Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of important dates in fiction

:{{la|List of important dates in fiction}} — (View AfD)

I think it will be impossible to complete or maintain this list. I raised a concern about the list being a collection of information that belonged on individual articles. There was no response. -- Ben (talk) 19:04, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete, since 'fiction' is such a vast category, and there are only 365 dates in a year, the list can't avoid being either badly incomplete, or an unmanageable mass of unsorted data. There is also a problem with 'important'. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 19:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• delete I agree, unmaintainable and indiscriminate. — brighterorange (talk) 19:29, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete What Squiddy said. This list is potentially infinite (WP:NOT an indiscriminate collection of information) and of little foreseeable use. Also, in its current state the list is unencyclopaedic. You have to click on the links to discover which works of fiction it's talking about. --Folantin 19:32, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• Note - this article likely came about because editors added these fictional dates to date articles and were told to go create their own article instead. I think we should judge this article based on the information's utility (assuming verifiability, etc). Rklawton 19:41, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• Question - is this article really less legitimate than other Wikipidia lists of stuff in fiction, such as fictional countries, swords, and companies? User:Mdiamante 4 January 2007.
• Response - I don't know. I would speculate that it might be because dates are pretty hard to avoid using in fiction while the other things are usually included and named because they are important to the work. -- Ben (talk) 22:01, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• I'd argue that comparatively few fictional media list specific dates. We aren't told the dates of Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or those of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (I've checked). How many millions of Law and Order/Star Trek/Simpsons/Friends episodes are there? Only a handful of each might list actual dates. As for the charge that this list could become huge and unmanagable, why not address that if and when it became an issue? User:Mdiamante 4 January 2007.
• Comparatively few fictional media list specific dates? This list is open to every novel, play, poem, film or TV series ever created anywhere in the world. Let's take Richardson's Clarissa, supposedly the longest novel in the English language. It is composed of 176 letters, almost all of them dated. Now not every date in the book will be important, but this list has so far failed to define its criteria for notability. The same problems would apply to any fictional work in the form of a diary. And, oh yeah, historical novels? Do we include the date January 24, 41 AD because that's the date Claudius became emperor both in reality and in Robert Graves's I, Claudius? --Folantin 11:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

• Holy crap!!! I am speechless. -- Ben (talk) 22:07, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete hideous piece of listcruft. Specifically, this list will never be complete, could easily run into hundreds of thousands of entries and is inherently POV. How could you ever come up with a systematic definition of what constitutes an 'important' date in fiction?--Nydas^(Talk) 22:25, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete WP:LIST states that a list must be annotated, organized and useful. I'll admit that it achieves the first two, but I can't imagine that this is helpful. Whereas I think someone would be interested in knowing about fictional swords, I can't think of anything that dates have in common other than being dates. Too indiscriminate. Tarinth 22:42, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• How about the list Fictional chemical substances, A-M? There's an entry from the film The One. How is that useful? As for dates, I think fictional dates are neat because they occur once a year. People can consult the list and tell friends on March 4 that it's the anniversary of the start of Holmes and Watson's first adventure. I think that that's more likely to occur than someone spreading the word about "Anistance" from The One. User:Mdiamante 4 January 2007.
• Delete - ridiculous. Horrible listcruft. Unmaintainable and just plain wrong. What's up with the Futurama worship? Moreschi ^Deletion! 22:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete - Important is subjective. What makes the day Fry got unfrozen more important than say, the day he got frozen? Only one is listed. This list is also impossible to maintain and complete, and would be very hard to source. VegaDark 10:30, 6 January 2007 (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.