Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Index of Sri Lanka–related articles

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. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 11:14, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Index of Sri Lanka–related articles

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These are alphabetical lists of articles related to Sri Lanka. As discussed in the recent nominations for the Brazil and India indexes, these sorts of lists have very low utility for readers and bring massive maintenance burdens that no-one has been willing to shoulder.

The page Index of Sri Lanka–related articles comes with the usual issues for the genre: it's got just over a thousand links, which represent a tiny fraction of the 18,000 actual Sri Lanka–related articles tracked by Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka. This can mislead readers into believeing that articles don't exist on a large number of topics related to the country.

The other set of pages – Index of Sri Lanka–related articles (0–9) through Index of Sri Lanka–related articles (Y–Z) – suffers, unusually, from the opposite problem. With a total of over 28,000 links, these lists have a large number of entries without any identifiable connection to Sri Lanka: from South Indian films (like Akam (film) or Akale) to Bangladeshi neighbourhoods (like Akania and Akania Nasirpur) to Burmese temples (Zinkyaik Pagoda) or Tibetan power stations (like Zhikong Hydro Power Station). – Uanfala (talk) 20:19, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. – Uanfala (talk) 20:29, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sri Lanka-related deletion discussions. – Uanfala (talk) 20:29, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. These are huge blocks of links that are of no use to any human user. Geschichte (talk) 21:29, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all per nom. These lists are not a useful method of searching for topics. Many of the articles on the individual letter lists are not even related to Sri Lanka. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 22:06, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all per Metropolitan90 and the fact that none of these lists are maintainable in the slightest. I looked one of them randomly and the only edits to it have been random people removing links for articles that had been deleted. There's probably no way to keep them up to date aside from that. I doubt anyone could add new articles about Sri Lanka to them at a rate that would make the lists up to date and useful though. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:43, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - These articles/lists/indexes are not against WP:DP. Therefore, DR is simply wrong or POV. The DR nominator seems he/she has own Deletion Policy than accepted wp:DP. Do we follow accepted policy or user's interpretations. If there any misleading inclusions, we can edit as per common practice. Are we going to delete all from Lists of country-related topics. --Antan O 09:46, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all as impractical to maintain and largely useless to readers. firefly ( t · c ) 17:24, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Question How could you say useless to readers? Does wp:DP says to delete? If so, where it is written? --Antan O 17:47, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The relevant bit of the deletion policy is WP:DELAFD, which basically says that an article can be deleted if editors reach consensus to that effect in a discussion like this one. There aren't any more specific guidelines: indexes don't have any encyclopedic significance per se (so notability, and WP:LISTN, aren't relevant), their function is to provide navigation for readers, and deciding whether to keep or delete a particular one will depend on whether they're deemed useful as navigational aids. In recent AfDs (like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Index of India-related articles) there has been rough consensus that country-level indexes are generally not useful: if a reader is looking for a topic in such a vast area, they're unlikely to be served well by an alphabetic list of thousands of entries: using it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. A reader will be much better off to use the search function, or browse the category tree, or look through the links in a related article. – Uanfala (talk) 19:58, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all The online encyclopedia has a search bar, categories, and a network of links from other articles so I can't conceive what the usefulness of listing thousands of disparate topics together alphabetically is. This is not a paper encyclopedia in which an index tells you what pages content is on: if you know what you're looking for, you can type it in, and if don't, two dozen massive lists aren't going to do much good. Yes, deleting the rest of Lists of country-related topics too would be a good idea. If the creator above or others somehow have utility for this, perhaps it can be moved into the Sri Lanka Wikiproject similar to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics articles (D), which has a bot that adds new articles to keep Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity comprehensive. Reywas92^Talk 20:38, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all for the same reasons as the following Index articles: Brazil, India, Pakistan, China and Romania. I believe a precedent has been set that country-based index articles shouldn't exist. Ajf773 (talk) 10:02, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all Sadly, someone has gone to a lot of work to create this, but this is a lot of maintenance work. Browsing lists is valid way of looking for material, but categories will do the same function. Deathlibrarian (talk) 03:37, 26 January 2022 (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.