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. --MuZemike 03:07, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Index of gaming articles[edit]

Index of gaming articles (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Impossibly huge scope; every article related to "games". This article is not even the slightest fraction complete, and it never will be. There are board games, video games, midway games, people, companies, genres, but only the tiniest representative slice. When it was created on 28 December 2002‎, maybe they were able to list every article, but now we'd have a huge page if we just list every other list. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 18:10, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Transfer any information that might be useful to a more specific list and Delete. John Daker (talk) 19:50, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of video game-related deletion discussions. (G·N·B·S·RS·Talk) • Gene93k (talk) 01:23, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:23, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:23, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Can this be turned from a list-of-lists into a list-of-lists-of-lists? Jclemens (talk) 04:52, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and split into a list of lists (by major subcategories of Category:Games), obviously. Just deleting this would make no sense at all, since it would necessarily be re-created if the Category:Indexes of articles continues to grow and become all-inclusive. (That is a meaning-laden "if", too. I wouldn't mind seeing the entire thing and its contents disappear, other than its subcategory Category:Outlines, the contents of which serve a real purpose; most of rest of that stuff just duplicates the functionality of categories. But if we're going to keep them, don't discriminate arbitrarily against the games category.) — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 06:13, 17 December 2011 (UTC) PS: The fastest way to get started would be to rename this Index of gaming topics ("gaming" per Category:Gaming, as Category:Games is for individual games, not the topic of games and gaming a a whole; and "topics" since it will list higher-level topics, not individual articles in most cases). Next fork off an Index of video game topics; about 2/3 of the content would go in there, move them into, respectively, Category:Indexes of gaming topics and Category:Indexes of video game topics (named per Category:Video games not gaming), which already have other categorized articles. Then subdivide further by major topic areas of Category:Gaming and Category:Video games, some of which already exist as "Index of..."/"List of..." articles. Anything more properly a sport than a game should go in Index of sports topics and Category:Indexes of sports topics, based on subcats of Category:Sports. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 06:19, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: Article moved to Index of gaming topics in process of editing. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 08:38, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete in this form as unmanageably broad. No objection against a complete rewrite/recreation as an index of indices.  Sandstein  12:45, 24 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Kurykh (talk) 08:55, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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• Incubate so as to give SMcClandlish time to carry out the revamp that he proposes. There's no reason to keep this material in the mainspace while he does it.—S Marshall T/C 16:45, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep The fact that there are lots of gaming topics is a reason to have a substantial index, not a reason to delete it. If it seems to need improvement then this is a reason for ordinary editing not deletion per our editing policy. The article should not be moved from mainspace because that is the usual place for us to work upon substantial articles in a collaborative way. Assigning the topic to a particular editor or project would be contrary to policy. Warden (talk) 11:02, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Thing is, Colonel, that the name of this list has already changed during the course of this AfD and the proposal is to completely rewrite the content pretty much from scratch. What we're proposing to keep has a different name and different content from the material that JohnnyMrNinja proposed for deletion. That's not really a "keep" outcome except in a highly technical sense, is it? The purpose of incubating it isn't to "assign" the project to SMcClandlish (and if that was what was wanted then we would userfy it to him instead), but to put it into a collaborative workspace where SMcClandlish can take the lead in doing as he suggests, because clearly he's the man with the detailed plan for what to do.—S Marshall T/C 17:10, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Mainspace is our collaborative workspace and that is the essential feature of wikipedia. The move to a new title is not settled as we have had little participation here as yet. This article has existed for 9 years and has been edited by multiple experienced editors in that time. It is presumptious for one editor to suppose that they now control its destiny. Warden (talk) 19:27, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep – This list article is discriminate and exclusive to articles about gaming. It serves to functionally and usefully serve as an index for various Wikipedia articles, and assists users in browsing and navigating topics on Wikipedia. Compare this to having to utilize the search engine and sort through all of the results, which would be more burdensome to users. Overall, this article improves the Wikipedia project. Northamerica1000^(talk) 22:07, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep The list is discriminate, and length or incompleteness is never a valid reason to delete something. Dream Focus 08:38, 27 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep – no scope is impossible for Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is the prime example, because its scope is all-encompassing! So, an index of all gaming articles is an appropriate goal to accommodate navigation through the ocean of gaming subjects covered on Wikipedia. Nominator exhibits all or nothing reasoning. The fallacy that it's not beneficial unless it is complete is a very dangerous one. In its worst application, it implies that only finished articles can be posted on Wikipedia. But, Wikipedia is a wiki: a collaborative editing environment designed to allow many editors to work together to create documents. If you disallow works-in-progress, then you defeat the whole purpose of the wiki. Wikipedia's goal is long-term. It costs us nothing to allow incomplete articles to wait for volunteers to come along and work on them (that's the central M.O. of a wiki). Something else that the nominator missed was that technology accelerates. The human genome project is an example of such acceleration. They took almost 10 years to sequence about 10% of the human genome, so experts were projecting that it would take 100 years to sequence the whole thing. Three years later it was within a few percent of being complete. What happened? Innovation happened. The same type of thing is likely to occur with respect to Wikipedia's knowledge indexes. Eventually, someone will figure out a way to do it faster. The mathematics department is already experimenting with automated indexing approaches, as they maintain a comprehensive collection of math lists. The nomination to delete this page is near-sighted in the extreme. Please vote it down by voting Keep. Thank you. Sincerely, – The Transhumanist 19:22, 27 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I wasn't responding here but since you've brought up my "reasoning", I feel obligated. The logic used to debate the logic that I didn't use is flawed. This is an index, not a list, not a category. This is entirely self-referential, this is an index. The harm is quite clear, in that an index by its nature lists all things within a certain grouping. A "list of gaming topics" or some-such would be a list of all things that fit in that grouping in the world, and would never be complete. Lists don't need to be complete. An index, however, is Wikipedia telling readers that this is what we have on this topic. We are talking about the contents of Wikipedia, not the world at large, so it damn-well better be complete, or at least attempt to be complete. Otherwise it is wrongly labeled. If you want to rename it "list of whatever", feel free to suggest that. If we make it an index of lists, great. But don't pretend that we can call this an index of all game articles with a few hundred links, while WP:VG alone links to at least 50,000 articles (not to mention board games, RPGs, etc.). That is like making an article about all the people in the world that have ever swam, or an index of every article related to a person born after Shakespeare. There is no benefit to such an indiscriminate grouping, unless it encompasses more discriminate ones. To put it simply, there is no way this index could or should ever be completed, as an article that lists hundreds of thousands of other articles is completely useless to everyone. If this index were complete, it should still be deleted, as a giant mass of marginally-related words with no context and no value to anyone that has or will ever use the internet. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 02:44, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Note that this article has been renamed to Index of gaming articles. Northamerica1000^(talk) 04:06, 30 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - Anyone who thinks this list is discriminate isn't aware of how big a field games are. It could be broken down into meaningful lists, but "everything ever related to games" is way to broad to be useful. Kuguar03 (talk) 04:18, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - I don't want to get involved in this discussion myself, but I would like to point out how enormous the scope for this list could potentially be so, in the very least, I'd hope that this would be split up. DarthBotto _talk•cont 10:21, 03 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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.