Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Allen (surname)

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. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 23:20, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Allen (surname)

redundant with List of people by name and counter to WP:MOSDAB -- JHunterJ 16:02, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

• Delete No page links to Allen (surname). No one is likely to enter "Allen" in the search box to find "Tim Allen". The only real content here is "Allen is a surname", which can be handled by Wiktionary. List already covered by the List of people by name: All#People_named_Allen, which is why WP:MOSDAB reads the way it does. -- JHunterJ 16:04, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. The reference to WP:MOSDAB is thoroughly misleading. If the manual page, which is at most a guideline to how to write generic dab pages, is worded so as to permit valuable lists by surname to be deleted, then the wording is wrong and needs to be changed. List of people by name is an inflexible structure that has done good work in the past, but is not adapted to the WP of today where the number of pages by personal name is in the hundreds of thousands. No one is likely to enter "Allen" in the search box to find "Tim Allen" is a comment with no merit at all (who is in a position to claim anything of the sort?) . This was brought here as the 'upgrade' of a prod suggestion: see Talk:Allen (surname). See the same user's prod at Albert (surname), big undiscussed cuts from Adams. Let's nip this in the bud. Charles Matthews 16:08, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Of course it was brought as an upgrade; that's the procedure. I thought no one might object to the prod; when someone did, I moved here to discuss it. I am relying on the manual page, you're right, but I think treating Allen (surname) as List of people with the surname Allen and duplicating the effort of List of people by name: All#People named Allen is the wrong approach, encyclopedicly. I'll hold off on asking for an AfD on Albert (surname) until this one is decided. -- JHunterJ 17:12, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
    • From WP:PROD: Proposed deletion is a process for deleting articles that are uncontroversial deletion candidates. Apparently you in good faith thought the deletion of this page would be uncontroversial. In future ... Charles Matthews
      • Absolutely right. -- JHunterJ 12:48, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
  • _ _ Charles is IMO wrong in suggesting LoPbN's "good work in the past" rested on its being essentially complete. Almost three years ago (and 1 or 2 editor-years of my effort on it), it had neither an entry for Thabo Mbeki, nor even a page where it could properly be placed; i can't count the number of obviously needed people that i've personally added, just because i chanced to notice a name missing.

  Digression: The Byron Janis entry, and the Byron Janus rdr to it, may be in my last half dozen -- hmm, a month ago, un-breaking after 27 months the rd lk entry that i created under the Janus misspelling. Hmm, the bio article was created 9 months after my rdlk, but in the absence of a rdr from my misspelling, not accessible from LoPbN for another 18. Oh, wow, 6 hours after the bio's creation, Charles did the lead sent & Cat'd it; small world.

  My belief is that it has always been one of our most long-term seriously in-progress features. There have lately been demonstrations, IMO successful, of a bot that can make practical the addition of most of the missing bios, and there's been an upsurge of, AFAIK, manual mass insertions from Cat lists; IMO the {{persondata}} tag also offers powerful new practices, which i will discuss elsewhere. IMO something that looks to the user approximately like LoPbN should be a permanent feature, even tho i'd like to see more machine-assisted mechanisms to support

  LoPbN,

  "full"-name Dabs like John Smith, and

  lists/dabs devoted each to one surname,

  hopefully dramatically reducing the fraction of bios unlisted by them.

  _ _ As i was writing, Charles responded to my earlier comments to the extent of mentioning his WikiMedia Board plank for "support for surnames", a pregnant and probably brilliant concept that i'll study soon. He, i, or someone should lk here to a page where these matters are fully on topic!
  --Jerzy•t 17:22, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
  

