The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was delete Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:47, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Nomin talst (band) (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

unused with no useful content. Frietjes (talk) 22:53, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any chance that we'll get articles on their albums anytime soon? There are a half-dozen albums that should be in this template, so I'm going to add them, but without articles, I think this is a good edge case. Neutral VanIsaac_WS^contribs 05:06, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ugh. I just took a closer look at this template. The links to the musicians just sections in the band article. Delete. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 07:00, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, not enough for a navtemplate. mabdul 12:15, 3 February 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was Keep. -FASTILY ^(TALK) 09:54, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Persondata (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

This is one of the most widespread templates on Wikipedia, with over 800,000 instances. But sometimes even well established things need to be put into question. Please first read the whole nomination and the different options, before jumping to conclusions! Over three years ago, there was Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 September 2#Template:Persondata, but a lot has changed since then. Note, I have put the deletion template at the talk page of the template, no sense in getting it included 800,000 times without anyone being able to see it those times anyway. I'll put some pointers to this discussion at relevant or oft-visited locations.

1. Reasons for deletion: this template serves no purpose for Wikipedia at all. Wikipedia:WikiProject Persondata claims that "It's important for Wikipedia maintenance and the possibility of a Wikipedia comprehensive CD-ROM". No evidence of it being used or useful for Wikipedia maintenance is given, and no indication that it has been used in the creation of any Wikipedia CDRoms. The only known use of the Persondata template, after more than 6 years, is its inclusion in DBpedia. I haven't seen any indication that it has served any purpose from there though. So the template is basically unused, certainly onwiki and most likely offwiki. This seems logical, since for metadata it is rather useless, without strict rules and uses. In many cases, places (birth and death) are filled in with wikilinks, including piped redirects, which is not really the most easily machine-readable information. They sometimes list only the place, or the place and state (or province or department), or the country as well, or only the country, and so on. No rules seem to exist or be followed. Dates are given in different formats, it is unclear whether names should include diacritics or not, and so on. Wikipedia talk:Persondata has discussions about these problems, and on whether it is useful or overkill to have this template at all. Most if not all of the info in it can be gotten in a much more structured way from the defaultsort (name), categories (years of birth and death, and reasons for being notable), and infoboxes. This makes it basically unused, useless and redundant.
2. If not deleted, is there any reason why this template shouldn't be located at the talk page of the articles? Talk pages are loaded what, once for every 100 pageviews (probably less, from the sample I took)? Moving the template from the article to the talk page would reduce the useless loading of this template from let's say 10 million times a day (800,000 articles!) to perhaps 100,000 a day, without any loss whatsoever to anyone (since it does nothing at all to help any reader or editor of the article).
3. If kept (at mainpage or talkpage), why doesn't this have a "gender" parameter? Seems to be the most obvious persondata metadata, and the one least easy to get from the other items we already have (infobox, defaultsort, and categories). Fram (talk) 10:10, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• AFAIK serves no purpose for Wikipedia, probably massive waste of work Bulwersator (talk) 10:26, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Agree completely with Fram's nomination. It's a shame because to put it on 800,000 pages some editors must have put a lot of work in, but I don't see that as a reason to keep it. If it is kept, I strongly support moving it to the talk page because all it does at the moment is clutter up the bottom of articles and increase load time (even if not significantly). Jenks24 (talk) 10:31, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• (Related: WP:RFC/Microformats) Unless I understand wrong, moving this to talk page is pointless, because all the metadata will be lost and the only purpose of this template is to produce metadata on the same page as the article. I would say "merge with infobox", but unfortunately we haven't standardized them yet. I've wondered this before, but I don't see any widespread use of this outside WP and this looks like we are trying to pioneer something for many years but no one is catching up. Only hits are microformats wiki explanation, but that page is mostly written by Wikipedia editor. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 10:42, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • You may be right about the move to talk page, my understanding was that it would be nearly as easy for any automated tool (read the metadata from the talk page and link that to the page name -"talk:"), but I may obviously be wrong about this. Fram (talk) 10:47, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep for now - Although I partially agree that this template is being underutilized my gut tells me that we need to keep it. The truth is for the last couple years we haven't really been able to use it because the data wasn't populated. Now we are getting close to getting that data populated so that the data will actually be useful. I do completely agree that adding gender would be useful but the problem is verifiability. Many articles don't have it either because many consider it Privacy data and because its hard to source. Everybody knows Drew Barrymore is a girl but trying to find a reference that proves it is another matter. --Kumioko (talk) 12:29, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. It's at least potentially useful, and nobody is forced to use it. As long as there are people who want to fill out these things for an admittedly as-of-yet unclear purpose, let them. No opinion about a possible move to the talk page; that might be sensible if the additional loading time is really a practical concern (but somehow I doubt that).  Sandstein  12:52, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Sandstein, although Fram's quite right to point out that it's basically not utilized. The answerwould seem to be to actually use it. Beyond My Ken (talk) 14:09, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: I agree with the nom. It is hidden and redundant. You get all the same info from the infobox anyways. We don't link the same thing 15 times in the same paragraph/section, so why have this information twice?--NavyBlue84 16:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete In addition to the nominator's rationale, I think there is additional risk of turning off new editors with confusing in-article templates that don't seem to do anything. Standardization of infobox templates seems like a more transparent and reasonable way to store structured article metadata. Gigs (talk) 16:27, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - I'm inclined to !vote delete, but would like to know what purpose, if any, this template is intended to serve. There is nothing wrong with introducing something with the intent of added functionality at some point in the future. But this thing has been around for over six years. It is time to either find a use for it or dump it. Resolute 17:02, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: All its metadata can be emitted by the hCard microformat in biographical infoboxes, using the new v4 of vCard, which includes birthplace and place and date of death. Furthermore, unlike PERSONDATA, such microformats are an open, global standard, not unique to Wikipedia; and the metadata in the microformat is visible on the page, so errors and omissions are more easily noticed and corrected. