Wiki143:Articles for deletion/List of HTML decimal character references

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep. There was no consensus to delete or to transwiki. A couple of votes were discounted because the editors are either too new or have too few article edits. I expect at least one month and 100 edits total at the time of voting, with a decent proportion of those being article edits. angrydruid had only three edits in all, Firefox made his first edit a day or two before voting here. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 15:08, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

List of HTML decimal character references

This is someone's attempt to make a companion article for List of XML and HTML character entity references. Whereas that article is clearly useful in its discussion and listing of the standard 5 XML and 252 HTML/XHTML character entity references, this new article merely contains the first 10 thousand numeric character references out of a potential 1.1 million. Nearly any Universal Character Set code point, aside from an unassigned or otherwise disallowed handful, can be referenced in this way.

• There is no need for this kind of list,
• its cutoff is arbitrary,
• its formatting is poor and makes no use of existing character table templates and formats (see ongoing discussion in Talk:ISO 8859-1#Character table format),
• its length is too great,
• no one is going to be able to render the characters in it (slapping Template:SpecialChars on it isn't going to help much),
• and most importantly, there were similar "Table of Unicode characters" articles (with similar charts and arbitrary cutoffs) that existed up until a month or two ago, but have since been deleted. See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Various Unicode-related pages. — mjb 07:50, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• The precedent is delete so I'll go with that. Actually, the precedent is transwiki. So let's do that instead. Agentsoo 09:25, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Any cutoff point is arbitrary, and if there is no cutoff, then the list will grow every time the Unicode working group meets. --Carnildo 19:56, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Keep or transwiki to WS. The precedent is NOT delete (RTFVFD). Its cutoff is not arbitrary. I checked the next few thousand, and none of them appear to have been used yet. In any case, where in the article is it suggested that the list is complete? Poor formatting is no reason to delete an article, it's a reason to post a cleanup tag at most. You delete an article based on content, not formatting. Claiming there is no need for it is also not a valid complaint, since your opinion of a need is subjective. The fact that such lists already exist on the internet, and even on Wikipedia as you have pointed out, indicate a need for the list. What do you mean noone can render the characters in it? If you can see the characters in your browser, you can render them (so already we've found one use for the list). Another invalid complaint. Also, the precedent is NOT delete but to keep or transwiki. In any case, following precedent is only an excuse to be lazy, when other possible suggestions, such as splitting the article, would also work, but require minimal brain power. Claiming that the growth of the list is a bad thing is invalid as well, since Wikipedia is not paper. Claiming that the XML/HTML article is useful whereas this is not is also invalid, since this article simply requires expansion of content, so you should put in a request for expansion, or more easily wait a while (the article just started!). :)  BRIAN0918  21:27, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Note that the comment above is by the person who created/generated the article in question. Re: formatting, inconsequential cosmetic details are not the issue; rather, it is the content. A numeric character reference is not necessarily going to correspond to a renderable glyph (even with an extremely capable browser and all fonts), because not all characters are 'graphic', and some are only usable in combination. That is, while it is reasonable to say "© is ©", it is not reasonable to say " is …some replacement glyph for unrenderable 'interlinear annotation separator' character", so the purpose of the table is in question. What exactly is it trying to show? Also, the nature of the numeric character references is such that they are really just another set of labels for UCS code points, just like the 'U+' notation. If there is no consensus on the value of a table that has nothing but code points (listed in U+, decimal, or hexadecimal) and browser-dependent glyph-rendering attempts, regardless of how the table is split up, then the value of a table that differs only by virtue of prefixing each code point with "&#" and following it with ";" is equally dubious. In other words, the new table is nothing more than a minor cosmetic reformatting of the deleted/Wikisourced articles, which were not-very-well-thought-out attempts to automatically generate information found in ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard. If they don't belong on Wikipedia, then this one doesn't, either. I suggest following up on the discussion in Talk:ISO 8859-1 where various ideas for where and how to best present character info in general are being floated. — mjb 22:30, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
    • So you are saying this list is no different from those that were transwiki'd to Wikisource. You might want to update your vote, then. -- BRIAN0918  22:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Delete FireFox 20:38, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep or transwiki, this article can improve and there is precedence to transwiki. NoSeptember 00:44, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep: To put it plain and simple, this is an article of knowledge and by definition that's what an encyclopedia is! 03:32 UTC 8 August 2005 Kurthalomieu J. McCool
• Delete this is completely irrelevant (preceding unsigned comment by Angrydruid 04:26, 8 August 2005 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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.