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 NO CONSENSUS TO DELETE. I don't see this as a straight Keep because there are too many hedges around some of the keep comments - not to many editors want to keep the article as it is, rather (those that don't want to straight-out delete it) desire some fixments, which may or (more probably) may not be forthcoming. No prejudice against a renomination at some future time. Herostratus 03:10, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Greatest Hits

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Comment. I clean-up a lot of disambiguation pages, but this dab page is problematic. The page's purpose is namely to help people disambiguate "Greatest Hits" albums. After I had cleaned up this page per MoS:DAB and went for the disambiguation of pages under Special:Whatlinkshere/Greatest_Hits, I noticed pretty fast that this dab page was NO help and that more and more to-disambiguate GH albums (non-existant yet) of rather less notable artists showed up and should also be included on the dab page now. Out of curiosity, I checked Special:Allpages/Greatest_Hits (a index page that lists all existing wikipedia articles starting with the letters "Greatest_Hits"), and that list was enormous. I am nominating this dab page not to get it deleted in the first place but to gain consensus whether it should be trimmed or to get to know more ways to make the dab page more helpful for disambiguation purposes. Because as it stands now, it doesn't fulfill its purpose and makes disambiguation even harder. (See also Talk:Greatest Hits#Cleanup.) – sgeureka ^t•c 15:37, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Compilations are useful as a introduction to artists...that being said, this article is unhelpful as is, just "Greatest Hits of X", "Greatest Hits of Y"...it needs to be better organized, by genre or...time, or something. My vote is keep (conditional on cleanup). Jakerforever 16:58, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong delete as violating Wikipedia is not a directory. Gathering all albums together just because the artist or the record label happens to put the words "Greatest Hits" in the title, with no regard to the mishmash of artists or genres, is untenable. Not every "greatest hits" album is called "Greatest Hits" (c.f. Madonna's The Immaculate Collection or Cyndi Lauper's Twelve Deadly Cyns...and Then Some) and not every album called "Greatest Hits" is necessarily a greatest hits album. Otto4711 17:04, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment. As you can see in Talk:Greatest Hits, there is a strict rule to only list those albums that have the name "Greatest Hits" (i.e. no "Best Of" albums etc.) For many albums with the same name (e.g. Shine), the dab pages are manageable. It's just that almost every notable artist will have a greatest hits album (see the unrelated page greatest hits) at some point, and chances are high that the album will be called "Greatest Hits", so that's where it becomes unmanageable to provide further disambiguation. – sgeureka ^t•c 17:27, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Further comment - we have an extensive categorization scheme in place for compilation albums and greatest hits albums. While lists are not automatically supplanted by categories, in this instance the category will be much more useful than a massive list. Otto4711 18:31, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as unmaintainable. Or maybe redirect to Compilation album? meshach 21:52, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This seems needlessly tangled, to me. My suggestion would be to merge the articles in chief compilation album and greatest hits; merge the two categories at Category:Compilation albums; and merge this with any other related lists at List of compilation albums. Until such time as all of these things can be achieved, I'd recommend that we keep this provisionally. - Smerdis of Tlön 22:38, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, actually looks and feels like a dab page. --kingboyk 22:53, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes, but (a) it doesn't help DAB editors such as me, and (b) it is not complete, up-to-date and never will be whereas e.g. Special:Allpages/Greatest_Hits is. As it is now, the dab page has 127 individual entries. Special:Allpages/Greatest_Hits lists 312 entries for GH albums (unfortunately including a couple of redirects and some unwanted GH albums that are called something like GH Live etc.) that should actually all be included on a good dab page. All the yet non-existant GH album articles whose artists have a wiki article should also be listed on a good dab page, so that would make (guessing here) 400 entries, maybe even much more in a couple of years. After more thought on this matter, what about this proposal: Delete content of Greatest Hits dab page, redirect that page to greatest hits, and change dab link on greatest hits to Special:Allpages/Greatest_Hits. – sgeureka ^t•c 13:21, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep unless an alternative mechanism is suggested. This disambig page is intended not to help DAB editors, but rather to serve as a target for a plausible search term. The term "greatest hits" is a plausible search term even if it has no incoming links. So what if it's not complete? An incomplete dab page is better than nothing. -- Black Falcon 23:38, 1 April 2007 (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.