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:33, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. This is a standardised method of formatting metadata that provides what is currently a unique service; infoboxes don't do it, for example, and if hCard is used extensively, we need to make that plain, because I've seen Persondata all over the place but never even heard of hCard or encountered Wikipedia:Microformats until after reading Andy's comment just above mine. Note — as any information professional will tell you, you don't dump metadata just because it isn't yet being used: it doesn't hurt to keep it, and getting rid of it might substantially hurt in the future. Nyttend (talk) 18:08, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • You don't need to know about hCard - though every biographical infobox (there may be a few minor exceptions - please feel free to point them out for me or others to fix) includes details of it in its documentation; it's just there. Yahoo, for instance, already index ours. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:55, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. The persondata template is not perfect, it may not be complete, it may not hold all data in a sufficiently standarized form, each use of it may not currently hold all available data. However, not all pages have infoboxes, certain wikiprojects do not use infoboxes, infoboxes are improving in standardization and field coverage but are not there yet. Persondata is designed to make metadata available without forcing a particular rendering or visible page formatting on an article; we must make metadata available before it can be used by others. The above comments from other editors are insightful and cover a number of areas. The persondata template has particularly improved in usage and standardization over the last year or two, I would like to see the above comments used to inform discussions on further improvements. Rjwilmsi 18:22, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • "certain wikiprojects do not use infoboxes - though some would pretend otherwise, that's not, per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS a decision in their gift.
  • "without forcing a particular rendering or visible page formatting" - other than requiring the data to be visible on the page, which is a good thing, nor do microformats.
  • "infoboxes are improving in standardization and field coverage but are not there yet" - that's irrelevant to their emission of microformats.
  • Nonetheless, I suspect this needs an RfC, not a TfD. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:55, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Look at this abortion. 800,000 articles and 645,000 of them in this category! Lugnuts (talk) 18:36, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your right that looks ugly, but no uglier than looknig at the list of articles with no Infoboxes, or those with infoboxes with no birth information. For what its worth about 24, 000 are in WikiProject United States project alone, down from about 36, 000 a couple months ago. As with many things, we have identified the problem now we are working on addressing it. It just takes time. --Kumioko (talk) 18:42, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. DBpedia does use persondata and it is part of their dataset. I don't know how they use it. Contacting them on how they use it or if it is even important to them would be a good idea. I go thru newly created living biographies everyday for multiple reasons. I'd say roughly 50% of new articles contain infoboxes with roughly 75%-80% of those using hCard. 99% of new articles have persondata. Sportspeople are more likely to contain infoboxes than any other type of article. One problem I see with infoboxes is they don't contain standard metadata labels... "Birth" or "birth_date". No "birth_place" for musicians, but people use "Origin". I see alot of people putting birth date and birth place in the Birth parameter. The main reason they don't contain standard labels is because people copy from other article's infoboxes and not what is the current syntax of the infobox. If you were to get rid of persondata, you need to 1) Standardize birth and death metadata labels accross all articles (via bot?). 2) If there is no infobox in a current article, add it with information from persondata. 3) Make sure all new articles contain infoboxes. Only when the bots/people get up and running converting old articles should persondata go away. Bgwhite (talk) 19:07, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if it affects us here but I think a couple of the other sister pedias use it also especially Germany. It seems to me that there was a conversation recently that they were getting into the 95% completion territory. I also think we should ask one of the WP developers to comment in case there are internal Wiki initiatives or processes affected. Normally I wouldn't suggest something so drastic but due to the purpose of the template and the number of pages affected I think we need to exercise due diligence before deleting it. --Kumioko (talk) 20:46, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I left a notice on the following locations that would be affected by this change. Persondata-O-matic developers talk page, AWB and Rjwilmsi (he runs a bot that makes a lot of changes to Persondata and is a developer of AWB). --Kumioko (talk) 16:38, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That seems rather one-sided. What about the metadata, biography and infobox projects? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:01, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea I'll do that now. I think FRAM already contacted some of them but I'll drop a couple in obvious places. --Kumioko (talk) 20:31, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok I dropped a couple more on WP Biography, Infoboxes and WikiProject Council. FRAM did a good job of notifying several as well including the Village pump so we should be pretty well covered. --Kumioko (talk) 20:46, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:02, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - I've been thinking how useless it is for a while now. Rcsprinter (rap) 20:53, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Not causing major harm and potentially useful. Can this be exploited for research? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:12, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I've never believed that persondata would be a permanent feature of Wikipedia; we already have infoboxes that can serve pretty much the same purpose, and to a large extent already do. But I've seen plenty of articles (especially short articles) that have persondata but no infobox, and it strikes me that simply tossing away the persondata would be a waste; why not convert the information into an infobox instead and preserve that effort? (I did casually suggest mass-adding the generic ((infobox person)) to articles like this, but for a number of reasons that simply won't happen.) Nevertheless, I don't want to support deleting this template unless more is done to get infoboxes out there and avoid wasting the metadata. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 22:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you try adding an infobox - any infobox - to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, you'll be reverted pretty quickly (not by me). For some reason there is an embargo on infoboxes for classical composers. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:34, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • There is no such embargo; though a few editors like to pretend there is. Please don't be fooled by them . Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:00, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. I don't like the proposal of putting it on the talk page, because we want this data to find its way into database dumps that don't include talk pages. Personally, I'm a fan of solutions that make the data directly visible whenever possible, so that it can be verified and fixed by casual editors (and make it as easy as possible for them to edit this data). Errors in persondata are likely to languish, and writing a bot to keep it synced up with changes to infoboxes (as it seems we inevitably must) seems silly. On the other hand it's also true that persondata is a very widely-used standardized format, making it more straightforward to use for machine processing than infoboxes. The rules for the values in the persondata fields are stricter and better-specified. The best solution that I can see is this: all biographical infoboxes are given a set of standard named parameters corresponding exactly to the persondata fields, and in any article containing such an infobox, the persondata template is merged into the infobox. In any article without such an infobox, the persondata remains. This would make machine processing almost as trivial (just look for templates in the Category:People infobox templates category and extract the standard fields), but enable infobox templates to easily display (or cross-check) the data. As for gender, it seems like a reasonable field, although we do have to account for edge cases like third gender people. Dcoetzee 22:39, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oh, yes, I didn't intend "gender" to be binary, things like transgender, third gender, and people with unknown gender (e.g. some artists) should be included as well. This is the same as for the other fields, there are also unknowns, exceptions, dubious cases and so on. No idea why this field isn't included in infobox person and the likes, when we have less well-defined things like "weight" or "ethnicity"... Fram (talk) 08:09, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Potentially useful and not doing any harm. The hCard argument is also rather unconvincing: the emitted hCard data can only be obtained through the HTML version of the page, whereas the persondata information can be readily extracted from wikitext. The latter is clearly much more convenient for research purposes, if only because our database dumps provide wikitext and not parsed HTML. Until infoboxes are standardized (which is unlikely to happen any time soon), this template needs to be retained. T. Canens (talk) 22:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Information about SOPA/PIPA/ACTA hidden in <!-- --> is also "potentially useful and not doing any harm" - but it is a bad idea to place it in more than 800.000 articles. We need really useful things rather than "potentially useful" Bulwersator (talk) 18:56, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Are you seriously comparing metadata relevant to the subject and irrelevant advocacy? Or claiming that permanently putting advocacy irrelevant to the subject into the wikitext of our articles will not do any harm? Really, next time find a better straw man. T. Canens (talk) 19:48, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, but I agree with Andy Mabbett, this should be an RFC. Mark Hurd (talk) 08:51, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Wikipedia needs metadata. This is metadata - machine-readable formatted data. It is really hackish, but MediaWiki (as installed here) is not semantic and does not support a better way. Infoboxes, while an apparent alternative, are inconsistent and not always machine-readable as persondata is. — This, that, and the other (talk) 08:55, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • The dates in PERSONDATA are not - unlike those in infoboxes, using (for example) ((Start date)) - are not formatted for machine-readability. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:02, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • On the contrary, Wikipedia:Persondata#Dates_of_birth_and_death explicitly says that persondata dates should be in plain text and that using templates such as ((Birth date)) "can interfere with data extraction." jcgoble3 (talk) 17:12, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • I didn't say that PERSONDATAs should use such templates; but that its current instances use a variety of unstandardised formats (4 jan 2012, 4-01-2012, Jan 4th 2012, 2012-01-04, 4-1-2012, 1-4-2012, etc) whereas infoboxes use templates which emit metadata in a single, ISO format. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:37, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per This, that and the other. The metadata provided here is potentially useful, and infoboxes can't provide the same functionality without some serious standardization that probably won't be forthcoming anytime soon. jcgoble3 (talk) 17:12, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • This template is also unable to provide the functionality without some serious standardization Bulwersator (talk) 17:27, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • While that may be true, a single template is a hell of a lot easier to standardize then the roughly 200 infoboxes in Category:People infobox templates and its subcats. jcgoble3 (talk) 17:36, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • We don't need to standardise 200 infoboxes; just the markup of the metadata they emit - and that's already done for the vast majority of them. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:39, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        • We provide our articles in database dumps as wikitext, not HTML. The consistency of metadata emitted by infoboxes is therefore beside the point since there's no way you can do it from just wikitext alone. T. Canens (talk) 19:48, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
          • Then we need to look at way to standardise template content in wikitext; we should not store, nor expect people to enter or change the same values in different places. That way lies madness. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:17, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
            • Yes, I agree that this template is not well designed, but until we actually standardized infoboxes (or whatever other templates), we need to keep this one. It would be foolish to demolish the crappy house you are living in when you haven't built a better one yet. T. Canens (talk) 00:19, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - As superfluous. What exactly does this template contribute to anything? What makes it worth the investment of volunteer energy to establish and maintain these things? Like many silly things on Wikipedia, things like this start innocuously enough then develop a momentum of their own as people become bureaucratically invested in their continuance. Enough already. There is nothing worthwhile coming out of this template so far as I am aware... Carrite (talk) 18:20, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per that infoboxes are not yet standardized, and this template is needed for hCard microformat data. Additionally, until infoboxes are completely standardized crawling and categorizing engines will find this extremely useful. A412 (Talk * C) 02:34, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Inconspicuous and potentially useful. I think it would be advantageous to develop similar templates for other types of topics. --Hegvald (talk) 05:19, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Sandstein. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:36, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - just not real soon. If we have it it should be correct. But there are downsides to all our page-level metadata efforts, most of which which can be resolved by other means, namely using a metadata subpage with a proper ontology and coding structure based on Dublin or some other standard schema/ontology, and maintained by a group of experts with apporopriate tools. Rich Farmbrough, 10:52, 1 February 2012 (UTC).[reply]
  
• Strong keep for now. As others have noted, metadata is an incredibly valuable tool in organising information, and as such its inclusion should be welcomed and encouraged. It is a pity that some contributors to this discussion appear unaware of the purpose of structured metadata, and I hopde that this does not influence the out come.
