Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of left handed people

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. - Mailer Diablo 02:57, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of left handed people

List of left handed people (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Expired prod but this should not have been proded since I'm sure this is not uncontroversial. Rationale for prod was "unreferenced, unmaintainable". Roughly 10% of people are left-handed so clearly, it's not realistic to expect this list to ever be exhaustive. What may be doable is to have very specific sublists such as List of left-handed Presidents of the United States, though I have doubts about the encyclopedic value of that. Pascal.Tesson 12:33, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep It is potentially an interesting article. I agree that it won't be exhaustive, but that is just a matter of noting this. However, the list is currently almost entirely OR, so I'd recommend an effort to provide sources for everyone currently on the list, and then deleting those who remain unsourced after a preset period of time. First step towards sourcing would, of course, be to look at individual articles to see if they contain sources about lefthandedness. Lilac Soul (talk • contribs • count) - Review me! 13:13, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting, I suppose we could speedy delete this as recreated content then. Pascal.Tesson 14:38, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete While we could keep aspects of this list to be honest whether someone is left or right handed seems to be of no relevance to anything else. We may as well have a 'list of US presidents with blue eyes'. Absolutely no encylopedic value what-so-ever. If its especially noteable or relevant (say for example a famous left handed pianist) then it could be added to a bios trivia section if it has one. WikipedianProlific(Talk) 15:19, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy delete unmaintainable lists, unable to be verified and non-notable. Btw, I am left-handed but still I don't find it special. Magioladitis 16:33, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep or Merge selected parts (see "Second comment" below) Before voting, editors should take a look at the "Left handedness and intelligence" and "Possible effects on humans on thinking" sections of Left handed article to which this list connects. Also look at the detailed Sports section in that article. Ignore all the statements without footnotes and you still have some compelling reasons why we might want to know who some famous left-handed people are. I think on anyone's top 10 list of scientific geniuses would be Albert Einstein and Newton, and maybe Tesla and perhaps Aristotle -- and they're on the list. In sports, isn't left-handedness sometimes important? Wouldn't it be good to know who's left-handed in particular sports to see whether there might be an advantage to left-handedness in certain team positions?
And take a look at this, from the Left handed article: Handedness researchers Coren and Clare Porac have shown that left-handed university students are more likely to major in visually-based, as opposed to language-based subjects. Another sample of 103 art students found an astounding 47 percent were left- or mixed-handed. So one would expect to find a lot of left-handed artistic types on the list, and there they are. The people you think of when you think of famous artists? Well, Leonardo is on the list, Michelangelo is ambidexterous, Picasso is on the list. These three would be on the list that most people would come up with if asked to name the top five artists of all time. Even though it proves nothing, it provokes interest and makes the reader think. And it just may prove something about how brains work for people at the heights of creative achievement. Seems useful to know.
This list is unimpressive on various levels: It needs citations; its usefulness should be tied directly to sections of the Left handed article where parts of it would help illustrate that article; the organization is difficult. That may mean it should be merged, but the information here seems important. You don't really prove much with any list of famous people, but you may well indicate and provoke thought. I think these work great as the equivalents of anecdotal evidence that has some value in an encyclopedia. For that reason, a merge may be the most appropriate thing, because the lists don't really need to continue to grow.
It may also be appropriate to have a Left handed category rather than a list. Left handedness may not be a trivial fact about a person, if it's an indication of creativity and the way certain people's minds may work. If that research is in fact true, then it may be helpful for readers to know. Noroton 16:57, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - I created this page, after extracting it from the Left handed article. I did this as a step towards improving the page as it was starting to dominate the article. The contents are largely uncited and mostly constitutes trivia of staggeringly little significance. I understand that for a few people left-handedness constitutes a part of their notability, but for most it is totally unremarkable. For the few that it is notable, then perhaps they should be mentioned as examples in the left handed article, (e.g. as examples on the advantages of left handed tennis players), rather than being clumped into a list with people they have nothing in common with other than an accident of birth.
The above reference to Einstein is an excellent example of the unreliability of this sort of list. His left-handedness is a popular 'fact', but a simple google of images of him tells a different story.
As it stands the list is simply a cruft magnet, gathering irrelevant entries daily. This is why I also strongly vote against any merging it back into the article it came from.--Escape Orbit (Talk) 17:43, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Second comment Escape Orbit makes good points, and he's convinced me this should be deleted, although I think parts need to be merged back (perhaps it's a discussion for the Left handed talk page). I just found a 1988 article from the New York Times that could be used to cite maybe 20 of the most famous names on the list, although I wouldn't claim that makes it absolutely true (it mentions Einstein, for instance -- the article simply reported that these people have been said to be left-handed and it was a light feature, so it's unlikely the reporter checked it out). There are something like 245,000 Google hits for "Einstein" and "left-handed" (some of those refer to a concept in physics called "left-handed" though). I did google the images, and I think that proves Escape Orbit's point about Einstein. One [apparently posed image (the most famous of the bunch) could have been posed, but not this many: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].
Since the Einstein urban legend is so widely publicized, I think it's worth mentioning this conflicting information in the Left handed article and linking to the convincing pictures. It's also worth mentioning that many lists may be similarly dodgy (and that might prevent lists from growing and growing in the "Left handed" article).
Everything should be footnoted or tagged "citation-needed", but the mere fact that notable left-handers are referred to so much in discussions of left-handedness means the subject won't stop coming up, even without this page. My points about using portions of the list to illustrate particular points in the "Left-handed" remain. I'll bring it to the talk page there. Noroton 18:36, 4 September 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.