Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of blast furnaces

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 delete‎. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 01:20, 10 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

List of blast furnaces

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Fails WP:NLIST. Considering that blast furnaces have existed for centuries all across the world, this seems like a completely random choice with no clear inclusion criteria for these individually not notable furnaces. Was there anything special about e.g. the 1905-1907 period in the US that it deserves a separate section? Fram (talk) 13:05, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Lists of people and Technology. Fram (talk) 13:05, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Fram why was this included in "Lists of people"? LibStar (talk) 13:16, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- Because I misclicked, should have been plain "lists" of course. Fram (talk) 13:18, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

same notability guidelines apply which apply to "List of ship launches in XXXX" or "List of shipwrecks in XXXX".

The more the merrier. All blast furnaces are supposed to be included. Nowakki (talk) 13:23, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Rather useless synthesis if it only covers the USA. I suppose some furnaces are notable if they're preserved on the NRHP or the like as industrial heritage (and I believe some steelworks are, both in the USA and in Germany). Needless list otherwise with no indication as to why these are notable, no technical discussion, no historical context given. Oaktree b (talk) 13:56, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The list is supposed to cover all countries. Nowakki (talk) 14:05, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have any idea how incredibly many blast furnaces there were? I just did a rather random search, and e.g. the small city of Chimay, in Belgium, had 9 blast furnaces in the 17th century[1]. These kind of small blast furnaces were omnipresent. This is not a reliable source, but if correct then there are at least nearly 500 operating blast furnace sites in the world, and this is just a fraction of the list of former ones (and probably not a complete list of current ones either). Fram (talk) 14:25, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The list can if needed by broken down into one list per century. Or broken up in a variety of other ways. Nowakki (talk) 14:30, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But they were so common and in many cases just ignored because of that, that such lists would be a totally random selection of some examples. We already have List of preserved historic blast furnaces, which is a well-defined, limited list of blast furnaces which are considered important enough to preserve. Fine, good topic for a list. But an open-ended list or series of lists for all of them? Please no. Fram (talk) 14:38, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Please no is not in any wikipedia content guideline. Nowakki (talk) 14:43, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

also, the "list of blast furnaces built in the 1940s" is not indiscriminate and open-ended and such a list can be looked up by anyone interested using a chronological list of all blast furnaces. Nowakki (talk) 14:50, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I was about to say draftify to allow it to be converted to a list of notable blast furnaces, but we already have one at List of preserved historic blast furnaces. A list of all blast furnaces is simple implausible to do here. Reywas92^Talk 15:38, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Is a list of ship launches implausible to do here? Nowakki (talk) 15:45, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If it's any old random boats, yes the list is useless. We need to cover important things, not trivia lists of every type of ship that ever hit the water. Same idea here, we either need some discussion of why each listed blast furnace is important, a scientific discussion of a particular type of blast furnaces or something along those lines. This could simply be a list of red cars, the list is too large and too trivial to be useful to anyone. Oaktree b (talk) 20:09, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
List of Liberty ships (A–F)

List of Liberty ships (G–Je)

List of Liberty ships (Je–L)

List of Liberty ships (M–R)

List of Liberty ships (S–Z)

i believe the number is 2700 or so total.

can we have this discussion when there are 1000 entries in the blast furnace list? Nowakki (talk) 20:22, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
feel free to nominate them for deletion as well, most of the ships likely aren't notable. I don't have the capacity to review each list at this time.

Oaktree b (talk) 00:06, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
i would really appreciate it, if you spent your available capacity on somebody else.

i don't even know why i have to jerk off so many people to get a bunch of dates approved for inclusion in an encyclopedia. it seems one has to first build a lobby of people interested in steelmaking to gain permission to rescue wikipedia from its depth of ignorance.

how about we approve the list on the less than zero chance that it will be useful to whoever rewrites History of the steel industry (1850–1970) to suck less. Nowakki (talk) 01:06, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:52, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete why not “list of grain elevators” or “list of canals” if we’re going to cover every mundane construction in history? This is clearly a vanity project of user:Nowakki since they’re the only editor and have been incessantly bludgeoning this discussion. Dronebogus (talk) 07:05, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
lack of contribution to a page that is less than 48 hours old is evidence to you that somebody is engaging in a vanity project?

i do NOT endorse with this new article a list of grain elevators or any other type of possibly useless list.

if you want to object to grain elevators and canals you have to wait for somebody to make a list of grain elevators or canals. Nowakki (talk) 07:23, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

List of windmills Nowakki (talk) 07:30, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I recently read a book about destroyers.

