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. This is actually more like the fifth time... please consider joining a discussion on how to make this data more usable/maintainable rather than renominating again: see also 0th, 1st, 2nd (partial), 3rd (partial), etc. -- nae'blis 22:06, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of people by name[edit]

List of people by name (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

This list is absolutely humongous and completely unmaintainable. Most of the biographies on Wikipedia aren't listed anyway, making this a huge waste of space as it is unsusable. If people want a list of all the biographies on Wikipedia, then this could all be made into 26 huge categories (one for each letter). I am nominating all subpages along with the base page in this nomination. —Mets501 (talk) 15:44, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong keep. The list is actively maintained. It is a very useful alternate index to human names. older ≠ wiser 16:10, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The problem is that it's not actively maintained. I honestly just randomly checked out 7 people in Category:1980 births, and none of them are in the list. —Mets501 (talk) 16:18, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Look at the edit history of individual pages. It is actively maintained. Simply because it is incomplete does not mean it is not actively maintained. older ≠ wiser 16:38, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: It's obvious that a lot of work was put into setting up this complex of pages, and so I certainly wouldn't want to see them deleted or deprecated without thorough discussion. If there is a problem with keeping the pages updated, that may be a result of insufficient awareness of them: I have contributed 50 or so biographical articles, but I never heard of these pages until I came across this AfD discussion, so of course I never added my biographees to the pages, which I would have been happy to do. I just added one of my bios to the page as a test, and I had to go through a number of subpages to get to where I needed to be, so it will be a challenge to get the list comprehensive, but if it's a useful list could be worth it. Am wondering if the list has been useful to others, and what the editors at Project Biography might think. Newyorkbrad 16:49, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • But wouldn't categories just be much easier? A bot can run through and place everyone in Category:xxxx births into the correct category. —Mets501 (talk) 16:59, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, categories are obviously useful, but they typically group by just one criterion, as opposed to the few words of description after each name on this listing. By the way, has anyone asked the people who set up these pages what they think they are useful for? Newyorkbrad 17:09, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Well, they were created more than 5 years ago, so I'm not sure how accessible the original authors would be. —Mets501 (talk) 17:15, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Wow, I've never seen this list before. What a Herculean effort! Someone should write a bot to transfer all this information into Persondata templates. Then we could jump from having about 4,000 articles with Persondata to about 100,000 or so. Kaldari 18:07, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I can see a good reason to keep something like this, in that it could be a useful organizational tool for people to look up a name when they can remember something vague about a name but not its exact spelling. The main problem with these pages is that it appears to have some major technical problems in that it takes a long time to load. Is there a better way to address the problem that this page is attempting to solve? Tarinth 18:07, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, there is a better way, and that is putting these into letter categories. —Mets501 (talk) 18:09, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete this, it's the very definition of unmaintainable and redundant per categories. Guy (Help!) 18:08, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete I simply cannot see the use of this list. It does not aid the user in finding anyone. Anyone looking for a specific individual will use a search engine rather than dive three or four levels deep into such a list. Anyone who isnt certain of a name, but knows attributes (ie: profession, nationality, etc) will not be aided by this list. Unmaintainable, indiscriminant, redundant with categories. Resolute 19:34, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment This is potentially a useful resource, but I think there ought to be a better way of presenting the information. Like many lists, it would be much better as something much more like a category. WP is full of biographies, sometimes several for people of the same name. Peterkingiron 20:06, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's what disambigs are for Bwithh 23:58, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per JzG and Resolute. TJ Spyke 23:41, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per JzG and Resolute. Also, it is so large that my computer will not allow the edit page to load before timing out. This article is unneeded.--WillMak050389 23:53, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Impractical, redundant Bwithh 23:58, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep. Please stop those absurdities. It is my experience that articles, especially lists, are usually considered "unmaintainable" only by those who neither use them nor have any wish to maintain them themselves. It's high time you thought about other users. A happy new year to you all. <KF> 00:21, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What other uses? If there in fact good uses for this page then I may reconsider. —Mets501 (talk) 00:43, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Other users, not other uses. Different people do use different methods when carrying out research, and a lot of people, myself included, find alphabetical lists of people useful, if only to see what names there are and how many people worldwide share the same, or similar, names. I was actually going to ask you on your talk page if you might consider retracting your nomination. I do see the necessity to get rid of POV and dangerous stuff or of copyvios, but those lists? <KF> 00:53, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • Sorry for reading error :-). That's what we have categories for, isn't it? Categories are automatically alphabetical and easily maintained. —Mets501 (talk) 06:32, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
        • I have no reason whatsoever to oppose categories. Rather, I find them quite useful as well. However, I don't believe any category could give me all/most of/many of the names starting in, say, Flei- and at the same time, and at one glance, provide me with who they were and when they lived. Am I wrong in surmising that there is a tacit assumption among opponents that man/woman-made lists can never rival computer-generated ones and that the former might appear like an antiquated feature in an otherwise top-notch multi-media project (when in fact they are not)? <KF> 22:41, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Existing categories do everything that this list does, and more. The most commonly-cited reason to use a list in place of a category is if the list would contain redlinks for possible articles in a finite set; however, this one shouldn't. Zetawoof^(ζ) 00:52, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. I was unable to load it (my patience was low) so I doubt it is a good idea for WP at all. Such lists may find a good use in the future when/if MediaWiki will be able to generate them automatically, add context information etc. Pavel Vozenilek 02:24, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • So the usability of a list depends on how it is generated? <KF> 03:04, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep. The list's functions cannot be replaced with Categories, as Cats are presently implemented, for several reasons:

