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 of the debate was No consensus. Deathphoenixʕ 17:11, 4 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This list is unnecessary, we should use a category instead. A Clown in the Dark 22:12, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as listcruft ComputerJoe 22:13, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment There are a lot of 'List of basic ... topics'. —Ruud 22:18, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Move to Wikipedia namespace Only used for keeping track of articles that still need to be written and as an alternate way to browse wikipedia. —Ruud 22:18, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or move to Wikipedia namespace. Lists are almost never encyclopedic, and categories are nice. --bmills 02:25, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not really interested in this, but these are some truly horrible arguments for deletion. My set of encyclopedias has no categories as far as I know. It does have an entire book that's just an Index.--T. Anthony 09:19, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia, and as such uses links instead of list of articles. Think of the category namespace as Wikipedia's "index" volume. --bmills 16:35, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Great, an index with no capacity for alternative names or annotations. Kappa 08:07, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We have redirects for alternative names, and an encyclopedia index generally doesn't have annotations beyond basic categorization. --bmills 16:35, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We don't put redirects in categories, and when I look at Britannica's index [1], it seems pretty nicely annotated to me. Kappa 16:42, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you're searching by category, redirects are unnecessary (the redirect target should be there anyway); if you're searching by name, redirects are automatic (and categories are more or less unnecessary — all you need are disambig tags). The annotations in the Britannica index are precisely those two forms: redirects to other articles, and disambiguation tags — both of which are already present in Wikipedia without some difficult-to-maintain list. --bmills 17:12, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You seem to be assuming that users know all names/spellings for the target, so they will recognize the one we happened to choose. Also you seem to be suggesting that we should add disambig tags to every article, whether they need them or not, which is a radical change in policy. Futhermore lists allow different annoation depending on the context, while disambiguated article titles are invariable. Kappa 17:29, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion is getting way too involved for an AfD. Let's resume on my talk page. --bmills 18:14, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, I don't want to see Category:Basic science topics on any of these articles, ugh. Kappa 13:32, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per WP:LIST, in particular the second point of section "Purpose": this is a useful aid for navigation. - Liberatore(T) 16:52, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Paolo. Westfall 07:24, 26 February 2006 (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.