Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Şerbeşti

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 keep. Stifle (talk) 13:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Şerbeşti

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Delete neither entry meets mos:dabrl, so it is a dab with no valid links Boleyn3 (talk) 07:33, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Del, per nom; Rdr. The two respective communes of under 8k pop'n each have single sent articles presumably machine generated by extracting sparse table entries from a national census. When someone is ready to the first article on one of the villages, they can use the title for it. If the second comes along, then someone else can fight out the question of whether there's a primary topic.
--Jerzy•t 02:33 & 06:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I switched my opinion to Rdr (and struck thru my earlier Del above), per Propaniac, below, in light of the river article.
--Jerzy•t 06:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Disambiguations-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Romania-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

* Redirect to Şerbeşti River, which appears to be the only topic that could be referred to as Şerbeşti about which Wikipedia has any information. (Otherwise delete because it's not disambiguating anything right now.) Propaniac (talk) 18:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep The page has been significantly revised since my original opinion. Propaniac (talk) 20:04, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. There are no WP:red links on the page, so mos:dabrl does not apply. And even if it did – why should non-compliance with an MOS guideline be an argument for deletion? --Lambiam 02:13, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The most relevant guideline is a bit further down, at MOS:DABMENTION: "If a topic does not have an article of its own, but is mentioned within another article, then a link to that article should be included." None of the entries links to an article that mentions any usage of "Şerbeşti", nor do any such articles mentioning a usage of Şerbeşti seem to exist (except for the river). The page thus isn't actually disambiguating anything, because Wikipedia has no info on any of these topics. The relevance of the MOS guideline is that if the page were in compliance with the guideline, it would be blank; there's no way to meet the MOS guideline while retaining the disambiguation page. Propaniac (talk) 03:02, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That rule is for topics that have no article of their own, but that are mentioned in another article. Since the topics you take exception to are NOT mentioned within another article, that part of the guidelines does not apply here either. Can you cite some rule that is actually offended by this page? Moreover, you ignore my remark that non-compliance with a guideline (in this case one that even explicitly invites us to "ignore these guidelines") is not an argument for deletion. How is the reader searching for "Şerbeşti" served by deleting this page? --Lambiam 17:40, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re "That rule is for topics...": (I think you grasp that "Şerbeşti" is not a topic but an ambiguous title; for any others looking over our shoulders who don't, the four topics it could be the title for are three towns and the river.) MOS:DABMENTION does apply to the topic Şerbeşti River and that is the only reason the guidelines permit (in light of our mandate to focus on the page rather than its exact content at nom'n) a Rdr rather than Del outcome.
--Jerzy•t 06:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Re "Can you cite some rule...": The page as it existed upon nom'n cannot comply with WP:MoSDab bcz per Individual entries, "These pages are to help the user navigate to a specific article", and

Per the same sec'n, "Including no links at all makes the entry useless for further navigation." No link means an entry with no effect but to clutter, which means no entry.
Per Disambiguation pages with only two entries, the clear intention is "No entries, no Dab page": the passage goes out of its way to say that a Dab w/ a primary topic entry and one other is not harmful; a Dab with one or no links cannot Dab, and as Boleyn3 implied in the nom'n, is both unnecessary and harmful.

--Jerzy•t 06:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re "Moreover, you ignore my remark...": (Oh, you don't care about rules after all!) IAR probably can't be mentioned often enuf (and perhaps if it were more often, it would be less often confused with "The rules mean nothing" or "Do what ever you like"). It is a two-sided coin:

It's impractical to get the rules exactly right, so an editor who ignores a rule may get it right.
When an editor gets it wrong by ignoring a rule, any editor^{(holding equal or greater privilege)} can revert the change and get it right.

