Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aulus Postumius Albinus (propraetor 110 BC)

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 redirect to Aulus Postumius Albinus (consul 99 BC). If anyone wishes to merge content from behind the redirects, they are welcome to do so at their own volition. Daniel (talk) 06:55, 21 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Aulus Postumius Albinus (propraetor 110 BC)[edit]

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The two men in question are identical with Aulus Postumius Albinus (consul 99 BC), as is explained in the article. The offices ascribed to each, "propraetor 110 BC" and "praetor 89 BC" are also incorrect. Avilich (talk) 01:55, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect. It's the same man, but the other titles are valid search terms considering Postumius is sometimes listed separately, especially in the older literature, such as the RE you cite. T8612 (talk) 03:54, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I had hoped nobody would suggest to redirect. Again, the offices are both wrong. 'praetor 89 BC' appears in no source whatsoever and simply cannot be right. 'propraetor 110 BC' is not only incorrect as well, but that page in turn also has two incorrect redirects, one giving him the unattested cognomen 'Magnus' and the other spelling his name as 'Postimius'. All of these seem completely unhelpful. Avilich (talk) 04:16, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as cleanup of superfluous and inaccurate information. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 04:33, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 05:38, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 05:38, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment This is not a job for an AFD, this should be handeled with a merge discussion.★Trekker (talk) 11:32, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It is, as the one above accurately said, "cleanup of superfluous and inaccurate information", and thus most certainly a job for AfD. Avilich (talk) 16:46, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: besides the possibility that there are at least two separate men here, Broughton does identify the one from 110 as legatus pro praetore, which would seem to justify the title, although I see nothing in Broughton to indicate that the one from 89 was praetor in that year—it could be that he was simply known to have been of praetorian rank, which description seems less likely if he had been consul ten years earlier. All three entries could certainly be handled in one article simply by indicating that these two could possibly be different men, or have been so treated in some scholarship—but as ★Trekker says, that's really merger, not deletion. I'm unsure as to whether the former titles are plausible redirects, although the one from 89 seems less likely to be. Remember, the justification for keeping a redirect isn't that it's a correct alternative, but less useful title, but that someone might look for it, not realizing that the person described is under another title. And if someone is identified as such in well-known sources, including older literature, then it's a plausible search term, even if later scholarship suggests that he was the same as another man. P Aculeius (talk) 15:23, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
None seems particularly plausible: 99% of people who find the article will have done so through a link on another wikipedia page or through the disambiguation page. Practically no one will know beforehand what a propraetor even is, and, even if they do, they will not think to search for it outright. Unless a redirect is spontaneously created or accounts for a possible spelling mistake, it is not 'plausible'. The fact that one simply exists already does not mean it's plausible or desirable either. The problem here is simple: we have two lower-quality articles which simply repeat information from an already existing one, under a mistaken label. The solution is natural and obvious: delete the two articles. Arguing that for some reason this should not be done, to the possible, non-immediate and brief benefit of some hypothetical person in the future, is an unreasonable stretch and unnecessary overcomplication. Avilich (talk) 19:39, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Also agree that this is the task of an article merge + redirect and is not for AfD. Ford MF (talk) 18:43, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No, both articles have duplicate, incorrect and misleading information, they need to be deleted. Avilich (talk) 20:02, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Merge them all -- It may all be the same man. At worst we end off with a dab-page covering more than one person. Peterkingiron (talk) 18:44, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Have you read anything I said above? All the alternative labels are wrong and misleading. This is "cleanup of superfluous and inaccurate information", the natural and simple solution is to delete. Avilich (talk) 19:00, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Delete, redirect or merge?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 21:03, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, once again. This should not have been complicated. We have three articles which represent the same person, two of which are simply incomplete, low-quality duplicates of the third, and thus 100% redundant. The obvious solution is to simply delete the two redundant and incorrect articles. The second to respond above said all that was needed to be said: "Delete as cleanup of superfluous and inaccurate information". Merging only applies when distinct (not identical) content is being transferred to another page; its clueless proponents have either not elaborated on their reasons or seem to have misunderstood the point here. None of the two wrong titles are particularly plausible as search terms (as I argued above), ergo no reason for redirecting (it's not Wikipedia's job to account for every single 'plausible' mistake). This is all a simple cleanup measure like any other. Avilich (talk) 23:45, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Check your nomination statement and I think you will see that you nowhere said the articles were 100% redundant, only that the titles were wrong in two of them. I can understand your frustration, but your nomination is does not explain the actual problem requiring deletion. And deletion is not cleanup, so you should find a better word. Srnec (talk) 03:16, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, I said they're the same person, so they're redundant. Your linked essay has nothing to do with the issue at hand, since articles duplicating content do not meet notability standards and do not qualify for speedy keeping. The only reason these three articles exist is because it was formerly thought that each referred to a different person; this is now known not to be the case, so this deletion just so happens to be a cleanup measure. Avilich (talk) 03:25, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