1. Red links placed on LoPbN have a high rate of turning into lks to bios.

   Rd lks cannot be assigned to Cats, so replacement of LoPbN by any Cat scheme would destroy this popular venue for calling attention to needed bios.

2. Multiple LoPbN entries for a single biography are important for people whose names don't fit the typical "Western" pattern of a one-word given name (possibly with initial(s)) followed by a one-word surname:

   1. the obvious exception is Chinese names (to which Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and traditional Hungarian names behave similarly) which, depending on the individual, may appear in their proper order, inverted for convenience of ignorant Westerners, or sometime one way and sometimes the other for the same person -- but don't forget
   2. compounds formed from two surnames (sometimes with and sometimes without hyphenation), related to noble status, or (at least in Britain) eligibility for inheritances or assertion of female equality, or gods-know-what in the case of Pauline Viardot-Garcia, whose maiden name was Garcia and whose name is so non-conforming that we mistakenly entitle her bio Pauline Garcia-Viardot,
   3. the reflection in Spanish-speaking cultures of mother's original surname, and (apparently different) practices in Portuguese-speaking cultures,
   4. surnames that include a prefix, raising the question of whether to alphabetize according to the prefix (Van Dyck, Anthony) or not (Beethoven, Ludwig van),
   5. non-inherited Icelandic last names,
   6. many surviving tribal-culture naming practices (Eritrean names were recently cited to me), and, moving beyond modern commoners,
   7. ancient Roman names ("Julius" is simply the name, IIRC, of the family line that the great Gaius Julius Caesar came from, but it is common to assume otherwise),
   8. European names from before the adoption of surnames (which tend to exist in different English-language texts in an Anglicized, a Latinized, and at least one version reflecting a language local to the person's origin or work),
   9. names of noble rulers (James I of England was the same person as James VI of Scotland, IIRC, and i think most Holy Roman Emperors were also monarchs under other titles and usually numbers), and
   10. other bearers of titles, who are likely to be sought under different parts of the alphabet depending on how many of their eventual titles they had inherited or been granted, by the period of their life that the seeker saw discussed.
   11. Besides these classifiable patterns of repetitive problems, there are misspellings and misrememberings of rare names, some of them also predictable, like Byron Janis (whose LoPbN entry i stumbled on, long after adding a rd lk for Byron Janus), and worthy of preemptive duplicate entries.
   12. Less obviously, some quirky and unpredictable mistakes like Henry James Ford need a duplicate LoPbN entry because they are so widely found on the Web. How can such quirky mistakes be so widespread? Sometimes bcz they got made by WP editors, were not quickly caught, and have been spread far and wide by cloners of our content. It would be irresponsible for WP not to be helpful to users misinformed by such WP errors.

   Multiple tags in an article for the same Cat produce only one entry on the Cat page, so relying on Cats is useless to a user who knows only variants differing from the title of the bio sought.

3. There are many groups, each with numerous bios of similarly or identically pronounced names like Hofman, Hofmann, Hoffman, Hoffmann, and Huffman (none presently on LoPbN, tho 11 are listed on Category: Living people). Cross references could be added on those LoPbN sections to alert users whose memories rely on sound more than spelling, or who heard a name in a lecture or broadcast, that they've not considered all the options. (A few of these have been done by me and others, tho i haven't made it much of a priority, and can't remember an implemented example at the moment.)

