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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. The category serves the purpose just the same and there's no compelling argument to keep. Kwsn (Ni!) 03:35, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of fictional amateur detectives

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

This is a case where the list just basically duplicates the category. And the excessive linking to external sites (or one external site in particular) make this more of a linkfarm than an appropriate article. Corvus cornix 22:20, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Keep if the only argument anyone has is that this list is redundant with the category. If anyone has a better argument I will think about looking at the article, and make a comment of some sort. But a categorisable subject should have an equivalent list, absent other considerations. AndyJones 13:57, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete. Category is better in this case, and I agree with Kevinalewis that all of the similar lists in Category:Lists of fictional detectives should also be considered for deletion. Crazysuit 03:07, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete List is unmaintainable and does not add anything beyond what a category provides. Edward321 04:50, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Critique of the above !votes:
    • Basically duplicates the category. Two responses:
      • Duplicating a category is not a deletion criterion. As my vote says above, in the absence of other considerations an appropriate category should have an equivalent list. This is because the list has scope for expansion in a way a category doesn't: for example it can contain annotations and red-links, both good things. For example, it can cross-reference to the creator and first appearance of a character, as this one does.
      • Clearly this list does more than duplicate the category, since the article contains columns x-reffing the creator of the character and the work in which the character first appeared.
    • Excessive external linking ... linkfarm. Inappropriate external linking is a matter for cleanup, not deletion.
    • Agree with nom. Why?
    • Don't find first appearance column to be much use. You'll have to explain this to me. Surely if you write an encyclopedia article on a literary character one of the first things you type is "...he first appeared in...".
    • not excessively precise. Lack of excessive precision (whatever that would be) is a matter for cleanup, not deletion.
    • category contains more items ...cleanup, again...
    • category is more useful and Category is better in this case. Irrelevant. We have no need to make a choice between a category and a list. We can and should (nay: we can and do) have both.
    • Delete as above. Good argument, soundly reasoned.
    • Delete per nominator. Ditto. Well thought-out.
    • [Other articles] should be considered for deletion. No. This article and other lists which are useful navigational tools should be preserved and expanded. Wikiprojects involved in the area of wikipedia in question (detective fiction in this case) should be encouraged to take the navigational lists within their remit under their wing.
    • Unmaintainable. Bizarre argument. I have no idea what you mean by this or why you imagine this list is unmaintainable: but if you can explain your rationale here, I will be happy to explain to you (by cross-reference to various featured lists where appropriate) why you are wrong.
    • Does not add anything beyond what a category provides. Except, of course, for the information it does provide which isn't in the category. If what you actually meant by this vote is "the information it adds beyond what a category provides isn't valuable" then that is what you should say, and explain why you hold that view, with which I will disagree. AndyJones 18:05, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I have to recognize that, based on the thorough and helpful comments of AndyJones immediately above, that I don't understand the issue here as well as I thought I did. I think I based my suggestion on the knowledge of the way that I use Wikipedia but it now seems fairly clear to me that other people use it in a way that I hadn't considered; I felt the list was redundant but I am not certain of that now. I would ask that an administrator take my ignorance into account when making a decision; this is the first instance I've had on commenting on an AfD for a list.
That being said, though, there was some reason I said what I did, and I hope to make that clear in case it helps anyone. When I suggested that I didn't find the "first appearance" column to be much use, my reason was that, if I wanted to know what the first appearance of Miss Marple was, I would go to the Miss Marple article and look there for that information, because that is where I would logically expect to find it. My reasoning for the existence of the list was that it would be used by people who were interested in finding information about amateur detectives of whom they were not previously aware, and after I tested that assumption by going to the page that lists the pages that are tagged with the category, I found that that page was much more helpful in that respect. As I suggested above, I think I use Wikipedia in a certain way that I now suspect may not be shared by everyone. If I was looking for more information about fictional amateur detectives, I'd go to the page for a character with which I was familiar, find the relevant category tag, and use that tag to find all the articles in that category. However, I now recognize that other people find the list format to be more intuitively useful and so, if people find it useful, by all means let's retain it.
And the reason I suggested that the list was not "excessively precise" is that, in two instances, I felt the first appearance datum was ... less than precise. The first appearance of Miss Marple is in a short story which is earlier than the novel cited in the list, and giving the first appearance of Jessica Fletcher as "Murder, She Wrote" doesn't give any precise information about what the first episode was, which is what I would have wanted to find. The more precise information is found in the respective articles.
Thanks to the other contributors to this discussion for improving my knowledge of why and how people use such lists, and I apologize for any imprecision I've lent to this discussion. Accounting4Taste 21:11, 1 November 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.
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