IIRC, IAR explicitly says that it applies to itself; this ensures that it is never in effect a rule that forbids acting in accord with the (other) rules.
If you were being punished for breaking rules, you might hope for the burden of proof to be on your accusers. You're not, and the burden is on you to show, if you want to persist, that the rules are brain-dead in the situation at hand.
--Jerzy•t 06:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re "How is the reader ... served...", we are no longer moving toward deletion, so there are three answers, depending on the reader in question, why an Rdr is an improvement:

Readers looking for the river are better served by the Rdr, bcz they go straight to the encyclopedia-grade info in the article without pointless distraction followed by an unnecessary click.
Readers looking for encyclopedia-grade info on one of the towns are better served by the Rdr, bcz they don't have to waste time reading the article on the corresponding commune in order to realize that there is no encyclopedia-grade info in en:WP on that town, contrary to what a reasonable reader would infer from a Dab entry's existence.
Readers looking for info at the level your on one of the towns are better served by the Rdr in the long run for the same reason that a Swiss Army knife is a lousy tool except in one situation: a circumstance where you can only have one tool with you. WP is an encyclopedia, not a replacement for everything else on the Web. Users who will be fully satisfied by knowing that the place is a village, and its commune and county have made a mistake in looking for that in WP. They should look instead in a gazetteer or dictionary. BTW, wikt:New York exists, and while does not fit my own priorities, it might be appropriate to Transwiki to wikt:Şerbeşti, then place a Rdr to Şerbeşti River at Şerbeşti; IMO that action is within the discretion of the calling admin even if our consensus is Rdr (or Del).

--Jerzy•t 06:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, I don't agree with any of what you write, but since none of it appears to have actual relevance to any of the points I raised – which were meant as a rejoinder to Propaniac's reaction, further discussion does not seem potentially fruitful. --Lambiam 19:17, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please see my (belated) reply further down the page on the matter of guidelines not mentioning this specific situation. (For your second point, I would argue that it a) does not benefit the user to be informed that Wikipedia has no information on the topic they're seeking, and b) that the existence of unhelpful pages encourages their proliferation, and the proliferation of unhelpful pages detracts from the usability of this website.) Propaniac (talk) 20:02, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I disagree that readers looking for one of the Romanian towns are better served by a redirect to the river. If they are looking for one of the towns they well might not know that there are three of them, going to the river leaves them with no information. As an encyclopedia, it is useful to be able to distinguish geographical places. It is one of the things that people use an encyclopedia for. I do not see "Wikipedia is not a gazatteer" on the WP:NOT page, as encyclopedias are frequently gazatteers. --Bejnar (talk) 07:35, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nor do we say "Wikipedia is not a cabaret". But we imply WP is not a gazetteer, e.g. in the first line of the body text of the first of the Five Pillars:

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers.

