Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Huxley family

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, defaulting to keep. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 08:31, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Huxley family

This article does not give any reason for the Huxley family being notable or even have a good deal of information on more than one member. Dev920 (Tory?) 08:47, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

• Keep Personally I feel that the Huxley family being notable is a given and there's no need to explain why they're notable. To ask why is about like asking why the Darwin — Wedgwood family is notable. Anyway the Huxleys have produced a Nobel Prize winner, one of the most known names in 20th century literature, etc.--T. Anthony 10:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. The family isn't notable, some members of the family are. These members of the family already have their own entries, the family one is superfluous. QuiteUnusual 11:14, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete superfluous information. We already have articles on the various notable Huxleys. Eusebeus 11:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Response to QuiteUnusual and Eusebeus: the article is summarising a topic, and as such will appear to be superfluous when it is not. Please see Wikipedia:Summary style for more on this. Carcharoth 19:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete. Wikipedia is not a genealogical database. Interrobamf 13:33, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

You are joking, right? This article is not trying to turn Wikipedia into a genealogical database, it is merely showing family relationships between notable people. There are lots of family trees in Wikipedia, but they have to involve notable people. This family tree clearly does involve notable people. Carcharoth 19:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

This is not about being a geneological site. There is already a Category:Huxley family and this family is significant as a family. It's not just a family that happened to produce some famous people. For many to most of the people named their being Huxley's had some impact on their history. For example many Leftist critics of Brave New World cited that Aldous Huxley was of the "Huxley family" and therefore dismissed his criticism of a future that was dull/overly-clean as the whinings of a child of privilege. (This was either in Rai's "Orwell and the Politics of Despair" or possibly Hillegas's "The Future as Nightmare") There's other cases too.--T. Anthony 19:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. They are not notable, they are a very important family. I can't think of a more noteworthy family in science and literature. It also shows relation to Arnold fam. I agree with above statements generally, but suspect users do not understand Huxley and Arnolds significance or believe their relationships to be an odd coincidence. Fred.e 14:10, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete whether the individual members are notable or not is irrelevant. The question is the family name, in its own right? And the answer is no, or at last it has not been made obvious in the article. Dev920 (Tory?) 14:29, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

If notability has not been made in the article, the answer is to add notability, rather than delete! The comments elsewhere in this debate attest to the notability of this family. Carcharoth 19:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

• Strong Delete sure, SOME family members are notable but they are listed invidually. Why is a listing for the entire family necessary? Why not list the entire Baldwin family if this is your policy? That family has produced several notable actors. Igbogirl 18:59, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Are you referring to the Baldwin brothers article?--T. Anthony 19:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

• • • Comment Here's the thing, ALL of the Baldwin brothers listed are notable. Are all of the Huxleys notable? What's wrong with just listing the notable Huxleys individually?

Huxley family does not list all the Huxleys. It lists only the notable Huxleys, as you are asking for, and it included an image that shows the Huxley family tree to show the relationships between the notable Huxleys. Where is the problem? Carcharoth 19:58, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

In fact, there is precedent on Wikipedia for this sort of article. See my examples listed below. And listing the entire family is what a family tree does. The important thing is to ensure that the accompanying text only mentions the notable family members. Carcharoth 19:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

• Strong keep - the alternative is to have a family tree template in each of the articles on the notable members of the Huxley families. This article should be considered a sub-article of each Huxley article, and it survives on the notability of the individual Huxleys. As T. Anthony pointed out above, family articles are acceptable, as shown by Darwin — Wedgwood family. Having said that, the family tree image is at some of the Huxley articles, and is at Category:Huxley family. However, there is massive precedent for family articles on Wikipedia. See Category:English families for other examples, such as Redgrave family, Mander family, Pease family (Darlington), Keynes_family. This article needs improvement, and the notability needs to be made explicit, but deletion is not the answer. Carcharoth 19:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Comment - another example of a family article, though rather different, is Ptolemaic dynasty. Returning to the present day, this sort of geneaological information allows people browsing Keynes family to see that one of the child actors in the recent The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe film (Skandar Keynes) is a great-great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. Carcharoth 19:25, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment with respect, such information is of no interest to me at all. It might be of more interest to people who play the game Trivial Pursuit.Igbogirl 19:34, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
    • You are right. Subjective opinion as to what fails to interest different people is not a good way to decide what should be in an encyclopedia. Master Keynes (a namesake of Alexander the Great incidentially, for the trivia fans) when asked about this, said "yeah, but there are a lot of them" (great-great-great-grandsons of Charles Darwin, that is). Smart kid. Carcharoth 00:13, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per Carcharoth as having half-a-dozen closely related notable individuals calls for such an overview article. Genealogical information of non-notable persons is one thing, this is showing the relationships. It would be cumbersome and confusing to point out all these relationships in the individual articles, but here we can include a family tree and show the relationships. This is not possible merely with a Category (theoretically the tree could go on the category page, but who would look for it there?). --Dhartung | Talk 21:17, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. There can be no question the family is notable.  --Lambiam^Talk 22:34, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

As individuals, yes. As a family? Dev920 (Tory?) 16:54, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Yup. They've been the subject of articles and the book The Huxleys by Ronald W. Clark (McGraw-Hill, 398 pp.)[1][2]--T. Anthony 03:34, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely, no question about it IMO. Charlene.fic 00:50, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Just like the Tolstoy family, or the Bach family.  --Lambiam^Talk 05:20, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

This is essentially a List of members of the Huxley family, only presented in non-list form. How many lists are inherently notable? They are lists of notable individual topics, and they simply provide an alternative entrance to the data. Categories do this, but lists serve different functions from categories. --Dhartung | Talk 20:35, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

As the article says, it is a stub. A whole book has been written on the topic. The question I answered to was not: Is this ripe for being a Featured Article, but: Is the topic notable?  --Lambiam^Talk 22:09, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm confused now. Lambian and Dhartung, you have both voted keep, but seem to be arguing about something. I can't quite work out what though! Carcharoth 23:05, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

They seem to be arguing about whether this should be deemed a list or an article. I tend to feel that lists are articles of a kind so that's not important to me. Also that debate is best for after the vote.--T. Anthony 01:08, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I got confused by Dhartung's comment. If this stubby article is doomed to remain "just" a list of the notable individual members of the family, well, then for this case I don't see an advantage in the list form over the category. It is the potential of a full-fledged article that makes me recommend it to be kept.  --Lambiam^Talk 04:39, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

My reply was to Dev920, not Lambiam. Sorry for the confusion -- I thought the indent was enough! To clarify my point and this unintended tangent: I believe it is a potential article, which is why a category is insufficient. I wasn't arguing against expansion, simply noting that a list, like a category, is an organizational tool. --Dhartung | Talk 01:47, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

• Strong keep. Obviously notable family. up+land 03:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, notable families do customarily get articles, see e.g Medici. Sandstein 07:20, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, redundant with Category:Huxley family. I was going to suggest moving the image to the category page, but I see it's already there. Angr 08:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

The category page serves a different function to the article. The article should be (eventually) an overview article, like the many other family articles pointed out on this page. Please click on a few of them to see what I mean. Just because this article may not have reached a mature stage yet, and appears to be redundant, is not a reason for deletion. Carcharoth 10:58, 10 October 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.