   Cats offer no facility for putting instructions, let alone cross-ref lks, on the Cat page. And altho you could have smaller Cats, for people named Hoffman, or for people with surnames that sound like Hoffman it's hard to see what good either of those could do for people who are expecting the bio's title to have a spelling other than "Hoffman" as its surname.

4. Speaking of "unmaintainability" (the name being bandied about here in place of the truth, which is undermaintenance), pick a common given name, and go to the corresponding page on Category:Living people to see how many bios for people with that given name are listed in the Cat among people with surnames that start the same way as that given name.

   Fortunately for users seeking bios misfiled on Cat LP, LoPbN has two factors making it more maintainable against such errors, so that is serves as a backup for some such cases:

   1. The errors occur much less often, bcz those who make them in most cases have to place them adjacent to entries that are clearly filed by surname, whereas you can put a biographical-Cat tag on an article without piping the tag, are likely see no examples with piping, and don't see the rendering of the Cat entry without following the Cat lk on the page you tagged to the Cat page.
   2. When an LoPbN maintainer notes such a misfiling (usually a given name like James or Henry that has a heading ending "... as surname", containing lks to monarchs surnamed James, Henry, or whatever), they may be keeping ((List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned))) open in a window or pane, and can use it to lk directly to the correct page for the lk, use its ToC to lk to a roughly 24-line section, cut and paste the offending lk from page to page, and if necessary repipe that lk (or re-code it using ((LoPbN Entry)) and get the piping done for free). (Those maintaining bio Cats re misplacement may have to wade thru an oversized section on the bio article, or even scan the 18 Cats 3 times before it occurs to them to look at the top of the page for the offending Cat tag!)

5. The assertion that Cats would be a valuable supplement to LoPbN, let alone a superior replacement, is belied by the fact that no one has created no one suggests that there exists a Cat that embraces all bio articles except thru its descendant subcats, and i am confident that no Cat (except hopefully Cat LP, which lacks subcats) exists that embraces solely bio articles thru its descendant subcats. In order to find a bio using its subject's name as the most definite information, you have to have people of all fields of endeavor, eras, and nationalities on the same alpha list, which we try to do via Cats only to the extent of all living people. The existence of LoPbN is no barrier to the creation of such a Cat, so either its creation would be not worth the improvement over LoPbN that it would provide, or all the other editors on WP are stupider or less responsible than the Del voters on this AfD, who are trying to destroy something that colleagues consider useful but not taking any action to create what they think should replace it. At the very least, it is inconceivable that LoPbN should be deleted without the creation first of an automated tool that can verify that every bio listed on LoPbN is tagged with (at least) a descendant of Category:People. (Ideally, those descendant Cats that do not consist overwhelmingly of bios should be detected, so that a DAG descended from Cat People can be searched, rather than all descendants of Cat People.)
6. The above list is not intended to be exhaustive.

