Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of most widely spoken languages (by number of countries)

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. Sandstein 18:43, 6 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

List of most widely spoken languages (by number of countries)[edit]

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Un-encyclopedic topic. I'll copy what I wrote on the article talk page: The main problem is that a list of most widely spoken languages by number of countries is meaningless because countries are not equal, and even arbitrary / trivial. Take for example the language listed last as of time of writing: Urdu. The countries that speak it are given as India and Pakistan. Now India is comprised of 29 states and 7 union territories. If every one of them went independent, Urdu would suddenly be spoken by not two but 37 countries, vaulting Urdu all the way from last place on the list to third, even though fundamentally nothing about the prevalence of the language has changed. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates how arbitrary - not to mention meaningless - the list is. In a way, a list of languages by number of countries that speak it is as useless as a list of languages by the number of speakers with the surname "Li". Such a list could be completely accurate and index every single person surnamed "Li" who speaks a language, and yet it would be meaningless.

I don't see a point in this article; it looks like an un-encyclopedic topic that's not worth having an article about. Banedon (talk) 03:37, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

~~Support~~ as nominator. Looking through the article's talk page there's an argument that the article is worth keeping since it indicates how prevalent the language is (example given is how Mandarin has more speakers than English, yet English is the more important world language). While that is true, counting the number of countries that speaks a language is not the way to measure prevalence. It gives for example equal weighting to Tuvalu (population ~10000) and the United States (population ~320 million). One could argue for a list of languages by the surface area of the countries that speak it as a measure of prevalence, but that neglects population density, and countries such as Canada, Greenland or Russia would be unfairly weighted for. I think the topic is inherently unencycopedic, and that the two other lists by number of native speakers and number of speakers are the ones to look at. Banedon (talk) 03:48, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Struck duplicate !vote; the nomination is considered your !vote. Feel free to comment all you'd like, though. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 04:32, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per my arguments on the article's talk page, basically that the content is unverifiable. Since there's no one source, instead all editors add or delete languages according to their own definition of "language", "spoken", "in", and "country", it also borders on WP:INDISCRIMINATE. Sjö (talk) 04:54, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's not really difficult to verify that the majority language of the USA is English or that the official languages of Finland are Swedish and Finnish; indeed, the WP articles on those countries report this same information. If it is not considered unverifiable in the context of those articles, why should it be considered unverifiable in this one?

Like I said on the talk page, the article's coherency depends largely on whether an agreed set of definitions can be established. Regarding countries, the conventions for this on WP are fairly well established. Archon 2488 (talk) 11:28, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 17:47, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 17:47, 30 May 2015 (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.