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.
I will use the same rationale as I did in the last AfD with examples specific to Aeroflot:
Per the 2018 RfC, there is consensus that lists of airline destinations do not belong on Wikipedia. A discussion at AN advised editors to nominate lists at AfD in an orderly manner and include a link to the RfC in their nominations; it was also recommended that the closer of the AfD take the RfC closure into account. The consensus has been reaffirmed in several AfDs since then.
This list violates WP:NOT. Wikipedia is not meant to host a database of every single city that an airline flies to as of March 2024 or whatever month it is. Nor is it supposed to provide an indiscriminate collection of every destination in history. Even if Aeroflot flew to some city for a few years in the 1960s, it gets added to the list. Not to mention that in Soviet times, Aeroflot flew to over 3,000 destinations! All the former destinations border on airline trivia.
If we look at how the list is referenced, we realize that it is basically a repository for airline data. Someone accessed the airline's route map in December 2018 and cited it for over 100 destinations. When I click the link today, I am only able to download an undated table of Aeroflot's routes. To verify all current destinations, I can instead visit the airline's flight schedule and copy down all the cities that appear when I click the dropdown under "City of departure", or I can consult a third-party aggregator of scheduling data, like Flightradar24 or FlightMapper.net. Then one of these websites can be cited for each current destination. You can add more references, like news stories about a new destination, but they would be redundant. Also, you cannot use such a reference on its own to say that Aeroflot still flies to a given city as of this month. For example, the reference for Lagos is a list of destinations from 2000 and the city is labeled 'terminated', which implies that someone had to check Aeroflot's current schedule to see if it still flies there.
Ultimately we have established that the information in the list is indeed verifiable. But the problem here is not one of verifiability. It is one of suitability – the suitability for Wikipedia of a list that essentially reorganizes data sourced from flight databases.
In addition, maintaining the list effectively makes it a newsfeed of airline destination updates. For instance, the list informs the reader that Aeroflot will resume flights to Chengdu on 1 April 2024, and in December 2023 it noted that service to Sanya would begin on 27 December and to Blagoveshchensk on 31 January. The tracking of these periodic changes in airline schedules goes against WP:NOTNEWS.
There are 187 remaining stand-alone lists of airline destinations. I am only nominating Aeroflot's as a test case for those list articles that include prose. While the list is unsuitable for Wikipedia, the prose has to be addressed separately. Some of it repeats information found in the history section of the parent article, and I have copied over some of the remaining prose. Please see my explanation on the talk page of what prose I copied or did not copy to the parent article. (So if the outcome of this AfD is that Wikipedia should not have this list article, I believe we'd need to redirect it to the parent article rather than delete it to comply with WP:PATT.) Sunnya343 (talk) 17:38, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. A list of past and present destinations provides a better understanding of an airline's operations. The information about past destinations or the destinations of a defunct airline may not be readily available elsewhere. Even if someone has access to a collection of old editions of the Official Airline Guide, such a collection would be less accessible than a Wikipedia article. Aeroflot's route network was not just the routes it could make money on, but included destinations that it served because of the national interests of the Soviet Union. Understanding how destinations were dropped as the result of a trade embargo or other Western response to Russian or Soviet foreign policy is an important part of the company's history. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 18:42, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A list of past and present destinations provides a better understanding of an airline's operations. If that were the case, instead of having articles meant primarily to present a digest of information found in secondary sources we'd just present raw data and let our readers figure out what they all mean. It's like saying that we should have lists of all the people who've every lived in Moscow because that will help us better to understand Moscow. A live feed of raw data (including, for example, hourly Dow Jones Industrial Average figures since the Dow's inception, right through today's closing bell) just isn't what Wikipedia is. Largoplazo (talk) 23:46, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I will echo what Largoplazo said as well as Beeblebrox's comment in the RfC regarding the difference between information and knowledge. This list is just raw information: "As of March 2024, Aeroflot flies to Yerevan, Baku, Minsk, ..." and "Aeroflot used to fly to Kabul, Algiers, Luanda, ..." It does not impart any of the knowledge that you describe in your last two sentences.