It is also important to mention that proposals for enhanced Cat features, that some argued would meet some of these needs, began being discussed soon after the introduction of Cats, and there has been no sign of motion toward those enhancements. (The reason may be despair abt making the Cat structure into a DAG, which is also a further reason to dislike using the current Cat system in place of LoPbN.)
--Jerzy•t 07:52, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. There are points raised here, with more merit than the AfD proposal, that i will at least address on the Talk:LoPbN page or subpages; these may be off-topic on this page. I am referring at least to the performance complaints, which are new, and may be valuable observations that are otherwise not naturally accessible to me.
  --Jerzy•t 07:59, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  
• Weak keep, because Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not paper. However, I'm really uncertain for a few reasons. First, the load time is intolerable. This is due to the many sublevels of templates. At least on the top few should be substed. Second, I think the list is lightly used, and thus lightly maintained. It will thus perennially stay incomplete. For this reason, I tagged tried valiantly but failed due to timeouts to tag it with ((Dynamic list)); it might need additional disclaimers. Finally, this isn't the best format for such a project, but there's no better way to implement it on MediaWiki. The ability to caption items in categories could solve this in a much more natural manner. Superm401 - Talk 09:34, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sup, i think what happened is that you succeeded in the edit, but failed in viewing the result. (Best way to confirm the change is viewing diffs via popup tools, maybe diffs w/out will work as well.) I think the LoPbN page is even slower to load than the problematic templates that i was aware of, and i'm going to make at least some temporary fixes in the next half hour that may suffice. Not sure how much time i can give quick fix and better approach to the underlying problem, in the next 24. BTW, depth of nesting is bad approach, and while it's important not to subst, i'm confident this can be cleaned up with the goals i had met and this problem solved.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Jerzy (talk • contribs) 10:15, 1 January 2007
  • I think the limited hacking out of changes i've done will probably make a substantial difference. With more time i expect both further improvement, and restoration of the new functionality (hidden from users and most editors) that i was aiming at w/o the performance problems they previously introduced. User reports welcome, tho i must go w/o taking the initiative to start a section & lk to it from here, at a page where it'll be on topic. Someone else start it, or perhaps use my user-talk page in the interim. Thanks.
    --Jerzy•t 11:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    
• Keep. None of the new objections are convincing to me; They make some good points as to how the page should be maintained, but as to whether it should exist, I still say it seems useful to some, and harmless to the rest of us. Andrewa 09:40, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep It's obvious that a lot of work's gone into this page and its subpages. Some sort of indexing by name is needed - I'm not convinced that one-letter categories would do the trick. It's entirely possible that someone comes up with a better method of indexing than what's used on this page. But I haven't seen one yet - all I've seen is a discussion on what might be better. Until we see a concrete, fleshed out proposal for how to carry out this task, the existing system should not be deleted. Quack 688 09:45, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. I totally agree with Resolute. dh ▪ 2¢ ▪ 10:18, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Some people like these pages, some don't. If you don't like the pages, let someone else who does do the maintaining. I can't see Andrew Orlowski pointing at List of people by name: Bra and saying it only has 500 entries when it should have 2000. Andjam 11:29, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep, of some use even though it is far short of comprehensive. For better or worse, Wikipedia has long grown beyond the point where lists like this can be maintained by ordinary means. Ideally this would be maintained by a bot which would crawl the various bio categories (and have its output subjected to a quick sanity check). Even more ideally, every bio article would have persondata embedded, and a list like this could be generated with a trivial database query. -- Visviva 12:20, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• STRONG delete - just today I was thinking about nominating this for deletion... Unsourced, unmaintained, disgrace to Wikipedia, and nothing that Categories could not achieve. Renata 13:25, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Absent including all bio articles directly in Category:People, I don't see how categories could replace this. -- Visviva 13:37, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • The "unsourced" objection doesn't make a lot of sense to me in this context, and rhetoric like "disgrace to Wikipedia" should be avoided. Newyorkbrad 16:45, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - If editors are willing to maintain these pages (even if imperfectly), I find it problematical to force a more restrictive view of what type of indexing is useful in Wikipedia. I'm sure there are a lot (quite possibly the vast majority) of Wikipedia users who have never used (or found) these index pages, but for a minority - assuming whatever load problems there are can be fixed - they are presumably very useful. In short, this index is clearly the sort of thing that should be done by better categorization software and/or by a bot (using categories or other structured data). But the reality is that neither of those things exist at the moment. John Broughton | Talk 16:35, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: The alleged load problems seem to be pure speculation, based on the slowness with which these particular pages load. If they really are low usage, as is also claimed, then that's no problem for the rest of us. And, even if there are performance problems, deleting content to fix them is a last resort. We're not to that point yet, to say the least. The logic of the delete case is not nearly so strong as its rhetoric. No change of vote. Andrewa 18:52, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Moderate keep as there do appear to be uses for the pages; but hopefully this discussion will continue to spur useful improvements in the set-up of the listings as well as more publicity for their existence. Newyorkbrad 16:45, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Useful and cannot be replaced neither by categories nor by possible DBMS (unless as smart as an average illaterate American) for at least one simple reason: seach for similarly sounding names Smith or Smythe, Johnston or Jonhson, Yvette or Yvett, Ivan or Iwan, etc. Also, for hundredth time: categories cannot replace lists, which can be annotated. "Poorly nonmaintained" has always been rejected as an invalid reason for deletion: if we let lazy people rule the world, we are in real big trouble. `'mikka 17:15, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • That sounds more like a case for redirects than anything. Zetawoof^(ζ) 01:15, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep per comments by other keep proponents. A lot of people have obviously put a lot of work into this, and no one is forcing anyone to use this list if they don't like it, and it's not as though it contains anything offensive. Also, as for it not being complete, there are people working hard to change that now. This has been up for deletion before and the vote was no, and people are just rehashing the same arguments, so it's time to just let the matter rest. --Slyguy 18:42, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep - An excellet reference, it will probably be a work in progress for as long as Wikipedia is around but I find it as an useful reference. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 18:48, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep. It is actively maintained, there's no hurry to have it 100% updated, it is harmless to those who don't find it useful, it's a good anchor for newly created bios, and, at the very least, it's a nice window on the universe of human names, a fascinating thing by itself. RodC 18:50, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep, these lists are being worked on, and will grow as time goes on. Just get a bot to stick ((listdev)) on them and that should be enough. --Merovingian ※ Talk 19:23, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, it seems to me (i) it is being worked on (ii) it does things categories can't do (iii) it may never be perfect but then what is? Richard Pinch 22:35, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per arguments above, particularly per KF. The list shows information at a glance which would not be easily available in categories. --Eliyak T·C 23:51, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I wasn't planning to vote initially, not having much of an opinion, but when I saw Renata's "Strong DELETE" for four reasons, and realized that I don't believe any of them, I needed to put in a vote for the other side. Matchups 02:21, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• It's bulky, it's ugly, it's huge, it's redundant, it could be implimented in a much better way, and yet I am still neutral. I can see arguments on both sides as holding water, so I really can't base it on that. However, does anyone even know if this list is helpful? wtfunkymonkey 06:04, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. In my personal opinion, I believe that the list is long and time consuming, but useful. It would be great if someone created a bot that would help us list the names. Tony the Marine 06:07, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Delete. There are some major, irreversible problems with the list:
  • It's ugly and bulky
  • No one uses it (I for one, don't; instead, there's something I use called a "search box")
  • It will grow to a point where it is too unmanageable to maintain
  • Wikipedia is not a directory
  • The range is too broad and none of the people in a group may be related (other than name)
  • Some of the articles are not maintained (see Special:Ancientpages)

