Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canada/References

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 of the debate was redirect to Canada (and I will restore the history of this list as well). I would have called this a "delete" decision otherwise, because the idea of reference subpages has been rejected, and the Canada article already has this reference list in it. However the structuring of the references took place here, and to avoid any trouble with the GFDL requirements, the history needs to stay online. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:55, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Canada/References

Not a valid use of subpages per Wikipedia:Subpages#Allowed uses. We got rid of subpages from the article space 4 years ago. Reference pages like this, when corectly named, are only useful when a great many articles share the same references. The content of this page has already been moved back into the Canada article. --mav 15:09, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• Merge and delete as nom. --mav 12:44, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - Wikipedia:Subpages#Allowed uses is a guideline. Regarding the difference between a guideline and policy is, as quoted on that page, "Although it may be advisable to follow it, it is not policy. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus.". The Canada editors did not ignore the MOS guideline. Consultation was done with the MOS guidance in perspective, and decided that in this specific case, it was best not to follow it. The reason for this is two-fold. One is that there is a large amount of references, which in combination with the footnotes would make the bottom of the text very long. Secondly, the references are divided up into the sections they back up, so that the interested reader can find what they are looking for easily. This would however, make the table of contents on the first page overly long and complicated, so the decision was to place it in a subpage. -- Jeff3000 15:11, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Two things: / does not make a subpage in the article space. Thus this is simply a very oddly named page in the article namespace. This page, on its own, does not have any encyclopedic content. It can only be used as being part of the Canada article. The TOC being too long is not a reason to have a separate page; simply use ; in front of headings instead of ===. Making the article too long is also not a valid concern since Wikipedia:Summary style clearly makes a distinction between prose and non-prose content when talking about accepted article length. --mav
    • When I say too long, I'm not referring to the 32kb limit, I'm talking about the the electronic length of the page on a screen; the bottom of the text of the page becomes confusing and unreabable; generallly bad web style; webpages and HTML have been successful on the net because information has been able to be kept but not made unreadable. The information which is encyclopedic (references) is being kept one click away for accessibility of all the references and the footnotes. -- Jeff3000 15:24, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
      • That can be fixed by allowing reference sections to be collapsible like TOCs or simply change the MOS so that references are always the last section in articles. In other words, this is a technical problem that requires a technical solution. --mav 12:43, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
• keep Keeping references together allows users to easily print them out and use them, rather than hunting through many different articles. Rjensen 15:15, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
  • You misunderstand. All the references are still in the Canada article. What we have with this "Subpage" is two articles when only one article with a ==References== section is needed. --mav
    • You misunderstand Rjensen's point; Rjensen is pointing to accessibility of the References section, they are easier to print, and indeed view when they are not cluttered with all the rest of the text. -- Jeff3000 15:25, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
• Merge back references are seriously important for an encyclopedia article, but they can't be an encyclopedia article. This just can't stand. CanadianCaesar Cæsar is turn’d to hear 16:09, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
• Merge back into Canada. This is not a valid use of article space; it isn't an encyclopedia article. —Cuiviénen^T|C, Saturday, 20 May 2006 @ 16:18 UTC
• Merge back into Canada, not an article. --Terence Ong 16:30, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
• Merge back into Canada. If the article is too long, then split off sections into their own article, and take the references with them. That is the normal practice. Tyrenius 16:56, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
• Merge back and delete, I've never liked this separation of references from content even setting the subpage issue aside. Ideally these references will become footnotes, linked directly to the actual substance they're referencing, which will allow some of the unused ones to either be culled out or moved to a "further reading" section if they're significant. Bryan 18:21, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Oh, just saw that they're already merged back. Just plain delete, then. Most of the work appears to be already done. Bryan 18:22, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
    • FYI - This article contains numerous footnotes. The "References" section is a collection of all the works that are referred to in the footnotes. None of them would be appropriate for "Further Reading" since they are all referred to already in the text of the article. Cheers! User:The Disco King (not signed in) 204.40.1.129 17:16, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. I think that User:JesseW had discussed setting up referencing this way at one point. I'll drop a note on User talk:JesseW asking what came of the proposal. Jkelly 17:48, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
  • My opinion on references on seperate pages has changed somewhat. I strongly support going through an article, dividing it up into statements, then attempting to specifically verify each and every one of them, as a means of making sure of the accuracy of our articles, identifing useful references, and providing guidance on statements that may be unverifable. As this is a wiki, we should put the results of this type of work somewhere, so other people can help out with it. Where such material is placed is not something I feel strongly about. It could be at {{ARITCLENAME}}/References, Talk:{{ARTICLENAME}}/References, Wikipedia:Detailed Referencing/{{ARTICLENAME}}, or most anywhere else. The page in question here is not such a thing; it's a list of references (which is great!). I have no particular opinion on where it is located. Thanks for asking for my thoughts on this. JesseW, the juggling janitor 18:54, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

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.