Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Syrian Air destinations
- 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 all except List of XiamenAir destinations on procedural grounds, which was not tagged for deletion. It will need to be nominated separately. ✗plicit 14:03, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
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- List of Syrian Air destinations (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Also nominating:
- List of Thomas Cook Airlines Belgium destinations
- List of Thomas Cook Airlines destinations
- List of TUI Airways destinations
- List of Sunclass Airlines destinations
- List of TUI fly Belgium destinations
- List of TUI fly Deutschland destinations
- List of TUI fly Netherlands destinations
- List of United Express destinations
- List of ValuJet destinations
- List of White Airways destinations
- List of XiamenAir destinations
- List of Yemenia destinations
- List of Zest Airways destinations
Per the 2018 RFC on lists of airline destinations, these are not suitable content for Wikipedia. A subsequent AN discussion recommended these be listed for deletion at AFD in orderly fashion, with a link to the RFC, and the closer of any AFD was to take the RFC into account in any close.
The articles are failures of WP:NOT, since they are exhaustive lists of the services offered by commercial enterprises as well as being essentially travel-guides. They are ephemeral and impossible to maintain given the way airline schedules change constantly, but if you did try to do keep them up to date, what you would have would essentially be an airline news-service, and Wikipedia is not news. Nobody would come to Wikipedia to find out where an airline went - they would go to the website of the airline concerned to find that out. None of our readers wants to know every single route operated by an airline on some random day in 2017, as these will have little bearing on what services they operate now or operated at other dates in the past.
In additional to this, every one of these articles is dedicated entirely to exhaustive lists of trivial, run-of-the-mill details of commercial operations of a kind that WP:CORP expressly bars from being used to sustain notability, making the content of them essentially trivia and non-notable ab initio. This includes "simple listings or compilations, such as ... product or service offerings"
and "standard notices, brief announcements, and routine coverage, such as...the opening or closing of local branches, franchises, or shops [and/or] the expansions, acquisitions, mergers, sale, or closure of the business"
.
The sourcing of these articles also universally fails to sustain notability under WP:CORP. They are either cited to the airline itself (including quotes from airline officials, airline websites, press releases of airlines, and airline blogs and Instagram accounts) or to aviation industry press that fails to meet the WP:ORGIND standard. No source is cited, having significant coverage of the destinations of each airline, that would meet the audience standards under WP:AUD.
Even if none of the above were an issue (and each point mentioned above is a WP:DELREASON in itself), much of the information on each page is unverifiable, making them WP:V failures.
Given the nature of these articles, I do not think WP:BEFORE searching is necessary - there simply isn't any source that would rescue these articles since their fundamental problem is the topic they are supposed to cover is one we have expressly decided is what Wikipedia is not. I therefore only did it for one of the above airlines (United Express) and did not find anything that would fulfil the significant coverage, independence, and audience requirements of WP:CORP. FOARP (talk) 13:27, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Aviation, Lists, China, Philippines, Syria, Yemen, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, United Kingdom, and United States of America. FOARP (talk) 13:27, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Keep These are useful to a significant number of people. For the various TUI pages, thess are actively updated on a regular basis, and usually quickly. Pmbma (talk) 15:02, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete per the thorough and well-reasoned nomination. Unmaintainable, unencyclopedic, and (most critically IMO) actively misleading to users unless constantly updated. -- Visviva (talk) 15:42, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Came here from CENT listing. I'm leaning toward deletion, as the nom appears to be well-reasoned (with the exception of the WP:V failure argument, which I don't follow — having only primary sources available doesn't make something unverifiable), but I have two questions. First, as a non-aviation person, could someone more familiar with it give some details/data on exactly how often airline routes tend to change? The nomination largely hinges on that, so I want to understand what "often" really means. Second, many airport articles list the airlines that fly to them and their destinations, e.g. here. This is the same info, so I'm curious what approach the nominator/supporters would like to see for those sections. Lastly, it appears that the nomination is not comprehensive, as I came across List of American Airlines destinations and there may be others not listed. