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.
Merge to Julie, then delete the resulting redirect as an unlikely typo. MER-C 13:13, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I really think that merging to Julie is impractical. There are probably hundreds of Wikipedia articles for people named Julie. This is what the search function is for. Pascal.Tesson 14:08, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Unmanageable, sets a bad precedent. Picaroon 16:00, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Wikipedia is not a directory. Simple enough. Arkyan • (talk) 16:07, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Agreed, Wikipedia is not a directory, it is for all intents and purposes an almanac as well as a general encyclopedia, therefore I thought that this list was valid. Many people insist on keeping this list as a part of the article Julie, similar lists can be found on many other first name pages such as the ones on Jonathan, and Bryan, so manageability shouldn't really be an issue. No list is 100% complete, and the editors of Wikipedia over time will decide upon the manageability of the article as they add to the list. Similar lists are already being kept for people sharing a surname, why not for common names? I created this article with the intention of keeping the list separate from information about the name Julie itself, my vote, naturally, is to keep this article as is. - HammerHeadHuman(talk)(work) 19:57, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well I'd be happy to submit similar lists for deletion. The difference I see with surnames is that surnames list are short enough that they can be reasonably used for disambiguation while this one is not. Pascal.Tesson 20:02, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
One more comment: a pretty viable option is to link to Special:Allpages/Julie. For all practical purposes it's just as good as the list is similarly sorted in alphabetical order. Pascal.Tesson 20:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I was not aware of the Special:Allpages/Julie page type. I will add such a link to the Julie article, and I withdraw my objection to the deletion of this article. This is a much more practical solution to the list problem... Additionally, as for the Bryan entry I thought that the list was for the common name Bryan rather than the surname, in my haste to find evidence to support my argument I may have overlooked that detail. Thank you all for your patience and civility. - HammerHeadHuman(talk)(work) 02:43, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I see no such list on the Bryan page, and the link at the bottom of Jonathan leads to Special:Allpages/Jonathan, not to a list article like the one under discussion here. Deor 00:21, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for keeping an open mind HHH. I have to agree about the Bryan page, but as far as Jonathan is concerned the list did exist up until a few hours ago when I made the whole thing into a proper dab page. Pascal.Tesson 06:58, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete this and any other lists of people by first name. If such search capability is desired, it really should be added to MediaWiki as a database function, not implemented in half-assed lists that will never be kept up to date. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 21:37, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the timber rattlesnake above. Deor 22:49, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The debate about Allen is about Allen as a surname, which is a completely separate issue: in that case, there's a clear value to these lists as a disambiguation tool. However, someone looking Julie Delpy is unlikely to try to go through List of people with the first name Julie. Pascal.Tesson 17:16, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I know. But it is part of the picture painted by the other discussions as well. I'm with you on the delete, I just want to be with the editing community on it as well. -- JHunterJ 17:19, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
merge with Julie - Surely this is not unmanageable; an editor looking for a "Julie" who didn't have an article would stumble across Julie and insert the relevant line before creating the missing article. Of course this assumes someone has first created a complete list (using Special:Allpages/Julie as a base) as I did with Derek for example. Abtract 17:35, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as it is a lot of work but always out of date, while Special:Allpages is no work and always complete. Chris the speller 17:40, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
see Talk:Derek for some discussion about the validity of allpages as a tool from outside wikipedia. Abtract 17:51, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete list per nominator (unmanageable list for which we have Special:Allpages/Julie in this case), but merge Julie Berthelsen (Danish Popstar contestant) and Julie Gonzalo (Argentine actress) with Julie since they might be known by just their given names, i.e. the need to disambiguate exists. Leave an invisible note on Julie to just list people named Julie who are actually widely known by just their given name. – sgeurekat•c 19:50, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - don't even think about it, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information or pointless lists. to the garbage!! Baristarim 05:01, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And, personally, I am against a merge. Merge for which reason? Is there a point to this list? Is every name article going to have a humongous list of everyone who happens to have that name? Especially for such common names as this? Come on :) Baristarim 05:04, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Merge into Julie, disambig page. --FateClub 01:44, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong delete WP is not a directory, and it would be both pointless and useless to maintain Julie as a list of everyone with that first name. This is just a complete waste of an article. Thewinchester(talk) 05:29, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Merge (and redirect) to Julie, obviously, as there are so few uses of "Julie" that are not a person's first name.
