Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Australian musicians

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 was delete. A userfied copy will be provided upon request to aid in creating a category, if desired. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 16:06, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Australian's in music

List of Australian musicians (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (52kb, 3 columns wide, and incomplete)

List of Australians in music (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Two lists, the later is a partial version of the former. Neither list has any criteria, they include individuals and bands, some of which may not meet WP:MUSIC. Since there are no inclusion criteria, are problems with WP:LIST; in addition to the issues with potential size as well as category overlap. Delete --Peta 04:11, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletions. -- Bduke 11:46, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep both, on condition of cleanup and a probable merge - I think we should discount the point on WP:MUSIC - this is NOT a debate to make value judgements on individual bands and whether they are notable - that can be made on an individual article basis with AfDs if that is to be the case. The "List of Australians in music" is a useful article as Australia has a wide and varied music culture, and the musicians involved in it are just as important as the music itself - and it could easily have criteria, Peta, if we did some work on it (which no one is keen to do). It is not easily replaced by a category, either; let's think about the alternatives to deleting this list: the alternative would be an article on Australians in music, not a category: and it would be an article where someone would have to make value judgements on who is and is not able to be included; a list can encompass more people and can be maintained and pruned accordingly. Let's not just go deleting lists because we think they overlap with categories too much (as I think is being done quite rashly at the moment) - let's fix them up first and improve them instead. If that includes a name change, setting down some criteria of who should and should not be in the list (eg (just a suggestion), you could have people who have made it onto various notable music charts in the top 100 or something??), and some major culling, so be it, but let's not waste the good work done by several editors encompassed in this list - it's already a good start and should be improved upon, not consigned to the dustbin simply because a couple of editors think it's superfluous. JRG 12:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete both. JRG's suggestions are reasonable, but I don't think these lists as they stand are necessarily helpful starting points to create properly referenced List of Australian top 40 performers, which would have tables listing group/artist name, single title, album title, and dates or List of ARIA Award nominees with artist, award nominated for, year, and nomination (if it's for a song or album). These lists may need to be moved to user or project space for a while to use as references, but the blue links should eventually end up in (subcategories of) Category:Australian musicians (or related for the non-musicians "in music"), and the red links get filtered for vanity links, but then added to Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/To-do until an article can be created. --Scott Davis ^Talk 14:24, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete both - much better done with a category. - Richard Cavell 23:49, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Why? Please give a reason. JRG 00:32, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

• Delete both, alpha lists are better served with a hierarchy of categories. Will anyone ever need to see a context free list that contains film composers, producers, sound engineers, opera singers and Kylie Minogue's set designer together? That's what List of Australians in music can grow to. And in List of Australian musicians there's no way to say that some of those redlinks are non-notable high school bands? At least a category only contains verified, notable bands that conform to WP:MUSIC. If any redlinks need creating there are better places to list them. --Steve _(Slf67) ^talk 00:24, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

If they are not notable, it is not the job of this discussion to decide what is or isn't - we use an AfD. A category can contain non-notable bands too. JRG 00:32, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep List of Australian musicians - but something needs to be done to make it different to a category, such as adding a genre, instrument, recording information or some other summary information. Without summary information, lists are just bad manual attempts at categories. Delete List of Australians in music - inclusion criteria is too vague (I am guessing being a roadie doesn't cut it but being a recording producer does?) Why is everyone in List of Australian musicians not also in this list? Garrie 01:08, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep List of Australian musicians as useful list that played an important part in developing articles on musicians. Why do we have this insistence on deleting useful lists? Redirect List of Australians in music to list of Australian musicians. Capitalistroadster 01:22, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
  • That's what project or user namespaces are for. These lists may be useful for contributors to find a topic to write an article about, but they are not useful to readers of Wikipedia, as there is no validation of quality of the list. --Scott Davis ^Talk 02:05, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete because this is what we have categories for. Kopf1988 04:44, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

No it's not. Lists and categories are different things and they can co-exist. I think editors here need to realise that. That reason is being cited far too much in these Australian list debates and it's just not true. JRG 11:58, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Lists and categories are different things, and therefore their strengths lie in different areas. Lists such as these that have vague or hugely inclusive criteria are not useful. Lists with well-defined and tractable membership that identify the membership as notable and contain additional information are different to categories that contain alphabetic-sorted lists of people with articles only. This means a number of lists with loose criteria were created in the early days of the project as aides-memoire. These are no longer needed or appropriate as the project has evolved. Many "good" lists have associated categories. So do many "bad" or obsolete lists. Some of these are being cleaned up. You appear to show up at every discussion and claim that if it was cleaned up, the list would be OK. Most of the ones being considered are so far from being a suitable list that it would be better to start afresh with proper references, if they could ever be made suitable. Examples of good Lists of Australians with matching categories include (I have not checked for completeness at either level, or either direction):

List of Australian Test wicket-keepers 

Category:Australian wicket-keepers

Australian national cricket captains 

Category:Australian cricket captains

List of Australian Test cricketers 

Category:Australian Test cricketers

List of Australian government ministers 

Category:Government ministers of Australia

Premiers of South Australia 

Category:Premiers of South Australia

List of cast members of Home and Away 

Category:Home and Away cast members (the category is proposed to be removed as being what lists, not categories are good for)

List of Anglican bishops of Sydney 

Category:Bishops of Sydney

Some of these need more articles written or added to the category to make the category useful. Other lists exist without appropriate matching categories. This is about cleaning up the list detritus. --Scott Davis ^Talk 13:08, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

If it is about cleaning things up, why won't anyone help out? Everyone's so mega-keen to delete anything, yet no one can be bothered to put in the good work and actually do some cleaning up and create some useful Australian lists. Why can't we keep these here so we can actually know what we need to improve on. Wikipedia is not about having every article perfect -it's also a work in progress, and these sort of articles help us to understand where we need to clean things up. I'm really tired of advocating things to be kept, when there is good reason for it, when other people are so zealous and stuck in their ways about deleting anything and everything. JRG 11:35, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment If you want to-do lists then go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/To-do. Don't put/keep to-do lists in article/main space.Garrie 22:03, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Most of the lists we're looking at are not getting nominated, so you don't have to advocate in a deletion debate for most of them. Since you sound like you think it's personal, here's some evidence that we are helping too. I haven't bothered to check the others' voting records, but I know I've supported keeping a couple lists that were nominated for deletion recently.

• Scott: List of Australian Test batsmen who have scored over 5000 Test runs[1], List of Australian Ambassadors to the United Nations‎[2], List of Australian television presenters[3] 17734 edits
• Steve: List of Australian Federal Police killed in the line of duty[4], List of Australian Ambassadors to Iran[5] 4933 edits
• Peta - I didn't spot any relevant list edits quickly, but there probably are some. 45000+ edits
• JRG: Lists of Australians[6] 4095 edits

None of us (you included) get to these edit counts without doing something good for the project! Sometimes it's adding content, sometimes cleaning, tidying and formatting, and sometimes it's putting the rubbish out. The deleted lists are like cleaning up and putting out the recycling. I don't want the place full of lists that attract vanity edits. An article about the person can stand in its own right to demonstrate notability. If there is no reliable reference for the list, it is usually better as a category. --Scott Davis ^Talk 13:50, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

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.