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 are either cited to the airline itself or to aviation industry press that fails to meet the WP:ORGIND standard. Where reliable sources are cited, these are not cited for significant coverage of the destinations of the airline concerned but instead for something incidental - for example, a BBC article about countries closing their airspace to Russian airlines in general is cited for destinations being terminated for a specific airline.
In every case, no source is cited, having significant coverage of the destinations of each airline, that would meet the audience and independence standards under WP:AUD and WP:ORGIND. Realistically, the only people who can ever tell you what services an airline is operating on a specific date is the airline itself and this information is therefore inherently incapable of being reliably and independently sourced. 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) 09:05, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
speedy delete per the well-considered consensus. Pecopteris (talk) 09:17, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. I am not sure how compatible "speedy" is with "orderly", but the best fit of the two would be good. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. I've tagged the articles. BilledMammal (talk) 10:11, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think it is likely delete for the reasons given above and previously. However I am uncomfortable about deleting hundreds of AfD nominations in one go. There's very little chance that any of us would be able to give each nomination a fair examination so we are !voting based on the kind of page it is. To be clear, I can't see that redundant airline destination pages are ever verifiable. JMWt (talk) 11:25, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
TBH @JMWt, the only airline destination page I've ever seen that ever raised the need for separate consideration for me is List of Braathens destinations, but this is not because of the list (which is a WP:V-failure), but because it has a history of the Braathens airline from 1954 to 2004 in it. However we also have History of Braathens SAFE (1946–1993) and History of Braathens (1994–2004) which this is basically just a fork of. Nothing would be lost by simply redirecting this page to a disambiguation page called History of Braathens. All the others, even List of British Airways destinations, are just the same thing that we have here but with more references - no evidence that anyone other than the airline (or a source ultimately depending on the airline) could ever really tell you what flights they were actually operating as of October 2020 (or whatever the date used for the list is). FOARP (talk) 12:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure AfD is the right venue for this kind of mass deletion proposal. I also have never seen a list of this kind which meets the notability criteria. JMWt (talk) 14:01, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The issue is that the 2018 AN discussion doesn't leave any other way of doing it. The close of that AN discussion explicitly ruled out Beeblebrox's mass-deletion-in-one-go approach and PROD-ing the articles one by one, and explicitly endorsed bundled AFDs (which this is). The varying quality of the articles was cited as a reason not to delete all of them in one go by at least three contributors to the 2018 AN discussion, so bundling article of similar quality appears a justified approach. We've already had 19 AFDs in a row closed as "delete" for these articles, and this AFD will make 20 over nearly four months. I don't think anyone can really say we're being hasty here. FOARP (talk) 14:23, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all per nom. Also WP:NOTGUIDE and majority of articles fail WP:CORP. Coastie43 (talk) 13:44, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Coastie43 - I'd say ALL of these articles fail WP:CORP. Taking possibly the most prominent airline, US Airways, the list of their destinations is cited to:
1) A 404 link to Airlineroute.net, a blog/industry press.
2) Ditto.
3) A 404 link to a YahooNews Finance piece, apparently industry press.
4) Another 404 link to Airlineroute.net
5) Ditto
6) The US Airways website.
7) A press-release.
8) Another 404 link to YahooNews Finance.
The only sources here that aren't 404 are the ones that clearly come direct from the airline and even if the other sources weren't 404 they are not sufficiently independent of the airline itself. Even if they were, NONE of these sources even COULD support the verification of the information in the list, since they are all from before the date that the list is supposed to be accurate for (17 October 2015). Every article on this list is at least this bad in terms of verifiability and notability. FOARP (talk) 14:35, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom, and per recent successful deletions of this same type. --Jayron32 15:43, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I remain convinced that we should not maintain airline destination articles at all, per WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Beeblebrox (talk) 16:24, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment We really don't have a Speedy Delete feature in AFD (unlike the Speedy Keep option) unless there is content that violates BLP or copyright guidelines or another CSD criteria can be applied. Since this discussion was brought to AFD (instead of the articles being tagged for CSD), let's let this discussion continue on for 7 days. These articles have been around for a while, a few more days won't bring down the project. LizRead!Talk! 19:51, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Liz: The closer could always point to WP:AVALANCHE, though I would caution against using that reasoning too soon. — Jkudlick ⚓ (talk) 21:15, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom, all above, and the relevant policies NOTGUIDE and NOTDIRECTORY. SilverTiger12 (talk) 20:10, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom and previous discussions. Mgp28 (talk) 22:53, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or Redirect per nom. As a spot check, I did a quick WP:BEFORE for Pan Am and didn't see anything that would support a full list of their destinations. Though I note some prose on each article describe the general idea of where they serve would likely be possible, and perhaps redirection to the parent airline articles if the closer is willing to do that work. JumpytooTalk 02:17, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per precedent and NOT. Draken Bowser (talk) 07:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I actually like reading these airline destinations lists. They have a lot of useful information that you can't find anywhere else. Particularly of when an airline flew to a destination in the past that they don't serve now. Many airlines don't have route maps anymore so it's hard to find what cities they service unless you start a booking to see if a fare is available. Which is a very slow process for every possible route.
