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 redirect to List of countries by national capital, largest and second-largest cities. There's consensus that this is one list too many. But there are concerns that the lists we have are not the right ones. The redirect preserves the history and allows editors to figure out editorially how to organize these lists such that they make sense to readers and are not redundant. Sandstein 09:19, 20 June 2018 (UTC) reply

List of national capitals in alphabetical order

List of national capitals in alphabetical order (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)

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Completing nomination for User:2601:183:101:58D0:9C15:8D0B:3367:7B21, whose rationale is basically that this page is redundant to List of countries by national capital, largest and second-largest cities, which can be sorted by alphabetical order. ansh 666 18:11, 12 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Delete - redundant page (see also List of national capitals by population and List of national capitals by latitude, which should IMO be combined into an overarching List of national capitals, or the list mentioned in the nomination) with not enough incoming links to justify a redirect, being linked almost exclusively in nav templates and See also sections. This is likely a relic of an era where sorted tables weren't possible. ansh 666 18:21, 12 June 2018 (UTC) reply

  I can agree with a rename/merge. If this was the original list, then the others can and should absolutely be merged into this one. ansh 666 06:35, 19 June 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. ansh 666 18:23, 12 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Delete: really not much to justify the continued existence of this page, honestly. Given that the other two pages, population and latitude, allow one to sort their tables alphabetically, this page is superfluous. (I also read the argument by User:2601:183:101:58D0:9C15:8D0B:3367:7B21; it is correct.) — Javert2113 ( Let's chat!) 19:31, 12 June 2018 (UTC) reply
• Delete per nom. Redundant list which can be easily obtained by using the sortable table in List of countries by national capital, largest and second-largest cities. In fact we should not even have lists whose sole distinction is that they are listed in alphabetical order. Ajf773 ( talk) 20:56, 12 June 2018 (UTC) reply
• Comment. This article was created in 2001(!), and should not be deleted lightly. The other articles mentioned may be quite derivative from this. I strongly prefer some further consideration about history of this and related articles, and some wp:ATD (alternative to deletion) should be found. At worst it should be redirected. Perhaps a derivative should be deleted or moved out of the way, and/or some history merge should be done. It is important for the internal history of Wikipedia to keep the edit history here, I think. -- Doncram ( talk) 01:19, 13 June 2018 (UTC) reply

Note this article was developed before tables were sortable, and perhaps before tables existed. -- Doncram ( talk) 01:21, 13 June 2018 (UTC) reply

Hi, I created the original page. And yes, back in the day we had to painstakingly map things out with tabs and hard spaces, because we couldn't create HTML tables, let alone sortable tables. I don't think there is any real value in preserving the page, or even the history of the page, because in the grand scheme of things, it is fairly trivial. We created hundreds of "alternate" pages like this to deal with our inability to sort things, and many of them have long since been removed for the same reason. Manning ( talk) 14:13, 17 June 2018 (UTC) reply

Yes, thank you for hand-craftting the original version, and for being willing to give up credit for it, but there were lots of major contributors since, and your memory is (understandably) faulty: it was created in 2001 simply as the list of capitals, not as an "alternate". You did the good thing back then. BTW, your version had what might have been a redlink, pointing to a suggested alternate version which was created later, in 2002, which was later redirected to something created in 2007. The 2001 creation, which was quite large for the time, seems to be the oldest surviving. -- Doncram ( talk) 02:22, 19 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Delete and redirect Keep and move to List of national capitals. The other articles on this subject should redirect there. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 20:19, 13 June 2018 (UTC) (amended power~enwiki ( π, ν) 01:15, 19 June 2018 (UTC)) reply
  • After further thought, I'm convinced by Doncram that this is the article that should be retained at List of national capitals. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 01:15, 19 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Delete Lists can now be sorted so this is redundant. WP:LISTCRUFT Acnetj ( talk) 18:54, 16 June 2018 (UTC) reply
• Delete Yes kids, way, way, way back in the day (2001 or so) we created pages like this because we couldn't create sortable tables. I am amazed this page is still around. Manning ( talk) 14:07, 17 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Keep, or at worst Redirect (presumably to List of national capitals or List of capitals). This AFD is an uninformed trainwreck. There is NO decent argument above that this should not be at lest redirected. This is a decent alternative to deletion which we are obligated to consider, and which is more important for such an ancient article. Votes of "delete and redirect" are invalid or certainly should not be interpreted as merely "delete". -- Doncram ( talk) 19:15, 18 June 2018 (UTC) reply

But note, this long existed as List of national capitals, but it was trashed by being moved to List of national capitals in alphabetical order in 2012, which can be seen more easily in history for that. If it was still with that name, we wouldn't have this AFD at all. The history of wikipedia does matter, IMHO, and it is not right to allow for original major works to get trashed and then deleted. The trasher was permanently blocked a month-and-a-half later, as a sockpuppet.

Further note that "List of national capitals" was redirected to List of capitals with a note that there are other lists of national capitals (listed in the List of capitals). Note there are:

• List of national capitals by latitude
• List of national capitals by population
• List of national capitals serving as administrative divisions, and more.

What makes sense now is to combine some or all of these by merger back to THIS ONE, THE ORIGINAL ONE, which should get moved back to "List of national capitals". -- Doncram ( talk) 19:30, 18 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• This is better for the purpose than the page mentioned in the nomination, as when that list is sorted by city name some cities are listed twice because of the structure of the table. The population list can be sorted alphabeticallye and the latitude list already is, so it could be redirected to either of these. Page view statistics (for 90 days, an average of 1596/day and minimum of 1154/day) indicate that people are looking for this information and it wouldn't be obvious to look in the list by latitude so this shouldn't be deleted. Peter James ( talk) 22:20, 18 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Thanks, some words of wisdom. The latitude column to sort by is kind of interesting, but we don’t need separate article for it, and it was created in 2014. By population one was created in 2009. Both can be merged into THIS 2001 original. — Doncram ( talk) 22:32, 18 June 2018 (UTC) reply

• Keep, but rename this list back to List of national capitals. There is too much overlap between the various national capital lists, but it is those lists that should be deleted or merged into this one, not the other way around. It was a poor move a few years back, but that doesn't mean the original national capital list should be trashed. -- Tavix ^{( talk)} 22:45, 18 June 2018 (UTC) reply
• REDIRECT Information already at List of countries by national capital, largest and second-largest cities you able to click to sort it by alphabetical order. If you click on "what links here" it shows that there are links to this place, so best to put a redirect here. Dream Focus 05:03, 20 June 2018 (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.