Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Liberty ships by hull number

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; the efforts by editors to reorganize the lettered lists are superb. There was not any kind of concensus formed about these numbered lists, however, and I wasn't really even able to just be bold and redirect them , because there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do so. I suggest a clever editor with topic-specific knowledge just go ahead and merge/redirect these in some beneficial way. However, for now they must be kept. JERRY ^talk _contribs 04:17, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

List of Liberty ships by hull number

DeleteThis article and related articles are repeat articles of List of Liberty ships. Redundant material for these ships are not needed. Please note that the majority of the Liberty Ships don't even have their own articles. I am also putting the following articles up for deletion:

Tavix (talk) 02:02, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete as far as I can see, these lists fail WP:N and are redundant.--Sunny910910 ^{(talk|Contributions)} 03:30, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I don't see the use in this, they're listed alphabetically already, and the articles are virtually all redlinks anyway... Pete.Hurd (talk) 04:39, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- the wub "?!" 12:59, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. We already have a list of Liberty ships that sorts them by name; they apparently were also numbered serially from date of construction. Not sure that one form of indexing is less useful than the other. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:03, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I'm neutral at the moment, I don't see any problem with a list by hull number in itself, I do question if the info needs to be split into quite so many articles. Just eyeballing the size, it looks like the number of articles could be cut by about a third. Anyway, does anyone know if there is a guideline/policy on repeating information just for the sake of a different sort order? If so, then I could form an opinion. -Verdatum (talk) 16:03, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment When I created the articles, I was trying to keep them to a small size. I would have no objection to fewer, but longer articles. — Bellhalla (talk) 14:40, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Seems like a directory. When did Wikipedia become a dumping ground for such numerical listings? The fact that the same info appears in other arrangements is hardly an effective argument for keeping yet another listing. No more encyclopedic than a listing of all Jeeps made during WW2 by chassis number, or all M1 rifles, or all tanks by serial number. Perhaps it could be placed at Wikisource. Edison (talk) 17:55, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
keep. Perfectly valid list per WP:LIST. I would argue that the guideline that "Redundancy between lists and categories is beneficial" implies that redundancy between lists organized on different principles is equally beneficial. --Paularblaster (talk) 21:38, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Commentand I would argue: How is redundancy beneficial? All it is is the same information relisted. Tavix (talk) 23:21, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. This is indeed mostly redundant to List of Liberty ships, but actually, I think that's the list that should be deleted rather than this one. After all, Category:Liberty ships already sorts them alphabetically; there's no need for an alphabetical list as well. Whereas a list by hull number is information provided nowhere else on Wikipedia; so, I suggest keeping this one and deleting the alphabetical list as redundant to the above category. Terraxos (talk) 23:50, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, that wouldn't work because only a handful of ships have wikipedia articles. Tavix (talk) 03:22, 10 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I placed notice at WP:SHIPS and WP:MILHIST about this proposed deletion. — Bellhalla (talk) 14:36, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Paularblaster, Smerdis of Tlön. Also, if a sortable list of all Liberty ships in a single article wouldn’t be so incredibly huge, I would favor the deletion. But given limitations in place, I think the articles should remain. — Bellhalla (talk) 14:46, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This should have been discussed with at least WP:SHIPS before nomination. A lot of Liberty ships also had US and Royal Navy careers so the matter of 'no articles' is simply finding the correct redirect. --Brad (talk) 15:56, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Seems highly duplicative, and a nightmare for maintenance if there were any changes. Why not just make one List of Liberty ships, but SORTABLE by hull number as well as ship name. Hmm, okay, I am doing that...hmm, ok, DONE, have made List of Liberty ships sortable. Instead of 22 or so separate Letter-specific sections, I have edited it now into four chunks: doncram (talk) 23:52, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- List of Liberty ships: A-F (approx 129kb)
- List of Liberty ships: G-L (approx 170kb)
- List of Liberty ships: M-R (approx 71kb)
- List of Liberty ships: S-Z (approx 167kb)
If someone wants to reapportion those 4 chunks, that would be fine by me. Or combine them into one big list. Anyhow, now to find any one hull number, you can just visit these and click "sort" on Hull number. On average, you would visit 2 of these articles to find any one specific hull number. doncram (talk) 23:52, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Some mathy whippersnapper shoulda pointed out by now, that on average you would have to visit 2.5 of these, to find any one hull number. :) Still comparable number of expected clicks vs. navigating through all those separate small lists. doncram (talk) 08:45, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - List of Liberty ships: S-Z is actually about 108kb. There were a considerable number of duplicates, probably unintentionally introduced during the consolidation. — Bellhalla (talk) 13:32, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - I've been able to squeeze the pages further (using {{SS}} and carriage returns rather than double pipes and associated spaces)
    - List of Liberty ships: A-F (approx 92kb)
    - List of Liberty ships: G-L (approx 122kb)
    - List of Liberty ships: M-R (approx 51kb)
    - List of Liberty ships: S-Z (approx 85kb)
    - — Bellhalla (talk) 14:54, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Lookup by hull number now easy enough to do in the List of Liberty Ships article chunks. Also, note that the following articles should now be deleted:

