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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of polygons, polyhedra and polytopes

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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 no consensus: The "keeps" emphasize that some of our core readers (high school and college students?) may well find this list to be useful. The "deletes" claim it's not helpful. The nomination actually did not even cite any rule or policy, but that was remedied by others. Every item on the list is probably notable, because each has an article or redirect with a blue link. Some other issues raised in the discussion, such as ordering the list, can be solved through the ordinary editing process. Bearian (talk) 20:06, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of polygons, polyhedra and polytopes

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List of polygons, polyhedra and polytopes (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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Arbitrary grouping of polytope articles that is not helpful for a reader. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 01:25, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed - not useful. Tom Ruen (talk) 01:31, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete per WP:IINFO (and List of geometry topics has questionable usefulness itself). Erpert Who is this guy? | Wanna talk about it? 01:36, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The nomination seems to jump to conclusions about who "readers" are. I wouldn't see the list as unhelpful to every reader - what about those who wish to browse geometric "shapes" and are not so well served by more sophisticated categories? And the specification is hardly arbitrary: we are talking about two-, three- and n-dimensional versions of the same concept. What is wrong with "list of polytopes" as a topic? The given title just spells that out for those less familiar with the terminology. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:09, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For those "who wish to browse geometric shapes and are not so well served by more sophisticated categories" we should create an article that lists classes of polytopes by dimension or something similar. Also, why are two- and three-dimensional cases so special? (Yes, these are the cases that can actually physically be built, but only because an object can not be physically built or is more abstract does not mean it is less important than the objects which can be built). Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 09:27, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: This is a useful collection of topics. Lists and categories serve different purposes so there is nothing wring with having a certain amount of overlap between the two. The article could use some work, for example distinguishing between families and individual objects, but that's not a criterion for deletion.--RDBury (talk) 04:40, 26 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • DELETE - This list hasn't changed since 2006, contains an alphabetical listing of a tiny subset of existing polyhedron and polytope articles, without any context of their relations or meaning. Category:Polytopes does a better job on organizing polytopes, by dimension, and automatically updated based on articles tagged. And for regular ones, Template:Polytopes is a navigator template used on most higher dimensional polytope articles. If this article were to be "improved" it would be done by systematically scanning all the categories of polyhedra/polytopes, and combining the lists, and sorting by alphabetical order, and dumping a replacement list. The list would be VERY long and very slightly more useful, and LIKELY out-of-date within a few months. Who wants to maintain such a list? Obviously NO ONE! Tom Ruen (talk) 05:32, 26 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - a useful navigational list. Categories and lists are not either/or - often it is useful to ahve both. This list could benefit from some maintenance, annotation and structuring, but that is not grounds for deletion. Gandalf61 (talk) 07:47, 26 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete (as nominator) - This form of page would make sense for a disambiguation page, which this article is not. Therefore this article would need to be referenced in order to establish its notability. I doubt that a source can be found that presents this particular listing of polytopes. Therefore, this article is just an indiscriminate collection of information and can be safely regarded as listcruft. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 20:42, 26 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Please note that at AfD the point is primarily whether the topic is suitable for the encyclopedia. We are seeing subjective criteria introduced into this discussion, instead. I believe your two points don't say much more than you don't like the page (and lists). WP:LISTCRUFT to which you link is an essay, not a policy, and its substantive point about the condition for existence of a list doesn't apply here. Charles Matthews (talk) 06:41, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Fact is, that information included in Wikipedia must be verifiable. And this list is not. Only because the individual entries of a list are notable does not mean we can create made-up lists and arbitrarily group entries together when there is no notable principle for the grouping. If there were some notable concept behind this grouping that is discussed by sources (such as a list of uniform polyhedra) it could be kept. But since no such concept seems to exist for this list, this list fails to satisfy WP:N. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 08:02, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am puzzled by your assertion that "this list is unverifiable". Suppose the list were to contain a particular entry, say "regular dodecahedron". This seems to me to imply nothing more than that a regular dodecahedron is a polygon, polyhedron, or polytope. Even supposing that this claim was somehow doubtful or likely to be disputed, why would it be unverifiable? —Mark Dominus (talk) 21:23, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, I am sure most of the individual entries in this list can be verified through sources (which is required anyway, since this list is not a disambiguation page). Then still the criteria for inclusion in this list are not clear to me. Is this list supposed to contain every known polytope? In my opinion the intended scope of this list is 1) not clearly enough defined and 2) overly broad. So again my question: which polytopes is this list supposed to contain? And I still fail to see which advantage an unannotated list like this has over a category. This list contains no contextual information, thus the same function would better be served by a category. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 22:29, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The criterion for inclusion in the list seems to be "is a polytope". Are you suggesting that polytopes, as a class, are non-notable or non-verifiable? —Mark Dominus (talk) 01:12, 1 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't say that polytopes, as a class, are non-notable. However, that the class of polytopes is notable does not automatically mean that each individual representative of this class is also notable. Lets take one random example wikilinked to from this list: Great retrosnub icosidodecahedron. I think I fail to see, where this polytope has established its notability. I don't say it cannot be mentioned in some kind of "List of ..." article, but 1) there is no established notability for a standalone article and 2) if this polytope were included in some kind of list, then there should be some kind of verifiable, contextual information. It was said before, that this list is useful for people, who want to learn more about existing polytopes. I still fail to see, in which way an arbitrary, non-contextual grouping like this is useful for that purpose. If this list would contain some short description for each entry, then it would make sense. But lets suppose, I am a reader who is not very familiar with polytopes yet. I cannot see how an unannotated list containing a bunch of weird sounding geometric terms is helpful for someone, who does not have a good understanding of polytopes and terminology yet. Can someone explain to me, in which way it helps a reader, who is not yet very familiar with polytopes, to see a term, such as "Small ditrigonal dodecacronic hexecontahedron" inside an unannotated list like this, without any context or annotations explaining, how this particular polytope fits into the overall concept of polytope? Yes, he or she could click on the wikilink, but then, what do we need this list for? A well structured category could (and should) have done the same job. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 08:31, 1 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This is an argument to improve the list, not delete it. No one is saying it's perfect but there is potential here.--RDBury (talk) 21:04, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also, why are two- and three-dimensional cases so special? (Yes, these are the cases that can actually physically be built, but only because an object can not be physically built or is more abstract does not mean it is less important than the objects which can be built).

