Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/December 16, 2005

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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 move to a centralised discussion. It is clear that there is consensus that these articles do not need to exist and should be deleted. All the opposition to deletion (except one vote) is due to a belief that AFD is not the best way to go about this.

We need to find a way to go about ensuring that there is a suitable opportunity for people who may only have one arbitrary day watchlisted out of the 1400 or so, and enough people have suggested a more centralised discussion for me to think that this is a better idea, as AFD is not the ideal place to determine this kind of wide ranging move (transclusion fixings and the like). I suggest somebody take this to WP:CENT (and refer people to it also via a note on the Village Pump). I will not do this, I am just closing this deletion discussion.

A bot might be helpful to tag all the days with some kind of bespoke 'Please comment on this discussion within 5 days' tag (5 days being the notice people would get via AFD anyway). Please note that the consensus at AFD was, however, that they should be deleted, but this discussion has not been made visible in the way it ought to for each and every article concerned, so further opinion may sway this. Proto::► 15:08, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


[edit] December 16, 2005

December 16, 2005 (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

This is a tough one, so please bear with me. This is in fact a proposal to delete some 1,400 pages, i.e. all the pages in the categories Category:Days in 2003, Category:Days in 2004, Category:Days in 2005 and Category:Days in 2006, or put otherwise, all articles on individual dates in this Wikipedia. I am not going to tag all those pages individually, unless consensus in this AfD wuold be that I have to do it before further discussion is possible. As far as I have seen, all those pages are quite similar, all seem to be created by User:Pcb21, whom I'll leave a notice on his talk page (even though he seems to have left the project), and no new page are being made (except for five ones in 2006). Reasons for deleting: WP:NOT for news reports (and these pages are basically newspaper frontpages), WP:NOT a mere collection of internal or external links (these articles say nothing about the date (not much could be said probably), but only provide links to articles about events that happened on said date, making it a strange and unnecessary variant of the disambiguation page). They are unmaintained, redundant, and orphaned (most of the articles have very few links, and most of those were involuntarily (someone linking the whole date instead of the standard double links to day/month and year), with the additional disadvantage that such complete links do not reflect the date preference set by users).

Older dates (2003-2005) also are transcluded onto a month page (last one seems to be December 2005), which would become largely empty if this AfD is successful. I have no opinion as to the usefullness of these pages, but we can always copy the info for the individual dates to the main month page if needed (as has been done for e.g. January 2006), or use the solution of the portal current events, as has been done since July 2006 (yes, we have currently at least three different methods of maintaining month-year pages, another good reason to get rid of one of them).