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:18, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Some of the articles refer to airlines that have gone bankrupt. An example is Thomas Cook Airlines. Others remain active like TUI Airways. There is a larger list of 450 similiar pages at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_airline_destinations. For small airlines, it's fairly typical that the list of destinations is on the same page as the airline itself - for example see Chalair Aviation. For larger airlines, it was decided to split the list of destinations flown by an airline into a separate page, simply because the list was so long - List of American Airlines destinations. Virtually every airport page on multiple-language Wikipedias in the world has a "Airlines and Destinations" section which list which airlines fly to which destinations - again see as an example Los_Angeles_International_Airport#Airlines_and_destinations. Most airport and airline destination pages on English-language wikipedia are updated pretty quickly - often within minutes, but almost always within 24 hours of a third-party reputable source showing new information. Larger airlines like American Airlines will announce several (between 5 and 10) destinations per year while smaller airlines might announce a new destination every 2 years. Larger airlines often base their aircraft at more than just one airport (e.g. American Airlines has hubs at multiple airports in the USA) - the cost of opening service to an airport it has not flown to before is high - it's usually financially better for an airline to open routes between 2 airports that it already serves (but which are not linked non-stop) instead of opening places to lots of new destinations - the number of new routes per year is usually far greater than the number of new destinations. Pmbma (talk) 16:56, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
"Most airport and airline destination pages on English-language wikipedia are updated pretty quickly - often within minutes, but almost always within 24 hours of a third-party reputable source showing new information."
- umm..., this isn't true, is it? I mean, look at 1) the sources cited in the above articles (none of which really fits this definition, being at best industry press of dubious independence, and more often the airlines themselves) and 2) the fact that in most articles the date given is years ago. But even if it were true, it would be a blatant WP:NOTNEWS violation, because you would effectively be making a news-feed of airline destination updates. One thing I'm struggling with here is why, if the old schedules were as notable and useful as you seem to think they are, you would delete them and replace them with new schedules anyway? FOARP (talk) 17:34, 19 May 2023 (UTC)- You mentioned "One thing I am struggling with..". Could you perhaps rephrase the question ? I'm not sure I understand what you're asking and I don't want to answer the wrong question.Pmbma (talk) 17:52, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- If the list of destinations operated by TUI on 19 September 2021 was notable, why replace it with the list of routes operated by TUI on 9 May 2023? If one was notable/useful, why replace it with the other? Unless, that is, what we are looking at here is essentially a schedule which we try (badly) to keep up to date. But then why the schedules for defunct companies (at a randomly-chosen date of typically no great significance)? FOARP (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- It's largely an attempt to keep up-to-date. People will often add or remove a destination without updating the "Effective as of XXX date" so it appears to date from (maybe) 5 years ago on first reading, but will actually include references from 3 months ago. I'm guessing this is because that to change the "Effective as of XXX date" means verifying all airports in a list in case there have been other changes in the last 5 years. I'm undecided whether an "Effective as of XXX date" statement, is a good idea or not - maybe better to just include the list of destinations instead. Regarding the Terminated/Seasonal label, this is to try to cover the case where an airline stops flying a route, and you don't want somebody claiming an airline flies to a destination based on a source from 10 years ago. The Seasonal bit is to avoid somebody claiming that an airline no longer flies to an airport because flights to a beach destination in the cold season cannot be reserved. There used to be separate summer seasonal and winter seasonal labels, but this got too difficult to update if demand to travel somewhere had a complex season - eg spring and sutumn but not summer or winter - a label of Seasonal was simpler.Pmbma (talk) 18:16, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- I’m sorry, but isn’t all this just basically pointing to the information being just not entirely true? An editor’s WP:OR approximation of what the sources actually say? FOARP (talk) 18:43, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- If you seek 100 % accurate all the time, then these pages will never succeed - but that's true of wikipedia in general as well. If you accept a little bit of stale info with data being corrected as and when people notice errors, then that's what the pages offer, just like wikipedia in general. If people choose to regularly update a page and have done so for many years, then it means people probably consider the pages worthwhile, despite their faults. In general, attempts to insert deliberately false info is usually reverted quickly.Pmbma (talk) 19:00, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Pmbma - A few follow-up questions here focusing on WP:V for the 14 articles in the AFD specifically:
- 1) looking at the Thomas Cook article it says
"At the time of its closure, Thomas Cook Airlines flew to the following destinations throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and North America"
. Thomas Cook closed in 2019 and all the references on the page for which a date is provided are from 2016 or earlier, and are about future events that hadn't happened at the publication date. The only reference which conceivably supports the data in the article is the Thomas Cook Airlines website, but that is undated and obviously now just redirects to the Thomas Cook travel agents website. The whole page is effectively unreferenced for the content it is supposed to show. Additionally, Thomas Cook was a charter airline which within reason would go to anywhere you paid them to go, so is there any sense in listing its destinations at all? - 2) the TUI article says
"As of September 2021, TUI Airways operates to the following destinations:"
. Again TUI is a charter airline so in what sense is this actually a list of the destinations it serves, when in reality you can charter them to take you anywhere? Is TUI really "serving" the destinations labelled as terminated? Almost none of the data on the page actually comes from September 2021, so in what way is this date supported? Same question for the services that are supposedly going to start in the future? - 3) In the Sunclass Airlines list it says:
"As of December 2022, Sunclass Airlines operates flights to the following destinations"
but every single destination is listed as either "terminated" or "seasonal charter", so were any of these destinations actually being served by Sunclass Airways flights in December 2022? Because potentially none of these flights were operating that month. Moreover the only reference for which a source is provided is dated November 2022, everything else is an undated link to various versions of the airline's website. Again, this is a charter airline so the same "goes anywhere you pay them to go" issue applies. Again, this article is effectively unreferenced. - 4) the United Express article states
"This is a list of United Express destinations by carrier"
. what is presented is then a listing of different services provided by different carriers at different dates, many of which are presently not actually being served since things have changed since 2019. The only sources for this information are the websites of each of the carriers themselves, with the single exception of the a news-story quoting the Kalamazoo airport's website and an email from United that doesn't mention United Express or any of its carriers. How is the content of this article supported at all? How is WP:CORP passed if all the data comes ultimately from the airlines? - 5) The White article says
"White Airways serve the following destinations, operating for TAP Portugal or/and CEIBA International"
. TAP and CEIBA are also airlines, so are these actually White services? Again, this is all based solely on the website of the White company. Without a date, how are you supposed to assess the distinction between destinations that are currently served and the ones previously served? - 6) Same date-related issues for Xiamen Air. None of the sources cited is actually for July 2016: some are earlier, some later.
- 7) Same issues again for Yemenia: every single destination that is currently supposed to be operated but one is supported by an undated general reference to Yemenia's instagram feed, the one that isn't is a one-sentence WP:CRYSTALBALL article from February 2023 about a service that was going to start to Ethiopia, carried in industry press and clearly coming from an announcement of the airline. Belgrade is listed as a previous destination, but the source for this is a non-RS/all-inclusive-source air-crash listing for 1958 which describes the flight as carrying a Yemeni foreign minister from Rome to Belgrade, so was this actually a service that Yemenia regularly flew?
- 8) Much the same issues again for Zest.
- 9) Much the same issues again for Syrian Air, which is all cited only to the website of Syrian Air.
- Again, I'm just trying to understand here how these articles are supported at all by the sources cited in them, and how the notability of the destinations of these airlines under WP:CORP is sustained by them. I hope this doesn't come off as bludgeoning, I genuinely am just trying to understand how these articles could be considered to pass WP:V, let alone WP:CORP. FOARP (talk) 14:10, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Apologies for the delay in response.
- 1 - Thomas Cook Airlines (along with the various current flavours of TUI) will happily sell a person a ticket to fly one-way or return between 2 cities. It sometimes set prices very high to encourage people to book full holidays (hotel + food + flight) instead of just a flight, and make it more difficult for people to organise their own holiday, but a flight-only ticket could usually be purchased directly from the Thomas Cook website.
- 2 - See answer 1. Same applies with TUI
- 3 - See answer 1. Same applies with Sunclass
- 4 - I don't know about United Express
- 5 - White Air operated many flights on behalf of TAP until last year. The page may need to be updated.
- 6 - A person who chooses to edit a single destination may miss the fact that the top of the page references 2016, or may not want to take responsibility to completely review the entire destination list to ensure it matches the current date. We should probably remove the "as of 2016" clause.