  It is true that the Persondata template does not yet appear to be widely used for the analytical purposes it was designed, and it may well be that some other mechanism for organising metadata may turn out to be a better long-term solution. However, we don't yet know what a better solution might be, so we are not yet in a position to transfer the data to a new format. Deleting the persondata template without having another mechanism ready and working will involve removing a huge amount of data which would take thousands of hours to re-create, and we should not take such a drastic step unless and until we are absolutely sure that there is no way all this metadata can be used. (Yes, it made need some tidying to be usable, but before writing it off we need a systematic analysis of the severity of any data quality problems).
  I endorse calls for an RFC on how to develop Wikipedia's use of metadata, and hopefully that process could lead us to a better-informed decision on ways ahead. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:00, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • There was a quite related RfC at WP:RFC/Microformats and the main result was to evaluate templates/cases individually. Which this fits, sorta. I would hope those who wish to keep this template would link to some actual real world usage of this data. There are many different metadata we can emit, like animal species or music albums, yet we are stuck with persondata, because it managed to propagate widely.. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 22:03, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Agree with BrownHairedGirl, in particular regarding the RFC which will presumably also cover WP:Authority control metadata. Favonian (talk) 21:17, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete since I fail to be convinced by the need for this manually populated template. It is just one more place to have to dab information and make other corrections in an article. Since the data is not displayed in the article, verification is not trivial. If we really need this material, how much is available in the various people templates? If the material is there, then we could have a bot generate this in a different standardized location if it is really needed. So this sounds like a bot task, even if it is to create/update a template in the article. We don't need additional human maintained templates for this information! Vegaswikian (talk) 00:21, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete and integrate/merge the data into infoboxes and standardize them. This can't be that hard: informing all related projects and start a topic at VP/T and do it. This can be done within a month... mabdul 12:33, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You do realize that there are more than 200 infoboxes, many arent't yet standardized, even then the persondata appears on more articles than infoboxes do so in order for this "merge" to work, we would need to populate every Biography that doesn't have it, with an infobox. Granted we should be doing that anyway just clarifying that it will be several months at least before this could be done and isn't just a matter of "informing" projects. Also due to its location on the article its a lot harder to add an Infobox to an article than to add Persondata. As I mentioned in my comments above, we shouldn't be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. --Kumioko (talk) 14:14, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, why is it harder to add an infobox? Well, let's assume it is in some cases. It still makes more sense to add persondata only to those articles, than to every single one. And I agree this will take months, I'd even guess closer to a year at least. But that's why NODEADLINE exists as a helpful reminder potential workload shouldn't come between the potential improvement. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 14:27, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We may identify standardised infoboxes and remove persondata from this group Bulwersator (talk) 14:29, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Reply to H3llkn0wz. That is a fair and reasonable question so let me exaplain further. I am going to try and keep this brief as posible.

LOL? Sry, but adding a standard infobox and moving the data of persondata (and then removing persondata) to an infobox can be really simple made by an bot. ~200 infoboxes transformed changed quickly if you want to add data/standardize data like birth dates and such stuff. The most work is to get enough people to a discussion and reaching a consent. After that, renaming the actual fields (bot, fallback solutions) or adding new ones are fast implemented. After that a bot can transform the persondata stuff. mabdul 16:17, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I think you are oversimplifying the problem and the solution but I have been wrong a couple times and it sounds like you have a pretty good idea about how to do that. I am not a good enough programmer to do that with more than a moderate degree of trust so I would recommend you go ahead and submit a BRFA task to do that? If you prefer and give me the code I would be happy to run it in my bot! Personally I have tried to do this several times and am currently working on an automated routine that would add Infobox person and the top ten parameters to folks in WPUS without it but I have found it to be very difficult and requires a lot of code and rules to eliminate problems. --Kumioko (talk) 21:18, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Break 1[edit]

First lets consider the structure of the templte itself. The Persondata template has a defined number of variables, the rules state that there should not be any embedded templates such as Birth date, Death date, age, etc. and it has limited fields that are standardized across the board. This makes it easier to update, particularly in an automated fashion, to pull data from and to view on the article if needed. There are about 200 different person related infoboxes, they have many fields, the fields don't have standard functionality or naming, templates are allowed to be used within them such as Birth date, death date, age, and many others. Some projects don't allow Infoboxes on their articles. I don't personally agree that projects should have the power to make that call but setting that opinion to the side for the moment how do we add the data to these and who has the power to tell the projects too bad so sad. We also need to determine which Infobox is more appropriate. Assuming we just go with Infobox person some projects will get upset that we didn't use a certain infobox for a certain biography so that will start fights and discussions. Some will blame others for forcing their preferance on others, etc.