The list is just a big zit on Wikipedia. Sr13 (T|C) 08:58, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Inflammatory rhetoric like calling a complex of pages "a big zit on Wikipedia" should be avoided. Newyorkbrad 22:57, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. "ugly" and "bulky" are not criteria here, and there are so many subpages that this list is in fact not ugly or bulky. People listed in a telephone directory are also "only" related by name but that's no reason to abolish them as they serve a useful purpose. Wikikiwi 10:38, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. It's an index page (or rather a series of index pages). As WP is not paper, size isn't an valid argument. -- User:Docu
• Conditional keep, if it is maintained and regularly updated - it could be a useful index.--Yannismarou 17:42, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - found this AfD from WikiProject Biography comment by Newyorkbrad. Not canvassing, but getting the opinions of people at a relevant WikiProject. Carcharoth 03:32, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Delete per JzG way up above. The comment by Wikikiwi is also perceptive in the comparison to a telephone directory. But that is something Wikipedia is not. Eluchil404 10:22, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Canvassing" Issue[edit]

• Note for closer: Jerzy has apparently undertaken some unfortunate canvassing on behalf of these lists, which may confuse consensus in the end. -- nae'blis 20:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • • For those who can't wait for the annotated version, exactly my User talk: edits related to this AfD may be viewed.
      --71.234.178.42 Jerzy•t 02:55 & 02:59, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      
  • Nae' wrote on my talk:

    Are you aware that it can be considered disruptive to consensus to "lobby" for keep in an AFD, as you did recently for the second nomination here? You may have made your task harder going forward, if it looks like this has tainted the natural balance of the discussion. -- nae'blis 20:34, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  --Jerzy•t 22:54, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  

  • _ _ I did not lobby. I did make well-informed users on the topic aware of the situation of this long-standing resource, which BTW has withstood not one, but about a half-dozen previous deletion attempts, each ending in a lopsided Keep vote, explicitly or implicitly covering the tree as whole -- a fact that would have come out in more careful decisions to vote for deletion. IMO the support and contributions it has received in the past indicate a valuable resource at risk.

