User:Logical Premise/nolists

Toolz

It's a goddamned list!

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This page in a nutshell: A list is an organized collection of data that is designed to organize, not an article

I fucking hate lists. I use them every day, but I fucking hate them.

I have to deal with lists every day in my job as an information worker. I have to deal with grocery and shopping lists, mailing lists and wine lists. When I buy my parents a present I go off a wish list. When I revert vandalism to WP I use a whitelist and a blacklist. I keep a set of to-do lists in my organizer at work and my blotter at home.

But why do I hate Wikipedia lists? Because they're usually goddamned stupid.

To me, a list is "a medium defined by an enumeration or compilation of a set of possible items." Period. There is no encyclopedic value in a goddamned list aside from the article it should be about. IF the list is inside an article, like in any normal encyclopedia, that's fine.

But we have lists that are somehow articles. We have FEATURED lists. What kind of psychotic happy horseshit is this? List of Academy Award-winning foreign language films? WHY the fuck is this a featured list, you may ask.

According to the intellectual titans that conceived this abortion of common sense, the following items are the main criteria for a featured list (and by extension should be the goal of all lists):

# Prose. It features professional standards of writing.
Lead. It has an engaging lead section that introduces the subject, and defines the scope and inclusion criteria of the list.

Comprehensiveness. It comprehensively covers the defined scope, providing a complete set of items where practical, or otherwise at least all of the major items; where appropriate, it has annotations that provide useful and appropriate information about entries.

Structure. It is easy to navigate, and includes—where helpful—section headings and table sort facilities.

Style. It complies with the Manual of Style and its supplementary pages.

Visual appeal. It makes suitable use of text layout, formatting, tables, and colour; it has images if they are appropriate to the subject, with succinct captions or "alt" text; and it has a minimal proportion of red links.

Stability. It is not the subject of ongoing edit wars and its content does not change significantly from day to day, except in response to the featured list process.

Do you see "has reliable sourcing" in there? How about "encyclopedic value"? No? Alright, can the list be verified? No. In fact, after going over all of WP, do you know what you end up with?

Lists can stand on their own if they are "useful" to the article they relate to and are too long to fit into the article. Lists, by themselves, are strictly defined by all kinds of restrictions, but as long as enough people feel they're useful, then suddenly they're wonderful things.

Let me put it more plainly, using a logical argument.

A list is a collection of similar or related items.
The mediawiki software runs off of a database and is very powerful.
The mediawiki software can already GENERATE lists in realtime , see catagories.
Almost all lists are merely tacking on short pieces of information to a list of other articles, without adding any real content of their own.
Such could be generated BY the mediawiki software, with appropiate settings.

There is nothing a list adds to the content available. It's merely a sorting methodology. The concept that somehow lists are encyclopedic fails to hold water. You will never find a stand alone list in any paper encyclopedia. Not for lack of space, but for lack of value.

The result of our idiotic list policy is abominations such as List_of_Alpha_Phi_Alpha_brothers, List of Presidents of la Société entomologique de France, List of former heads of regimes who were sentenced to death by hanging, the always useful List of unsolved problems, and my all-fucking-time favorite, List of group-0 ISBN publisher codes.

I am simply beside myself with rage at the concept that these piles of shit (or featured shit!) are somehow supposed to stand along side Acrocanthosaurus, Geology of the Bryce Canyon area, or Norte Chico civilization, which are all masterpieces of writing, sourcing, and true encyclopedic content.

List writers of Wikipedia, I salute you for perverting the mission of this place to push your own petty interests. Because, God knows, if we don't have a fucking List of Gundam episodes by number of rounds fired right now, someday we will. And it will probably be featured.