Second, lets look at the location of the template. Towards the bottom of the article directly above Defaultsort and categories. A fairly easy to define and standard location. Lets look at the Infobox placement. Towards the top of the article, above the intro and below some but not other templates. To automate the placement of Persondata we need to look for Defaultsort and the like and categories. To place the infobox we need to look for the order of templates that appear at the top of the page. Not impossible, but much harder which is probably why it hasn't been done already.

So in summary although I agree that the Persondata isn't perfect and having the functionality incorporated into the infoboxes and placed on all articles would be great I think we have quite a few issues we need to straighten out first. Then once we standardize the infoboxes(this has been an ongoing fight for a number of reasons), enforce that WikiProjects don't have the right to say that infoboxes are banned from their articles(who has the power to do that?), build some automation tools(we have several for persondata including a couple bots but not many for Infoboxes), sort out if templates are or not allowed in infoboxes (why don't we just build the age calculation into the Infobox template), etc. we can start talking about eliminating this template. --Kumioko (talk) 14:59, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Some projects don't allow Infoboxes on their articles." - Can you name me some or give any reason why they don't allow it? I never heard of that!

"Assuming we just go with Infobox person some projects will get upset that we didn't use a certain infobox for a certain biography so that will start fights and discussions. Some will blame others for forcing their preferance on others, etc." - Huch? If a project has a standard template (e.g. writer) then they simply should replace after the bot run the template (e.g. person) with theirs - with standard fields this wouldn't be that problemating to exchange the name of the template - everything should still work!

"To place the infobox we need to look for the order of templates that appear at the top of the page." - ? Sry, but there is the problem: every person should have only one. Other stuff like maintain boxes still will be displayed correctly.

As I mentioned above: In my eyes, it's rather easy after we get a consent to do this. I think this is the problem. And after we get the consent we have still the backlog, it doesn't matter if to add/modify the persondata or the infobox! mabdul 16:17, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See for instance Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music/Guidelines#Biographical infoboxes and the Composers and Opera projects referenced there. Favonian (talk) 18:20, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's a non-binding project guideline. It doesn't trump policies like WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and the five pillars. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:29, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Try telling them that and try adding a few infoboxes to those articles and see how long they last or the nasty discussion that will result. --Kumioko (talk) 21:04, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I'm well aware of the modus operandi; we should demonstrate consensus favouring infoboxes. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:15, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: If we do merge this with infoboxes, or use some other visible-on-page template, we should consider the proposal to merge ((Authority control)) with them, at the same time. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:10, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per some projects' dislike of infoboxes. This is invisible, and allows the metadata to be maintained independent of presentation. Merging it with Infoboxes would be a Bad Thing.--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 22:21, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • We can add a parameter hidden so that the data in the infoboxes are simply not visible. (Although I don't like that idea) mabdul 12:19, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I created this template back in 2005. At the time, I was assuming that within a few years Wikipedia would implement some sort of metadata system for articles, and this template would let us get a head start on collecting the data. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet, but I still believe it will happen one day. Regarding infoboxes, I really don't think they are useful as metadata sources. They are not consistent, and many biographical articles (even featured articles like Mary Wollstonecraft) don't have infoboxes. Personally, I don't like using infoboxes as I think they are cruft magnets, and many other editors have the same opinion. Thus I don't think it would ever make sense to say that infoboxes are mandatory for biographical articles. Kaldari (talk) 05:44, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: depending on the closure of this TfD, I'll probably draft some RfC about this. I just wanted to throw out one possible solution to the "some articles have no infoboxes / some projects and editors want no infoboxes" problem: there is no reason why we can't have a toggle to hide infoboxes for those articles that for some reason shouldn't have a visible one (e.g. hidden=yes as long as the article is a substub, and hidden=no once it gets fleshed out a bit). Succh a hidden infobox would have the exact same role as the current "persondata", but could be integrated in the "metadata-from-infobox" syetem that seems to be what many people prefer over the current system. While the method of doing this is not standardized yet over all infoboxes (but it is standardized over many of them), the actual info in the persondata template is included in all of them, hence the useless duplication of much of this on these pages. Take some random pages with an infobox and a persondata template: Jah Thomas has the place of birth in the infobox, but not the year; the persondata template however has the year of birth, but not the place... AbdulRahman bin Hamad al-Attiyah has all the info in the infobox, but misses the name in the persondata template. Charles Patrick Daly ha a nice infobox, and a nice persondata, except that this contains two, slightly differing, places of birth... The current situation, whatever the solution, is far from optimal. Fram (talk) 08:48, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good point about mismatching data in infoboxes and PD. However, one of the causes is that the PD data is hidden. We should not encourage proliferation of that by making infoboxes hideable, too. Perhaps, as a short-term fix, and to measure the extent of the problem, a BOT could add articles with mismatched data to a hidden category? I've fixed Jah Thomas, BTW Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:59, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Bots are unable to check whatever data is mismatched Bulwersator (talk) 12:07, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • But they/it could report it on any page (despite whether this template will be deleted or not) mabdul 12:27, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        • "report it on any page" - but what will be reported? How bot is supposed to check whatever
          • data is in different format
          • data is mismatched
        • Bulwersator (talk) 12:35, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
          • Are you saying that a machine can't compare two machine-readable dates? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:40, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
