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 articles should be deleted as they are failures of WP:NOT. Specifically, they are exhaustive lists of the services offered by commercial enterprises as well as being essentially travel-guides. They are also effectively advertising for the companies concerned, another thing that Wikipedia is explicitly not. Since they can only be true on a particular, randomly-selected day, they are ephemeral and impossible to maintain given the way airline schedules change constantly, but if you did try to do keep them up to date, what you would have would essentially be an airline news-service, and Wikipedia is not news.
In addition to this, every one of these articles is dedicated entirely to exhaustive lists of trivial, run-of-the-mill details of commercial operations of a kind that WP:CORP expressly bars from being used to sustain notability, making the content of them essentially trivia and non-notable ab initio. This includes "simple listings or compilations, such as ... product or service offerings" and "standard notices, brief announcements, and routine coverage, such as...the opening or closing of local branches, franchises, or shops [and/or] the expansions, acquisitions, mergers, sale, or closure of the business". They are the equivalent of a list of pizzas sold by Pizza Hut on 3 October 2007, or a list of Blockbuster Video outlets operating on 23 January 1988: pure indiscriminate trivia (another thing that Wikipedia is not).
The sourcing of these articles also universally fails to sustain notability under WP:GNG let alone WP:CORP. The articles that include any reference, are either cited to the airline itself or to aviation industry press that fails to meet the WP:ORGIND standard. No source is cited, having significant coverage of the destinations of each airline, that would meet the audience standards under WP:AUD. Realistically, the only people who can ever tell you what services an airline is operating is the airline itself. Particularly where the lists declare a service to be "terminated", this has been achieved through original research by comparing lists of previous services with those presently operated by the airline, since even if a source could found saying the service was terminated, that only verifies as of the date the reference was published, not as of the date given for the list which may be years later.
(I'll try to template the articles in the next few days, but if anyone with AWB would like to do it in the meantime that would be great) FOARP (talk) 14:16, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
DeleteWikipedia is not a travel guide, also these are always out of date as they are not properly maintained, which renders them of no value to anyone. Basically a non-encyclopedic subject. - Ahunt (talk) 14:53, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This is basically a catalog of their products. Plus in reality, as with any catalog, it would change rapidly and not be maintained. Thirdly, it would inherently not have secondary sourcing. North8000 (talk) 15:13, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete the information by its nature is either ephemeral (for current up-to-the-minute destinations) or indiscriminate and likely unverifiable (for an exhaustive list of every destination in history). These seems rather low-value, high-maintenance information that lies outside of such guidances as WP:IINFO and WP:NOT. --Jayron32 16:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom and all the above, and probably more. The nail in the coffin is that several members of WP:AIR have posted here to air the same view. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 18:28, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I maintain an adequately sourced list could pass NLIST, but I couldn't find any sources at all in the five I spot-checked apart from timetables. SportingFlyerT·C 19:42, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
SportingFlyer - They might theoretically pass NLIST, but not WP:CORP which, as articles listing the services offer by a company, they need to pass in order to show notability. The reason why this is so is that accurate, exhaustive lists of destinations that an airline flies to can only be sourced from that company (or media reports based on the announcements of that company) since they change all the time. Just as much to the point, they need also to comply with WP:NOT. FOARP (talk) 22:23, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't think so - I think one of these articles that passed NLIST would also be a valid split, considering we frequently include rail route maps which are essentially the same thing. SportingFlyerT·C 11:05, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Lists of the products and services of a company fall explicitly within the scope of WP:CORP. Rail routes are physical infrastructure and exempt from WP:CORP. Air services provided by a company are ephemeral, can be announced and cancelled at the drop of a hat, do not involve intervening infrastructure and so aren’t. Split lists still need to meet notability guidelines as stand-alone articles per WP:AVOIDSPLIT - they cannot inherit the notability of the article they split from because notability is not inherited. No article gets a pass on WP:NOT simply because it is a split-list.
