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 per consensus; no calls for deletion beyond the nominator. Non-administrative closure. Regent of the Seatopians (talk) 01:27, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of association football club rivalries by country[edit]

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

This is a list which cannot ever be completed, and for which there can never be full or reliable sources. Its purpose is better served either by:

Replacing with individual articles for countires (eg List of association football rivalries in England)
Replacing with a category
Writing a prose article on football rivalries.

Any of these could be achieved without this list as it exists; as it is it harms Wikipedia by being inherently flawed. Pretty Green (talk) 09:59, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Previously discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Major football rivalries, where consensus was firmly that the topic is notable and should be covered. Nothing has changed since then, except that the inclusion criteria for the list are better defined as required by WP:LIST. The points made this time round, while reasonable, are not valid policy-based reasons for deletion. The fact that the list can't be completed is not a problem, nor is the lack of full references: sourced material goes in, and anything else is removed, as WP:V states. With 92 references already, lack of sources is not an issue. Per WP:CLN, the existence or otherwise of a category does not affect whether a list should exist. In this case, a category would be useless as many of the rivalries here have no separate article. Splitting it into lists by country would be an editorial decision and not require deletion. A prose article on football rivalries is a good idea, but it does not need to come at the expense of the list. And how exactly does a fully sourced page with clear inclusion guidelines on a clearly notable topic harm Wikipedia? Alzarian16 (talk) 10:59, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. But remove unsourced info and add atleast 1 sentence to all subheadings. Should think about dividing to each continent and keeping it protected from anonymos users. Pelmeen10 (talk) 12:28, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I've long warned that that article was getting out of control, and advocated making a second article of the most major rivalries which would actually be more meaningful. However, this is beside the point. I vote keep because, simply put, none of your ideas are feasible, and I think that this article deserves to exist if it cannot be improved. Replacing it with individual articles for countries is absolutely no different from what we have now, except that it will be broken up into a hundred different pages. Some will be stub length and will be deleted for being 100% unsourced and irrelevant. Others will fill up with extra info about very minor teams just as this one has, and that's absolutely no different from what we have now, so what's the point. Replacing with a category is, if I may say so, an even worse idea, because then you actually need articles about individual rivalries, and you can bet that a lot of the actually significant rivalries would not have enough exposure for an article - they would be deleted and you would lose all information. Not to mention, people would start adding any page about football matches whatsoever into that category, and lo and behold you have an even worse problem. Finally, writing a prose article about rivalries simply wouldn't work because, frankly, that's what this page was supposed to be in the first place really. What you get is a load of casual editors coming and writing "extension" edits about their own favourite team, completely unsourced, and eventually the number of casual edits swamps the main article and you're back with exactly the same article we have right now. Falastur2 ^Talk 15:25, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Football-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:27, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:27, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Certainly not the prettiest list on WP, but its parameters are defined. Could be properly sourced (newspapers do like writing about football). One improvement I could see is to set a cap in the prose length for each entry, especially when there is a main article to link to. The other proposed solutions don't seem to be an improvement over the current setup. The most desirable would be the prose article, but it would get so large it would have to be split. The Interior (Talk) 00:35, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in WikiProject Football's list of association football-related deletions. Giant Snowman 13:54, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep - article needs a major overhaul - more prose, better referencing & organisation - but probably deserves its own article. Giant Snowman 13:55, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep. I can see the benefit of having an article like this, but it needs a lot of work. Some sections have a paragraph of prose or more and others have nothing. Just because a list is extremely long doesn't mean it needs to be split or deleted entirely. This is a great example of what can be achieved with the right layout, prose and referencing. Argyle 4 Life^talk 19:11, 16 March 2011 (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.