The result was keep. —fetch·comms 00:56, 18 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This article is fundamentally Original Research. Furthermore, this cannot be fixed via article clean-up, because the fundamental concept always will be original research. Qwyrxian (talk) 06:16, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Strong delete. Excellent analysis about this list being inevitably OR and SYN. I tried to fix the list in the recent past, but I soon found my best and in fact only weapon was to delete whole chunks of material altogether.
You hit the nail on the head: Any such hierachical list lives from applying an order to the referenced numbers, but given the vast array of different sources, authors and methods, any such sorting is bound to remain purely subjective and thus merely reflecting the views of the latest editor who bothered to edit it. Ironically the best-researched figure in the list is also the one which reflects most the epic failure of this list: there are 27 different estimates on the population of the Persian Empire, only to have 26 of them being ignored in favour of an alleged most "preferred" number.
Soon, inclusionists who are prepared to ignore the impossibility of such a listing for the 5th time will flock in and vote through the article on the grounds of the topic being notable alone, but mark my words: as interesting as the topic may be to our quantifying age, this article is destined to be indefinitely tagged as pseudo-scientific compilation of random numbers — because, the way it is set up, it cannot exist in another way. Regards Gun Powder Ma (talk) 16:57, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]