I don't know if this unusual AfD will run like a normal one or if some special treatment is necessary; whatever you feel I should do to make this AfD more manageable, visual, ..., please say so, and I'll try to do my best. Fram 10:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Congratulations on a bold proposal. Since this is a blanket nomination, I say keep. I do not see how we can argue adequately for each and every one of those articles. And can anyone really claim that some dates are not important enough to warrant an article that is not merely a collection of wikilinks? To me this seems to be more of a policy proposal than a regular AfD. I suggest we forward this issue to Village pump (policy). --Ezeu 11:06, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Speedy close - I'm anticipating a train wreck. MER-C 11:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
And what is your suggestion to do instead? Fram 11:52, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd nominate the most notable one and keep nominating notable ones until you get a deletion. Then go for five in the next nom, then ten, then 15, etc as the notability falls. Or you can have a centralised discussion and delete all on the basis of that. MER-C 11:57, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I don't quite see why this is problematic. We do have articles on each individual date (January 1 etc) as well as articles on each individual year (2005). That's plenty of places to put the information (not to mention the subject-specific lists such as 2005 in film). All of that is well-established and heavily edited. This is not, and neither does it particularly help in finding anything. Hence, delete the lot of them. This is neither a policy proposal nor a trainwreck, this is an attempt to get rid of redundant and unmaintainable information. Wikipedia is not a data dump. >Radiant< 12:43, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Close this AfD and seek consensus per MER-C. There has been Afd's before on some of these June 1 2003, December 31, 2005 are two I can find easily - there are many links to these articles and I given the magnitude of the request I don't think that AfD is the place to resolve this ( and possibly the future of WikiProject Current events - Peripitus (Talk) 12:55, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I hadn't seen those previous AfD's. I just want to say that the individual dates do not have many links (December 16, 2005 has only 5 links, only two to true articles; December 31, 2005 has 5 true links and one via a redirect (oh no, there are redirects to these pages as well!), but only one of these has any real relation to the article; and June 1, 2003 has two links. Then again, January 27, 2006 (which does not exist) has also two incoming links, neither of them of any importance. October 18, 2006 has five incoming links, only one of them of any importance. It doesn't look as if those articles are much missed... But no problem, I would like to hear the opinion of a few more people todecide if we should discuss this at an AfD (this one or smaller ones for individual dates), the Village Pump, WP:CENT, or anywhere else (but please let's keep it in one place!). Fram 13:29, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per Radiant! --Docg 14:06, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Discuss elsewhere with Comment. Probably Village Pump (policy). You need to tag each and every article. Otherwise you open up to the possibility of deletion review overturning any deletions. People probably have the articles on their watchlists, and they need to be given the chance to find out about the article's impending potential deletion. Royalbroil T : C 14:38, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
    • Untrue, since WP:NOT a bureaucracy, and the fact that most of these articles have only a single author and thus are unlikely to be watched by anyone. Note that the best "central" location for discussion is WP:CENT (that's what it's there for) with a link from the village pump (which has a rather high throughput and doesn't work well for longer debate). >Radiant< 14:44, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
      • I am not arguing for keeping the article, in fact I think they should be all deleted. I am arguing that the process is faulty. I once had an article deleted out from under me because it wasn't tagged for deletion because someone didn't want to tag 100 articles (2 articles per state times 50 states). The article was on my watchlist, but I was unaware and thus unable to comment on its AfD. I successfully argued to a second AfD in a deletion review. I don't want that to happen here. How do you know that people aren't watching any of the 1400 articles? A widespread discussion at (you pick the place) makes the most sense to me. Otherwise do an AfD nomination with 1400 entries. Just don't let the process fail again. Don't let history repeat itself... Royalbroil T : C 06:12, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Merge and redirect to Month, Year. --- RockMFR 15:10, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete - While the author proposes deleting 1400 articles, this nomination is for this one article alone, I would presume to set a precident? At any rate, these articles are lists of news events. Not encyclopedic. Transwiki to Wikinews perhaps? Resolute 17:27, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
    • FYI, please reread the nomination. It is not for a singe article; it is an umbrella nomination to delete all 1400 or so of these articles. The nominator is not suggesting deleting just this particular date and leaving everything else intact. Dugwiki 23:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
      • Ahh, you are correct. My bad. I read that he intended to propose deletion for all, but misread that he meant all now, rather than just one so to check concensus. Delete all then. Resolute 00:43, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete this entry to set a precendent. Reasoning: it belongs to Wikinews not there. For example, let's compare it with December, 16: the latter has section on events, each of them is notable, and most of them either have their own article, or play important role in another linked article. Then go sections on births and deaths of notable people. Contrary to this, December 16, 2005 mentions mostly minor scandals, none of which worth its own article. MaxSem 20:55, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