MER-C's solution is unacceptable for a couple of reasons:
"Merge and delete" would violate sections 4-I and 4-J of the GNU Free Documentation License (with which I strongly recommend you familiarize yourself) by failing to maintain an edit history for the content being merged. We can't use content if we have no persistent record of who originally posted it. Generally speaking, it would violate copyright law, but even if the original writer's right to attribution is somehow waived, a user who merges the unattributed text would (as far as we can tell) be fully assuming any liability that might arise from publishing it. On a list of names this concern might be minimal, but in the case of a real article, you could be cutting and pasting factual errors, libel, or even an elaborate hoax.
If merged the redirect's title List of people with the first name Julie would not be, as you put it, an "implausible typo". It's written in proper English, with no spelling or grammar errors, and perfectly describes what would be the contents of the target page.
Somebody suggested linking to a Special:Allpages query. Once again, I must advise against that. Please read Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. Wikipedia not only condones wholesale copying (and even modification and resale) of its content, we also encourage it, as long as it is released under the same license, and as long as the edit history is also made available. Special:Allpages/Julie is a useful tool, but does not exist outside of Wikipedia, and would not function properly on a mirror site, as the query results are not stored in any persistent form, and would not be present in a database dump from which a mirror site would be constructed. Even if the mirror is another wiki using the same software, we have no reason to assume that they have chosen to include every single "Julie" article (maybe they plan to write half of them from scratch, which they have every right to do). In effect their copy of our content would lack the functionality present in the original (it would consist of a David Bowie song and a bunch of dead links, instead of actually helping readers find biographical articles). A non-wiki mirror site might collect a one-time snapshot of the allpages query to replace the missing list, but this, again, would be unattributable content. When an article is created or deleted, it appears on, or disappears from the list, there is no centralized record-keeping for such changes, and it could be argued that there is no GFDL-compliant way to copy that content (because it's not really content, it's an index, a search engine result). Special:Allpages/Julie is not a complete list even for us, because more articles will obviously need to be created in the future.
More broadly, I'm not aware of any appropriate reason, other than on a (hopefully temporary) maintenance template, to link to a "Special:" page from article space.
As for what to do with a list of people named Julie... well, finish building it of course. Brief biographical information is always nice, year of birth (and death if not living), nationality, and occupation(s) are generally the bare minimum for disambiguation pages and lists of people by name. These also are features not available in the special-page solution. Lists may become long, and they may need to be split by the alphabetical range of peoples' last names. But it's not as difficult all of you make it sound. — CharlotteWebb 11:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete -- entirely un-encyclopaedic and contrary to WP:NOT#DIR --LeflymanTalk 22:02, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
How are disambiguation pages "un-encyclopaedic"? — CharlotteWebb 22:58, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's not a disambiguation page. It's a list of people with a particular given name, none of whom would otherwise have been the subject of an article titled simply Julie. It's different than an ((hndis)) dab page like Julie Brown (disambiguation). -- JHunterJ 23:34, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If merged, which I feel it should be, it would be a redirect pointing to a disambiguation page. See, for example, Elvis, Derek, Rory, Katie, Leroy, Lois, Rachel, Phillip, Morgan, Jeremy, Kevin, Jason, or hell, Charlotte to name just a few random ones. Granted none of them are complete, but no article pages of any kind are ever complete, and it would be easy to update any of them to include, at least, links to pages which already exist, though a proper indexing of the missing articles would require a bit more research. — CharlotteWebb 02:59, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Many lists of people by name are included on disambiguation pages, yes. That doesn't mean that lists of people by name are disambiguations though. Other lists are kept on "XXX (name)" or "XXX (surname)" pages, or indeed on "List of people named XXX" pages. There is a new topic on the village pump that readers here may be interested in: WP:VPP#Lists of names -- JHunterJ 11:15, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment In all of this we are in danger of losing sight of the fact that we need an article Julie for two reasons; first the obvious one of talking about the name and its origins, but also there needs to be a place for readers to find a Julie when they can't remember the surname - look at Derek to see what I mean. At Derek it is easy to find "that Dutch actor ... Derek whathisname ... ?" Derek de Lint which is not to say he is ever known simply as "Derek". Without the article Derek, where would we look? The fact that it may be difficult to create/maintain such articles doesn't mean we should delete them when they exist. Abtract 08:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
For other solutions to that problem, there's also a Search button next to the Go button to search Wikipedia, or the Special pages link will take you to a link to All pages with prefix (which is the same as the Allpages link or the ((lookfrom)) template that could be added to articles, with the drawbacks CharlotteWebb noted above). -- JHunterJ 11:15, 11 April 2007 (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.