          • See also Wikipedia talk:Biographical metadata#Pages with inconsistent metadata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:43, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: DBpedia among others use it, and there's really not much reason to remove metadata from things anyway. The Web and the world are moving more and more toward automation and "intelligent agent" data processing. "It's not being used enough yet to make me happy" is not a deletion rationale. The "Persondata data isn't consistent enough and is often incomplete or incorrect" argument is vapid; this is true of pretty much everything in the world, from the phone book to Wikipedia article content to what the nightly news says. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 19:17, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, though there does need to be more discussion on standardisation and keeping biographical metadata updated. Not necessarily through infoboxes, but if so then an option to use on articles that don't have infoboxes should be developed. Many years ago now I tried to make a start on a meta overview of biographical metadata at Wikipedia:Biographical metadata (if more people were aware of that page, a notice about this discussion would have been left at the talk page there!), but someone marked that historical for some bizarre reason and I only noticed that a year later. You will see that I noted there the situation with gender not being documented. Another thing is the mixing up of individual biographies and group biographies (e.g. saint pairs, brothers, music groups, and so on) without a parameter to separate them. Hopefully some of those reading this discussion will have time to bring that page up to date. One thing I would plead for is not to lose data unnecessarily. If the template is ever deleted, please try and extract all the information from each page where it is used and dump it somewhere first (e.g. the metadata subpage that has been suggested before) in a format where it can be cleaned and standardised. I have an additional comment to make, but will do that separately. Carcharoth (talk) 06:46, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - Noting that within the bit above that was collapsed, there was one point relevant to this discussion, which is that the Persondata template 'short description' field could be used by bots to generate lists for human name disambiguation pages and surname set index pages. The rest of what I said, I'll post at a village pump for discussion there. Carcharoth (talk) 23:41, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a personnel database. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 03:08, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • You do realise that the same argument would apply to deleting much of the metadata in Wikipedia, including hCard and infoboxes? And I think you misunderstand what the word personnel means. My view is that biographical metadata is an important part of maintaining a biographical dictionary, along the lines of Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Australian Dictionary of Biography and others in Category:Biographical dictionaries. See also biographical dictionary. And one thing that puzzles me here is why so little attention has been paid to what Fram pointed out about gender not being tracked. I pointed this out in 2008, and others probably pointed it out earlier. I'm still no nearer getting an answer to the question I asked back then, which was how many biographical articles do we have, and how many are about men and how many about women, and how many are in various other gender categories? It is a valid question, and I think it is a failing on Wikipedia's part that we can't answer that question. That is why it is important to maintain metadata for biographies. The other reason is that biographies form a large section (around 20%) of the encyclopedia, so they fall into the classes of large groupings (such as geographical locations) that it is reasonable to maintain metadata for. Carcharoth (talk) 12:27, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • We could achieve that another way; using categories, such as, say, Male English chemists, Female English chemists, English chemists of non-traditional gender, or whatever. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:03, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • Those would be examples of threefold intersections (gender, occupation, nationality), something rare (and rightly so) in our category system. Better to record gender some other way. Though a really big discussion about how to do that in a sensible way is needed. The way the German Wikipedia have used biographical data looks to be a good example of how to use such data. Carcharoth (talk) 19:34, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep expand use, do similarly for other types of structured data. In fact, move Wikipedia to a semantic wiki structure as soon a feasible to facilitate the reuse of our information, which is one of our core purposes. The potential for data mining in a factual databases as extensive as this is one of the factors that makes Wikipedia a wonderful resource. Free form writing is very good for narration, but has its limits when it comes to clarity, accuracy, and reusability. DGG ( talk ) 17:32, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep per SMcCandlish. We (the community/WMF) just have to encourage developers to work with this data and create new tools. The potential is there. On the German Wikipedia for example, the authority control template included in most biography articles links to the person's entry on the "Wikipedia-Personensuche" (Wikipedia person search) on the toolserver. See [1] for Albert Einstein for example, which not only displays all the metadata (including persondata) from the article, but also uses it to create our own standardized authority records for this person. The tool also allows you to search for biographical articles, you can search for "all women named 'Smith' from the US born between 1900 and 2000" for example. Trying to implement this into over 200 infoboxes (and articles that don't have infoboxes) will take a long time and achieve no improvement over this template. --Kam Solusar (talk) 17:34, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • How and where does the German Wikipedia record gender for subjects of biographical articles? Could that system be adopted here? Carcharoth (talk) 19:34, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • By category. See de:Franz Beckenbauer - the very last category (it's in the wikicode just before the Personendaten [persondata]) - is [[Kategorie:Mann]] - literally, Category:Man, which is singular, not plural. Compare de:Angela Merkel which has [[Kategorie:Frau]], i.e. Category:Woman. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 5 February 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was Delete. -FASTILY ^(TALK) 09:54, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Horn of Africa Music (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Redundant to the standard navbar, ((Africa topic|Music of)). Had been nominated for CSD T3 but contested by the template creator. The concern had been raised that "Africa topic" is not specifically about music, but I note that "Horn of Africa music" doesn't cover any topic not already capable of being covered by Africa topic. I am also concerned that a template specifically for music in the Horn of Africa will suggest to the reader some sort of common musical heritage that isn't clearly supported by the constituent articles (and, indeed, denied to a degree by the lead paragraph of Music of Ethiopia). ClaretAsh 10:00, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep -- The countries in the Horn of Africa do share related musical cultures (e.g. [2]). This is why a music template reserved for them makes sense, in the model of Template:South Asian Music. On the other hand, many of the countries in Africa do not share related musical heritages; they just happen to be based on the same continent, in the same way that Arab and Japanese music are not especially related though both are based in Asia. And even if these various musical cultures had all been similar, the Africa topic template that is linked to is on countries, not on music. It's actually this Horn of Africa Music template that exclusively contains music-related links. The only music-related link that the Africa topic template contains is a link to the Music of Africa main page at the top. The rest of its many links are all to irrelevant country articles, not to the relevant music articles (c.f. here; mouse over the links in the template). Middayexpress (talk) 17:26, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think you may be experiencing some sort of technical error there. The variant of the Africa topic navbar used in the link you provide shows up for me exactly how it is supposed to; i.e. with every entry auto-adjusted to link to the appropriate "Music of..." article. ClaretAsh 23:20, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Yeah, I got the same thing as Claret did - the links are to the "music of" articles. It must have been a bug (someone doing maintenance on the template, perhaps?). As for the deletion question, I would suggest that unless we have a distinct article on the music of the Horn of Africa - one that ties these particular music traditions together, opposed to the general development of African music - this template should be deleted, with all instantiations replaced with the more general (and more informative) ((Africa|music of)) template. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 00:48, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• The links point to the respective music articles now, but they certainly did not when I made the post above. Someone in the interim indeed clearly made an adjustment/fixed a bug of some sort on the back-end. At any rate, unless we do the neutral thing and list on TfD the other templates in Category:Music by region templates (most of which aren't linked to stand-alone articles), there's no reason why these temps should be singled out for deletion. Middayexpress (talk) 02:54, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• The only reason the Horn of Africa music templates are at TfD is because their deletion was challenged. Otherwise, like the others I've come across (and I'm not going to hunt down every eligible template), they are eligible for deletion under CSD criterion T3. Also, when we consider the seven day gap between nomination and closure under that criterion, it gives ample time for both the template creator (who is auto-notified by Twinkle) and any interested parties (for whom the deletion nomination is advertised at every transclusion) to question the nomination. In other words, there is nothing non-neutral about this nomination. And they have not been "singled out", except in the sense that I can't be buggered seeking out every other redundant template. I deal with what crosses my path, as the randomness of my editing history will show. ClaretAsh 10:20, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Understood; I'm sure the nomination was made in good faith. But the allegedly redundant nature of this template and the similar North African ones that were also tagged was never that clear cut. Others have remarked this too (e.g. [3]). Middayexpress (talk) 16:52, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Pretty uncontroversial T3. As for the argument that for consistency a whole load of other templates should be deleted, there's no reason that everything need be deleted at the same time. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:58, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• The main argument is that the template is redundant because it subdivides the continental musical traditions into a particular regional one (CSD criterion T3's "substantial duplications of another template"). This is what every other category in Category:Music by region templates does. So if the template is earmarked for deletion on that basis, the others in the category should be looked into as well for the sake of consistency. Middayexpress (talk) 16:52, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• If you want to delete the others, then go for it. ClaretAsh 23:09, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• My only concern would be if any of those templates actually document a coherent regional musical tradition that can be contrasted with the larger musical geography. In that case, the regional template is actually not subdividing continental musical traditions, but is recognizing a particular split in regional musical traditions. But I agree with Claret - Be Bold!, and see what kind of a conversation we can generate. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 04:39, 1 February 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was Delete. -FASTILY ^(TALK) 09:53, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Horn African music (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Redundant to the standard navbar, ((Africa topic|Music of)). Had been nominated for CSD T3 but contested by the template creator. The concern had been raised that "Africa topic" is not specifically about music, but I note that "Horn African music" doesn't cover any topic not already capable of being covered by Africa topic. I am also concerned that a template specifically for music in the Horn of Africa will suggest to the reader some sort of common musical heritage that isn't clearly supported by the constituent articles (and, indeed, denied to a degree by the lead paragraph of Music of Ethiopia). ClaretAsh 08:54, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep -- The countries in the Horn of Africa do share related musical cultures (e.g. [4]). This is why a music template reserved for them makes sense, in the model of Template:South Asian Music. On the other hand, many of the countries in Africa do not share related musical heritages; they just happen to be based on the same continent, in the same way that Arab and Japanese music are not especially related though both are based in Asia. And even if these various musical cultures had all been similar, the Africa topic template that is linked to is on countries, not on music. It's actually this Horn African music template that exclusively contains music-related links. The only music-related link that the Africa topic template contains is a link to the Music of Africa main page at the top. The rest of its many links are all to irrelevant country articles, not to the relevant music articles (c.f. here; mouse over the links in the template). Middayexpress (talk) 17:26, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Same as above. If there were a "Music of the Horn of Africa" page that tied these together conceptually, there might be a justification for separating them out, but, as of now, the ((Africa topic|Music of)) template is preferable. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 11:00, 31 January 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was delete Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:46, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Cite 1904 Gettysburg Battlefield map (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Looks like the idea here was to actually create a template that created citation information into multiple articles. Since it was only used in one article, Springs Hotel and Horse Railroad, I just placed the actual cite info from here into the article. Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars (talk) 07:41, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Unusued, unnecessary, not an effective use of a template. Resolute 17:03, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - depreciated. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:39, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, created by an editor who is blocked with an expiry time of indefinite, because of Disruptive editing and because the template is unused. mabdul 12:38, 2 February 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was no consensus Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:45, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Wanamaker Athletic Award (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Navbox for an award that doesn't have a Wikipedia article. Award is regional (Philadelphia) and may not be notable. Write the article first. – Muboshgu (talk) 05:35, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete: Agreed it needs an article/list created for it. Support deleting until that is done. Need to put the horse before the cart!--NavyBlue84 16:30, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Even if there was an article, this is still just clutter. Resolute 17:04, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Provisional Keep. WP:WTAF doesn't seem to have been written to cover this situation, and I'd like to get a more appropriate policy under which this template should be considered for deletion. It seems to have information pertinent to many disparate articles, and would seem to be quite helpful for research purposes. In some ways, the lack of an article on the award seems to create a perverse justification for the template, in my mind: If there isn't an article, someone trying to follow the history of the Wanamaker award would be dependent on this template, and a great deal of important information would be lost if the template is deleted. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 05:24, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, so the only problem is that there is no article for that award? Then simply astart to write it! It's a valid navbox containing enough links to navigate. There is no policy that prohibits navtemplates without "main article". mabdul 13:31, 2 February 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was no consensus Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:41, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Foster the People (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Template has been recreated again after being deleted twice in the last few months. The amount of links this template provides is so small, the template provides very little value. Y2Kcrazyjoker4 (talk • contributions) 00:39, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, huch? The original decline reason was that it was only in three articles. OK. But this version can be (maybe not done, approved it last night) added in 8 articles and thus the original reason is not longer valid. Even an admin (not a really active one) analyzed the situation and unprotected the template page for me. Please define for me "little value". mabdul 08:55, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - previous discussions are at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 August 3#Template:Foster the People and Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 November 2#Template:Foster the People, both of which closed as "delete". The deletion log shows that it's been deleted five times, not two: the other three were speedy per G4. There is very little progress from the first version to the current (sixth), just the occasional new single. There are now five singles and one EP - and every one of those six is also on the band's sole album (eight articles were mentioned above: the other two are those of the aforementioned album, and the band itself). Is this template going to be recreated every time the band puts out a single? Can't people at least hold off until a second album has been released? --Redrose64 (talk) 11:34, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • "There is very little progress" - o.O from August to now (~6months) this template was expanded from 3 articles to 6/7/8 useful links/articles, which should transcluded this navtemplate. Little progress is different for me. mabdul 12:57, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I disagree with the characterization of a G4 speedy as being equivalent to a standard deletion. That having been said, seeing as there is not only an article on the band, but one specifically on their discography, this template is not warranted. Delete until they get a good 4-6 studio albums released. Until then, I would suggest merging the discography into the main article on the band, and letting the current links to the band page do their trick. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 00:58, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete This appears to be one of those rite of passage templates: It's not a WP article until it has a [navbar/infobox/sidebar], whether it needs one or not. Delete as redundant to existing in-prose wikilinks. For that matter, delete as redundant to merging the unnecessarily individual song articles into the album article. ClaretAsh 11:58, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as not useful. Why should this template exist with only eight articles. Not everything needs a navbox. – Muboshgu (talk) 15:37, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: Very little information, which can be gathered from article on band. Maybe once they release a couple more albums, then they should have one.--NavyBlue84 16:27, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: Useful navbox. As in WP:NENAN cited by a deleter, this navbox clearly has more than five links. It has eight- the original deletion reasons no longer apply. A412 (Talk * C) 22:09, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NENAN does not document a minimum beyond which all templates are warranted, it documents a maximum, below which a template is never justified. In other words, WP:NENAN is not a justification for keeping, only deleting. The fact remains that this is a highly unnecessary navbox. People who want to navigate around a band's single album, one EP, and few singles are going to be able to easily do so from a simple discography section of the band's page. It took me three minutes, but it's all there now. VanIsaac_WS^contribs 04:55, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep as long as articles on the individual songs exist. Navigating between the articles on their songs seems useful, and remains feasible for the moment as their discography is not that extensive. Admittedly this only saves one click compared to navigation through Foster the People discography, which links them all and provides better context. Dcoetzee 01:57, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Some of the delete arguments don't make sense. Navboxes are not intended to convey information, so lack of information is not really relevant. WP:NENAN uses five articles as a rule of thumb, and there are more than five here. However, if song articles are merged (and after any merge), this should be deleted. — This, that, and the other (talk) 08:55, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Template contains links to well more than five articles; WP:NENAN does not seem to apply as it might have when this was previously deleted.  Gongshow ^Talk 03:52, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - This template has many more links than it did when it was previously deleted, it is now substantial. NYSMtalk page 12:33, 5 February 2012 (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 template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.