They are only redundant if the information in them completely overlaps. If there is good info in one that is not in the other, then they should be merged and only afterwards should we consider whether a certain redirect ought to be deleted. This is why people are saying "merge". Wrong titles are normally fixed through WP:RM, bad redirects through WP:RFD and the normal procedure for handling articles that are about the same subject is to merge them. Your nomination fails to give a reason to delete and that is why this has turned out to be complicated. You have to make the argument, not leave it to others to figure it out. You are calling people clueless but you're the one who was supposed elaborate your reasons at the start, not after relisting. Srnec (talk) 05:00, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The information just so happens to completely overlap indeed, and none of the nominated articles are too big that one can't figure it out after skimming through for a few seconds. My description of the editors' cluelessness is based not just on this discussion but also external interactions with them elsewhere too. That none of them even bothered to explicitly say merge, but instead labeled their ill-informed misgivings under a comment out of insecurity, just proves my point. The standard policy for handling duplicates is to delete them. Avilich (talk) 15:11, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Labelling people clueless and insecure is surely a winning strategy in a discussion. Srnec (talk) 01:08, 16 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

So is not doing it in this case; might as well tell the truth. Those I have in mind probably won't look here again to defend their own encumbering arguments anyway, so whatever, it makes no difference. Avilich (talk) 01:50, 16 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Srnec (talk) 03:16, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Redirects. I rest my case, if a historian like Münzer considered there were three Aulii Postumi at the same time, it is still valid to have these redirects, even if he was obviously wrong. Moreover Broughton lists Aulus Postumius Albinus as "legatus pro praetore" in 111 BC, a distinction that is not that obvious. Same for the "praetor 89 BC", it's wrong, yes, but there was an Aulus Postumius commanding that year too. Finally, Wikipedia has contaminated a large part of the internet and people may be looking for these search terms. I don't think it hurts to create redirects, just to prevent inexperienced editors from creating these articles in the future. T8612 (talk) 19:20, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There are endless possibilities for alternative links if one is going to account for every single 'plausible' mistake in the realm of possibility. An inexperienced editor might create just about any of these, and it's surely more practical to simply clean up a mess in the rare occasion one is done rather than try to preempt every single one of them. People will eventually stop looking for those search terms once they're removed from the source of contamination, wikipedia.

Münzer's entries are not available on WS so the reach of his conclusions are limited. The RE does not, incidentally, give any of the three a title/label (only a number), as the nominated articles do. 'Praetor 89' comes solely from a misinterpretation of Plutarch's description of Albinus as a 'praetorius', but Orosius calls him 'consularis', so from this one could create a new (wrong) redirect, 'consul 89', and we again return to the original argument of where to draw the limit. 'Propraetor 110' is perhaps conceivable, but it spans multiple years (covering yet more potential redirects) and most people don't know what that is, and as such won't search for it. In any event, both 'propraetor 110' and 'praetor 89' had next to zero views before I nominated them for deletion, so both formulations are as unlikely as any other. Avilich (talk) 22:11, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If turned into redirects, they should be tagged with R from incorrect name. Srnec (talk) 01:08, 16 January 2021 (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.