This was all covered in the previous AFD, which closed as delete and was endorsed at DELREV. FOARP (talk) 17:19, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree with you, but that's fine, and it's completely irrelevant to the AfD at hand anyways. There may be airlines where the routes or destinations pass NLIST, that is a very high bar, none of the articles appear to at the moment, but this should not preclude their recreation. SportingFlyerT·C 22:24, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, I echo what's above; I've always felt these types of lists are better suited for WikiTravel. We aren't helping anyone if these lists are never maintained and without any kind of critical discussion, a long list of random facts is rather useless. Oaktree b (talk) 19:53, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For funsies, I pulled one out of a hat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arik_Air_destinations. List was current to 2015, archived in 2019. Lead says it's current to 2021 and they only fly to seven destinations. Below is a list of a few dozen places that they don't fly to... So it's almost a decade old, out of date by three years? Oh great, if I never need a historical list for this airline from 2017, I can look it up? That's too much minutiae for Wikipedia and is rather niche. Simply googling old timetables would be a better use of my time. So there is no real reason to keep it here. Oaktree b (talk) 19:58, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And even the AN discussion the nominator mentions was in 2018; if no one's adopted these lists in the FIVE years since then, I'm not sure what we're expecting to happen... Let's get rid of them and move on to more important things. Oaktree b (talk) 20:02, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Oaktree b - That's a good one. The only way any of the Arik Air destinations can be sourced is by going to Arik Air's website and looking at where they're flying to that day. The basis for saying a destination is "terminated" as of April 2021 can only be original research (i.e., comparing the April 2021 destinations with older ones and arriving at a conclusion not stated in the source - that the destination is terminated as of April 2021). Even with this the entire list is a WP:V failure because the source isn't from April 2021 - it's from something they looked at in October 2015 and the archived version is from July 2019. And even if the date were changed to the archive date... was Arik Air actually flying to all those destinations on that date, or were they just saying that they did? I honestly don't know how we ended up with this whole corpus of articles that can only be sourced ultimately from the airlines themselves, and were clear WP:NOT violations. Reviewing the RFC and AN discussions, as well as the earlier AFD discussion in January 2007, May 2007, 2015, and 2018 it appears that most of the opposition was sparked either by the idea that the lists were "useful" or simply opposition to deleting that many articles in one go - in retrospect a great deal of time would have been saved had the problem been dealt with back in 2006 when it first arose, but that's Wikipedia for you. FOARP (talk) 09:30, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Prior discussions there have indicated that, as a small community, they do not want to maintain these articles and would prefer for them to be at Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:07, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: that says a lot that even they don't want to maintain them. For the reasons stated above they certainly do not belong here on Wikipedia. Where they do belong and are already available is on the airlines' websites. - Ahunt (talk) 18:15, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. They may well want to shuffle the useless things off onto us, but that is our decision not theirs. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 18:23, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It does seem like no one thinks they are notable for any website, save the airlines themselves. I think this actually strengthens the delete votes here. - Ahunt (talk) 18:29, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all per nom. WP:NOTGUIDE and most lists don't pass WP:CORP, even if some were formerly Nationalised airlines, which for the most part largely still doesn't pass WP:INHERENT. Coastie43 (talk) 01:06, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all all totally unencyclopedic. Maungapohatu (talk) 02:32, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all per nom. The nominating statement provides a detailed and accurate rationale for why these articles are not helpful to the encyclopedia. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 21:01, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all and proactively endorse deletion of all future such lists at AfD. JoelleJay (talk) 02:12, 27 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all I would of had say merge a brief overview to their parent articles, but I spot checked a few and the sources do not seem good enough to use as a base. Also question for nominator, does this AfD cover every airline destination list articles that have "no sources or only one source"? JumpytooTalk 02:18, 27 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I went through all the articles in the airline destination list category back in May and these are the ones I found then. Possible I’ve missed some since I am only human, and also possible some have been created since then. There may be multiple citations in some cases, but these should be to the same source (eg multiple citations to the airline website). FOARP (talk) 04:52, 27 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Reluctant delete Effectively my only opposition to this is to the deletion of so many articles at one time. I am always wary of throwing out so much work at once, no matter how low quality and un-encyclopedic it may be. That said, clearly nobody has much interest in maintaining these, thus they will remain low-quality and out of date. SurferSquall (talk) 06:13, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Why limit this nomination to just articles with no sources or only one source? If I am reading the 2018 RfC and consensus here correctly then all articles in Category:Lists of airline destinations should be deleted. Charcoal feather (talk) 08:31, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For historical airlines which no longer exist, the question of currency and maintenance does not arise. Historical notability of the service becomes the main criterion. For extant lines with a long history, things get complicated and would need to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I'd rather not go into all that here. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 11:05, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
[update] I checked some sample lists for historic airlines. Our lists are equally awful there; self-published sources, whether as a standalone article or a section in the parent. The article on Imperial Airways takes a more narrative approach to the historic routes, which is far better. If the odd baby is thrown out with the bathwater, it can always be added back in somewhere more sensible. I now agree that the lists should go en masse. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:39, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Particularly, if you give a list of services operating on a particular date then the only source that can conceivably sustain that is the company itself - no-one else (except maybe equally non-independent industry press?) is going to provide such an exhaustive listening. But if you instead try to state start/finish dates for the services listed, you’ll be cobbling together sources (again, almost universally sourced ultimately to the airline) to state a conclusion that none of them actually say. Additionally, coverage of services in industry press is almost always from before the service starts/stops, and thus is forecasting the future for something that may not actually have happened.