Yeah, it does have to be emphasised that “it’s useful” has been the only argument ever put forward for these articles. No-one ever explains how they don’t offend against WP:NOT. No-one ever puts forward a cogent argument for their notability under WP:CORP (which applies as these are lists of company services). The reason for that is it can’t be done.
Even on usefulness grounds I really doubt their usefulness, because these aren’t route maps, they aren’t up to date (or even up to date for the dates given in the articles), and often the majority of destinations listed are places the airline explicitly does not fly to (i.e., those that are “terminated”). If, however, aviation fandom finds them useful, then there is still the answer of taking them off-wiki (eg setting up a fandom wiki) and this can still be done even after the articles are deleted by asking an admin to email copies of the articles to you. FOARP (talk) 05:46, 25 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Not obviously made up as without a reference for a destination on the lists they get quickly removed by other users even for a terminated destination. CHCBOY (talk) 20:23, 26 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@CHCBOY - See the analysis of the US Airways article above - the only links that weren't 404 was the one to the airline website and press-releases. FOARP (talk) 08:48, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete based on our policies and guidelines NOTDIRECTORY and the consensus at various similar AfD discussions. HighKing++ 17:49, 25 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete endorsing immediate SNOW closure by any admin. The rationales by nom are clear and overwhelming, with an extensive history of community consensus backing this. Apparently even Wikivoyage has declined to accept this content. Given the large number of pages and impracticality of exhaustive examination I believe the community would expect or be satisfied with a relatively lenient approach towards any request for access to an individual page, if anyone makes a credible claim that a deleted page contains some other useful content beyond mere destination-list. Alsee (talk) 22:43, 25 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This bundled nomination is not formatted correctly so I've asked the nominator to review it. This is a huge nomination and no closer should have to handle each article page individualy. LizRead!Talk! 04:02, 27 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Liz, thanks for highlighting the lack of "Article name (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)" tags in the list. I've added these. Let me know if that fixes the issue. FOARP (talk) 12:32, 27 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
XFDcloser now breaks for me: toomanyvalues error retrieving page information (reload the page to try again). I'll try some things to attempt to get the gadget to not break in the nomination statement. SWinxy (talk) 16:34, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Merge with the main airline article. 🛧Layah50♪🛪 (話す? 一緒に飛ぼう！) 14:20, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The main objection is WP:NOT, which leaves no scope for a direct merge. Additionally, for content to be merged, it needs to be appropriately sourced, and there is little sign of this (see, e.g, the analysis of the US Airways article above). FOARP (talk) 15:08, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all per above. SWinxy (talk) 16:18, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all and I oppose merging. It's non-encyclopedic. Suitskvarts (talk) 09:06, 29 August 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.
Deletion of so much hard work from dedicated editors.... For instance, I created the list of Aeroput destinations, an historical era work about destinations between 1927 until 1948 which is certainly interesting for aviation nostalgics. We have the opportunity to have the lists of all destinations of close to all airliners in the world, but we are unwilling to do so despite having dedicated editors agreing to do it all by Wiki rules and standards (proper sourcing, etc.) I ask myself, what we win by this. Erasing that info is literally giving other airliners websites an edge, and we fall to simply borring, basic info, texts which no aviation enthusiast will care from now on. My activity was limited in latest time, but I am astonished to have found this decition and found specially unpreciated since I made a list about one of the first companies in the world and thought this contribution was valiable. FkpCascais (talk) 18:57, 25 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]