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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. - Mailer Diablo 00:41, 29 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of people named John

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

Non-defining or trivial characteristic. This is a pointless list that serves no useful purpose. It could quickly grow to thousands of entries that would render it unreadable. WWGB 09:25, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Um, it's no more pointless than any other list. Besides, with sections and tabularized (sortable by date of birth and alphabetical), the list is perfectly navigable. ∞ΣɛÞ² (τ|c) 12:08, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect. This was branched out of John for no apparent reason, so I've redirected it back. Some of the given names should probably be removed but the rest, like the various Popes, are sound. —Xezbeth 09:35, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Um, why do popes get to be on the list but not other Johns? Don't be biased. ∞ΣɛÞ² (τ|c) 12:08, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Because popes are very frequently referred to simply by the single name, and other Johns are not. Listing every John Doe with the same prominence is biased. (Even the popes are borderline on disambiguation pages; it would probably be better to point common pope names to Names of popes.) --Piet Delport 20:40, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, well you would say that, since you wrote the "article". WWGB 12:13, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, is there any rationale behind this vote? (of course not...) /Blaxthos 12:55, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If you people bothered to actually research the history of John, you would see that List of people named John was made up of entries moved (not copied) from John (which someone else reverted). Why should some popes and other religions/"royal" and some generic Johns be allowed on the list and not others? Hypocritical bias. The list isn't an article, WWGB--hence why it's called a list! It should be fairly obvious why this was page was created--to free up John to actually refer to just John articles and not include lists of compound word articles (i.e. people with the first/last name of "John"). ∞ΣɛÞ² (τ|c) 16:49, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The reason, in case it's not obvious, why we have kings and popes named John but not any old Johnny -come-lately is that very few people are known by first name only. A list of all Johns, even all Johns who have Wikipedia articles, would be too broad to ever be even close to complete, making all inclusions arbitrary. Kings and Popes use one name only; John of England is basically never refered to as Jphn Plantagenet, even if that were a proper last name, hence it is reasonable to disambiguate him at John. Cash, Fogarty, Cena, Carson, Dalton, et al are not known simply as "John" to anyone but close friends. For them, if we use one name, we use last names, and it is at those articles that we disambiguate them. -R. fiend 00:30, 25 June 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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