Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Places in Afghanistan

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was Keep. Acetic Acid 10:17, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

Since Acetic Acid isn't an admin, and the vote was not unanimous, he asked me to look over this and confirm his closure or change the result. I'm confirming the result as Keep. -- Essjay · Talk

[edit] Places in Afghanistan

This article is way too long and just takes up space. 98% if the links are red and most of the towns are not notable. List of cities in Afghanistan exists in its place anyway. Banana04131 00:56, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

• Merge/redirect. Pavel Vozenilek 01:38, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. That article is massive; it almost crashed my browser. From what I could see, there was no information beyond just the names. Nothing to smerge, just delete. Fernando Rizo T/C 01:40, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. This is useful information. We have lists for western countries (see UK, Canada, France, etc.) and similar lists for US states (Alabama, Pennsylvania). It's long, obviously, but that's no reson to get rid of it. It just needs sorting into sublists. (And I say just in its loosest sense.) The need for this list would ideally be obviated by categories, but since there are few articles on Afghan places that's not going to happen right now. Flowerparty ^talk 01:42, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
  • OMG, where do I go to delete all of them? Not only is this not a valuable or notable list, neither are the ones for US states. The state pages already list counties and towns. This is lunacy. --Tysto 06:27, 2005 August 21 (UTC)
• Keep per Flowerparty. -- Kirill Lokshin 01:45, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per Flowerparty. --Revolución (talk) 02:05, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per Flowerparty. CanadianCaesar 02:11, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Comment - not voting on this, but it ought to be pointed out that the vast majority of the small number of blue links in the article do not refer to articles on places in Afghanistan anyway, but other meanings of the same words. 80.255 02:20, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per Flowerparty but it needs substantial correction. 80.255 is correct about the blue links e.g. Qamishli is in Syria, a long way from Afghanistan. Dlyons493 03:06, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, needs a lot of work though - The list is a useful starting point, whoever made it must have reference material in regards to Afganistan, is it not possible to split up the list into regions? - Hahnchen 03:18, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Merge & redirect" to List of cities in Afghanistan and in the process remove incorrections. ≈ jossi ≈ 03:28, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Not all places are cities. -- BD2412 ^talk 03:59, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, definitely a notable list. Zoe 04:52, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per Flowerparty. --Apyule 05:27, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per above. Dottore So 06:01, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, revise, and divide into shorter pages. Uppland 06:48, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, this is too large, and it has thousands of useless links. Maybe this would be useful later on, bt not now. Jolb 07:12, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
  • Right, and it's absolutely impossible to break up the article into smaller, more maintainable articles. Too large is now a criterion for deletion? CanadianCaesar 07:38, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, atlases and almanacs are the place for lists of places, not encyclopedias. And this list doesn't even separate them into types of places or give populations; it's just a list, that doesn't even link to anything. Category:Places in Afghanistan, sure. This page, no.--Prosfilaes 07:42, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
  • It is an index. Thus it helps people find things. An encyclopedia without an index isn't overly useful. Ambi 07:44, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
    • It's not an index, because an index links to things that are in the book. It's not an index, because the function of an index is to help you find things where you don't expect them, and if these articles did exist, they would exist right where you expect them. Not only that, the search box elimenates most of the need for an index, and what's left is mostly handled by Category pages...and as I said, a category page would work just fine.--Prosfilaes 08:04, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Um, have you ever read Wikipedia:Five pillars? It reads "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia incorporating elements of... almanacs." CanadianCaesar 07:45, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
    • "Incorporating elements of" is different from being an almanac. In any case, this isn't even almanac-worthy; I've never seen an almanac with a list of names without information about their location, population, or even what type of place they are.--Prosfilaes 08:04, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
      • Right now, we have a list with a crap load of places in Afganistan. But how many people would be able to list so many places in Afganistan, if we delete this, we may never have a list as comprehensive again. It may not be almanac-worthy right now, but it serves as a handy to-do list. - Hahnchen 15:15, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep per Uppland. Ambi 07:44, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

*Keep - Don't clutter up List of cities in Afghanistan, making it hard to find major places (for those of us with serious foreign place name confusion). But, the secondary list is *easily* justified compared to the endless mass of lists for North American communities. Don't split the list up into sub-lists yet though, because then you'll just spawn a bunch of unnoticed orphans lists. With just two Afghan lists, we can put "back-links" to the list from the place articles, which will encourage "filling out" the info". --rob 09:14, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Delete The page is practically useless, the vast, vast majourity of the links are red, therefore, without a LOT of work, thee page will stay useless! Tekana 15:36, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

• Keep per Uppland. Guettarda 16:35, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Comment I just went through the A's and checked the links. Most were blue only because the incorrectly pointed to non-related extant articles (as mentioned by 80.255). Most of the rest are only one-liners in disambiguation pages that I added. I think this content is notable and important and in keeping with Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias, but maybe it could be a to-do list in the community section rather than a live page. Bubamara 18:29, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Comment That's a good idea. I've listed it at Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias open tasks. I didn't think of the Systimatic Bias project when I listed it for VFD. For my vote...
• Delete Unless some of the "cities" have pages created for them that are actually relevent. I don't want to encourage people to create a million one sentance stubs on every villiage in Afghanistan though. Even if pages were created for all of the places I doubt half of them would be notable. Both posts mine. --Banana04131 20:03, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Wonderful article. I regard the English Wikipedia as the World Wikipedia, and our goal must be to cover every place in Afghanistan. But it desperately needs dismbiguation link repair. Punkmorten 20:28, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep; An updated list with more explanatory data regarding areas is needed though. "Place" is way to diffuse - is it a city, a village, a riverbank, a mansion? | Celcius 01:39, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Keep - Wikipedia is not paper. --Celestianpower ^hab 14:52, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Comment Vote count so far: merge/redirect-2 Delete-5 keep-17

• Delete A forest of red links, and very obscure to us Westerners. --Wtshymanski 23:32, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Neither is a valid reason to delete something. It is a forest of red links because of systemic bias, and the English Wikipedia is not an exclusive club for "Westerners". List of places in Pennsylvania has quite a few red links and is probably of limited interest to Afghans. There is no reason to delete that either. Uppland 07:56, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
  • They may not remain red links for long. If they are expanded. I do not recollect a rule in wikipedia where a page is deleted if it has too many reds. Because it's a transitory phenomenon. Unless we allow such pages, far flung peoples may not use wikipedia or find it useful. Manik Raina 09:06, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep , expand. Manik Raina 07:44, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

• Comment : I had a thought regarding the use of categories. We could use categories and do something very similar to what this page is doing. What are your thoughts ? For example, create stubs for each of the cities mentioned in the page and categorize them as "Cities in Afghanistan". Would that not be more intuitive ? We could get rid of many lists .... Manik Raina 13:04, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Using a catagory would be good, but it means that someone would have to make a lot of new stubs. It might be best to do a catagory and keep the list as well. --Apyule 00:24, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

• I want to keep this article, but I agree that the signal to noise ratio is far too high for it to be useful as is. So I think we should revert it to this version, which is right before it jumps to about 1500 entries. Then we can reasonably build from there (or, more realisically, we can then talk about merging with List of cities in Afghanistan). Bubamara 07:36, 26 August 2005 (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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.