrant an article, but if someone wants to write them then I'll all for it! I think most "List of X in/of Y" articles should be "X in/of Y" as the "List of" part sort of deters people from expanding the article and including prose. -- Chuq 23:29, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Lists, which recommends "List of Xs". Also see Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists). Personally, I would rather see the title as Xs rather than List of Xs, but that is apparently the convention at this time. older≠wiser 14:05, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

  • That convention could (and probably should) be overturned in cases like this. It gained in popularity during the "invasion of the lists" (March 2003 or thereabouts) and went a bit too far. Here having "list of" adds nothing but a sense of inelegance. Having just X also allows for the addition of prose to complete the list. To prevent duplication, redirects from the "List of" form would be appropriate. Pcb21| Pete 18:53, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
True. I can see how, eg. List of cars would be better than Cars, if it was just a list of well known cars or models of cars. -- Chuq 23:29, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  • Having "List of" as part of the title tells the reader to only expect a list. Otherwise there is an expectation that the article will contain encyclopedic vs almanac info. --mav 07:59, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  • Most of those articles should be "List of X", since they are nothing but lists. If there was an article entitled "Islands of Australia" giving an encyclopedic account of the islands of Australia, then it should be titled with list. I believe the naming convention is well thought out in this case. —siroχo 00:36, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)
  • Having "List of" as part of the title tells the reader to only expect a list. By the same argument, having "List of" will also deter people from adding information other than a list. For example, "Islands of Australia" could have a separate section for Bass Strait islands. Then someone could mention the Furneaux group and mention that these islands were discovered in (whatever year). Other islands could be listed as being under control of xxx state, or having a fairly autonomous government. Eventually it could become a fully fledged article... but if it is named "List of" this will deter people. -- Chuq 01:44, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  • Why we can't have both "List of Islands of Australia" listing all the islands of Australia, and an encyclopedic "Islands of Australia" article? Paul August 16:15, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Ban on Stand-Alone Lists

I feel that stand-alone lists are inherently non-encyclopedic and can not ever qualify for the term "article". I would like to see a policy requiring that all stand-alone lists be deleted or merged into an article whose content qualifies for keeping independently of the merged list. What are other people's thoughts on this matter? The Literate Engineer 19:31, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

As a researcher I find wikilists to be the most useful part of Wikipedia. It allows for a person to have a good idea of where to start looking for information. For example, let's say I want to know about hats. Well, an article about hats is good but a list of types of hats and articles about them make it easier for me know where to look for information. Maybe I knew that the Pope wore a skull cap, but I didn't know it was called a zuchetto. If I don't know what it's called I can't research. Same thing with lists of assasins, lists of presidents, almost any topic you can think can be supported by a list of terms or ideas concerning that topic. I strongly support lists and would like to see wikilists expanded. Wikipedia is about helping people freely access knowledge and lists help people do that. Maybe there not in traditional encyclopedias but that one doesn't mean that they shouldn't be. hdstubbs

Strong oppose, as above. Megapixie 00:49, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that lists often used to bypass the non-negotiable principle of WP:NPOV. See for example List of dictators. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @
My main beefs against lists are that they rapidly get out of date, and have strong tendencies towards POV ("List of prominent XXX"). I've put up a proposal which I think would make categories more useful as a list alternative; see: Annotated categories instead of lists. — Johantheghost 23:11, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. One advantage of lists over categories, which I recently discovered in an unpleasant way, is that lists are more resilient to censorship. A list has its own edit history, so systematic POV deletions are easy to trace and revert. No such safeguard exists for categories. Durova 17:12, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Categories in lists of articles

Do you think it's ok to include a link to a category in a list of articles? I used a colon after the initial square braket to keep the list page from being added to the category. --Larrybob 20:34, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Manual of style according to lists; All ultimately alphabetical?

Here in the manual of style, it says in the different kind of lists there are alphabetical & etc., but when the purpose of the list is numbering disparate entries, if they are not by some other rank or grade; shouldn't any equal value be put in alphabetically? Shouldn't that be part of the manual of style? What about 'surname first with comma then given name' when doing names of persons along with entities, trade names &/or brands? It would be confusing to be glancing down an a, b, c… list and then have a letter come out of sequence because surname is not first; I recently had a revert over this and that is why I'm now bringing it here as the MoS doesn't seem to cover this. Nagelfar 05:49, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Chronological lists should be used for historical information, hierarchical lists should be used for lists where listed items have sections that would fit on the list, and alphabetical lists should be used only when a more appropriate means of sorting the information is unavailable. -209.129.128.254 18:53, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I think alphabetical lists of names should be by last name. I have never heard of alphabetizing by first name, but I've seen it quite a few times on WP. Is there no official ruling on this? --Jhlynes 07:07, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

There might be something in the Manual of style that might show preference. I've usually seen it done by last name. -- Ned Scott 08:35, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shortcut?

