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 keep. KrakatoaKatie 10:31, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of Motorola products[edit]

List of Motorola products (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

List of some products (but not others, with no rationale) from Motorola. Unencyclopedic, unreferenced, and an arbitrary collection of information. As such, easy to feel like it's just advertising. Mikeblas 21:19, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Wikipedia is not a (product) directory. Jakew 21:38, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as a directory, however, this might be able to become a category. Useight 21:59, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Wikipedia is not a place for ad fliers.--JForget 22:52, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletions. -- the wub "?!" 14:30, 27 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Motorola has been around for many decades, and this unreferenced article/catalog just lists current products and then says "Vintage Equipment. Myriad radio and television receivers." Very superficial and arbitrary listing. Edison 20:55, 27 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep as per my argument on the Nokia list. I really don't understand why this is considered an ad directory. It provides information on products not notable enough to have their own article, and simply needs referencing. Rwhealey 02:45, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep.
  • This seems perfectly in keeping with the letter and spirit of WP:LIST - it provides both structured information as well as navigation (surveying the product history of Motorola).
  • Motorola is definitely a notable company. Many of their products are notable (witness the considerable number of bluelinks in the list). Listing all of their products in the main Motorola article would be infeasible.
  • This list is nicely formatted, separating things by category, providing overview information, and links to individual products.
  • Maybe the various redlinks should be de-linked, as I don't think we need articles on every thing Motorola ever made. But that doesn't mean "delete the whole thing".
  • Yes, this list is incomplete. So are hundreds or thousands more. Per Wikipedia:Editing policy, Perfection is not required; an incomplete list is okay. Deleting this list means it cannot be improved to be more complete, so I don't see how that helps.
  • I don't see how this can be considered an advertisement, when all it does is list information and link to a variety of existing articles.
  • It seems to avoid being Wikipedia:Listcruft. It's not an indiscriminate collection; it's a list of a notable company's products. It is verifiable. It is maintainable and limited to Motorola products. It has content beyond a category, by providing structure and overview info.
  • —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 13:35, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. The point about the article being incomplete has more to do with this being a completely arbitrary collection of Motorola products. The most notable products are missing, and this really is just a list for cell phone fans. Motorola's 6809 series of microprocessors is one of the most widely used processors today, vastly outselling the Pentium. It's not in this list, nor are any of the company's notable semiconductor products.

Since there's no rational guideline for inclusion, then this is an arbitrary list and absolutely not what WP:LIST is about. Imagine that it's 15 years earlier. Instead of being full of cell phones, this article would be full of pagers. In 15 years, we'll wonder why we hvae tens of dozens of articles about cell phones. -- Mikeblas 14:21, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Response. You seem to be arguing from the premise that "the page will never change". As I noted, we have have hundreds of lists that need expansion. It is perfectly okay for a page to start small and be improved. • It does look like the list creator mainly knew about cell phones, but so what? We do not require editors to have comprehensive knowledge of every page they touch. I will improve this list, if I am allowed. • I suppose we might want to have a policy of "No lists of a single company's products", but this AfD is not the place to decide such a policy. • Finally, your point about the semiconductors is totally bogus. This list explicitly states that such are now part of List of Freescale products, and sure enough, the 6809 is there. Did you even look?  :) —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 17:30, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Response'. You're allowed to improve the article right now, and have always been allowed to do so. Yep; I looked. I hope you'll forgive me for not finding the single sentence (or two?) buried amid all the other advertising. -- Mikeblas 20:33, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Response. The point with "allowed" was that if the list is going to be deleted, it cannot be improved. I just found this thing yesterday. • It seems that an assumption in your argument is that any list of products is "advertising" and thus should be deleted. This search would seem to indicate that we have many, many such lists. • While there is only the one sentence directing you to the current holder of those products, it is given in a top-level heading, "semiconductors" and appears as such in the ToC. I'm not really sure what more could be done. Suggestions? —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 21:47, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• And one more: If we need to delete this list because it is not comprehensive, doesn't that mean we also need to delete the thousands of stub articles? I really don't get this strong sentiment of "Delete anything that isn't perfect right now". —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 20:19, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep It doesn't look like an arbitrary collection of information, it looks like the criteria for inclusion is: product manufactured by Motorola. While I'm wary of advertising creeping into Wikipedia, I see no language in this article to indicate that it's advertising. Wikipedia:Deletion_policy/Brand_name_products says "Minor products from a company should be merged into a 'list of minor products from this company' which is kept in the company article, unless it becomes too large as above." If the nominator is serious about cleaning up product lists from Wikipedia, I think he's got a long road ahead[1]. He can start by nominating List of Google products and List of Linux distributions. And I have to wonder why iPhone and iPod was not nominated in your recent attack on cellphone/catalog articles. --Pixelface 05:06, 30 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep as per my argument on the List of Sony Ericsson products AfD. —TigerK 69 02:04, 31 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep and split mobile phones into List of Motorola mobile phones. I would not find the PowerPC, even if it was included in the list. (Not to mention the Motorola 68000 series.)-- Petri Krohn 01:08, 1 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Splitting the list into multiple lists might indeed be a good idea. It would also help highlight List of Motorola products#Semiconductors, which states that Moto sold that stuff to List of Freescale products. You're the second person to miss that note, so I have to think it's a real problem. —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 01:21, 1 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep & cleanup This list could benefit from better organization and annotation of specific product lines. ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 04:15, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep For a person to come across this list, they would have to search for it deliberately--as opposed to the advertisement coming to them. I find this list useful for finding past products that are no longer available on the company's website. Instead of destroying articles, Wikipedians should be improving them, and this article already has an extensive index, we shouldn't waste it all. Drant 05:52, 3 September 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.