The question is which elements of gazetteers are appropriate, and on which pages. Rich precedents do support gazetteer-like entries in lists of similar entries (as the main content of list articles or SIAs, or accompanied by the prose of typical articles), and inclusion of the information content of a gazetteer entry, as prose integrated within the prose of an article. You've already heard what precludes unlinked or misleadingly linked Dab entries from serving as excuses for putting gazetteer entries into Dabs, which are list-shaped navigational mechanisms but not a kind of list that mere gazetteer entries may be included in.
If, e.g., the applicable commune in Bacău County can be identified, and its villages listed in a new article whose topic is that commune, a mention of Şerbeşti would result; some reasonable editors would be willing to consider tolerating a entry on a Dab-page that any editor could replace the contemplated Rdr with. (I might well not, but even so the matter would not be likely -- in contrast to the atrocity you are advocating on this page -- to lead me to devote the AfD energy that this one has.)
--Jerzy•t 03:52, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, a reader looking for a town and being directed to a river is going to be confused as well as disappointed. Polarpanda (talk) 19:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete (1st pref) or Redirect. This is not a dab page because is not disambiguating articles on WP. It is actually misleading because anyone following the bluelinks related to any of the three villages will see zero information about that village. If it remains because the intent is to give information here about the three villages, rather than to disambiguate other articles, and if the three villages are actually notable, the dab template should be removed and the title turned into a multi-stub with reliable sources. Station1 (talk) 05:56, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Important Note - There's been an ongoing debate about this here at DAB project. The argument is about the scope of the redlink policy. A previous compromise was struck in regards to some similar pages that were being auto-created for the NRHP (national register of historic places) project because there were other advantages. In my estimation though, the underlying question about the red-link policy remains unresolved. The main difference between that and here is 1) this is unassociated with a separate project, that had specific reasons, 2) there aren't actually redlinks, so the blue-link policy applies (although the redlink policy's relevant too; again, more clarification on those two policies would be good). Shadowjams (talk) 08:08, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - none of the linked articles mentions Şerbeşti, and therefore this page has no disambiguation function in the encyclopedia. PL290 (talk) 09:26, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete (or redirect to the river). The cleaned-up dab page is speediable; it has only one blue link. The other blue links were to articles that are not ambiguous with the topic. They did not mention the ambiguous title. The articles need to mention the places first, so that the usual guidelines of reliable sourcing and notability can be applied. If there then turns out to be ambiguity, a disambiguation should follow. -- JHunterJ (talk) 10:57, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That is one way of trying to force the outcome of the debate – modifying the article under discussion so as to make it "speediable", and then recommend deletion. But speediable according to which of the criteria at WP:CSD exactly? I'm still waiting for someone to quote a specific rule of an extant policy or guideline that (a) applies to the page as it was, say, at revision 356512690, and that (b) justifies deletion. I'd also like to hear about a rule that says the topic of an entry on a dab page must be mentioned in a blue link, or else that entry must be deleted. In any case, my criterion is not slavishly following some general set of rules, but doing what is most useful to the reader who searches for Şerbeşti in Wikipedia, having seen the name somewhere and wanting to find out what that name stands for. By the way, it would be easy enough to create stubs for the three entries that have been commented out, or to add token mentions to the blue-linked articles, if that is all that is needed to keep this page from being deleted. --Lambiam 15:28, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't modify it in order to make it speediable. I modified it to observe the disambiguation guidelines, and noted that observing those guidelines left it speediable. Disambiguation pages disambiguate ambiguous Wikipedia articles. WP:MOSDAB says "Each bulleted entry should have exactly one navigable (blue) link to efficiently guide users to the most relevant article for each use of the ambiguous term", and if there's no use of the ambiguous term, there's nothing to disambiguate. The guidelines aren't slavishly followed, but they are usefully followed. I would find it difficult to stub out the articles, since I know nothing about them. If you can stub them out, there will then be ambiguity, and (only) after there's ambiguity, there will be a need for disambiguation. I will cheerfully strike my !vote above and re!vote Keep in that case. -- JHunterJ (talk) 16:15, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The word "use" in that sentence means "meaning" (as in For other uses, see ... in {{otheruses}} hatnotes). The term "Şerbeşti" does have several meanings. It is definitely an ambiguous term, whether we have five articles on topics with that name, or one, or none. So the rule is: "Each bulleted entry should have exactly one navigable (blue) link to efficiently guide users to the most relevant article for each meaning of the ambiguous term", which was definitely satisfied. 85.102.55.108 (talk) 18:12, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
See MOS:DABMENTION for the expansion, which does state the "but is mentioned within another article" bit. But really, the reason for it is the problem if it's not required: mentions in articles can be subjected to WP:RS, WP:V, WP:N, etc. If they aren't in articles, then there's not way to vet their inclusion in dabs, and that path leads to a lot of cruft, so we avoid it. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:38, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You keep referring to rules that do not apply to this particular case. Rule: "If a topic does not have an article of its own, but is mentioned within another article, then a link to that article should be included." Topics that are not mentioned within another article are not mentioned within another article, so this rule does not apply to them. Maybe there is another rule that applies, such as: "If a topic does not have an article of its own, and is not mentioned within another article, then no entry for that topic shall be included." Only thing is, I have been unable to find that rule. --Lambiam 19:12, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The guidelines tell you which entries to include. You're right, the (old) entries here do not fit those guidelines, so the guidelines might be read as not applying to those entries. The conclusion, however, is that the (old) entries should not be (have been) included, since none of the guidelines for inclusion apply. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:27, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam, since this is the same point we were discussing up above, I hope you don't mind if I reply down here (and sorry for taking so long, I was on a bit of a wikibreak): you're right, the rule does not explicitly say what to do if the topic is not mentioned in another article, but I think we can agree that it would be foolish to conclude that such a topic should be treated in the exact same fashion as if it were mentioned in an article, since the guideline explicitly distinguishes that. Moreover, I agree with JHJ that if the MOS does not provide any rationale or instruction for including a certain type of entry, such as a topic not mentioned in any article, the rational conclusion is that such an entry should not be included per the MOS. Propaniac (talk) 20:02, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as cleaned & expanded. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:54, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep perfectly good dab page. Mjroots (talk) 07:17, 22 April 2010 (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.