Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of life extension-related topics

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 nomination was no consensus. Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 20:31, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

List of life extension-related topics

Listcruft. Category of articles is very badly defined. List had the potential to become huge. -- Koffieyahoo 04:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment to closing administrator - Note that Ben Best has extensive experience editing biological, medical, and life extension-related topics (see his user contributions), and is therefore especially qualified from among those participating in this discussion, to judge whether or not a list is useful for navigating the subject at issue. I also have strong familiarity with the subject the list supports as well, as my edits to the article life extension clearly show. I carefully constructed the list to support this subject, and every item on the list pertains in a direct and important way to the study of life extension (anti-aging) or the life extension movement. Please retain this useful tool for the following reasons: that we believe it will be useful to those who wish to study life extension, and that it will also be useful to us as (and to others who are) developers of this subject area on Wikipedia. Please give special consideration to our reasons stated below. Meanwhile note that based on their user contributions, those who voted to delete the list may not have a strong familiarity with the subject, and that a casual glance at the list by an editor inexperienced with this interdisciplinary field of applied science may not be a good indicator for deletion. Thank you. --Transhumanist 17:06, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete If anything, this would work fine as a category. joturner 04:40, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per above. Zos 04:42, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete yep, bad idea for a list. Might work as a catagory. Deleuze 04:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per above. Shorten the life of this category. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) -- Gogo Dodo 06:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - That the list may become huge is not a valid reason to delete it. By doing so, you are directly violating Wikipedia policy: Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. Here's a quote from that page:

There is a kind of feasible limit for individual article sizes that depends on page download size for our dialup readers and readability considerations for everybody (see Wikipedia:Article size). After a point, splitting an article into separate articles and leaving adequate summaries is a natural part of growth for a topic (see Wikipedia:Summary style). Some topics are covered by print encyclopedias only in short, static articles, and since Wikipedia requires no paper we can give more thorough treatments, include many more relevant links, be more timely, etc.

• commentary continued: The above policy applies to lists as well as to conventional articles. There are some extremely large lists on Wikipedia, and some have grown so large that they have been split up into several pages. This list on life extension topics compares favorably with the indices of books on the subject. Because of this, the list should be kept, and refined over time as we learn through trial and error how to optimize the list's support of the featured subject. I didn't create it to be cruft, and I'm committed to making the list as useful as possible. It is incredibly frustrating to have some stranger who is unfamiliar with the topic come along and kill it with an axe rather than constructively discuss how to improve the list on its talk page. No effort whatsoever was taken to improve the approach, just "Articles for Deletion." Yeah, that's real constructive. --Transhumanist 18:14, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• With that being said, why don't we discuss how to modify the list so that it optimally supports the theme subject? What has to be done to the list to make it valuable enough to keep? No objections other than potential future size have been presented, so I have no idea where to begin. And since I was closely following the instructions from Wikipedia:List guideline, I'm completely baffled as to why you would want to delete the list. Is there something political going on here? The reason I ask is because here is what the guideline article has to say about creating a list:

Lists on Wikipedia have three main purposes:

Information

The list may be a valuable information source. This is particularly the case for a structured list. Examples would include lists organized chronologically, grouped by theme, or annotated lists.

Navigation

If the user is browsing without a specific research goal in mind, they would likely use the See also lists. If the user has a specific research goal in mind, and there is only one or two words that are used to describe the research topic, and they know exactly how to spell the word, they would probably use the search engine box. If the user has some general idea of what they are looking for but does not know the specific terminology, they would tend to use the lists of related topics (also called list of links to related articles).

Development

Some lists are useful for Wikipedia development purposes. The lists of related topics give an indication of the state of the 'pedia, the articles that have been written, and the articles that have yet to be written.

Like categories, lists can be used for keeping track of changes in the listed pages, using the Related Changes feature. Unlike a category, a list also allows detection of deletion of pages from it, and, more generally, a history of its contents is available.

• As you can see, I've created this list of related topics as a navigation tool, and to be a survey of the subject area (hence its informational value), and also as a tool to indicate the state of the 'pedia in that subject area (notice its redlinks). It also serves well for monitoring this subject just as mentioned in the guideline. I've done everything by the book, yet here we are. I respectfully request that you reverse your positions and give this (and the other lists I have created a chance to prove themselves useful). Please give this matter some thought. Thank you. --Transhumanist 18:14, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

• First of all, the number of redlinks is minimal, they're basically in the "Theories of aging" sublist. Second of all, a list has to have some added value above just navigation, because that alone is perfectly doable with the help of categories. The added value usually comes from either a maintainance perspective or a navigation perspective. Given the nature of this list I would say it was created with the second perspective in mind. However, to be useful from that perspective requires the subject list to be narrowly defined, very long list are not useful in this case, and that is simply not the case here. -- Koffieyahoo 01:09, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

The redlinks are minimal only because you nominated deletion before more could be added. In that sense you've totally discounted the fact that it was an ongoing effort. --Transhumanist 06:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

• In whatever way you look at it, the number of red-links will always be dwarfed by the temendously huge number of existing articles that should be on the list given its underspecified topic. -- Koffieyahoo 06:27, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
  • that does not diminish the list's usefulness pertaining to redlinks. And the topic is not underspecified. I have extensive knowledge of this field and atest to the list's applicability. --Transhumanist 17:06, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

• Keep - this is better as a list, as it is too broad for categorization. Useful navigation tool. (But make it "life-extension-related".) Outriggr 23:04, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

• • Each topic on the list pertains to Life Extension in an important and fairly direct way. --Transhumanist 14:21, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

• I am not arguing that (and incidentally, am on your side. I tire of seeing AfD's that want to delete one arbitrary article out of a huge precedent-setting group of similar articles). I said that because, if this were turned into a category, then you'd have someone doing a Category for Deletion because the category was "original research" or such—in the view that categories are purely categorical (ie. member "x" of category "Life Extension" implies that "x" extends life), and are not mechanisms for grouping items about a topic. In CfD's I've participated in, the above view seems to lead to someone saying "it should be a list". So you have made a list, and now someone wants to delete that. Outriggr 23:34, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

• Keep - I was sympathetic to the view that it could be a category (and I do think that there should be a life-extension category), but the list is too broad for that or any category and yet is useful as a tool for those interested in finding relevant subjects (as I am). It would be an awesome task and somewhat inappropriate to include every item in this list in a life-extension category --Ben Best 17:09, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

BTW, if this list is not deleted I will create a life-extension category (unless someone beats me to it). --Ben Best 17:12, 14 July 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.