Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of most-printed books (2nd nomination)

:{{la|List of most-printed books}} – (View AfDView log{{int:dot-separator}} [http://toolserver.org/~snottywong/cgi-bin/votecounter.cgi?page=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_most-printed_books_(2nd_nomination) Stats])

:({{Find sources|List of most-printed books}})

This is a content fork of List of best-selling books - even its lead misrepresents the contents as there are no book series in the content. Few readers are going to realise there are two articles and I'd lost track of that fact myself. It's out of date for that reason. If there is a desire to have a list of books for these four religious books and the words of Chairman Mao, set up such a list as that seems to be the only thing distinguishing the two. The last AfD didn't fix the problem. Dougweller (talk) 09:55, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

• Delete. For the reasons stated by Dougweller. This list was set up as a way to include religious and political books, which are excluded for a number of reasons from the List of best-selling books. While that list is regularly maintained and expanded(although all help is welcome!), the list of most-printed books is only used as a battle-ground between different religions (and a few people trying to maintain NPOV like Dougweller), with the result that the last 100 edits, going back six months, contain nothing but edits to Bible and Qu'ran to change numbers, authors, ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_most-printed_books&diff=613541719&oldid=583435381]. Since the end of the previous AfD and today, nearly two years later, only two books were added[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_most-printed_books&diff=613541719&oldid=503969439], one of them another religious book with discussion about the author, and one uncontroversial addition. No figures were changed for any book. Meanwhile (in a shorter period, since December 2012), [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_best-selling_books&diff=613396514&oldid=526003347 these] are the changes to the original list; this means that the list of most-printed books is now not just a POV fork, but an outdated POV fork, where no one is interested in maintaining the list but some people are using it as the battleground to edit war over religious truth and precedence. Fram (talk) 10:11, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

• Delete : I got here from Fram's talk page. These figures don't seem to be reliable. Mao's figure is incorrect too. There is hardly any scope because this list doesn't cover all books, editors may have cherry picked the listings. There are no actual estimates of Qur'an and Bible. OccultZone (Talk • Contributions • Log) 11:51, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

• This discussion makes me uncomfortable because of the idea that we should delete the page because it's only used for edit-warring. The trouble is that if we ever start to delete pages because people edit-war, then we're creating an incentive for people to edit-war when they want a page deleted. User conduct issues should never be a factor in deciding whether to delete a page.

  However, OccultZone makes a decisive point in favour of deletion. Print run figures for the various holy books are not available and will never be available, so the figures given for the top books on the page fail WP:V. That's a failure of a core policy which it's impossible to fix: the entries have to be removed. And once you remove the unverifiable entries, all you've got left is a duplicate of the List of best-selling books. We should delete and then redirect to the List of best-selling books. But I think we should be clear that this isn't because of user conduct issues, it's because the page can never be policy compliant.—S Marshall T/C 14:22, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:18, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:18, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

• Delete per nom and WP:FORK. I reviewed the edit history. This seems like a WP:COATRACK on which to hang a WP:BATTLE. SW3 5DL (talk) 16:24, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

• Keep The idea that we should have a list of the most numerous books which excludes the leading candidates such as the Bible is absurd. If this is a content-fork of the list of best-selling books then, per WP:CFORK, the remedy is "If the content fork was unjustified, the more recent article should be merged back into the main article." Merger is not deletion and so this a matter of ordinary editing. As for the facts of the matter, I don't see why the print runs of religious works or the thoughts of Chairman Mao should be any less well-documented than the works of authors like Charles Dickens, which were pirated in the USA and are long out of copyright. Sales and printing are both grounded in particular technologies and modes of business. What about library loans? What about digital downloads? We have many lists of books and it seems clear that the total size of the print run is a notable way of doing this. The list should therefore be kept in some form per WP:LISTN. Andrew (talk) 18:13, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
• Comment Andrew, are you actually calling for a merge? If so, would you change your !vote to that because if we keep the article then merging is often objected to by those who !voted keep. Dougweller (talk) 20:44, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
• My preference would be a list of popular books. This would be a sortable list with several columns for a variety of relevant statistics including: print run, editions, translations, unit sales, revenue, &c. These are all common measures of success for a book and so it makes sense to combine them rather than bicker about the use of a particular one. Doing this would be a matter of ordinary editing in which we would preserve the existing content per our editing policy. Andrew (talk) 22:38, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
• It would make more sense to have a separate short list for the religious and political books (or two separate ones). The list we are discussing here though is just for 99% an old copy of the best-selling list, so that a few books could be included and be edit-warred about (indicating just how hard it is to get some acceptable numbers and information on these crammed into such a list). Remove the 99% abandoned copy, rename the list to "List of religious books", and let those interested in it edit war until the end of time (which, according to some of them, is near anyway ;-) ). Fram (talk) 06:45, 20 June 2014 (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.