  _ _ The significance of the risk particularly struck me as calling for an alert because i became aware of the deletion only the next day when i received a talk-page msg, and probably would not have, before the 5 days expired, without such a msg. (I monitor the LoPbN-tree via ((List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned))), a dynamic list of something over 700 LoPbN-tree pages that does not include the "unmaintained" page that is so fully developed that virtually no one but deletion nominators needs to edit it, and that Tl also provides a much more convenient means of access to pages.) Others may be in a similar position -- in contrast to the possibility of holiday-bored AfD browsers finding the opportunity for a deletion-frenzy with an "absolutely humongous" target to rouse their blood. I think it would be foolish to advocate that deletion of large structures require AfD tagging every page, and outrageous to rule out a reasonable mechanism for alerting a reasonable number of those who would have been alerted by that measure. My messages seem to me to fulfill that reasonable mechanism. But if there is sufficient concern that i made a bad choice, it would be reasonable to disallow the 13 votes, and restart the 5-day clock from zero at the time when the nominator suitably places an AfD notice (roughly imitating the look and feel of the AfD template) on WP:VP, which should include a high-profile notice of the disallowing of those votes and their caster's option of responding to the VP notice by recasting them. However, it should be expected that this would ensure that any future editor who seeks unfair "canvassing" advantages will organize it by EMail or other private media, instead of leaving the public record that my effort left.

  _ _ While i drew the attention of those who had previously voted to their previous position, in presenting them a lk to their respective previous arguments, and described to some one basis of my concern, i asked no one to vote for retention nor to make their "weighing in" conditional on continuing to support retention. I will, within the next 12 hours, provide below a list of lks to those 14 edits by me, to make firsthand examination of my wording convenient.

  _ _ It seems to me that the appropriateness of my action can probably be gauged to some extent by looking at the results of these messages to this doubtlessly quite admin-heavy group of 14: i left messages for 14 colleagues, of whom 10 responded only with (IIRC) sober responses here, 1 responded by echoing my holiday greeting, sending family news, and responding soberly here, and 3 made no response on this page or my talk page. (Let me be explicit: none of these 14 raised a concern here or to me about the propriety of my request to them.) To further answer the concern, i will ask those three to indicate here any procedural misgiving that played a role in keeping them for voting, and i will inform you which of them have saved edits since my posting -- since one doing so ensures their being notified to look at the msg (mine) on their respective talk page.

  _ _ At this point, i think questioning the 13 on their talk pages (as opposed to via this page) would be an unreasonable disturbance, but of course that should not be up to me. I ask only that anyone who thinks they need to be interrogated discuss it here, and that that not be pursued without agreement on a plan for minimizing the disturbance of those of the 13 who fail to respond to this discussion.
  --Jerzy•t 22:54, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  

New vote here moved above newly delineated section, to with other votes.

• Keep - found this AfD from WikiProject Biography comment by Newyorkbrad. Not canvassing, but getting the opinions of people at a relevant WikiProject. Carcharoth 03:32, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - also saw the comment on the Biography talk page. This could be very valuable as a way to track recent changes in Biography articles. I might myself favor it being broken up into different types of groupings, but that's really irrelevant to whether it should stay or not. Badbilltucker 18:05, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

---

The following tabulation will assist those who want to review the effect of my notification to other editors of the existence of this debate:

• 00:37, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:KF (AfD for LoPbN)

  Simply my acknowledgment of a colleague's notification that the AfD was underway, with a "[sigh]" (meant to suggest "There's no avoiding the need to deal with these repeatedly."). I note that i implied (above) that i heard much later than this about the nomination, bcz i carelessly relied on the timestamp of my first edit on the AfD sub-page.

• Msgs to various recently active Keep voters in the '05 Dec AfD
  • 08:28, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Superm401 (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Responded with a "weak Keep" vote including three reservations.

  • 08:52, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Interiot (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Includes result of my confusion about why this editor's name was so familiar, failing to recognize their (later?) association with a user-profiling tool; this user made no response i am aware of.

  • Two edits (combined effect) in quick succession, including holiday greeting and family inquiry.
    • 09:00, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Marine 69-71
    • 09:03, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Marine 69-71 (→Feliz Año - whoops)

    Response was Keep (while acknowledging costs); this user and i have since exchanged further messages unrelated to the AfD, tho following up on other aspects of this two-edit message.

  • 09:07, 1 January 2007 (hist) (diff) User talk:Andjam (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Response was a non-vote comment (that sounds to me like leaning to retention, in case that matters to someone).

