Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Disney characters' names in various languages

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 delete. Mackensen (talk) 12:22, 22 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Prod, deprodded by me, because of my previous experience with Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of titles of Harry Potter books in other languages. Prod reason was "Not notable. Arbitrary criteria. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information." I agree, and let me add to that: Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and this article is totally unverified, and the amount of individual separate verification it would need makes it arguably original research. Furthermore, we have the sidebar for all the relevant pages linking to wikis in other languages. Mangojuice^talk 04:13, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Obviously, as the guy who put prod on this, I vote delete. ' ^{(Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!)} 04:17, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per Mango AdamBiswanger1 05:15, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I'm going to state a preference that maybe isn't Wiki-policy. I think this page could be quite useful and is about Diseny, something certainly notable. Rather than delete, I'd favor putting a {citation-needed}} tag on it. It really isn't original research but is a collection (still not yet in proper Wiki-form, I admit) of info from secondary sources. Am I going to get jumped on for this? Interlingua ^talk 05:38, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep to Strong Keep I don't follow any of the arguments of the nominator. WP:V is about verifiability not verifiedness (is that a word?). I tried a few and had no problems verifying any of them. Also none of the entries are strictly dicdefs. I don't even see the need to tag it with a {citation-needed}} tag, since the info is not controversial and probably frequently patroled by international editors anyway. (See recurring What nonsense interjections which should probably be removed.) I think the list is too unwieldy and also believe that all lists should eventually be outsourced to Wikilistmania, but these are not AfD issues. ~ trialsanderrors 07:00, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. With (until now) 237 editors contributing to the article, this is probably one of the most verified articles on Wikipedia. It is also quite useful for, say, a Finnish user, who wants to read up on her favourite character Pikku Apulainen. Just enter it in the search box and bingo. Without this list, the search would produce "No results found. For help on searching, please see Wikipedia:Searching." --Lambiam^Talk 07:11, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • (Discussion refactored to talk page)
  • Comment: on the contrary; though there are a lot of editors on this page, I found very few that actually came BACK to the page after another editor had edited the page. For the most part, all those editors just edited the page once, or a few times, and then never returned. Mangojuice^talk 20:25, 19 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nom. I'm desperately unimpressed by the assertion that this turgid mass of cruft "might be useful;" that's the usual last defense of the editor who lacks a genuine reason to keep, and somehow the ways this might be useful seldom are cited. I likewise see no reason to cater to the Finnish user who cannot operate her own language's Wikipedia. WP:NOT. RGTraynor 08:49, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, per nom and per RGTraynor. The arguments made for keep are distinctly desperate. "Just enter it in the search box and bingo." (Lambian). A Finnish user would be better served on the Finnish Wikipedia... looking at, oh I don't know, the Finnish Disney article. It's a horrible, cross-language Wiki mess of an article... and list-cruft - Motor (talk) 10:25, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Not seeing any obvious violations of policy, all info is verifiable in principle. No rush to save space. David L Rattigan 10:46, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep as per David L Rattigan Matthew Fenton (TALK - CONTRIBS) 12:22, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per Mango; seems like a candidate for WP:BAI (do not write articles which are redundant due to existing categories or interwiki links). Angus McLellan (Talk) 12:50, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per Motor. --Shizane 13:22, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nom and Motor. BoojiBoy 15:23, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per Motor. Optichan 21:22, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Useless list, I mean how often is someone going to need much less be intrested in the chinese characters for Micky Mouse, it'd be intresting if the names were significantly different but alas that doesn't seem to be the case. Deathawk 19:22, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per many people above. Listcruft, ahoy! -- Kicking222 23:00, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Not everybody who speaks English know the original names of the Disney characters, I certainly don't know half of them. Disney character names are usually regionalized as this list shows. I usually "vote" delete on lists, but there's no good way to preserve this information other than a list. -- Eivind^t@c 23:37, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm a bit confused. We do have List of Disney characters, which seems to accomplish the use you're interested in. Mangojuice^talk 17:12, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• WTF?, er... Keep This page is odd, but I have seen some disney cartoons in other languages (was it german or french?). Anyway, somebody will find it useful. MichaelBillington 01:03, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Valuable reference tool. Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference work. Fg2 13:23, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Trivial. Cute, but trivial. This belongs on a Tripod page somewhere, not in an encyclopedia. --FuriousFreddy 15:46, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete If any are notable, they can go on the relevant character pages. Ace of Sevens 17:33, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• keep some Wikipedias do not have all of these characters listed, this lists makes it easier to find the names of the characters in another language. --84.184.95.151 21:26, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • User has only three edits, all in deletion discussions. ' ^{(Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!)} 21:32, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Weak Delete Hard to justify its existence because it's a messy and somewhat difficult to maintain way to construct the list; the comics have been published in many languages and there's hundreds of notable and even non-marginal minor characters. Perhaps add these to the articles about the characters, but even in them, interwiki links are somewhat more helpful... If I want to know what "Pikku Apulainen" is in English, I type Ctrl-T, Ctrl-L, wpfi Pikku Apulainen, Return and follow the interwiki links, and bang! =) --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 17:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  And what do you do for "Varyemez Amca"? --Lambiam^Talk 22:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  Use google? Let me counter: what do you do if you want information on Ballibay? Obviously, any deletion implies a loss of information that, if you were specifically looking for it, would be useful. We need to answer the question of whether this kind of information belongs in an encyclopedia, not whether it would serve someone. Mangojuice^talk 15:34, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  I think the argument that when information is deleted from Wikipedia you can get the information by doing research outside Wikipedia does not work at all in favour of deletion. The number of editors that the page has attracted shows this topic is notable enough. The criteria for inclusion are quite obviously not arbitrary, and the information collected here is not at all indiscriminate. So why should this not belong in an encyclopedia? I've said before that I can't see verifiability as an issue. Finally, I do maintain that the usefulness of the information is an argument. --Lambiam^Talk 07:36, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Where is the line in your opinion, then? If we have this, should we have, for every fictional universe, a "list of names in other languages" for that universe? What about places? Or real people? Or ordinary nouns, verbs... this starts to sound like a translation dictionary very quickly: do you think all of this is okay? If not, where do we draw the line? I think the place to draw the line is where we can write ABOUT the translation and actually say something; to me, that's the equivalent standard that differentiates a dictionary definition from an encyclopedia entry. Most of these, there's nothing to say. Mangojuice^talk 13:17, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Although many interesting things can be said about the translations, that would mostly be OR. Among the "recognized" main purposes of lists (see Wikipedia:List guideline) are information and navigation, both of which are provided by the present list. It's nice if you can create an annotated list (see Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists)), but this is only one of several recognized formats, and the fact is that the majority of present non-controversial lists, like List of Maine rivers or List of U.S. Army installations in Kuwait, is not annotated. Should there be a list of names in other languages for the fictional universe of, say, Pride and Prejudice? Well, the fact is that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy also in translations in other languages. So, no. This is the case for almost all notable fictional universes. But there are a few exceptions. I'm also in favour of having a list of of Harry Potter characters in other languages, so that a reader can find who Severus Rogue is, or Petter Pittelpytt. Such lists are not going to overwhelm Wikipedia, and unlike for names of nouns etcetera it is not something you learn when learning English as a second language and not something you can look up in a dictionary. I'm also in favour of keeping Names of European cities in different languages and similar articles, and I've tried to explain on the deletion page that the argument that there are hundreds of cities and hundreds of languages is specious. --Lambiam^Talk 22:09, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Violates policy by being unverified and original research, not to mention unmaintainable and POV in its selectiveness. Also unencyclopedic and irrelevant. Indrian 19:35, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Worthless article. Doesn't even include Elbonian. --Atrian 03:17, 22 June 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.