The list could comfortably exist on an aviation-enthusiast wiki. On Wikipedia, however, WP:NOT defines our scope, and lists of airline destinations like this one lie outside of it.Sunnya343 (talk) 04:36, 21 March 2024 (UTC) Struck those sentences since I've been criticizing aviation enthusiasts unfairly. Sunnya343 (talk) 01:06, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I must note again that merely including up-to-date information like start dates is not a violation of notnews, nor is that a basis for deletion as an aversion for detail can simply be resolved by noting a route is upcoming. There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia maintaining periodic changes, though it may not be necessary to have standalone articles dedicated to a single corporation's business operations like this; my greater concern would be the lack of detail as it's not particularly useful to a reader that a certain airport is a terminated destination (when? from where?). Reywas92Talk 20:13, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At the risk of bludgeoning, I wanted to clarify that my idea with the NOTNEWS argument is similar to what FOARP said in the AfDs that they started: if you try to keep the list up to date (which is what people in good faith have been doing), what you would have would essentially be an airline news-service, and Wikipedia is not news (source). We can disagree about whether the practice of documenting every single change to an airline's destinations is a NOTNEWS violation. However, even if we discontinue this practice, we are still left with the NOTDB argument, which is my main argument. Sunnya343 (talk) 16:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't really related to the AfD but per Reywas92's point... it is useful to note terminated destinations for readers in some instances, especially for readers interested in the historical footprint of an airline, such as myself. SportingFlyerT·C 17:14, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As an aviation enthusiast I, too, am genuinely fascinated by certain destinations, and I do believe there is a place to talk about some of them on Wikipedia. A great example would be the paragraphs that people wrote in the Anchorage and Magadan airport articles about Aeroflot's and Alaska Airlines' flights between Russia and Alaska in the 1990s. Sunnya343 (talk) 00:55, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep There is significant prose in this list article, and which destinations were served by the primary carrier during the Cold War is not insignificant in the slightest. I don't think WP:NOTNEWS applies here, and simply listing the destinations of most airlines does violate WP:NOT - except, of course, when it's encyclopaedic, meaning it's beyond mere directory or database, and Aeroflot is one of the airlines where I think the information is clearly encyclopaedic. I would be open to alternatives in how to present the information, though. SportingFlyerT·C 20:39, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would be open to alternatives in how to present the information, though. Regarding historical destinations, we already have a great alternative: Aeroflot § History. Sunnya343 (talk) 04:37, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment to the people who've opined so far and those who follow: As the nominator noted, this nomination follows from an RFC that already took place. This isn't the place to relitigate it—that would take another RFC. Given the RFC, this is the place to determine whether compliance with it calls for the deletion of this article, or whether there are factors that set it apart from the domain of articles that the RFC covered. Largoplazo (talk) 23:46, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the airline destination articles which were deleted were simple lists of destinations which violated WP:NOTDIRECTORY, which is what that RfC agreed on. This article is above and beyond WP:NOTDIRECTORY because of the prose involved. It's possibly a valid split. SportingFlyerT·C 12:25, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Please see my discussion of the prose in this article in the last paragraph of my rationale. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While such a list does seem unlikely to be kept up to date, and I do not see it as particularly useful, It is not obvious exactly what part of WP:NOT it is claimed to violate. · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 07:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete in line with the 2018 RfC. The prose section is relatively short and can easily be merged into the Destinations and History sections of the main Aeroflot article. Rosbif73 (talk) 09:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that moving/combining the data to the Aeroflot page as a subsection. However, the data should *somehow* be kept and not fully deleted. This data will be viable when/if Worldwide-Russo relationship(s) improve in the future. Metcalf81 (talk) 17:29, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, LizRead!Talk! 23:38, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per other "keep" recommendations above. I believe that consensus has changed since the 2018 RfC given that there are still nearly 200 pages like this for various airlines, without even getting into such lists that may appear in the articles about the airlines themselves, and the 2018 RfC should be disregarded. --Metropolitan90(talk) 00:03, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - These historical destination lists are encyclopedic and the RFCs stated do not support this AFD proposal of removing historic destinations. To put a more clear delineation - this AFD request cites discussions and RFC's that are all about maintaining/keeping lists "up to date". Ignoring that isolated focus, the proposed articles for deleted contain lists of historical destinations as a well cited/detailed information relevant to the history of that airline. Removing these historical, indelible/unchanging facts (well cited and structured) runs contrary to the aim of Wikipedia. These historical lists of destinations do not fall afoul of any of the WP:NOT or WP:NOTDIRECTORY. My full reasoning & citations here along with logic in a competing parallel AfD raised by the same editor DigitalExpat (talk) 09:05, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We should bear WP:VNOT in mind: the fact that information is well cited does not guarantee its inclusion in the encyclopedia. Sunnya343 (talk) 16:42, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Metropolitan90 and DigitalExpat. S5A-0043Talk 13:23, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep the submitter of this action is disguarding consensus. Axisstroke (talk) 18:31, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, this is certainly valuable information to be part of an encyclopedia and be maintained regularly. Contributor892z (talk) 18:35, 2 April 2024 (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.