Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mathematics articles (J-L)

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The result was withdrawn by nominator (me). Non-admin closure. See bottom comment for reasoning. --Cybercobra (talk) 21:51, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

List of mathematics articles (J-L)

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Adding the sister pages to this AfD (essentially identical rationales): --Cybercobra (talk) 05:09, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Pointless orphaned page that merely transcludes the individual pages List of mathematics articles (J), List of mathematics articles (K), List of mathematics articles (L). Cybercobra (talk) 04:12, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment it appears this list was split into the other lists... so GFDL require a keep. 76.66.200.21 (talk) 04:37, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I believe there's some admin thingy (histmerge?) to push the revisions into the history of another article. We can just arbitrarily push them into the "J" subarticle. --Cybercobra (talk) 04:58, 2 September 2009 (UTC) Or just turn the page(s) into redirects. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:28, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. It's also not actually an orphan. It's used (via Special:RecentChangesLinked) in {{MathTopicTOC}}, to list recent changes in math articles in that alphabetical range. That template is used in many places and deleting this article would break it. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:49, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Talking about "meta" stuff like recent changes in an article-space template isn't proper anyway; consider the irrelevance in a print edition; links deleted. --Cybercobra (talk) 05:05, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - I added a note to WT:WPM regarding your removal, since it affects many math articles and in case any interested parties want to take this farther along the WP:BRD cycle. To me there's something a little off about declaring someone an orphan, finding out he isn't, and then killing the parents to make one's declaration retroactively true, but maybe that's just me. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:08, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - They were orphans for all but one template (which did not show up at all on WhatLinksHere, so I was unaware at the time of the nom). When you pointed out their use, I looked and concluded, for the reasons in my previous comment, that these links did not seem appropriate. There's no element of retroactivity. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:20, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - At the least, I would ask why these pages are in article-space as opposed to project-space given their only apparent use is for "meta" purposes (i.e. those of editors rather than readers). --Cybercobra (talk) 07:20, 2 September 2009 (UTC) Or alternatively, the transcluded articles could just be used directly, albeit more cumbersomely. I would be totally fine with just moving them into WikiProject Math subpages instead. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:26, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      - Is there some reason why {{MathTopicTOC}} can't be split in a template used to index articles in article space and one used by the WikiProject in Wikipedia space to keep track of recent changes? As far as I can tell the row is about the "Recent changes" row in that template. Pcap ping 13:48, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep all of them, par above. --MaNeMeBasat (talk) 06:32, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep I don't know whether this list plays a particular role in the maintenance of the generally excellent quality of the mathematical articles (and the nominator has displayed no knowledge of that point either), but I see that the list has existed for six years and appears to be maintained. Collecting the individual "List of X" articles into eight "List of (X-Y)" appears likely to be very helpful for those who take mathematics seriously, since it makes browsing the titles a lot easier than a category. Johnuniq (talk) 07:36, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The pages are not used for navigation (check the WhatLinksHere), they are used almost exclusively for recent changes patrolling of math articles. There is no reason they should be in article-space, where they duplicate the individual pages. Either they should be moved to project space, or the existing letter pages used individually, or the individual letters merged (rather than transcluded) into them. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:48, 2 September 2009 (UTC) edit: added "almost" --Cybercobra (talk) 07:51, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - Ok, apparently they're used on a Portal (I had only checked Article & Template spaces initially), but there's no reason that single letters couldn't be used instead. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:56, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - Technical question (hoping for a compromise): would these lists fail to work as intended if moved to the Wikpedia namespace? If so, would that be hard to fix? Pcap ping 13:04, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - Comment (or further question) as far as I can tell Portal:Mathematics#Index_of_mathematics_articles uses different lists for each letter like List_of_mathematics_articles_(Q). Am I missing something? Pcap ping 13:10, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - List_of_mathematics_articles_(P-R) for instance simply transcludes the appropriate letter-split lists, e.g. it transcludes List_of_mathematics_articles_(Q). So this seems much ado about noting as the letter-range lists are not hard to recreate elsewhere. But they don't seem to hurt in any way by their presence in article space either. Pcap ping 13:21, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - The individual letter-split lists are maintained by User:Mathbot. Pcap ping 13:29, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - The letter-range lists do not appear necessary to keep track of recent changes via {{MathTopicTOC}}, which can (and now does) include the letter-split indexes directly. Pcap ping 13:52, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- –Juliancolton | ^Talk 14:36, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep There is every reason to think that the people in that project know what they are doing, and I see nothing here that would lead me to think otherwise. They sort their articles, it gets done, it doesn't interfere with anything. (I would like an simple explanation why they do both multiple letter groups and single letter groups, but that's so I could learn from them). DGG ( talk ) 04:29, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The multiple letter grouping is used only to keep track of recent changes to math articles in reasonably sized chunks, using the Special:Recentchangeslinked functionality. That little "template" was split from {{MathTopicTOC}} by me since Cybercobra made a reasonable argument that "recent changes" is an internal function not useful to readers in, say, print. It is also transcluded to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity. This compromise appears to be okay with everyone involved. Pcap ping 10:05, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Withdraw Nomination I filed this AfD under the premise that the articles had no use; however, they turned out to be used internally by the Math WikiProject, and therefore movement, not deletion, would be the appropriate action, making AfD the wrong venue for this. I shall instead take up the matter on the WikiProject's talkpage. --Cybercobra (talk) 06:24, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Good idea. We can discuss whether it's necessary to move these to Wikipedia space on the wikiproject. Pcap ping 10:05, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - addendum to previous comment: or a related forum. I'm thinking of contacting the bot author. --Cybercobra (talk) 10:10, 3 September 2009 (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.