From a purely mathematical POV, the 2-dimensional case is unique but trivial. However, the 3 & 4-dimensional cases are interesting in ways that higher dimensions (arguably) are not. I can unpack this argument further, if desired. From a more pragmatic angle, the cases that can be physically constructed are of greater interest to most artists, architects, and designers (just to give a few examples). I also disagree with the assertion (from Tom Ruen): If this article were to be "improved" it would be done by systematically scanning all the categories of polyhedra/polytopes, and combining the lists, and sorting by alphabetical order, and dumping a replacement list. The list would be VERY long and very slightly more useful, and LIKELY out-of-date within a few months.

I am convinced this "proposal" would make the list less useful, as well as very long and quickly out-of-date. What it needs (in my opinion) is to be shorter, with fewer entries for individual polygons and polyhedra, more emphasis on classes and types (such as Archimedean solid and Cross-polytope ), and more polyhedron/polytope topics, such as Stellation and Wythoff construction. I would also like to hear from Charles Matthews, about how he intended the list to be structured when he started it, and from Dingo1729, who said, "If we need any other lists, it would be better to start from nothing than from this list.": what sort of structure would you propose? Hrttu523 (talk) 18:47, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

p.s. My proposal was merely taking the existing (alphabetical) structure to the nth degree. I'm open to any other structure, but still not convinced the collection is superior to an alphabetical listing (and has been here largely unchanged for 5+ years). Polygon, [regular polygon]], polyhedron does well to summarize show these classes. There's still no nice summary of the higher polytopes, but the contents are still in flux, and there's few sources for polytopes beyond the regular and uniform cases. I suppose my BEST proposal might be to make this a "list of lists", grouped by dimension. Tom Ruen (talk) 19:45, 2 June 2011 (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.
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