Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Windows games starting with A

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 keep. JForget 20:18, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

List of Windows games starting with A

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Unmaintainable list, duplicates Category:Windows games RadioFan (talk) 20:49, 7 September 2009 (UTC) I am also nominating the following similar articles as well:[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Game-related deletion discussions. —RadioFan (talk) 20:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. —RadioFan (talk) 20:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of video game related deletion discussions. MrKIA11 (talk) 21:47, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep or reorganize It seems unfair that we can have complete game lists for every platform other than Windows (or PC in general). Apparently just because the PC is unregulated, and therefore has the potential to have far more games, it's considered to be unmaintainable. In principle, however, these lists are no different than the ones for the consoles, which also duplicate their respective categories. Is there a better way to approach the construction and maintenance of these lists? For example, would it be more useful to organize these lists by year, which would also place a more effective limit on the size of each list? Ham Pastrami (talk) 22:59, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment its not a question about fairness, its about maintainability. There must be tens of thousands of PC games and as Mercurywoodrose notes there are a number of issues with the existing lists. I just dont see how these articles can add much value.--RadioFan (talk) 01:58, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's not strictly about fairness (though I do argue for some consistency here), but the point was that size is the only difference in rationale between these lists and the console lists. But you also seem to object to (or are ignoring) the proposal to reduce the size of the lists (which Mercury also came up with a suggestion for) to make them more maintainable. "Unmaintainable" lists are those that have no well-defined boundary or scope, and no means by which to subdivide the list into narrower segments that do. A Windows game list has a very well-defined boundary and scope, which merely happens to include a lot of items -- "big" is not the same as "unmaintainable". It can also be subdivided with an additional criteria, and by reapportioning the list content appropriately, you can get each list to a size and state where there should be few or no changes. On an annual basis (2009 in video games), notable Windows games are not much more numerous than games on any other platform. It is only the decades-long backlog (thanks to almost complete backwards compatibility) which makes it so. That's why I proposed subdividing the lists into years. Some consoles also subdivide their game lists: the PS2 has almost complete backcompat with the PS1, but the game lists are separated (rightfully so). Windows can be split up by iteration too (95, 98, XP, etc.) which will limit each list to about the same size as a console list, if that is preferable. By assuming that there is only way to list these games (lumping them all into one list), based on the faulty idea that Windows is a singular ageless platform, we will come to a situation where we have a list of Linux games, or OS/2 games, but not Windows, the most significant PC game platform. Not seeing the value in a list for this, and only this platform seems like we're trying to avoid the elephant in the room. It will take some work to begin with, for sure, but the lists would be far from unmaintainable. Once a sublist is done, it's done for good, as far as any list can be. Ham Pastrami (talk) 03:28, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. additionally, having a game in the Category, as opposed to this list, doesnt mean its not also a linux, mac, etc game. some of these are online games, multiplatform. this list, by duplicating the category, lists all multiplatform games, which is somewhat misleading, given the article name. hmm. maybe if the list was games exclusively for the pc, it would be more useful. Mercurywoodrose (talk) 00:59, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As with nom's rationale, this is again equally applicable to the console game lists as well. Just because a game is on the list of Xbox games doesn't mean it's not also on the PlayStation or Wii (or Windows). For that argument to hold, the lists in this AfD would have to be titled "Windows-exclusive" games, which they currently are not, but that is one possibility for reducing the size of the lists. Ham Pastrami (talk) 03:28, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Weak Keep per WP:CLN; thought it probably needs some cleanup & TLC. --Cybercobra (talk) 02:26, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- Cybercobra (talk) 02:30, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, it's me that started this project. Some points:

This list should exist for completeness and conformity with the other platform-specific lists, such as List of MS-DOS games; if you look at Lists of video games you'll find that Windows is the only platform not covered
Browsing the Category page is slow, awkward and annoying, though that is where I took the data
The articles are still only rough drafts which no doubt contain errors - I intend to clean them up once they have all been posted
Someone is moving the pages from List of Windows games starting with A to Index of Windows games (A). Is there a policy reason for this? If so, it should apply to List of MS-DOS games starting with A as well.

2fort5r (talk) 04:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the moves: "Index" is more specific and there's a wikiproject for them; and other such lists use the parentheses convention, e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics articles (A) --Cybercobra (talk) 07:44, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: the lists provide more information and have the potential to be more useful than categories; furthermore, they are new and the creator is still working on them. It's a bit unfair to say they will be unmaintainable right now. RichsLaw (talk) 08:59, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep – looks like a bunch of valid lists. I don't know about merging, as we do have a couple of video game lists that are over 100KB long. MuZemike 20:02, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep but suggest making it more specific, such as "List of Windows XP games" etc. Or even, for the sake of manageability, a list with only those games that have existing Wikipedia articles. Other than the valid issue of unmaintainability that was raised above I believe this list should be kept simply because it's missing.. the topic sorely needs coverage, as 2fort5r noted above, Windows is the only platform not covered. See discussion here for context on the creation of these lists. Also, a list duplicating a category is not a valid reason to delete. -- œ ^™ 22:24, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A few futher points:

I would expect the issue of maintainability to be more of a problem for old/unpopular gaming platforms that few people play nowadays. Everybody plays windows games and I'm sure there will be no shortage of people willing to keep these pages clean and current.
Ordering by date and ordering by Windows version are largely equivalent, since all games released before 1995 would be for Windows 3.1, games released before 2000 would be for Windows 95, and games released since then would be for XP. The borderline cases are not numerous.
The total size of the data I'm working with is about 400Kb. Ideally there would be just one big list, but that would cause problems for slower computers and connections.
All of the games here have WP articles, since I generated the data based on already-existing articles. There are a few red links but that's due to inefficiencies in the routine used to extract the data.

2fort5r (talk) 12:12, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I want to create some date-sorted lists in my namespace so that we can compare the two arrangements. Instead of CompactTOC8, which table should I use in order to get a list of years instead of letters? 2fort5r (talk) 10:34, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You could inquire at WikiProject Templates. --Cybercobra (talk) 12:04, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Some additional statistics:

Games released 1995 or earlier = 252
Games released 1995 to 2001 inclusive = 1206
Games released 2001 or later = 2333

These categories overlap:

Total number of games = 3478
Total number of games counted = 3791
Borderline cases = 313

If the list is cut into three parts, broadly corresponding to O.S. type, the largest file will be about 250 Kb. 2fort5r (talk) 17:25, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A chronological list might be more informative. SharkD (talk) 02:50, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Example list sorted by date: User:2fort5r/Index of Windows games. 2fort5r (talk) 12:45, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

^^ however, that simply duplicates the information in the XXXX in video gaming articles. 2fort5r (talk) 12:58, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Here's the raw data in CSV format in case anyone else wants to experiment with it. 2fort5r (talk) 15:19, 13 September 2009 (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.