Forum:SH:Dealing with the creation of new lists

This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. JocastaBot (talk) 15:11, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:Dealing with the creation of new lists

The practice on Wookieepedia has been that lists are discouraged unless they significantly contribute to our goal as a comprehensive encyclopedia, like the much-beloved timeline of galactic history and the list of phrases and slang, which do something that cannot be replicated by either articles on distinctive subjects or categories: they selectively consolidate information relevant to a chosen subject type. Now that's all fine and dandy, but the problem I see here is less with whether certain lists should be included on the wiki,[1] but the process by which notability gets decided for potential new lists: the recent creation of a "full list of armor sets" has alerted me to the fact that there is no policy specifically targeting lists, so administrators cannot delete the page simply on the basis that it is a list. This would be an issue if new lists keep getting made.

To tackle this, I propose 1) a policy addition to the Notability policy regulating the creation of new lists and, based on that, 2) the creation of an AbuseFilter (an automatic mechanism that prevents specific actions from being made by specific types of users) that prevent new users from creating any mainspace pages with titles that include the text "list." I believe it would be prudent to require that any new potential list to through a community discussion and voting process before it gets created. That way, we get community input on something as important and debatable as lists, and we save time having to TC each new list and the time of any user wanting to create a list that might ultimately get deleted. What do everyone else think? OOM 224 19:40, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Footnote

  1. ↑ As the recent deletion of the list of theme park attractions has shown, our process for dealing with existing lists is to discuss and vote on them via the Trash compactor forum. Note that a lot of the decision-making for the nature/existence of such lists seems to be arbitrary and subjective to individual editors' opinions, as shown by a recent discussion regarding the List of planets/List of planets/Legends.

Discussion

  • I would like to see a 100% confirmation that editors can in fact see exactly the message(s) we want to send them when they trigger such an abuse filter before I'd be comfortable agreeing with that. Imperators II(Talk) 19:45, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Sure. That also remind me that I must present SH about a restructuring of our main Star Wars article, media articles and media lists to have a better integrated articles hierarchy and be generally less chaotic... NanoLuukeCloning Facility 03:47, 3 November 2022 (UTC)