[WikiEN-l] Deletions, lists, etc?

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

"The Cunctator" wrote

> I'm mildly sorry for taking the shortcut of asking the list about things I
> could figure out by wading through the insanely complicated policy pages,
> but here goes-- if you think a page that went through the AfD process was
> wrongly deleted, what is the proper action?

There is a process, which is apparently full of twisty little passages, all of which sound the same.

> How wrong is it for an admin to undelete a page?

If you believe 0WW, it's wrong.

> Also, are we trying to get rid of all "list" pages?

This is actually a good question.

I'm not trying to rid enWP of lists, though in a sense they have to some extent had their day. Their functionality is still much superior to categories, in some important respects.

One of those respects is that one could _in principle_ annotate lists, entry-by-entry, justifying each claim. Something of the sort goes on at [[list of polymaths]], I gather, though I don't follow it in detail. No one knows what 'polymath' really means, so in the end we'd get out of that a fairly interesting article of who said of whom and when that polymath applied. That's OK, I think.

Another example in which I'm involved is [[editio princeps]]. I'm kind of staggered that I haven't just come across a list of when the classical Greek and Roman authors were first printed. So, anyway, there's a list being compiled there, mostly from internal enWP evidence. Technically it's fairly illegal to use other articles to source a list like that. In practice (a) the material, if from 1911 EB as it typically is, is highly reputable anyway; and (b) collating such a list is a very good first step, because checking an edition was produced in Venice in 1495 or something of a specific author is a short Google away. In other words, fact-checking something specific is convenient enough.

There have always been some really junky lists around, and some of those could reasonably be axed via AfD. It is not a solution just to use categories, certainly. That hides the problem, rather than solving it: categories look more trustworthy, but some are real rubbish. (Like the Erdos number fiasco ...)

Charles

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