- 7 - I agree that Instagram is not a reliable source. Please remember that Yemen is in civil war, and you should not expect normal sourcing rules to apply in civil war
- 8 - I don't know about Zest
- 9 - Syria has been heavily sanctioned by other countries and is recovering from a civil war. Please be a bit forgiving
- Pmbma (talk) 22:07, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
- If you seek 100 % accurate all the time, then these pages will never succeed - but that's true of wikipedia in general as well. If you accept a little bit of stale info with data being corrected as and when people notice errors, then that's what the pages offer, just like wikipedia in general. If people choose to regularly update a page and have done so for many years, then it means people probably consider the pages worthwhile, despite their faults. In general, attempts to insert deliberately false info is usually reverted quickly.Pmbma (talk) 19:00, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- I’m sorry, but isn’t all this just basically pointing to the information being just not entirely true? An editor’s WP:OR approximation of what the sources actually say? FOARP (talk) 18:43, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- It's largely an attempt to keep up-to-date. People will often add or remove a destination without updating the "Effective as of XXX date" so it appears to date from (maybe) 5 years ago on first reading, but will actually include references from 3 months ago. I'm guessing this is because that to change the "Effective as of XXX date" means verifying all airports in a list in case there have been other changes in the last 5 years. I'm undecided whether an "Effective as of XXX date" statement, is a good idea or not - maybe better to just include the list of destinations instead. Regarding the Terminated/Seasonal label, this is to try to cover the case where an airline stops flying a route, and you don't want somebody claiming an airline flies to a destination based on a source from 10 years ago. The Seasonal bit is to avoid somebody claiming that an airline no longer flies to an airport because flights to a beach destination in the cold season cannot be reserved. There used to be separate summer seasonal and winter seasonal labels, but this got too difficult to update if demand to travel somewhere had a complex season - eg spring and sutumn but not summer or winter - a label of Seasonal was simpler.Pmbma (talk) 18:16, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- If the list of destinations operated by TUI on 19 September 2021 was notable, why replace it with the list of routes operated by TUI on 9 May 2023? If one was notable/useful, why replace it with the other? Unless, that is, what we are looking at here is essentially a schedule which we try (badly) to keep up to date. But then why the schedules for defunct companies (at a randomly-chosen date of typically no great significance)? FOARP (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- You mentioned "One thing I am struggling with..". Could you perhaps rephrase the question ? I'm not sure I understand what you're asking and I don't want to answer the wrong question.Pmbma (talk) 17:52, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Hi Sdkb. AFDing all of the airline destination articles in one go was basically discouraged by the close of the 2018 AN discussion, but frankly I thought it also better just to deal with a more focused set of articles where the lack of sourcing was clearer to avoid WP:TRAINWRECK allegations. I'll freely admit that I've chosen some of the less-well sourced articles in this set, but I don't see anything wrong with starting with articles where the case for deletion is (even more) clear - indeed, that's the best place to start. This is very unlikely to be the last word on airline destination lists anyway: further AFDs would be necessary even if this one passed.
- My point about WP:V is that many of the articles contain statements such as "these are the services that XXXX airline operated on MM YYYY" but then give you a long list of services marked "terminated" (so they weren't operating them at that date?). Or "Seasonal" (based on what?) and it's not clear how the sources support the services at that specific MM YYYY date as they are about things that happened before or after that date. In reality, only the airlines can actually confirm what flights they're going to fly on a given day (and even then, only once the day is over will they know which flew). I don’t know if I’m explaining this well, but it's not the most important point here though - that's WP:NOT and WP:CORP.
