Wikipedia:Viability of lists

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Just because you can create something, doesn't mean you should. In order to keep Wikipedia from becoming

navigational lists
, though, may be under the scope of this essay.

Article vs List

Look up list in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Since this essay focuses on the viability of

doesn't use paper
, the basic premise is the same.

This is important because while an article by its nature must contain a large portion of prose, a list may or may not. What this means is that lists can be like

Timeline of evolution or not contain any indiciation within the title that it is a list such as Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration
. However, all of these share the common point of enumerating or compiling a set of items.

Finally while most lists use prefixes such as "List of", "Timeline of", "Chronology of", etc., they are not required to do so. With lower quality articles, a page it may look more or less like a

stand-alone list, but a more complete high qualify version will show whether the content. Nintendo video game consoles
may appear to be an article because the amount of prose, but to many it is a list.

Verifiability

Lists need to conform with Wikipedia's core policies, including

reliable sources
how multiple items are related; it is not enough to just group them together and say they are - that is original research.

Notability

While it is best to re-establish

notability
within the list, it is not always necessary. Some lists are notable because the topic itself is notable. If the topic is notable then a list dealing with the topic is notable and vice versa. the opposite is also true; if a topic does not meet the notability guideline, then a list on the topic is also not notable.

For more complex lists where there is a qualifier, such as

List of birds of Canada and the United States
other factors come into play.

Complex lists

While notability of a topic is clear for singluar criteria lists like List of birds, it becomes more difficult when qualifiers are made on these lists.

While it may be okay to say that if

List of One Piece episodes as those are published material of the media franchise, it is unclear if List of One Piece characters
would be, although there is widespread support (and also dissent) for this.

Other complex lists like location-based lists may depend upon how well the topic is likely to have serious study; the narrower the location, the less likely that is to happen.

Birds of Yellowstone National Park
.

Being discriminate

Just because a topic is notable, does not mean it needs a list.

consensus should prevail. A wing is a notable topic, but List of wings
would not be an appropriate list because the topic is so broad and diverse it encompasses a subject too large to easily categorize.

In addition while a

List of U.S. Presidents is a good list idea, a List of U.S. Presidents with brown eyes
is not because the listing of U.S. Presidents is quite small and grouping people by their eye color is almost unheard of.

For stand-alone lists, the selection criteria should be clearly explained, both in the article's introduction to the list and also stated in the header of the talk page via Template:List criteria, which requires a link showing where consensus was established for the list criteria. Lists lacking adequate statements of list criteria can be tagged with Template:List missing criteria. If the criteria include an acceptable reference to Wikipedia, format it with Template:Self-reference link. Effective use of the criteria guidelines and these templates will help focus lists and prevent the accumulation of indiscriminate information.

Longest, biggest, highest

Wikipedia hosts a number of these types of lists which boast something to be "the xxx of" such as

hubcaps
, we don't devote a multitude of articles to that.

In some cases it is impossible to gauge what belongs in a list even though it the criteria seem objective. A good example is List of cars by speed. Cars are certainly a well covered topic, however fastest moving cars has no clear criteria what goes in it. If it goes by top speed then List of cars by top speed is better. Does it mean acceleration? Again, List of cars by acceleration is better. There could also be other criteria such as top cruising speed.

Too broad

Some topics just aren't that viable because they would be either too broad or of little interest. These usually comes because the criteria for the list is extremely easy to accomplish that it is relatively commonplace such as List of students with perfect attendance. It is a clearly objective statement, relatively narrow focus (for a broad list), but the numbers of people who could qualify for this are extremely high when one takes into account the number of students worldwide. Finally, this is a relatively easy thing to accomplish. While a specific individual may not have or had perfect school attendance, numerous people do or did.

Neutrality

While

point-of-view fork
by trying to convey that the party affiliation of the President ties certain Presidents together and alienates them from others.

Spinout lists

Many list articles come about when a list grows too large and begins to dominate an existing article. When this happens editors usually create a separate article placing the info there. While there are many quality lists that emerge from this, there are many more that do not need to be split.

Before spinning out a list - or another article for that matter - because of the

editing
the article to reduce unnecessary info or wordy prose.

See also

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