Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of British politicians

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 delete. Sr 13 00:24, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of British politicians

Delete This list is far too ambitious in its scope, and currently includes only a rather poor and unrepresentative subset of British politicians. Wikipedia already has articles on several thousand British Members of Parliament, and total number of people who have British MPs since the Act of Union 1707 probably exceeds 10,000; and many notable politicians have not been MPs, and have achieved prominence through the House of Lords or in local government, so if this list was complete, it would probably have cover more than 15,000 people.

So there is no point in trying to improve this list; it is simply far too broad in scope, and will only ever be an eclectic collection of politicians. The same material would be better approached by creating further lists of MPs (see Category:Lists of British MPs), and by adding additional lists of particular types of politician, for example of Cabinet ministers --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:02, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Delete If anything BHG is overgenerous to this list - since every one of those estimated 10,000 MPs has (generally) had at least two serious competitors in every election, plus assorted Lords, lobbyists, even bishops in the UK system, I'd estimate at a minimum 30,000 serious candidates for this list - and that's before we get into the assorted local authority leaders, mayors, party chairs, unelected ministers - a thousand years of history adds up to a lot of political hacks and chairwarmers. This works fine as a category as it's self-limiting in that only those people who pass WP:N appear - otherwise, this list has the potential to be totally and irredeemably unmanageable; the only way it could be useful is if sorted into an arbitrary "order of importance" which would probably violate NPOV and still be unmanageable — iridescenti (talk to me!) 23:32, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete and organize this material as BrownHairedGirl suggests.DGG 03:34, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - this list could in theory list every British politician since the Roman times - it would be almost infinite. Dovea 16:31, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Delete - This list is much too ambitious in scope. In any event, lists of this kind are much better as categories. The only merit in having them as lists is that lists can contain red links, thus identifying articles that may be needed. Peterkingiron 22:52, 27 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the commenters above, too broad of a list to be useful. We should use categories and subcategories in this situation. Yamaguchi先生 07:06, 28 May 2007 (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.