Does this project page have a WP: pseudo-namespace shortcut? To be honest, it's the first project page I wanted to get a shortcut to that didn't have one mentioned in a shortcut box. BigNate37T·C 18:58, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed addition re: chronological lists

I'd like to suggest an addendum regarding chronological lists. Specifically as follows:

  • chronological lists, including all timelines and lists of works, should always be in earliest-to-latest chronological order. Special cases which specifically require frequent daily additions, such as Recent deaths, may use reverse chronological order for temporary convenience, although these articles should revert to non-reverse order when the article has stabilized, such as Deaths in 2003.

Does this sound like a reasonable change? Are there any other special case types which might need to be covered?

The rationale behind this is to formally state what seems to be obvious to most cases, but is sometimes disregarded with topics which tend to fall into recentism. Unfortunately there hasn't been any discussion (that I've yet found) which deals with the matter on an encyclopedia-wide basis. Thanks, Girolamo Savonarola 11:29, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I added this to RfC almost immediately, but it's been a month without any comments. In the absence of any critique, I'm adding this to the page. If there is any further objection after the fact, please feel free to initiate discussion here. Thanks! Girolamo Savonarola 20:02, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikilinking in lists

I couldn't find any specific guidelines for Wikilinking in lists. Right now our only guideline I saw is the manual of style, and I think lists could qualify for some exceptions. For instance, let's say there is a long list of football players in a section. Let's say it has Chad Johnson, National Football League wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals towards the top, then 2 pages of scrolling down the page we have T.J. Houshmandzadeh, NFL wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals. According to the MOS the only thing for TJ that should be linked is his name, while NFL, his position, and his team should remain unlinked as they were already linked to earlier. If the person only sees TJ and wants to click on, say, the Bengals, they are going to have to scroll up and find the first instance that team is linked amongst a jumble of other teams and it may be difficult and annoying to find. See List of Oregon State University people as an example. I want that list to comply with the MOS but I think keeping at minimum each instace of a pro team link is reasonable. I'm not sure on de-linking NFL or the position on everyone either. I want this clarified before I put it through peer review. VegaDark 03:59, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chronological lists: Awards should be in reverse chronological order

I propose that any listings of awards should be in reverse chronological order because:

  1. Readers are more likely to be interested in the most recent awards rather than the oldest, and, particularly with well-established, older awards, readers will be forced into more scrolling. Many, many literary awards lists on the Web are in reverse chronological order, which I think is more common than chronological order.
  2. Reverse chronological order, particularly when the year is the first thing in each line of a list (which is almost always the case with awards lists) is confusion-free for the reader. Everybody is familiar with lists in reverse chronological order, and everybody can quickly pick up the idea that a list is in that order (and since it is more useful for the reader to have the list in reverse chronological order, that should be the preferred style, making it uniform and therefore even easier for a reader to follow).

I think the onus should be on anyone proposing chronological order for awards lists to show how that would be more useful or less confusing for readers — or provide some other reason why chronological order should be preferred. Noroton 18:00, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that either of those points stands to reason. An encyclopedia is there to provide all suitable knowledge, not just the latest results (nor favoring them either). Standard encyclopedic and almanac styles tend to prefer oldest-first. Oldest to newest is certainly confusion-free, as it follows the natural flow of time. Reverse chronology is simply another manifestation of Wikipedia:Recentism. Girolamo Savonarola 20:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adding External Links to Stand-Alone Lists

I added a few external links to a couple of independent record labels that I know about, and somebody took them out and called them spam. It seems that these outfits are too obscure to warrant articles, so internal links won't work. That's why I figured that external links would be OK. After all, it is a list, not really an article. I wanted people's opinion on this. Neanderthalprimadonna 12:14, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of fictional characters by series

