Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of United Airlines destinations

This discussion was subject to a deletion review on 2024 March 28.
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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. ✗plicit 05:01, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

List of United Airlines destinations

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I am also nominating the following lists with the same problems:

Per the 2018 RFC, there is consensus that lists of airline destinations do not belong on Wikipedia. A discussion at AN advised editors to nominate lists at AFD in an orderly manner and include a link to the RFC in their nominations; it was also recommended that the closer of the AFD take the RFC closure into account. The consensus has been reaffirmed in several AFDs since then.

These lists violate WP:NOT. Wikipedia is not meant to host a database of every single city that an airline flies to as of February 2024 or whatever month it is. Nor is it supposed to provide an indiscriminate collection of every destination in history. Even if the airline flew to some city for a few years in the 1960s, it gets added to the list. All these former destinations border on airline trivia.

If we look at how the lists are referenced, we realize that they are basically repositories for airline data. In the United list, someone accessed the airline's route map in August 2020 and cited it for over 200 destinations. United also publishes a cleaner version of its route map in its inflight magazine (see pages 91–95 of this month's issue), which could be cited instead. The Lufthansa and American Airlines lists lack references for many current destinations, but this problem can be fixed rather easily. Neither airline publishes neat route maps like United; instead they have timetables that you have to search. In this case, an easy way to verify all current destinations is to consult a third-party aggregator of scheduling data, like Flightradar24 or FlightMapper.net. Then one of these websites or the airline's timetable can be cited for each current destination. You can add more references, like news stories about a new destination, but they would be redundant. Also, you cannot use such a reference on its own to say that the airline still flies to a given city as of this month. For example the Lufthansa list includes this source from 2017 about the launch of flights to Shannon, yet the city is labeled 'terminated' – which implies that someone had to check Lufthansa's current schedule to see if it still flies there. Ultimately we have established that the information in these lists is indeed verifiable. But the problem here is not one of verifiability. It is one of suitability – the suitability for Wikipedia of lists that essentially reorganize data sourced from flight databases.

In addition, keeping the lists up to date means functioning like a news service that documents every change to the airline's destinations. For instance the United list informs the reader that service to Winnipeg will resume in May, and the American list notes the upcoming addition of various destinations such as Naples and Copenhagen. The tracking of these periodic changes in airline schedules goes against WP:NOTNEWS.

For what it's worth, I'm an aviation enthusiast who has contributed to these lists in the past. I enjoy looking at old route maps, and I cited the one in my copy of Lufthansa's July 2011 inflight magazine for some of the past destinations. Nevertheless, WP:NOT makes it clear that these lists are inappropriate for Wikipedia. Sunnya343 (talk) 03:58, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Aviation, Transportation, Lists, Germany, and United States of America. Sunnya343 (talk) 03:58, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aviation, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airlines, Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not. Sunnya343 (talk) 04:07, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: In recent AFDs on lists of airline destinations, many more than three lists were bundled into the nominations. I am taking a conservative approach here because these are the lists of three major Western airlines, which may attract more attention on the English Wikipedia than other airlines. I want to give people the opportunity to concentrate on and discuss a small number of such lists before more are nominated for deletion. Sunnya343 (talk) 04:02, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Travel and tourism-related deletion discussions. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 05:17, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. NOTDB, NOTINDISCRIMINATE. These are simply mirrors of primary corporate sources and are out of date almost immediately. Any page that requires vigilant regular checks to make sure its content is accurate and serves any purpose at all does not belong on WP.

JoelleJay (talk) 05:25, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom, in accordance with the RFC cited above. Rosbif73 (talk) 09:11, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete NOTDB. Additionally nom's reasoning should be summarized and added to Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information as it is a good explanation of why pages are not databases. Jfricker (talk) 12:49, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per RFC. Impossible to keep these lists up to date ✈ mike_gigs ^talk_contribs 14:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree that the mere concept of keeping something up to date makes us a "news service" in violation of NOTNEWS. It is perfectly acceptable and routine to track current changes, and that's part of the beauty of a wiki that we can keep something current. That's simply untrue that doing so here is "impossible", nor do we just delete things whenever – gasp! – something isn't perfectly accurate or current (WP:As of). However with respect to single corporations, I agree these do not need to be stand-alone articles, particularly because United has such a map on their homepage. Reywas92^Talk 15:29, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is a difference between updating an airline's article to state that it has begun its first international flight, decided to close a hub, or filed for bankruptcy protection – and updating it to say that the airline will start flying to Redmond, Oregon, on 6 May 2024 and to Brisbane on 26 October 2024. Sunnya343 (talk) 01:05, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's an editorial decision. Can just as easily say no future destinations, or mark it as "planned" without a specific date. I agree that I wouldn't put that that kind of detail in a prose article, but that's not a reason for wholesale deletion. Reywas92^Talk 04:51, 16 February 2024 (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.