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 delete. L'Aquatique[talk] 19:06, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

List of ships[edit]

List of ships (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

A list of ships per se can not be notable unless it expands and explains in some manner the verifiable notability of the ships so listed. There are more ships in the world than you can shake a stick at. This list, the more so since only the warships have any sort of rationale for being in the list, can be argued very clearly to fail as an indiscriminate collection of information Fiddle Faddle (talk) 22:36, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Overly broad subject (indiscriminate). ChildofMidnight (talk) 23:04, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Some lists are good, and I wholeheartedly support, but this one requires serious OR to synthesise, unless more discriminating criteria can be set out. —Kan8eDie (talk) 23:09, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as this would be a perfect example of the "indiscriminate list". Bfigura ^(talk) 23:26, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• changing to Keep per the cleanup into a meta-list. --Bfigura ^(talk) 14:38, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep This is, as the introduction says, a list of ships with WP articles. But it isn't a complete list, and I dod not know the basis of the selection. there might be a point in a complete list, but there is a bit of a problem, because it's an accepted principle that a WP article can be written on any ship (that's ship, not boat)--that there is always enough documentation to show notability. The virtue of a list over a category is the usual one, of providing some context--but this has been done very irregularly. So the best thing to do might be to keep, and divide, and add some context. DGG (talk) 23:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. This list is indiscriminate in the sense that it could include any ship with an article and we have a lot of those. We already have a category to do this. A better solution would be to make a list of ships by country. If those were written using sortable tables and fields for the year of maiden voyage, decommision, builder and a notes section, we would definitely have an encyclopedic list that offers something a category doesn't. Applying that solution to this list simply doesn't work. It's too large. - Mgm|^(talk) 00:14, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On a side note the List of fictional ships while badly formatted, offers the work of fiction the ship comes from along with a year. Pushing that to a category would lose information, or at least would make finding it a lot harder. - Mgm|^(talk) 00:14, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete: Indiscriminate, practically infinite, unmaintainable. Much better served as a category. TallNapoleon (talk) 00:16, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as too broad/indescriminate. Now if this was a list of ships that wear bow ties... DENNIS BROWN (T) (C) 00:33, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Indiscriminate, likely to be overly long and unmaintainable. RayAYang (talk) 01:18, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Way way way too broad a criteria; so what if it's a list of ships with WP articles? In that case, it should be a category. 23skidoo (talk) 01:56, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - Completely indiscriminate, this is a category's purpose. — neuro^(talk) 04:55, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Torpedo — AAARRRRGHHHH! MuZemike (talk) 07:18, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. This is too big of a topic to maintain as a list; this is exactly why Wikipedia has categories. Majoreditor (talk) 05:49, 23 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: This looks like a candidate for WP:SNOW. TallNapoleon (talk) 20:36, 23 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and rewrite: Before you snowball this, consider that our guideline on stand-alone lists suggests that "lists that are too general or too broad in scope" can be "split into categories", which is "best done by sectioning the general page under categories. When entries in a category have grown enough to warrant a fresh list-article, they can be moved out to a new page, and be replaced by a See [[new list]] link. When all categories become links to lists, the page becomes a list repository or "List of lists" and the entries can be displayed as a bulleted list. For reference see Lists of people, which is made up of specific categorical lists." This is what should be done with this list. Note that the use of the word "categories" in the guideline is referring to "categories" in the general sense of categorized sections within the list, not to Wikipedia categories per se—See why the existence of Wikipedia categories is not a reason to delete lists. DHowell (talk) 04:29, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I've started the rewrite. Someone who types "List of ships" ought to be presented with something that will usefully redirect the reader to one of a plethora of more narrowly-defined lists which might be what the reader is looking for. So I've rewritten this to be a list of some of the various lists of ships which already exist on Wikipedia. This can be expanded to be a useful index to all the ship-related lists on Wikipedia, presented in a format more organized than can be done by Wikipedia's category system. DHowell (talk) 06:29, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Withdraw Nomination on the basis of the rewrite. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 07:05, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Before someone closes this because of the withdrawn nomination, can a few of the previous voters take a look at the new page and decide on how the new page looks? DARTH PANDA^duel 13:12, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Note that a withdrawn nomination is "just one editor, just one opinion." I have never seen it to be valid simply to close an AfD based on the withdrawal alone of the nominator. the person closing this should note that the article has changed so dramatically that previous arguments for deletion may no longer be valid, and should close it with the radical changes in mind. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 15:11, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• DELETE. Well at least the community has this one right. Too bad they can't do the same for cakes. JBsupreme (talk) 07:44, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per DHowell's rewrite. This list is no longer indiscriminate since it's a list of lists. Cunard (talk) 07:50, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

---

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Rjd0060 (talk) 16:18, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I know the consensus above was to delete, but that was all prior to a mass rewrite. I've relisted this and I'd assume that most people would agree that it should be kept at this point. See the old version compared to the new one. Much better and great job DHowell! - Rjd0060 (talk) 16:21, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, although before the re-write, this was an obvious delete, now its a definite keep. Good job on the re-write. Umbralcorax (talk) 16:24, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep - There is clearly a use for such a list now it has been changed. I hope it doesnt get deleted based on votes from before the changes were made. BritishWatcher (talk) 16:52, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Cease torpedo fire and change to a solid, boldface keep. The list of lists is a good way to go in this case, not to mention much more manageable. MuZemike (talk) 17:23, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Neutral (struck my earlier !vote) I'm not convinced of the usefulness of a list of lists, but it's not the clearly deleteable content it once was. - Mgm|^(talk) 17:43, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Massive re-write after the majority of "delete" votes means most of those arguments are no longer valid. List is now managable, and is basically a disambiguation page to various types of lists of ships. It should remain. Theseeker4 (talk) 17:57, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - appropriate navigational list at the moment.--Boffob (talk) 18:34, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Close this AFD: the list is now being edited into a compact Lists of ships which is quite an acceptable alternative. NVO (talk) 18:51, 26 November 2008 (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.