Talk:Festival of Lights

The role of disambiguation pages and the proper use of external links

Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages should only be used to link to internal (on Wikipedia) articles that share a similar name. It is not appropriate to use disambiguation pages to discuss and list items that do not have specific articles. Any attempts at listing items that do not have an article in a disambig page should be kept to an extreme minimum, and only for cases where there is a reasonable expectation for an article to be created.

In terms of External Links, external links should never go onto disambiguation pages. This violates several policies, and should go without saying. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 17:35, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm with Jeffrey on this one. External links on a disambig page basically try to give credit to individual things that are not encyclopedia-worthy in and of themselves. If they don't have an article, they shouldn't be on this page. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 17:38, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Review

Hi,

There has been a bit of discussion on this article, so I decided to have a look for myself, independently.

The title is fine - "festivals of light" are common culturally and religiously, and probably notable as a cultural theme too. But the article as it stands has some problems.

If it is intended to be a disambiguation page, then it fails. A dab page doesn't list and section all meanings with description. It lists them in a few words each:

Religious festivals of light:

• Diwali - a Hindu festival.
• Chaharshanbe Suri, part of Norouz, the Persian New Year.

etc.

This isn't a dab article at present. That needs fixing according to the AFD which seems still to be the most relevant view on this common expression.

Secondly, you need to consider WP:NOT. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. This means not every "festival of lights" in the world is notable. Those that are, need proper verifiable sourcing and citation.

Hope that helps! FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 17:36, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Disambiguation

The page now resembles a proper disambiguation page both in practice and in policy, and satisfies the conditions of the AfD. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 17:50, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Unique / Different Category than Disambiguation

If you had bothered to read the previous talk page you would have seen that this page is like a combo of a disambiguation/list/stub collection. Many of the entries listed here were stubs that where transfered here then deleted. The other entries were added here instead of being made stubs, by numerous people over a very long time.

By deleting the entirety of this article you have opened up a can of worms that this article was helping to keep in check. Instead of gutting the page to make it look like every other disambig, did you ever consider making the page a list or a stub collection page (if such a thing exists) instead? You also deleted the links to internal sections of city articles which will confuse people and lead to even more pointless stubs instead of having a pointer here to the event section of the city page.

The external links were not important, but the page would be better as it was with some other category than disambig.

Also, as to notability, if one took only those 'Festival of Lights' from cities with more than 1 million people one would still wind up with 100's of entries. Many of the entries no longer listed had ten times as many attendees as the ones you left behind. The entire jist of the original AFD was because several different people kept recreating a stub for one event, which produced endless discussions about notability and wasted a huge amount of time. If someone (say for instance me, starting with all the deleted content here) really wanted to, they could add 10 festival of light stubs a day, every day, for the next year; every one of which would probably wind up in it's own AFD/Notability discussion.

Tiki God 09:19, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I support the changes and object to Tiki God's mild ownership he's displaying with this article. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 14:15, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

It must be nice to be an admin so that you can tell people to shove off without addressing any of their points. (I know you're an admin, because a normal user would discuss things, and at least try to explain things, even if they were explaining that I was wrong or in error.) I know I don't own this article, and I know I have to stay within the WP guidelines, but I don't see any replies to my points besides your snarky comments.

If I create stubs for each entry formerly here (which I don't want to do) and they're deleted without a full notability discussion I will recreate them, until a consensus says not to (which I also don't want to do). Determining the notability of any "A/The/- Festival/Celebration of Light(s)" in nearly impossible because of the thousands of similarly named events.

Also I don't think it's ownership, It's just that I like this subject matter, and I really hate dead end stubs. I've seen lots of collections of stubs that would do better on one page rather than a dozen stubs. A good example is all the stubs for Poodle hybrids which (I think) should be collected there.

Tiki God 02:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

You say that if these entries were listed on their own, they wouldn't be notable enough to stand and would be deleted? What makes you think they're any more notable on the list? Is somehow compounding a list of non-notable things make it notable? I can get a list of non-notable cigarette butts I saw in the street today, and if I get enough, it's notable? Not hardly. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 02:17, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I did not say they are not notable, I said it was hard to determine notability for these events. I also personally find notability to be the vaguest of all the WP guidelines, and most open to debate and abuse by admins. For example a well known park in Ontario may be very notable to Canadians and utterly unnotable to Britons. If a British admin decides it's not notable and deletes it then the Canadian users who created the page have no recourse. Even if the park was notable enough to deserve it's own stub (say because of a battle) it still might be an annoying 3 line stub for the next 10 years

I trimmed extremely (verifiably) small events from the page, I also moved events to a subsection of a city page, and then kept only a tiny stub and link here. The Chickasha Festival of Light is a good example. It's also a good example of a 'Festival of Light' that is no longer lister here.

And you still have yet to directly answer any of my points. Namely if this article was called List of A/The/- Festival/Celebration of Light/s (what a horrible article name) would it have received this much gutting and alteration?

02:39, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

• It would probably have been gutted even further - a List is just that - such articles have little or no expansion of the list items. User:^demon is quite right though, if an item cannot stand on its own, then we cannot end-run round policy by adding it into another page - that way lies article bloat and trivia. I would also point out that claiming that notability is "subject to abuse by admins" and general lack of ability to assume good faith doesn't exactly do you many favours, either. ELIMINATORJR 12:19, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I plan to edit this page to (hopefully) make it more efficient as a navigational tool (i.e. to get a variety of readers to the information they are looking for quickly). Does anyone prefer I provide an example here first for discussion or shall I go ahead and do it in 'real time.' (John User:Jwy talk) 22:32, 3 February 2009 (UTC)