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 delete. Whether indexes are useful generally or not, the consensus of the discussion is that this particular one is not. RL0919 (talk) 20:12, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Index of World War II articles[edit]

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

I am nominating this page and the related pages of indexes because this group of articles fails WP:NOTDIRECTORY and WP:NLIST. The very wide range of topics presented here are very loosely connected and never discussed as a group or set in any sources. While this type of index might be useful to house internally within user space or a relevant WikiProject, I am not seeing any relevant notability policy for keeping this in main space. Further, this index has very little use as a navigational tool as there are no descriptions of the items in the list to present context on how they relate to WWII, and in a few cases I am not even sure they should be in the index. For example, I came upon this index looking at the incoming wikilinks going to a biography on Walter Graf (bobsledder) which had zero content on WWII. This was perhaps linked to the wrong article, but it doesn't give me much confidence in a list with zero contextualizing text for its entries. 4meter4 (talk) 20:08, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am also nominating the following related pages which are part of this index:

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: History and Lists. Skynxnex (talk) 21:02, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 21:07, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete aside from being a directory, I struggle to think of how this could actually be useful to a reader. Categories already serve this function and have about as much context as well, if not more. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 23:05, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed completely. QuintinK (talk) 23:16, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, in addition to the notability issues I raised in the nomination I too am struggling to see any practical use for this index either. The index provides zero context to the articles, and the reader has no idea why a given individual topic is necessarily in the index and in what way it connects to the war. As such, the list fails to orient the reader in any meaningful way to the topic of World War II; including the practicalities of navigating World War II articles across the encyclopedia. Further, providing a lengthy list of terms in alphabetical order without context seems to me by definition a violation of WP:NOT. It reads like the phone book. It has zero referencing and while it claims to only encompass articles related to World War II there are a large number of articles on this list about topics that happened after the end of the war, or on subjects which are not primarily about World War II. This is why an article like Outline of World War II is a far better organization scheme for a World War II navigation list because it places articles in context to the topic. Providing context makes it possible for readers to quickly find the relevant content they are looking for, in addition to providing an overview of the content area. Not to mention that type of list passes WP:NLIST. To add to this, we also have many other World War II lists of varying kinds which are linked in the WWII outline, and a whole category tree for WWII articles. All of these are superior to this inaccurate, unreferenced, and difficult to navigate index.4meter4 (talk) 04:53, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: A few procedural notes regarding WP:Indexes. There doesn't appear to be a consensus on whether or not index articles are valid. In AfD/Index of Babylon 5 articles and AfD/Index of computing articles and AfD/Index of breakfast-related articles, which resolved to keep, several editors argued that WP:CLN establishes support for indexes; in particular, one editor argued that "Categories are quite inadequate, because they do not support citations and their tree structure does not work well with multiple independent keywords. Indexes are a traditional way of navigating reference works and so it is quite reasonable that we should support them".
Conversely, in AfD/Index of Brazil-related articles and AfD/Index of Romania-related articles, which both resolved to delete and redirection to their respective WP:Outline, editors argued that indexes are incompletable due to our scope compared to a paper encyclopedia and that a broad overview of the topic is better suited to the outline. Indeed, Outline of World War II does exist. Curbon7 (talk) 23:25, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Curbon7 for this useful summation.4meter4 (talk) 23:45, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment In 2015, I estimated 20% of the linked articles are irrelevant to World War II, which hasn't been fixed since then. See Talk:Index of World War II articles. Art LaPella (talk) 00:54, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - If ever there was a case for WP:TNT this is it. It seems these indexes were created by an automated search programme back in 2008 and have hardly been touched since. I guess finding Nazi or for example 1939 in an article resulted in its inclusion in the index with no human checking resulting in many non WWII articles being included. If anyone sees merit in having such a general index they can recreate it manually adding only appropriate articles Lyndaship (talk) 07:32, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Indexes are rarely helpful to readers, especially when they are this large, as we have a search bar, categories, outline, and many other articles and lists that cover these topics and which aid in navigation more effectively. I don't think the green quotation is valid at all. They are a traditional way to navigate paper reference works, our indexes virtually never have (or need) citations, and other navigation methods are better, particularly if there are many thousands of items. Reywas92^Talk 15:38, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I clicked on one of the lists at random: the letter M. The number of entries was 1530. I daresay that makes this way too broad per WP:SALAT. I am at a complete loss as to what WP:LISTPURPOSE this is meant to serve. TompaDompa (talk) 19:02, 22 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Far too broad and incomplete. Outline of World War II does a much better, more restrictive job. Clarityfiend (talk) 02:14, 23 December 2022 (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.