Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Lists of airline destinations

Are lists of all the current and former destinations of airlines acceptable content for Wikipedia? 16:00, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Many articles on Wikipedia include lists of every current and former destination of airlines. Examples include T'way Air § Destinations, List of Braathens destinations § Destinations, and List of KLM destinations § List. An RfC on the stand-alone (SA) lists was held in 2018, and the closing summary stated that Wikipedia should not have them. A subsequent AN discussion advised editors to follow the AfD process and closers to take the RfC into account. From May 2023 to February 2024, 26 AfDs resulted in the deletion or redirection of over 260 SA lists. In March 2024, however, an AfD to delete 153 SA lists was closed as No Consensus. At DRV, some people raised concerns about the age and limited participation of the 2018 RfC and described the recurrent AfDs as a timesink. It was suggested to run a new RfC as a de facto AfD or DRV, with every article tagged with a link to the discussion.

I am going to tag the talk pages of all the SA lists to ensure proper notification, but I favor uncoupling this RfC from the AfD process. This discussion is not about whether it's acceptable to write articles about airline destinations. That is a notability issue and is article-dependent. Rather, this RfC concerns the actual lists of every past and present destination. Sunnya343 (talk) 16:03, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Didn’t we have an RFC on this a couple of months ago? BilledMammal (talk) 16:17, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I came here to say that. Thryduulf (talk) 16:21, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

It turns out we haven't, quite. We have had three lengthy related discussions though:

• November 2023 Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 187#RfC on the "Airlines and destinations" tables in airport articles asked "Should airport articles include tables that display all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to?" and the answer was "sometimes".
• March 2024 an AfD of 153 stand-alone lists ended in no consensus
• April 2024 DRV endorsed that no consensus outcome. Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

There was Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 187#RfC on the "Airlines and destinations" tables in airport articles. It started as a discussion specifically about airport articles, not airline articles. Maybe the discussion and consensus also apply here? Pinging ScottishFinnishRadish, the closer, in case he'd like to weigh in and/or watchlist this page just to watch the tomats number go up. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:25, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

It's basically the same question for the same type of articles wearing a fake nose, mustache, and glasses. 🥸 Bytes for the byte god, words for the word throne! ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:14, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

• To answer the original question Yes, sometimes. If the content is verifiable and there are sources demonstrating notability then there is no justification to exclude the content. I imagine this will be more common for small airlines than for large ones, but that does not preclude exceptions. Curated lists of notable destinations are normally going to be appropriate - but how large a list and what the inclusion criteria should be can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. Thryduulf (talk) 16:32, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

RFCs or the village pump are not policy-compliant venues to delete a class of articles. If you tag the talk pages instead of the articles, it will not be "proper notification"; any "delete" result would need to be followed up by something that actually is compatible with the deletion policy. See also WP:LEOPARD. TLDR: if you want to suggest deletion of an article, use WP:AFD. —Kusma (talk) 16:35, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Maybe I worded the RfC question and context confusingly (again). This discussion is supposed to be about the practice of listing all of an airline's destinations in Wikipedia, not about whether one can write an article about those destinations. WP:N doesn't apply here since we're talking about the content of articles. Ultimately, the outcome of this discussion cannot directly lead to the deletion of any article. It may have an indirect effect on those standalone lists that only contain lists (e.g. List of British Airways destinations), but people would have to go to AfD next for that.

By the way if this discussion is found to be too confusing in the first day or so, I'm willing to withdraw it to avoid what happened with the airport list RfC. Sunnya343 (talk) 17:27, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

• Of course we can have these sorts of articles on Wikipedia. They're encyclopedic content. SportingFlyer T·C 16:41, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
• No Exhaustive lists of all past and present destinations of airlines is not acceptable since these can be changed at the whim of the airline, and rarely are the full list of destinatations covered by third-party, independent reliable sources (eg like those outlined at NCORP). It is acceptable to write about, when covered by reliable sources, things like when airlines have established central hubs, or what may be representative destinations when an airline expands to a region for the first time. --Masem (t) 17:05, 20 July 2024 (UTC)