TL;DR - these lists were always a mistake and should have been deleted back in 2006 when this issue first came up. FOARP (talk) 13:01, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately when Beeblebrox tried to do it in one go people complained (see the AN discussion linked in the nom). However we’ve now had 19 AFD discussions in a row about these things that have ended with the article being deleted, all of them with practical super-majorities for deletion. There just ain’t no “there” there. FOARP (talk) 13:21, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Drooly delete, where "drooling" is how I respond to the thought that at least some volatile, poorly or totally unsourced, perpetually inaccurate lists might be purged (for a while) from Wikipedia. I picked three at random; one was List of Air Bucharest destinations, which I found to be much like the Arik Air example mentioned above. Of the 11 destinations listed, only one has a citation. That source was "Retrieved 12 September 2015", "archived ... on 18 January 2016", and when I view the archive, it shows an image of a PowerPoint-type destination summary (slide 4) from December 2013. With about 105 destinations. WP:NOT and WP:V and, oh; I'm drooling again. I'd also like to see that the destinations list don't start growing again unsourced in the parent airline's article, but I suppose that's too much to hope for. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 12:06, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That’s a good one because (reviewing the article history) that article was both prod’d and AFD’d, but has never, ever, in its entire history, conformed to our most basic standards on encyclopaedic content and sourcing. It is ONLY airline-fandom and opposition to removing mass-created and failing content en masse that has kept it on this encyclopaedia.
Even the (bad) argument that some of these were featured lists and so all of them should be kept which was put forward by Lugnuts in 2018 no longer has any validity. Neither of the airline destination lists that were made FL should ever have passed (not least because they weren’t properly sourced), and both have since been de-listed due to these problems.
It’s time to solve the problem in one go and stop pretending there’s anything worth keeping in this category. I’ve got one more list of another ~100 poorly-sourced articles to go nominate after this one, but then we really should just mass-delete the remaining ~200. FOARP (talk) 13:37, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. Do we need to break this widening-out of the AfD as a separate subsection, or add it to the rationale? We should probably also notify a few wikiprojects of the change. I don't want post-closure complaints that we snuck it through without due notification. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:39, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Whilst the related projects have been notified of deletion, it does seem that many participants from the past (mass nominated) AFDs of the destination lists in 2006, 2007 and 2015 have either moved on from either Wikipedia entirely, or are editing different topics. It was also noted that in earlier previous AFDs there was some cross-posting of past deletion discussions to the outside community (e.g posting the AFD links to airliners.net for example). Also noted that a few promiment contributors that are still active over at the Aviation (and related WikiProjects) that has participated in the AFDs in the past, have chosen to no longer participate in the discussion after the past few AFDs have led to deletions. This may probably suggest that virtually no-one are willing to adopt the lists for editing and keeping up to date considering a large number of lists have anywhere between 2 to 5 years gaps between edits. Coastie43 (talk) 06:40, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Deleting Category:Lists of airline destinations, all who dwell therein, and a bunch of in-article lists elsewhere, does seem in a different order from deleting a mere 81 inhabitants. Maybe it'd be simpler to delete the 81 for now, and wait for any ripples to subside before going postal. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 07:27, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What views do you (all) have about what should happen if (at least) these 82 lists are deleted? The airlines' articles generally have a "Destinations" section with something like ((main|List of Air Bucharest destinations)) which produces:
Main article: List of Air Bucharest destinations
Should those ((main)) templates be merely deleted, along with the presumably then-empty Destinations section? Part of our problem is that we don't have current and reliably sourced destinations, so this seems the appropriate course, but I wanted to explicitly clarify our intentions. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 09:30, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty much exactly that. If certain destinations have verifiable significance (via independent sources) then that significance can be discussed under suitable headings (see for example the Imperial Airways article), but the lists themselves all go in the bin. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 11:05, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment These articles are a trove of (mostly quite accurate) valuable information which has taken years to compile and is difficult to find in such a synthetic form anywhere else than here, therefore they are of great use for airline enthusiasts. I would also like to point out that some of these airlines, such as Sabena are now defunct and of great historical importance, therefore these lists cannot be considered free advertising, rather they are information which provide historical context about the history of a major airline, and could be improved if more sources were added.
After reading the discussion however, it seems to me there will not be a policy-based consensus to keep them on Wikipedia, but wouldn't there be any way to download/export these articles in order to repost them to a more appropriate website? I'm asking mostly about those that are already deleted (which I therefore can't download), as I find myself using these articles relatively often and wasn't aware of their AfD status until now. Even if these are considered not good enough for Wikipedia, I would like to save this data before it disappears permanently, as it is not found anywhere else (some have suggested airline websites but this doesn't work for defunct airlines and is sometimes not listed directly).
DominikWSP (talk) 17:35, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
After reading WP:Userfication, I was thinking that, if others agree, moving the articles (at least those relating to more important or defunct airlines) to userspace might be a solution to avoid losing years of work on hundreds of articles in this category. These might come with a time freeze and a disclaimer, but would still be usable as a historical reference, especially for airlines which are already defunct and whose list of destinations at closure is thus complete. DominikWSP (talk) 21:41, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
DominikWSP, I suggest you copy what you want today. It's a little late into the discussion to be suggesting alternatives when it's almost 100% Delete all point of view among participants. LizRead!Talk! 07:45, 31 July 2023 (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.