• Keep. This page was apparently created to remove the personal names from the Allen disambiguation page in order to keep the size of that page manageable. The statement that no page links to Allen (surname) is incorrect. Allen does, and so do the others listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Allen_%28surname%29 . In terms of surname disambiguation pages in general, it often happens that people are referred to by their surname only, so that one needs a disambiguation page to resolve them: Hansen's disease, Asperger syndrome, Roe vs. Wade. Disambiguation is a good thing. TruthbringerToronto (Talk | contribs) 17:26, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • All those besides Allen linked to it after the deletion discussion started. Yes, surname disambiguation in general is useful for people who are very frequently referred to simply by one name, such as those you listed. Not the case with the Allens listed. -- JHunterJ 17:34, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
    • False statements should be retracted with an apology, I think. And the rest is nonsense. As I've pointed out, you may perfectly well have only initial and surname, in which case such a page is good. What is more, if you happen only to know that someone is a baseball player, and a surname, you can search on that basis. That 'useful' only for some preconception of how the site is used is an extremely weak argument, considering that you are asking the whole page to be deleted. Charles Matthews 17:53, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
      • I am sorry I overlooked Allen -- I confused it with the name of the page I was checking for links to. Mea culpa. Please be civil and stop tossing around "nonsense", "pedantry", and "no merit at all". -- JHunterJ 17:59, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
        • 'Pedantry' you seem to be citing from an email I sent round the wikien list, alerting people (without naming names) to the damage inherent in the approach adopted not by you alone (I'm thinking of User:AmbigDexter too). But you are wrong to say these are incivil terms. No merit is incivil? Many lawyers will be upset to hear that. Charles Matthews 20:04, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • The assertion that nothing does nor should lk to it is irrelevant, if it is treated as a Dab page (to which, by def'n, nothing should lk). IMO it is, like most lists, clearly a nav'n page, and IMO the distinctions among the various forms of Nav page (well, other than Rdrs) are fuzzy enuf that the presumption should be "there's nothing wrong with a Nav page that nothing lks to" and the burden of proof to the contrary should lie with those seeing a problem.
    --Jerzy•t 15:36, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
    
• Keep - to begin with, List of people by name is a useless mess that's difficult to edit and difficult to use. Surname pages are useful - if they don't quite meet the needs of typical dab pages, then the problem is that the guidelines have lagged behind the reality. Fix the guidelines, don't delete the (useful) pages. Guettarda 18:11, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Leaping from the difficulties imposed on LoPbN by size of task and inadequate tools, to "useless" and insinuating it is AfD fodder, suggest ignorance: both of the voluminous discussions of its mechanics and of the many lopsided Keep results in various AfDs of its pages.
    --Jerzy•t 15:36, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
    
• Keep and expand An extension of a disambig page, it could do with the addition of some referenced material about the history of the surname, however. LinaMishima 02:36, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Re "expand": History of the surname interferes with and in no way assists with Dab'n, and must be kept on a separate page, even if that page is in Wiktionary.
    --Jerzy•t 17:22, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
    
• Keep, nice and clean page. I like the solution of a disambiguation page plus a surname page for common names like this one, and easier to find than List of people by name. Kusma (討論) 12:19, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comment There is also some discussion about conflating surname and list of people with the name at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Hndis needs its own Manual -- JHunterJ 12:40, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Not sure that is the ideal place for all the issues being discussed there, but there is much more to be said abt the underlying issue that is not germane to this AfD, and for the moment i'll be saying my share of it there.
    --Jerzy•t 15:36, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
    
• Keep. It has a valuable function (almost entirely of a Dab'n nature); this function is distinct from those that are better served by List of people by name: All#People named Allen (nav when dead certain of surname spelling but, re given name, under various degrees of (A) spelling uncertainty and/or (B) typing fatigue). (I believe that Allen (surname) and Allen (given name) would be the titles that Allen (name) would be divided into, if it is one of the rare cases where the name-derivation topic is large enough and overlap is low enough. Thus i'm not sure the title shouldn't be Allen (person) instead; but that is not an AfD issue.)
  --Jerzy•t 15:36, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
  
• Keep. Common surnames are worthy of encyclopedic documentation. RFerreira 07:06, 29 August 2006 (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.