    • Yes, I am leaning towards retention. I probably would have !voted keep if it weren't for the fact I was canvassed. That being said, the fact that those proposing deletion did not mark List of people by name: Bra as being up for deletion should be noted. I'm not going to assume bad faith. Instead, I'll argue that the two cancel each other out. Andjam 10:20, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Msgs to various recently active Keep voters in the '04 Oct VfD on List of people by name: Db-Dd
  • Two edits (combined effect) in quick succession,
    • 09:20, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Andrewa (New AfD on LoPbN)
    • 09:26, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Andrewa (→New AfD on LoPbN - correct careless boilerplating)

    Response was a Keep vote.

  • 09:24, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Mikkalai (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Response was a Keep vote.

  • 09:31, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Gtrmp (New AfD on LoPbN)

    No response.

• 16:06, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Eliyak (New AfD on LoPbN)

  Message to the recent creator of ((LoPbN Entry)); response was a Keep vote.

• Messages to users who stand out as contributors to large numbers of LoPbN-tree pages in the last few days:
  • 16:20, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:John Broughton (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Response was Keep vote

  • 16:31, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Dale Arnett (New AfD on LoPbN)

    No response.

  • 16:33, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Sue Anne (New AfD on LoPbN)

    No response.

  • 16:50, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Richard Pinch (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Response was Keep vote

  • 17:14, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:RodC (New AfD on LoPbN)

    Response was Keep vote.

  • 17:24, 1 January 2007 (diff) User talk:Merovingian (New AfD on LoPbN)

    I invoked his "long-sustained work on the LoPbN tree" beginning over 3 years ago; response was a Keep vote.

• 18:07, 1 January 2007 (hist) (diff) User talk:Chrislk02 (AfD for LoPbN)

  My message to a relatively new editor, who had taken enough care to ask well thot out questions on LoPbN stylistics. Response was Keep vote.

Careful readers will note some small errors in the statistics that i previously quoted from my hand tabulations without checking them against the records cited in this message.

I submit that the clear positions stated by those who previously voted should not be disregarded simply bcz they didn't happen to notice the capricious reopening of the closed debates, and that (with the possible exceptions of Eliyak and Chrislk02) the remaining editors i contacted are a good sampling of, and much fewer in number than, those who would have taken note of the AfD during its 5 days if it were legalistically posted on all 700+ pages whose deletion was requested. Eliyak & Chrislk02, tho not typical, are better qualified than average to grasp the issues, and can only improve this process, in which the numbers are only a valuable guideline, with closing admins exhorted to consider them only in the context of the relative quality of the Keep and Del arguments.
--Jerzy•t 08:41, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• I said i would query 3 colleagues i left msgs with, who did not respond; there were actually 4. I expected there would me more interest than has been apparent, so i will follow thru by imposing on their attention, only if there is some indication of such interest.
  --Jerzy•t 04:57, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  

• All of the four editors i contacted about this AfD who have not responded on this page have saved edits since receiving their respective messages, and none has responded on either their talk page or mine.

I seem to have stimulated an admirably conscientious and reserved colleague into speaking. Here's my msg to the four:

== Notice of Process Inquiry re my msg to you, "New AfD on LoPbN" ==

_ _ A colleague has questioned the wisdom and/or propriety of my messages to you and to 14 others, each a retention-voter in a previous LoPbN AfD and/or recently showing heavy interest in LoPbN. For the benefit of the eventual caller of the current AfD, and secondarily as it reflects on my individual behavior and judgement as a Wikipedian, i have undertaken to place this 2nd message before you and the three others who have not acknowledged my respective earlier msgs to you-all.

_ _ I defended my actions in part by asserting the responses to my talk-page messages do not support misgivings on the part of those recipients, while admitting that the non-responding recipients might have been inhibited from responding at least in part by just such misgivings. At my own initiative, i am making this second contact to ensure that at least knowledge of the process question informs your choice to remain silent or comment on the AfD subpage.