    • See above reply to Resolute. This is not a single article nomination - it is an umbrella nomination to deal with all 1400+ of these articles. Dugwiki 23:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Strong keep for now. Articles such as December 2005 are almost completely made up of these types of articles transcluded, so in effect deleteing individual date pages such as this one also blanks those month pages. Probably these should really be subst'd instead, but we'd still probably need to keep the individual dates as redirects for the page history. At any rate I really think this needs to be discussed at WP:CENT or some other appropriate venue, not at AfD. BryanG(talk) 21:21, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • No opinion. I think this is a fascinating idea. Fram argued that a single user created these pages, which for obvious reasons are no longer maintained or categorized. I also agree that the information contained in the "day" pages is redundant with what can or should be found in the "month" and "year" pages. There are a couple of other points to make. First, I am not convinced that ten separate events are truly held together by the coincidence that they all occurred on the same day. Of course, the four plane crashes on September 11, 2001 are held together because they all resulted from a single terrorist plan. But there is no relationship between those attacks and the results of games that took place in the Italian soccer league on that day (for example). Second, it seems unreasonable to me that Wikipedia should contain day-by-day entries starting in 2003, but not beforehand. We have some sort of timeline for World War 2, but should we have individual articles for "September 1, 1939" and "December 7, 1941"? Obviously not. In spite of all that, the scope of this discussion is too large to handle in a standard AfD. You could either nominate "day" articles for ten days at a time so that each individual article can be reviewed, or you can transfer the discussion elsewhere, as others have suggested. YechielMan 22:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment I'm undecided on whether or not to delete these articles, keep them or merge them into existing by-month or by-year articles. The one opinion I do have is that all these articles should be handled the same way. It wouldn't make sense to keep some of them and delete others (except possibly to delete dates which are empty of information). So the only suggestions above I don't agree with are things like "delete this date to set a precedent" or "delete a couple of them and see what happens". Instead, consider all these articles part of the same informational structure, and handle them as a complete unit. If the structure is redundant and/or impossible to maintain, then delete all of it. If the structure can be somehow maintained, and the information appears interesting and useful to readers, then keep it all and maybe look for a project to handle upkeep. Dugwiki 23:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep or Merge. Seems like these types of articles are notable enough to stand on their own if people add content to them and look after them. Liveforever22 02:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete all Normally, batch nominations are to be done with great care. However, all these articles are essentially the same, with the essential nature of each article common to all 1400 articles. Thus, it is feasible to evaluate the merits of the articles in one sitting. Batch noms cause real problems when there are substantive differences between the articles and/or the article's content, causing commentors to split their !votes. That is, all the articles are a bullet point of news headlines for the day's news, with links to those news stories. However, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and there is such a thing as Wikinews. Thus, I say Delete all. Failing that, I recommend taking this to the village pump for policy development.-- danntm T C 05:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Speedy Close, then rethink the strategy without going through AfD first There's very few things these days that make me reach for the speedy keep thingy, and nominating 1400 articles in one go is one of them. I'm not sure if we can form a binding result here and now; if we decide things here and now, the closing admin will have an absolutely sucky afternoon. We need to decide this elsewhere and with less strict time limits. But since the nom asked, here's my recommendation anyway: Turn all of the articles to redirects to the individual days, without merges (December 16, 2005 to December 16, etc), let God sort the mergeable content out; then reach a strong opinion on what to do with them for the future years and as-of-yet uncreated day articles (leave them uncreated or turn them to redirects too). --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 12:06, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • 'Strong Delete all It would make some sense to create these for the current year, and then delete or merge them, but it wouldn't be worth the work. It makes no sense to keep them indefinitely, because this is the sort of thing done much better by a search engine. If deleting this meant destroyingthe data, of course we would all say keep, but that's not the case. DGG 04:12, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Move all to subpages of Portal:Current events to make them work like the pages transcluded at December 2006. Pages for individual dates should usually not exist in the article namespace unless there is extreme cultural significance. We should probably ask people from Portal:Current events to help us with this mess. Kusma (討論) 14:36, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
    If we delete all these pages, we delete December 2005. As Wikipedia is GFDL, we can't subst and delete there easily, so moving these old transcluded pages out of mainspace will be the easiest way not to violate GFDL and not to break the month pages. Kusma (討論) 14:42, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Postponed deletion To explain - I think these should go, but that we would clearly need a period whilst pages such as December 2005 could tidied up and allowed to live on their own. For example, we could leave this afd close with the proposal to have them deleted a month after the closing date? This would hopefully resolve the concerns of Kusma etc, which is a valid one but not one for permamnetly keeping unencyclopedic articles. The occaisional day may become notable (January 1, 2000 or November 11, 1918 perhaps stand out as examples that could have articles) but the vast majority will never be encyclopedic --Robdurbar 14:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
With a note that the suggestions of wwwwolf and Peripitus would probably also work. --Robdurbar 14:48, 10 January 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.