- I think you can get a feel for how regularly airline services change based on the revisions to the TUI page between September 2021 and the last update on 9 May 2023 (diff): in that time services to Oranjestad in Aruba, Varna in Bulgaria, Marsa Alam in Egypt, Fagernes in Norway, and Orlando in Florida were "terminated"; services to Liberia in Costa Rica, Copenhagen in Denmark, Finland in Helsinki, Frankfurt in Germany, Shannon and Cork in Ireland, Verona in Italy, Faro in Portugal, Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden, Edinburgh in Scotland, and Teeside in England were switched to or from, or introduced as "seasonal". The changes were roughly every month or few weeks. Many of the dates for these service-changes were either in the future when they were added (the changes to Marsa Alam) or are still in the future now making this WP:CRYSTALBALL content. A look at the average airline news website (e.g., this one for British Airways) shows a new destination announced roughly every month just for them (e.g., the stories about the new/resumed flights to Shanghai, Beijing, Aruba, Guyana, South Africa, Montpellier, Corfu, Mykonos, Salzburg and Innsbruck all from this year) - of course they don't announce terminations on the same page but these are likely as numerous, and there may be other service-changes not highlighted here, so again, we're looking at at least monthly schedule changes and probably weekly ones.
- PS - Regarding airport lists: I have no view on that, though my instinct is more favourable to them than to lists that explicitly state that they are dedicated articles for exhaustive lists of the services provided by commercial enterprise on a particular (randomly-selected) date and which are blatantly no different to a list of Blockbuster Video outlets that operated on 17 March 1995. EDIT: also worth noting that WP:CORP has an explicit exception for airports (but not airlines and their services), so again, on that basis I don’t think exactly the same logic would apply to the airport articles. FOARP (talk) 17:16, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Keep These lists/articles exist as a simple and easily accessible collection of information. How difficult would it otherwise be to find a full list of SyrianAir's destinations for example? DO you really want to delete 450+ pages for no reason other than that you consider them trivial? These lists have been present for years; there is hardly justifiable reason to delete them now.
"How difficult would it otherwise be to find a full list of SyrianAir's destinations for example?"
- Syrian Air's website is right here => link, it has a pretty full explanation of the services that it can sell to you. I'm not sure why Wikipedia should give them free advertising and maintain a catalogue of their business services even if it is useful and has been around for a long time. This AFD is about the specific 14 pages nominated, even if other articles exist. FOARP (talk) 18:55, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- What, then, is unique about these 14 pages? SurferSquall (talk) 20:14, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Pages do not have to be uniquely deletable to be deletable. FOARP (talk) 21:02, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Why delete just these 14 and not the other 400+? SurferSquall (talk) 22:35, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- The discussion is about these 14 articles. They have been selected because they are especially bad articles, both in terms of sourcing and the way they offend against WP:NOT. This is not a discussion about deleting all of airline-destination-list articles. That such a discussion should NOT happen was an outcome of the 2018 AN discussion linked above where the varying quality of these list articles was used as a reason not to have such a discussion. Now that we have a focused discussion on 14 articles with especially bad sourcing and content, advocates of keeping them start talking about all the other articles: forgive me if this sounds like Catch-22.FOARP (talk) 02:43, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- PS - I’ve probably said enough in this AFD thread, but I’d like to reassure the keep !voters that I do not intend to jump right into a full AFD against all of the airline-destination articles if this passes. Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I think in that event some space should be given for a wider discussion, without any strict deadline, and not at AFD, as to what to do next, and a decent interval given before anything further is done. FOARP (talk) 09:46, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- I suggest opening a discussion on the relevant WikiProject SurferSquall (talk) 20:36, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- With all the respect in the world for the great work that the aviation and airlines projects do on articles about air-travel, this is not only a discussion for them. FOARP (talk) 06:15, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
- I suggest opening a discussion on the relevant WikiProject SurferSquall (talk) 20:36, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- PS - I’ve probably said enough in this AFD thread, but I’d like to reassure the keep !voters that I do not intend to jump right into a full AFD against all of the airline-destination articles if this passes. Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I think in that event some space should be given for a wider discussion, without any strict deadline, and not at AFD, as to what to do next, and a decent interval given before anything further is done. FOARP (talk) 09:46, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- The discussion is about these 14 articles. They have been selected because they are especially bad articles, both in terms of sourcing and the way they offend against WP:NOT. This is not a discussion about deleting all of airline-destination-list articles. That such a discussion should NOT happen was an outcome of the 2018 AN discussion linked above where the varying quality of these list articles was used as a reason not to have such a discussion. Now that we have a focused discussion on 14 articles with especially bad sourcing and content, advocates of keeping them start talking about all the other articles: forgive me if this sounds like Catch-22.FOARP (talk) 02:43, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Why delete just these 14 and not the other 400+? SurferSquall (talk) 22:35, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Pages do not have to be uniquely deletable to be deletable. FOARP (talk) 21:02, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Löschen all. Because wikipedia is not a collection of indiscriminate information that may or may not be accurate and which is better found elsewhere - for example from the airlines in question. JMWt (talk) 20:12, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- The point of these lists is to consolidate information that is widely spread out into an easily accessible and sortable list. SurferSquall (talk) 01:27, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- 1) This sounds like a WP:Synth if no-one actually publishes lists like these, but we do.
