Talk:List of people by name: Db-Dd

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from VfD:

Pointless and contentless. (And how many people have names starting with Db, Dc, or Dd?) — Bill 17:57, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• Delete this. For that matter, I'd love to see all the "List of people by ..." deleted too. Not encyclopedic. --Improv 19:02, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Might as well just keep it and let the people maintaining lists of people figure out how best to deal with it. If its just outright deleted it will cause a bit of a mess in the List of people by name world. It could be merged with List of people by name: Da or something. —siroχo 19:56, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
• Keep for completeness sake. Darksun 20:00, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. (I'd be surprised if i'm the principal person "maintaining lists of people" but i am the principal person maintaining the structure of this particular unique list -- the largest list by, i think, orders of magnitude.) Contentless, yes; but its point is to provide a visible place for them to go, if it turns out there is one such person. How many people belong on List of people by name: Mb? Two, and you've surely heard of one of them. I also think the number for Db-Dd is zero, but i don't want to waste time making judgments about all the Latin-alphabet languages that use the same letters differently from the way English does, and which odd (to me) combinations they may just love. How many names begin with Tsc (which is likely to be prounounced in the same mouth-configuration as Dc)? You may know how to pronounce Brzezinski, but can you pronounce the Albanian name for Albania? It probably is many people's surname, and its letter combos may appear just below tomorrow's headlines. The alternative i don't want is new editors, who have no idea what it takes to create a new page within LoPbN, trying anyway, going away frustrated, or filing the name in an almost reasonable existing place where only 25% of readers will look, and where 75% of editors will consider it evidence that they should put names much more common than it (or look for them) just before or after it, in a cascade of disorder and error. This page is probably worthless, but WP is not paper, and it may be important. You buy insurance even tho you hope it's going to be a wasted expense. --Jerzy(t) 22:30, 2004 Oct 6 (UTC)
  • I sincerely hope you never decide that the arrangement of dust in your home might be important. List of Dust Motes by Apartment Sector would not be something I'd like to see. I sometimes wonder if the people who like lists have OCD.. --Improv 06:43, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

    Please be a bit more careful in your comments, this is pretty close to a personal attack toward Jerzy, we dont' want any ill feelings lurking. —siroχo 08:25, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

    My apologies. I was a bit rude to say that. --Improv 19:01, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

    • However sincere you may be, i'll paraphrase two heroes of info provision at once: "That's 'Mr. Harmless Drudge' to you!" --Jerzy(t) 09:02, 2004 Oct 7 (UTC)
• Merge with List of people by name: Da or List of people by name: De. Sarge Baldy 00:38, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
  • You and User:Siroxo deserve credit for coming up with precisely the natural solution, and the reason it is useless only highlights that naturalness: List of people by name: Da-Dd existed, in the form you-all presumably have in mind, about 24 hours ago, but for reasons beyond the scope of this page it was subdivided into 7 pages whose names may be easily inferred by viewing List of people by name: Da. To merge the nominated page with either "Da" or "De" (which was similarly subdivided back in July) would require finding solutions to LoPbN's inherant problems, different from those that have been evolved over the last 10 months and perhaps those from further back. If enough of you dislike the nominated page enough, vote Del and i might as well do the deletion myself, leaving red links. But Siroxo is right: a 5-day discussion on VfD is neither intended for nor capable of redesigning a redundantly interlinked tree of hundreds of pages, with millions of characters, and subject to various human-factors issues, so votes to merge are a waste of breath, and if you are interested enough to consider participating in such a redesign, you should start by going to Talk:List of people by name and its subpages for the 60+ kB of existing discussion there; by the time you've absorbed that, i may or not have completed the formal documentation project that i began there two weeks ago with a 10-kB draft of one section. --Jerzy(t) 05:32, 2004 Oct 7 (UTC)
• Keep. A valid index page in a large-scale Wiki-structure. jni 08:29, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. Indexes are good. Apparently they are also a pain to maintain. I defer to the greater wisdom of Jerzy in this matter. The Steve 10:29, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I read everyone carefully, and still stick with Delete. Random access capability quite obviates lists of this type: if I want to find Mbabane, I type it in "Find" and see what it gives me. (Note: I didn't think Db‑Dd would be void, but very sparse — and last year my Albanian barber taught me to pronounce that curious combination of letters I knew from stamp collecting as a child; I wuz surpriz.) Also agree with List of Dust Motes by Apartment Sector, and Improv, as an amusing sidelight, we've been beaten to it, by none other than the Roman emperor Elagabalus, who is reported to have sent people out to collect all the cobwebs of Rome and weigh them. I don't know how true that is: if of interest, and if I may be permitted, see my note, and experiment, on a passage of Tobias Smollett's Letters from France and Italy.

How about you typed Mbanane instead? List like this help you to deal with typos and unsure/variant spellings, especially with foreign names. Mikkalai 21:27, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• Keep. Harmless and obviously some find it useful. Andrewa 14:42, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Delete : search engines > lists, and they don't need active maintainance. I don't expect this will carry the day, mind. Ho hum. GWO 17:49, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. Search engines cannot replace Eyeball search.Mikkalai 21:29, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. Isn't it needed for the structure of the list? I'd consider it odd if it jumped from Da to De. Factitious 07:06, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
• Keep: Search engines are not capable of mind reading ... yet. -Sean Curtin 02:23, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)
• Keep, one never knows when one or more such name may crop up. 80.255 18:09, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Final Summary

Votes as of 02:27, 2004 Oct 12 (UTC) (5 days + from nomination):

• Del: 3 (including nominator's implicit vote)
• Keep: 10 (including the vote signed by User:Thesteve, even tho the signature is nearly invisible)
• Merge: 1

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[Unilateral election monitor's report [wink]:]

• The only numerical-named user who voted is registered, has a substantial user page and busy, twice-archived, talk page, and has contributed 1245 edits over the course of a year.
• No complaints of sock-puppets were made.
• I've quickly examined the diffs for each edit, and am satisfied no votes were tampered with. (I did reformat one vote by bolding it.)

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--Jerzy(t) 02:27, 2004 Oct 12 (UTC)

end moved discussion