The entries in Category:Lists of fictional characters by series are quite inconsistant, and the naming policy doesn't seem to help. Granted, they all need the "list of" at the beginning, but from there's no consistanty. Should it be:

  • List of SERIES characters
  • List of characters from SERIES
  • List of characters in SERIES
  • List of characters of SERIES

Personally, I think the "in" variation is the best. Occasionally, the "List of SERIES characters" format can make the series look confusingly like an adjective instead, like List of The 4400 recurring characters and List of Gargoyles characters. "From" and "of" imply that the characters all originated from the show mentioned (which wouldn't be true for spin-offs like The Jeffersons, if it had a list of characters that is). Other thoughts please?--SeizureDog 08:53, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Tjstrf has been removing the "List of" from these types of pages and reverts any attempts to correct them. See Characters in Berserk and Characters in Bleach for example. I've given up on trying to fix these types of pages, what's the point in trying for consistency when people just do as they please? I do like the List of SERIES characters, but it can be ambiguous as you have said. The majority of anime articles seem to use this convention. --Squilibob 10:46, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, if we agree on a standard style, we can move those pages and get them move protected. I wouldn't mind dealing with him if we have a consensus to back it up.--SeizureDog 11:10, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
I think List of Characters in SERIES would be best, this way its not too ambiguous. It also doesnt imply they were created in that series. --Malevious Userpage •Talk Page• Contributions 12:44, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
agreed. sounds like a good idea. if someone wants to spend time on this, i will be a supporter. --TheDJ (talk • contribs • WikiProject Television) 19:10, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

This seems like a solution in search of a problem. What's wrong with having different names? Plus, moving articles may involve more work than it seems- there are often a lot of redirects from character's names pointing at these articles. Anyway, my thoughts are that if there's no possibility of confusion, go with List of SERIES characters (keeps title short). If there's a subtitle or some other possibility of confusion, use "in" (though "from" also works; "of" sounds bad because it's repetition). So "List of SuperUltimate II characters" (obvious that characters is not part of the name, doesn't interrupt flow) and "List of characters in SuperUltimate: My Amadillo is on Fire." So, yes, since there's a possibility of confusion with "Gargoyles characters" and "The 4400 Recurring characters," a name change would be wise there, but I don't think that means all lists should also switch. SnowFire 06:22, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not trying to cause problems. I only bring it up because I was going to make such a list, but then got a tad confused on what to call it. Besides, I like consistency. It may take a bit of time to fix all of the lists, but hey, it's not like we're in any rush.--SeizureDog 05:07, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

It becomes a fine line between a "List of" and a "Characters of" type situation. A great many of our Lists have enough text for each entry to be seen as more than a list, so I can see removing "list of" on a lot of them. -- Ned Scott 06:41, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Someone explain to me at what point a page is no longer a "List of" page and becomes a "Characters of" page. --Squilibob 10:53, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
First of all, do these pages with a lot of text violate WP:FICT? Do they contain citations or are they just plot masquerading as character lists? If they're mostly the plot of the story as it concerns character XYZ, then it needs to be either sourced and mercilessly excised of cruft. Consistency is key. I don't care which way we go. I lean toward "List of..." because we had someone convert a lot of the "XYZ Characters" to "List of..." and he caused lots 'o 2x redirects which have been since fixed. --Kunzite 20:56, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
That was probably me. What double redirects didn't I fix? --Squilibob 06:13, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Uhm, say WHAT? Squilibob, if you're going to have a discussion about my actions I'd like to be informed of it. Regardless, those two mentioned pages were the only ones that I've moved and I had good reasons in both cases which I explained afterwards. In the case of the Berserk character page I moved it because the previous title, List of Berserk characters, was confusing, just plain wrong, and would have made more sense as a redirect to a hypothetical List of berserkers. The Bleach list was decided on quite a while back and has a couple hundred redirects pointing to it, so my reversing the move there before I discussed it with the mover (who I then sought out immediately afterwards and explained the situation to) was simply double redirect damage control. --tjstrf talk 18:10, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Well we aren't on the friendliest of terms T_T --Squilibob 06:40, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Again, say WHAT? Unless I have suddenly been reduced to the attention span of a goldfish, I'm pretty sure we're not mortal enemies. In fact, except for that one character list I can't remember a single dispute with you. Or are you the guy I kept trying to foist that damned barnstar off on? :)
Because that was supposed to be a compliment! --tjstrf talk 06:49, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
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