I don't know how to actually nominate them for deletion, perhaps someone else could help with that?. Note some of them very small, e.g. List of Liberty ships: V has just 2 entries. Bigger, sortable chunks make better sense. doncram (talk) 00:11, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose (potential) nomination of these pages (List of Liberty ships: B, List of Liberty ships: C, List of Liberty ships: D, etc.) for deletion. I have made each a redirect to the appropriate page (i.e. List of Liberty ships: I redirects to List of Liberty ships: G-L — Bellhalla (talk) 11:46, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Move the "Liberty ships by number" articles to my userspace, so I can make sure that no information in these articles is lost. — Bellhalla (talk) 11:14, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment/Question Hmm, either u don't trust my merging of the Liberty Ships by letter articles (by all means, check my work) or u suspect that there are informational differences between the "by letter" versions vs. the "by hull number" versions, or both? Why keep the ships by letter versions and the ships by number versions at all, even as redirects? Checking just a few, I see a few, but just a few, incoming links to them. Those incoming links should be redirected to the new articles.
  - Comment/Reply You are right, I suspect that there might be some differences between the "by hull number" and the "by name" lists. In the almost two years that they have been around, it doesn't seem unlikely that an editor might have changed links in one and not known (or bothered) to have changed the other. I have no problem whatsoever with your merges. I think that they provide a great solution to the situation at hand.
    - Comment/Suggestion Okay, well u show admirable dedication to getting the best information forward. Here's a suggestion how you could do it: create, in your userspace, a new bynumber table, and merge in all the separate "by hull number" files, like I did for the "by name" files. You will get filesize warnings and this will become a bit cumbersome, it will take some time for edits to appear after the file size gets big, but it is still manageable. (My experience on this is from even bigger temporary files, which went over 850kb, that database dumps used in the history of developing the List of National Historic Landmarks by state, the file was located here in User SEWilco's userspace and the edit history shows its old filesizes.) Make the 400k or so size merged table sortable. Sort it by ship name. Use that in your cross-checking the four new alpha chunk files. Scroll down slowly looking for differences. Hmm, if there is a discrepancy for one ship, I suppose you could want to check the edit history in the source byalpha file and in the source bynumber file for that ship. This may sound like a big task, but I don't know, it could possibly go pretty quickly once you got started. Put in a couple hours to try doing this, anyhow, and see if that eliminates your need to save the byname or bynumber files in your area. Hope this helps. doncram (talk) 21:56, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - Also, just because there are few or no Wikipedia links doesn't mean that someone, somewhere might not have a bookmark in their browser for one of the now-redirects of the "by name" articles. Having redirects for those now-deprecated pages seems a natural. Also, to be clear, I'm not advocating redirects for the "by hull number" lists. — Bellhalla (talk) 19:05, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment about DATE-SORTING I should have acknowledged that although the new tables are SORTABLE for names and for hull numbers, the date columns do not sort properly. That's due to what I call a glitch in the wikitable sorting software, which does not support most date formats. By trial and error I figured out that dates formatted like 23 Dec 1942 and 25 Jun 1943 sort properly (that is, with just first 3 letters of month in "DD MMM" "YYYY" format), while 23 December 1942 or 1942-12-23 do not sort properly. This implemented in List of National Historic Landmarks in New York, List of National Historic Landmarks by state, and other lists. Someone could notify the wikitable sorting programmer, or change all the dates in the List of Liberty ships tables, if sorting on the date fields is important. doncram (talk) 16:45, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - Comment Adding a hidden field for date sorting would (from a test I did) approximately double the size of the pages. In any case, if the ships are sorted by hull number, the the dates are going to be pretty close to chronological as a result. — Bellhalla (talk) 19:08, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - Comment You don't need to make dates sortable by adding a hidden field, which would indeed add size to the pages, you can just choose to format the date itself in the one date format that works for sorting, which I tried to explain. Nice job, by the way, in reducing the size of the pages by your various clever techniques, such as editing out the double column hash marks and so on. I note that you got it down far enough so that if some material was moved from the 2nd to the 3rd chunk, then all would fall under 100k, which is the level at which article size warnings kick in. Thanks for doing that and systematically documenting its effect. I have learned from you and hope to apply in some of the sortable tables indexed in List of National Historic Landmarks by state. Cheers, doncram (talk) 21:32, 15 January 2008 (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.