- 2) Do these 14 lists specifically achieve that? Because it looks like in the case of Syrian Air they are simply reproducing information directly from that airline’s website (which, though it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, is a straight-forward WP:CORP or even just WP:N failure). And the same is true of all the other 13 airline destination lists in this AFD - what isn’t based directly on what the airlines themselves say is based on non-independent industry press simply relaying announcements of the airlines, typically WP:Crystalball announcements about what will happen in the future. FOARP (talk) 03:20, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- 1) This sounds like a WP:Synth if no-one actually publishes lists like these, but we do.
- The point of these lists is to consolidate information that is widely spread out into an easily accessible and sortable list. SurferSquall (talk) 01:27, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Merge and restructure - I would merge these lists into the main articles on the respective airlines. A list of cities served by an airline is noteworthy information within that context (and can appropriately be cited to the airlines themselves as ABOUTSELF primary sources). This may require restructuring the list formats (say in bullet point format instead of chart format), but that should be easy to do. It would also make it easier to keep updated as cities are added/removed from service. Blueboar (talk) 20:50, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- Marge 450+ airline destination pages? SurferSquall (talk) 01:27, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- I think if we keep any of these, it's far better that they be on separate pages, otherwise the main articles would be overburdened. WP:NOTSTAT treats these the same way. DFlhb (talk) 06:21, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Löschen all of them. Fails Wikipedia policy WP:NOT and is also pretty close to WP:TRIVIA. Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, not a travel guide and cannot be relied upon for that sort of information to be up to date anyway. - Ahunt (talk) 23:57, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- If you find it difficult to keep the information up to date, I suggest you focus on other things! SurferSquall (talk) 01:29, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Kommentar - it is not necessary to try to refute everyone who disagrees with you at AfD, please see Wikipedia:Don't bludgeon the process. - Ahunt (talk) 01:34, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- See Jetstreamer's comment. Is is imperative that these articles aren't deleted, or else we risk losing so, so much more. SurferSquall (talk) 02:27, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Kommentar - it is not necessary to try to refute everyone who disagrees with you at AfD, please see Wikipedia:Don't bludgeon the process. - Ahunt (talk) 01:34, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Löschen Since airline schedules change frequently, these lists are the type that do not serve an encyclopedic function. This is not to say that you can say "Regional airport frequently serves <larger international airports>" in the article about the airport, or which airports an airport has defined as their principle hub. But these go well beyond that. --Masem (t) 01:06, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Agreed. Airports are transport infrastructure (i.e., built, relatively fixed and permanent facilities) so it is worth describing their important connections to other airports. Airlines and the destinations they serve are not - these are ephemeral business-services changing month-to-month which there is no cause to publish exhaustive lists of. This is particularly the case for the 14 airlines which are sourced in large part simply to the airlines themselves. FOARP (talk) 02:30, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Keep I am in favour of keeping all these lists, either as stand-alone articles or merged into the corresponding parent articles, and to honour others' past efforts. If lists bother you, why not deleting, for instance, List of shipwrecks in 2023. I may ask what is the purpose of having a list of shipwrecks in an encyclopedia? This list is as encyclopedic as a list of destinations of any particular airline. Not to mention that List of Braathens destinations is a featured article on which considerable effort was put to take it to that level; are you going to propose its deletion as well? If we start deleting articles because some people believes it is hard to maintain them I'll just say to them to focus on other articles. Arbitrarily deleting is not the way of building an encyclopedia and may create the opposite effect of getting a large portion of Wikipedia wiped out.--Jetstreamer Talk 01:11, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- This^ if we delete these, what's not to say just throw it all out? SurferSquall (talk) 01:24, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- I must say, List of Braathens destinations does give me pause. If an interpretation of WP:NOT would sweep out content that has passed muster with one of the project's most exacting communities, that's IMO a strong prima facie reason to reconsider that interpretation. That said, (and without prejudice to the concerns recently raised on that list's talk page) it does seem to me that the Braathens list differs from these lists in at least one fundamental way that renders it much more encyclopedic than the lists at issue here: it seeks to show to full historic range of routes covered by that airline, with start and stop dates for each. Such a list has lasting, plausibly encyclopedic value. But that's a world away from a list of "all routes served by this airline right now" (a moving target requiring constant updating to be of any value whatsoever) or "all routes served by this airline on some random date in the past" (which does not require updating, but unfortunately is of value to almost no imaginable user). For my part, I would view the at-issue lists here very differently if they were rebuilt on the Braathens model. But it seems to me that they would have to be rebuilt substantially from scratch (and also that doing so might be impossible without committing original research). -- Visviva (talk) 05:59, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- possibility of merge If consensus reaches deletion, I can merge all 14 of these back into their main articles.
