Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of non-instrumental songs with titles that do not appear in the lyrics (3rd nomination)

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  (aeropagitica)  (talk)  17:17, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

List of non-instrumental songs with titles that do not appear in the lyrics

Previous nominations: March 2004, October 2004, October 2005

I'd like to nominate this for deletion for several reasons:

1. The list is so long that both Firefox 1.0 and latest IE hang for a long time while trying to display the page (on a 3GHz PC with 1GB RAM). This is extremely annoying and makes Wikipedia appear unprofessional.
2. If this was addressed by splitting the page into many smaller lists by letter, it becomes even harder to maintain. If this AFD fails I think it should be split in that way, though, to at least address the browser issue.
3. There is very little encyclopedic value to this article.
4. It is original research. I'm aware of the arguments that the entries are easily verified, but show me another list on the subject and I'll accept it's not OR.
5. It is unknown how many songs are actually missing that should be included.
6. I find it hard to see situations where this would be useful.

I'm not a deletionist or inclusionists. I don't like such labels and I don't think they have any place on Wikipedia. But I do think that this article is plain silly. I acknowledge that people have put a fair amount into compiling this list, but frankly this fact does not make the article any more useful.

TH 14:25, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Note: This nom was orphaned so I am now listing it properly. --W.marsh 20:31, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

"Recommendations"

• Delete - for reasons stated above TH 14:25, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete listcruft. Huge and boring, list of songs with a non-notable characteristic. Phr 14:36, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per above. --TonySt 14:38, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Keep There are many articles on Wikipedia in which I have no interest. That doesn't mean they should be deleted. Mosts lists are incomplete, and it's not ideologically unsound for this to be the same (if it were a 'serious' topic, then the incompletedness would be an issue). Its size suggests that there are sufficient people interested in it. If it is unmanagable, then split it up. If you feel you wouldn't like to attempt that, then leave it to someone else. It has already survived twice: accept consensus. The JPS 15:33, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - Wikipedia is not a data mining operation. There are an infinite number of ways we could divide up the sum total of all songs ever written - how about the songs whose titles do appear in the lyrics, the songs whose titles appear N times in the lyrics, etc? Obviously we can't have them all, so we have to just pick a few. But who decides which are the most important ways to divide up and list songs by arbitrary criteria? I think Wikimedia projects should provide the raw material for researchers to create their own custom lists along these lines, but leave the original research to the researchers. A wiki-datamining project would be interesting, come to think of it... but this isn't the place for it. flowersofnight (talk) 18:47, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Strong delete - I voted for it previously as unmanageable, and it has since expanded. On the face of it, a good list, but the more you think of it, the less practical. --MacRusgail 18:58, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per The JPS. Moreover, why does the phrase "original research" pop up every single time a list is NfD? Wikipedia articles are not supposed to be carbon copies of existing works of literature, either in content or in concept. And anyway, it doesn't take much research to discover that a given song doesn't contain the title in its lyrics. -- Smjg 19:42, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

• Comment I think the OR claim is that the characteristic of being a song whose title does not appear in its lyrics is somehow notable. That claim could be established by citing, say, a journal article that discussed such songs. Seeing whether a particular song fits the description is not OR. Phr 01:49, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per flowersofnight. --torritorri 20:17, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Weak Delete considering there are lists of far less relevance which get kept, I'm not sure what the logic is behind deleting this one, but given that it meets the standards, I must agree. Danny Lilithborne 20:47, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, useless listcruft. Angr (talk • contribs) 20:51, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete Per most everybody above. Listcruft, absolutely unmanageable, barely loadable. Any list this long (164 KB) is too large to be useful for anything. Fan1967 21:01, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. garbage list (Notorious4life 21:03, 16 April 2006 (UTC))
• Delete. Entirely too broad a list: it's not quite as bad as a "List of songs", but it's too large a set to be useful. --Carnildo 21:15, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. --Tone 21:27, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete — artificial, pointless, and unwieldy list. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:36, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete Serves no purpose, arbitrary. --Eivind^t@c 22:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Been proposed for deletion at least twice before, in October 2004 and October 2005; article obviously was kept both times, and no new grounds have been produced, other than that people have continued to expand the list. Smerdis of Tlön 22:14, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