_ _ The AfD nomination is stamped 15:44, 31 December 2006; 5x24 hours expires at 15:44, 5 January 2007, approximately (as i post this on the AfD sub-page) whoops, an hour ago, with closer attention of course more likely after midnite UTC, 8 hours hence. I assume potential closers will give it at least a full day from now if any of you have not saved edits between now and then.
--~~~~

--Jerzy•t 17:25, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Size-Challenged Browsers Can Participate By Editing This Section[edit]

• This page reaches 32 KB with this edit. Some users will be unable to edit the page as a whole, but they can edit in this section. Courteous colleagues will check here for such edits, and place them in sequence at the end of the main section (or otherwise as those contributing here indicate, in order to respond among other responses to the same previous msg).
  --Jerzy•t 22:54, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  

• Keep. I think a good bit of maintenance should be automatic, and have proved that it's feasible User:Alvestrand/LoP Experiment, but a hand-edited list is MUCH better for "irregular" data like names than a completely automatic one. BTW, the name of this page is wrong; it shoudl be 7th nomination, not 2nd. --Alvestrand 19:00, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. It is interesting to note that polar-opposite arguments are given by delete proponents, i.e., the list is too bulky, and it also does not include enough of the names. --Slyguy 21:26, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ironically, the problems are not diametrically opposed, and hence can both be true. -- nae'blis 21:31, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • _ _ I stretch the don't-further-edit rule here, by posting my last few hour's work, that i completed as nae' sent me notice of calling the AfD as Keep. I'll try to compile the views here in the Talk:LoPbN structure.

  _ _ Alvestrand has indeed so proven. The primary barriers to it that are currently visible to me are

  1. the plethora of unmaintained Category:Living people tags, whose effect can be observed e.g. among 10 entries for Jonathons (altho i cannot find other examples that i thot i recalled, suggesting that someone's systematic work against this problem has had at least a temporary success),
  2. the info that probably needs to be manually added to any software for traversing the Category:People tree, in light of descendants of it that are not bio articles
  3. perhaps the likelihood of cycles that would be encountered in attempting to traverse Category:People as if it were a DAG.

  (I assume that the recent introductions of ((LoPbN Entry)), ((Deln trk list entry)), and at least one family of permanently rare Tls could be handled as a series of SMOPs using a registry of LoPbN-entry Tls.)

  _ _ Another contributor above mentioned ((Persondata)), potential enhanced versions of which i regard as

  1. a potential substitute for explicit Cat tags for any Category:People-descendant Cat, and
  2. close to a prime mover for the automatic generation of a resource that could be indistinguishable, by non-editors, from the current LoPbN. Note that this does not contradict Alv's deprecation of a "completely automatic" scheme: my proposal is for moving the manual work from one entry (or in some cases several entries) the central list to the individual bio's Persondata markup. Nor does it have to imply abolition of LoPbN rdlks, even tho they by definition have no Persondata markup. (It would also need
     1. a small database of "sounds similar to" and "may sound identical to" relationships among surnames and perhaps given names, and
     2. another of more complicated relationships re transliteration or (at least) Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations of the same Chinese character, and the variety of established romanizations of each, such as i have hinted at for the name Li (李) in List of people by name: name Li#People named Li (which should in due time mention the character, if not w/ a lk):

        This may be a transliteration of one of

        various Chinese surnames that are each also transliterated as one or more of Lǐ, Lí, Lì, Lai, Lee, Lei, or Lie; or

        various Vietnamese surnames transliterated as one or more of Lý or Lê.

        This may sound like a Korean surname transliterated as Lee, I, Rhee, Ri, or Yi., and

     3. perhaps, either permanently or as an interim measure, structural information, analogous to that about pages that is implicit in the layout of ((List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned))), but covering section and (if used, as i advocate) multi-level bullet-lists as well.
  3. a solution (applicable for bios only), to the non-bio-descendant & cycle problems mentioned above,
  4. an equally natural vehicle for serving, for bios, the purpose of the perpetual fata morgana of a flat view of a category's descendants (which i suspect reflects the apparently intractable problem of keeping the Cats within the specs of a DAG): subject to standardization LoPbN of nationality and occupational terminology (presently diffident but often visible), and tightening up slightly the vital-stats format, maintenance such as deciding that a particular person has only three causes of notability rather than five could remove them from 3 lists each for their birth and death years and decades, by nationality and among all nationalities. I hasten to add that some of these lists would correspond to Cats without subCats, so that the list would offer no advantage over the Cats, and others would never or seldom be used; by generating the various lists (and single-page or single-screen portions of lists) on demand (and caching the results under discard-LRU discipline), we would extend the powerful principle that WP is not paper by providing access to information that is not only not occupying paper, but not occupying storage dedicated to it.

--Jerzy•t 23:06, 5 January 2007 (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.