- Löschen per RFC. Sitewide consensus concluded that this falls under WP:NOT WP:IINFO so it should be obeyed. Who knows how or why these articles evaded scrutiny for five years but they're here now. Axem Titanium (talk) 21:52, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- What consensus? SurferSquall (talk) 00:37, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
- Hi @Axem Titanium, the TL;DR version of the reason for why the 2018 policy consensus never got carried out was a combination of vote-stacking at this AFD for the list of Adria Airways destinations (since deleted) and other Star Alliance members, and anger at the way Beeblebrox carried out the initial mass-deletion of all airline destination list articles unilaterally without going through AFD (see the AN discussion in the nom). The 2018 RFC at VPP (a WP:CONLEVEL higher than AFD) remains community consensus. FOARP (talk) 11:26, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
- I figured something like that happened. Community consensus should be implemented. I commend you for undertaking this (unenviable) task. Axem Titanium (talk) 16:02, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all as per WP:INDISCRIMINATE. When people want to know in which cities does an airline operates, they'll just go to the website of the respective airline instead of Wikipedia. Most of these lists only use the airline's websites as sources anyway, they are pretty redundant and don't add additional value to the topic. Tutwakhamoe (talk) 05:53, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all per the nominator and per WP:IINFO. We don't need articles that document the destinations of every major airline in existence. Nythar (💬-🍀) 23:36, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
- Keep as useful supplements to the main airline articles because where an airline flies is key information for putting the airline article in proper context. -- Tavix (talk) 13:31, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Kommentar - please see WP:USEFUL - Ahunt (talk) 13:34, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- The advice that section gives recommends putting "useful" comments in context and giving an explanation why something is useful because bare "keep because it's useful" comments are not conducive. Do you not feel I have done this? -- Tavix (talk) 13:40, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- The reason I left you that link is because I thought you have argued exactly what is says not to do there, that these articles are "useful" and nothing more. - Ahunt (talk) 14:09, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- No, I said they are useful supplements to the main article on the airline. Perhaps the most important thing about an airline is where it flies and these lists give that information. -- Tavix (talk) 14:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Usefulness or uselessness cannot trump notability and WP:NOT per WP:USEFUL. For a list to be a valid WP:SPLITLIST it has to be notable and not offend against WP:NOT per WP:AVOIDSPLIT. In this case that would mean passing WP:CORP, but these articles don't do that. In all 14 articles in this AFD, the destinations presently serviced could be covered by a much more simple summary in the main article. For example, most of the destinations listed for Syrian Air (21 out of 40) are not ones that Syrian Air presently flies to. FOARP (talk) 14:38, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Historic destinations are as important (or even more) than current ones. Why do they not meet WP:NOTABILITY?--Jetstreamer Talk 15:10, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- These are effectively lists of destinations that the airline doesn't fly to. The usefulness of that to our audience (who are not aviation hobbyists as such) is not clear. Information sourced entirely to an airline and/or industry press fails WP:CORP which covers businesses and their services, including airlines and the destinations they serve. FOARP (talk) 15:18, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Historic destinations are as important (or even more) than current ones. Why do they not meet WP:NOTABILITY?--Jetstreamer Talk 15:10, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Usefulness or uselessness cannot trump notability and WP:NOT per WP:USEFUL. For a list to be a valid WP:SPLITLIST it has to be notable and not offend against WP:NOT per WP:AVOIDSPLIT. In this case that would mean passing WP:CORP, but these articles don't do that. In all 14 articles in this AFD, the destinations presently serviced could be covered by a much more simple summary in the main article. For example, most of the destinations listed for Syrian Air (21 out of 40) are not ones that Syrian Air presently flies to. FOARP (talk) 14:38, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- No, I said they are useful supplements to the main article on the airline. Perhaps the most important thing about an airline is where it flies and these lists give that information. -- Tavix (talk) 14:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- The reason I left you that link is because I thought you have argued exactly what is says not to do there, that these articles are "useful" and nothing more. - Ahunt (talk) 14:09, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- The advice that section gives recommends putting "useful" comments in context and giving an explanation why something is useful because bare "keep because it's useful" comments are not conducive. Do you not feel I have done this? -- Tavix (talk) 13:40, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Kommentar - please see WP:USEFUL - Ahunt (talk) 13:34, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all — absent significantly-trafficked discussions more recent, the RfC remains the community consensus, and I see nothing in the arguments presented to dissuade me from thinking that remains the right call and right applicability of NOT/corp coverage. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 16:24, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all, per NOT and CORP. AFAICT there are no SIRS with SIGCOV on these topics, and even if there were I think an argument could be made that they still fail NOT and should be deleted. JoelleJay (talk) 18:03, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all, per WP:IINFO, airline destinations lists like this are ephemeral in the first case, and not really appropriate as an encyclopedia article. The existing RFC also indicates that there has been a well-established consensus that these are not appropriate topics for lists. --Jayron32 18:16, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all IMO these should all be deleted, primarily under wp:NOT but also under wp:ncorp. This is basically a list of products/ product catalog for the airline(s), albeit missing details like flight times. Some general summary type text describing where they operate would be good for the respective airline article. North8000 (talk) 18:19, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Notices posted - I have left notices about this AFD on the following talk-pages: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aviation, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airlines, Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations and companies), and Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not. FOARP (talk) 21:06, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all per WP:NCORP and WP:NOTTRAVEL. These lists covering company services are ephemeral collection of travel information, and they are likely to become outdated soon. They are also poorly sourced, being taken from websites of airlines in the best case, and may amount to original research. I appreciate including the information on major destinations in the main articles, but this should be based on multiple independent reliable sources demonstrating their significance. --TadejM my talk 20:40, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all this is in WP:NOTDATA / WP:NOTTRAVEL territory. Commercial information is often too detailed and too unstable to provide encyclopedic value. Let readers find more about products and services at the relevant sellers. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:15, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
- Delete all per nom; good statement. Most keep rationales here center around usefulness (not a policy, not a guideline) and misunderstandings about why this particular set of particles was chosen for a batch deletion. I think that this is a well-thought=out batch deletion both now and when the concept was considered years ago in the RfC. Iseult Δx parlez moi 18:53, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
- Comment Most things that are just useful are not suitable to be in an encyclopedia. "Usefulness" does not mean enclyclopedic. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:53, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
- Comment List of Libyan Airlines destinations has been deleted. Do with Wikipedia whatever you want. I will not make further comments regarding this.--Jetstreamer Talk 14:37, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
- Kommentar There are a variety of opinions around Keep, Restructure or Delete. However, *if* we choose the Delete option, I propose the pages to be deleted be moved to Wikivoyage. Better to move data to a place that may be seen as more suitable and allow information to remain in a wiki which can be viewed and edited, than delete because it doesn't meet some people's views on what Wikipedia should or shouldn't be due to WP:NOTTRAVEL.Pmbma (talk) 22:11, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
- I suggest you discuss this with the people at Wikivoyage. The Traveller's pub seems like the right place to start. AFAIK they have not so far had articles about airlines but it could be they're open to change. Another option is a fandom wiki. FOARP (talk) 07:57, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
- 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.