• Comment This list's endless expansion is grounds for removal in its own right: the defining characteristic for inclusion stops being notable. See WP:NOT, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. See also WP:NBD about revisiting old decisions if it looks like circumstances may have changed. Phr 01:42, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete- It's becoming increasingly obvious that this list is simply too huge to perform any useful purpose. The El Reyko 22:47, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Admrb♉ltz ( T | I | E ) 22:55, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per flowersofnight, but I have to add that WP:OR does not apply, because even though this list may be a new synthesis of published works, it does not advance any new position or interpretation. --Joelmills 23:01, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, listcruft. --kingboyk 00:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Keep 1. My computer circa '99 has no problem with it. 2. I'm pretty sure song titles don't change often, so how is that harder? 3. Define encyclopedic value... try (I know it when I see it is not a valid answer). 4. Not OR as anyone with ears can verify it. 5 & 6. not valid reasons. Kotepho 01:26, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Define encyclopedic value. That an encyclopedia user will look for this categorization of information. --Calton | Talk 02:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Someone cared enough to make this list and people think Wikipedia is a lot of things it is not. I don't find it impossible that someone would look for this. Kotepho 02:07, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Arbitrary-list cruft. --Calton | Talk 02:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Keep for the following reasons.

1. Everyone is saying this list is arbitrary, however, isn't much of the less "official" stuff on Wikipedia the same? For example, many songs by many bands somehow merit their own encyclopedic entry, with seemingly no "encyclopedic value" to back them up. I cite The Final Cut and Smile Like You Mean It, among others. On a similar note, I will cite 1972, and all of the year entries, which were seemingly created just for the hell of adding an entry that tells us what happened in that year. Arbitrarily done.
2. In reference to 1972 and the years, as mentioned above, these are similar lists. Extremely long, ridiculous to read in one sitting anyway, and serving no purpose, just as people say about this list.
3. Also on the same note, articles on dates, such as January 10 are the same ridiculous pointlessness.
4. Who can feasibly manage any large article? If you are going to be on that bandwagon, who can manage an article such as Number, which is large, and yet still there. And it is also split up, and yet it's there.

In conclusion, I just don't get deleting the article. Especially, as per above, if the consensus has kept it on for two times already.--Ljlego 02:26, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

To address Ljlego's points:

1) Saying "We have an article on Crappy topic A, therefore Crappy topic B is fine" is not good enough. Digging up any old junk on Wikipedia and using it as an excuse to let more rubbish in does not do the 'pedia any good. Perhaps "Crappy topic A" should not be there either, just nobody's got around to deleting it yet.

2,3) If you're looking for examples of long, boring lists to illustrate your point, you could not have made a worse choice than the year and date entries. They're featured on the main page, occasioanlly quoted in newspapers, and are clearly interesting.

4) The Number article is large, but it's of a very high standard and is well maintained. It's also not likely to get much bigger. The song list is extremely large, it's just a dumping ground for essentially identical info, and there's no indication that its growth is slowing. And the bigger it gets the less meaningful the contents. The El Reyko 03:34, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per flowersofnight. I'll go as far as songs with titles not in the lyrics, but this is getting silly. No doubt people would like to make such lists, but there are places other than Wikipedia on the Internet. -- Mithent 03:03, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm confused. This *is* a list of songs with titles not in the lyrics. It would be kind of pointless to include instrumental songs in the list, as they do not have lyrics and all of them would qualify. Kotepho 16:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

• Make Category - turn it into a category. -zappa.jake (talk) 05:16, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Make category per Zappa.jake. Hopelessly incomplete lists of non-notable phenomena are useless but as a category it will at least provide a chance to browse the most notable songs that fit this criterion. GT 06:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. I just completely fail to understand why this is useful. Comparing year pages to this is ridiculous... People actually care and frequently look up years, and those pages are well done. I doubt very many people would be so impassioned about this if it weren't on AfD... Grandmasterka 07:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete and no category. Useless listcruft. RexNL 16:04, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Strong delete: How or why is this list useful in any way? I have not yet heard a single good argument in support of it. Certain trivia can be of interest (even useful) but these aren't. The list of arguments to delete it is endless (see above). --Steerpike 21:48, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep As a music lover and fanatic, this is just the type of random information I come to Wikipedia for. It offers tremendous value for people who organize and collect music. This is what makes Wikipedia so powerful. Where else could we find a list like this? Absolutely nowhere. This article needs to stay. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.74.168.177 (talk • contribs)
• Delete and don't categorize per above. —jiy (talk) 20:15, 19 April 2006 (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.