Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of 1974 Macropædia articles (2nd nomination)

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. Courcelles (talk) 01:04, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of 1974 Macropædia articles[edit]

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Wikipedia is not a directory. In addition, this "article" has been here for three years without having gotten past the "A"s. And this could be construed as a copyright violation of Macropaedia's intellectual property. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 20:15, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. —Cliff smith ^talk 23:39, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete for all those reasons - DavidWBrooks (talk) 20:47, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Pointless article, although there is no legal precedent for the posting of tables of contents being a copyright violation. --erachima talk 21:06, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep, for the reasons discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of 1974 Macropædia articles. As a summary of contents, it is not a copyright violation. As to the rest: The Britannica's choices of what to write about in Macropædia are informative, and this list (with its links to the corresponding articles in Wikipedia) could be useful as one way of identifying and evaluating articles on key subjects; this list could thus be seen as a significant top-level organizational tool. In contrast to my "keep" !vote at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of 2007 Macropædia articles, however, my !vote here is "weak", because of Everard Proudfoot's legitimate observation that this list is still stuck in the A's after 3 years. Given the much larger number of articles in the 1974 edition of Macropædia, it is concededly questionable whether this list will get to the point where it is truly useful. Still, if WP:NORUSH means what it says, the incompleteness of the list is not grounds for deletion. --Arxiloxos (talk) 22:03, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as Wikipedia is not a directory. Armbrust ^Talk _Contribs 10:03, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - This a directory. -- Whpq (talk) 14:25, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This does not fall under any of the definitions of directory as specified in WP:NOT. It is not, as is alleged in the opening statements here, a directory. NOT links that entry to our article Directory (databases), where it is described as "as used in computing and telephony, refers to a repository or database of information which is heavily optimized for reading, under the assumption that data updates are very rare compared to data reads". As this is not a repository of information heavily optimized for computing or telephony reading, it is not a directory. Nor is a table of contents necessarily a directory; the pair serve separate purposes, the former reader-focused summary and structure, the latter for index and search. This is a list, which, under guideline and policy, is an eminently acceptable category of items, and has been recognized both in our Manual Style and the Featured Content processes. It is, moreover, a list on a culturally and historically substantive subject: the content and coverage of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the most important encyclopedia of the twentieth century. The notion that this constitutes a copyright violation is incorrect and invalid. G.W. (Talk) 16:53, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WillowW's comments at the first deletion discussion are worth reproducing in full. They address all the substantive criticism leveled here.

Keep with rationale. Thank you for bringing these articles to AfD, since such articles should be considered scrupulously, especially when there is a hint of WP:NOR and copyvio. However, I feel that deletion is not justified, for the following reasons:
The contents of the Macropædia provide insight into the topics that the Encyclopædia Britannica considers to be the hallmark topics of science, history and culture. Several Wikipedians have praised the utility of these lists; see for example the latest entry on Talk:List of 2007 Macropædia articles.

WP:NOT#IINFO does not apply here, since it does not mention this category of information. Moreover, these articles are not merely database dumps, but place the information in context, with links to other, more explanatory articles.

These article are not original research, unless looking up the number of pages or the year of references is. If that were deletion-worthy, a vast number of other WP articles would have to be changed; how often do we read something like, "X published a 370-page book in 1976"? If the consensus is that page numbers and year references are OR, I could delete the offending columns from the tables.

These articles are not copyvio, per this memo. Facts cannot be copyrighted, a principle that allows Tables of Contents to be copied, as we often see on amazon.com and elsewhere. The titles of these articles are drawn only from the Macropædia's Tables of Contents.

I hope that these answers address all of your concerns. Thank you for your carefulness in maintaining Wikipedia's quality, Willow 08:23, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Reproduced. G.W. (Talk) 16:59, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

These are not facts, they are Encyclopedia Britanniaca's arrangement of those topics it considers worth covering. In addition, how useful is a list that contains less than 1/20th of all of the material it should cover, and hasn't been updated for three years? Everard Proudfoot (talk) 23:23, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not these are "facts" (a word that is nowhere used here, in the article, or in the relevant policy documents) has no bearing on this discussion. That said, it is a fact, however, that the editors chose a particular arrangement of topics it considered worth covering in the encyclopedia. It is a fact that each of those multivolume works was published with a consistent collection of articles. Other than that: uh, what are you talking about? :S G.W. (Talk) 23:41, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
How much effort do you think a person puts into a work that is threatened with deletion? This is labor-intensive work, and you would delete it even if it were complete, as you did in the case of the 2007-series article. G.W. (Talk) 23:41, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete it is just a table of contents, how is this helpful to anyone? If it's been here for over 1000 days without even getting 1/20th of the way finished with this, when would this be finished? Besides, Wikipedia is not a directory. Tavix | Talk 17:17, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom, and notability of this particular list is sparse. Them From Space 22:45, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
DELETE. WE ARE WP:NOT A DIRECTORY. LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE TO THINK SO BUT WE ARE NOT. JBsupreme (talk) ✄ ✄ ✄ 22:46, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Really? How is this encyclopedic?--LAA Fan 01:47, 21 July 2010 (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.