[WikiEN-l] Lists which are sheer nonsense

[Erik Moeller]

> Okay. People are actively editing [[List of songs whose title does not
> appear in their lyrics]]. Four or five people have assured me I am a rotten
> git for daring to question the necessity of this article, but I can't help
> it. I think the fact that people created, discussed, and edited this article
> is just wrong. Even worse, people I respect (e.g. Tannin and Tarquin) are
> working on this article.

Of course, we should have some criterion of usefulness, in addition to the  
simple requirement of verifiability. However, it is much harder to  
determine usefulness than verifiability. In the case of weird lists like  
this one, I'd like to hear a convincing argument who might want to look it  
up and why. If the answer is just the entertainment value, then I am  
inclined to be skeptical about the need for the list's existence.

Ironically, I can see a more plausible argument for a "List of left-handed  
US presidents" than one for this list, left-handedness being a phenomenon  
that has long been claimed (not sure if this is still the case) to be  
related to creativity.

I also agree with Cunctator that extracting this kind of data  
automatically is obviously a better solution than typing it by hand. Once  
again, in my category scheme, you would just write

[[Category:Left handed]]

below an article about a person, and when clicking that category, you  
would get a list of other persons in the same category. You could also  
have

[[Category:President]]

and could then do a query on pages which are in both categories. Same with  
[[Category:Drink]] and [[Category:Banana-based food]].

Regards,

Erik