It had an appendix which listed all the destroyers built in the United States in WW2 in an appendix. It was just a book, not even an encyclopedia.

do you think that person was vain? if the list was useful to me at the time, should i still throw the book away because of possible issues of vanity? Nowakki (talk) 08:00, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Fram: how long is this application to host a Trill symbiont going to last? I need to know at what point i have to start nominating other lists on wikipedia for deletion to make a point. I would rather avoid doing that. Nowakki (talk) 08:44, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One: WHAT?! Two: WP:POINT Dronebogus (talk) 10:15, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

is the nomination of a list on wikipedia for deletion considered a disruption of wikipedia?

presumably i would pick one that deserves it for ulterior reasons. then i am clear? or not? Nowakki (talk) 10:47, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I would agree that as currently scoped, this is not suitable for an article—the list will be far too long as a single page. While we're allowed to have incomplete work in mainspace, this is so incomplete as to be misleading to the innocent reader--like a "List of sailing ships" that had ten examples, all post-1800. I think it would be best to move it to user space and think about suitable ways to partition it. I would probably start by breaking it down into lists by continent. Those could then be subdivided in a number of ways. In a strictly North American context, the most meaningful partition would probably be (independent) charcoal furnaces vs. coal and coke furnaces vs. integrated furnaces at steelworks, but that would probably be different in a European context, where coke replaced charcoal much earlier; a chronological subdivision would be more arbitrary but more clear-cut and consistent.

The additional arguments made here against lists of blast furnaces in general are, however, utterly unconvincing. To inject some numbers into the discussion, Gordon, in American Iron, cites J. P. Lesley's statistics on U.S. iron production in 1856 and enumerates blast furnaces: 416 charcoal furnaces and 164 coal and coke furnaces for a total of 580. This was already well into the trend of smaller, isolated charcoal furnaces being replaced by fewer, larger coal- and coke-fueled furnaces at more central points. I think tripling that to account for abandoned 1700s charcoal furnaces and late 19th-century merchant furnaces and steelworks is not an unreasonable way to estimate U.S. capacity, which would give us a figure of around 1800 furnaces. Round up to 2000, perhaps, to include Canada?

Compare that to 3,243 counties or equivalents in the U.S., each of which has its own article, or the 4,110 ships in the U.S. merchant fleet in the single year 1920.[2] Maybe it's different in a European context (although Chimay is in Wallonia, a major ironmaking region, so I suspect it's on the high end of the distribution rather than a representative example as implied above). Anyway, this is not an unreasonable list size if sub-partitioned by century. Given the existence of independent reliable sources such as J. P. Lesley [3] and James Moore Swank [4] compiling lists of North American furnaces and ironworks, with individual description, WP:LISTN is certainly met for a list of North American blast furnaces, and trying to impose inclusion criteria beyond verifiability is not appropriate.

American iron and steelmaking different significantly in practice from European due, among other things, to the differing quality and availability of fuels and ores. Gordon, aforementioned, wrote specifically on American ironmaking, this paper specifically treats American blast furnace practice, and I've linked above two works specifically enumerating American blast furnaces. The asseration that a list of North American blast furnaces is a "rather useless synthesis" is not tenable. Choess (talk) 17:26, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I could rename the article to "List of blast furnaces with hot blast, large stoves, coke ovens and skip cars, of more than 100 tons per day". not sure if that is against the rules. PS: trade journals in 1905 and later don't say "charcoal" anywhere. Nowakki (talk) 18:48, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Draftify. While in its current state the article is gratuitously incomplete, it doesn't seem to me like the topic of blast furnaces is inherently non-notable. Per what Choess says above, it's been covered before, and at some decent length. Obviously, one article that lists every blast furnace in the world would be impractical and unmanageable, but I think that limiting the scope could produce something very good. We should let this user cook... jp×g 19:45, 4 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The concept of a blast furnace is certainly notable, but I disagree that a list of all blast furnaces, no qualifiers, is appropriate. No objection to a more narrowly focused list. CarringtonMist (talk) 14:47, 6 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I'm ok with a Draft if we can carefully select which criteria we're using. The user Noawakki appears blocked, so I'm not sure who would take on the project. I'm certainly not interested. Oaktree b (talk) 15:43, 9 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. This article is redundant in this niche topic area with a better written and more focused article List_of_preserved_historic_blast_furnaces. My understanding is Wikipedia is not an WP:INDISCRIMINATE online repository or dump of trivia. I see comments mentioning that other list-based articles exist and I agree that some of those should be nominated for deletion too. The article is very new so if the decision is Draftify, I am fine with that. Saucysalsa30 (talk) 21:03, 9 June 2023 (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.