Talk:United Airlines

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VFD nomination[edit]

This page already survived a VfD nomination in January 2013. However, it looks like perhaps we should have deleted the article at that time since there was no clear consensus either way in that earlier nomination, in which case policy has us default to the "guilty until proven innocent" proviso. What say you, all? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:16, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think in any case, we should apply the same rule for all the Ryanairs and American Airlines out there. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:38, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong keep. It's not clear that it "violates policy" since redirects are permitted for major transportation companies. We used to have standalone articles for the major airlines, and those were later changed to redirects, so at a minimum we should leave the redirects in place if for no other reason than to prevent users from creating new articles in the future. Additionally, the redirect contains article history for content that was merged elsewhere, and thus may be required for attribution purposes. -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:58, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • All of the arguments listed above at #American Airlines apply here. I wish we wouldn't fragment these discussions like this. Also, in the AA discussion, Hobbitschuster was repeatedly told why redirects do not violate the policy against articles about airlines. Is there some other policy this redirect violates? Powers (talk) 23:26, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • We never did agree on whether policy should allow such redirects. The way I understand it (and User:Ikan Kekek seems to agree with me on that) is that we do not have articles on private companies and no redirects with one exception (Amtrak). Quite frankly, I could live with the Amtrak redirect going if it confuses people, but I think its much more useful because it points to where it should, whereas there is no point to point redirects like Lufthansa to (if we have one for American Airlines why not for them?). Where would we redirect them to? And what exactly (besides "stuff exists") is the benefit in having redirects for airlines in the first place? Also, I would doubt the need to keep redirects for attributing anything. Where was any of this stuff ever merged and if so is any of it still there? Hobbitschuster (talk) 00:01, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • The statement "I would doubt the need to keep redirects for attributing anything" concerns me greatly. WV:Deletion policy explicitly calls out attribution as a reason for NOT deleting redirects as that attribution is required by the terms of the CC-SA license - without providing attribution we have no legal right to keep content on this site. The fact that this redirect has article history indicating that content was merged elsewhere means that it absolutely should not be deleted. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:28, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • You probably misunderstood me because I was not clear in my wording. What I wanted to say is that whereever the content was merged, it's not there any more, so it also does not need to be attributed. If you can show me where the content went and it's still there, this becomes of course a different discussion. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:55, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • So which airlines should get a redirect? All of them? Only those in the US? Only those operating international flights? And where should the redirects point? Or is this just an argument along the lines of: Let's keep them, they do no harm but do not create new ones. I think we should have a clear cut logic for airline redirects and enforce it, no matter what that policy looks like. And deleting those superfluous redirects (if it is possible vis a vis attribution issues) seems to me easier and more logical than creating Air France, Lufthansa or Emirates (airline) as redirects to flying. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:59, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - I really do understand the desire to keep things clean, but airlines are major aspects of travel that happen to be companies. Probably better a redirect if someone searches American Airlines than the search page, although still it is relatively minor issue either way. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:52, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • I really do not understand your argument. We do not link to or even mention aggregators, yet airlines (some of them, with no discernible logic, given that several major airlines redlink) should be redirects? I am sorry, but I do not quite see your point. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:12, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • The logic behind the Amtrak redirect is that Amtrak is basically synonymous with rail travel in the United States. If you can think of any airline for which a similar thing can be said, we might make an exception there. But The PanAm Clippers (which were the closest anything ever came to being synonymous to Air travel in the United States or at least United States#Get in#By plane) have stopped flying a long time ago. We can decide to eliminate the redirect Amtrak for the reason that no redirect exists for Deutsche Bahn (for which a similar argument as the one for Amtrak could be made). I would not like that, but it would perhaps stop the use of this particular argument. We could also reconsider whether we should have articles about airlines after all, but what exactly is the use of a redirect that points to flying? Could anything more obvious than that an airline has to do with flying? And what exactly would you say to some hypothetical page creation vandal who makes a bunch of Copa Airlines redirects? Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:23, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yay, I've flown Copa! :) Anyway I'd suggest that someone creating a redirect out of Copa Airlines for Flying is not a vandal. It is fairly synonymous for air travel inside Panama.
  • Perhaps in your mind a line has been crossed in creating these redirects. I'm just not such where the criterion for this line has been defined explicitly? If it is implicit then it may be worth to define explicitly. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:55, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • We went through an exercise to define when keeping or deleting a redirect was appropriate recently, and that resulted in the guidance now present at Wikivoyage:Deletion policy#Deleting vs. redirecting. Bullets #3 and #6 clearly argue for keeping this redirect, while if I'm understanding correctly the sole argument being put forward for deletion is that the world's fourth largest airline doesn't meet the exception outlined in #3 as a "large and/or important business and service". -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:18, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • We don't have air travel in Australia, though. Look, I am the last to oppose a ttcf argument, and maybe one could even made for having articles on individual airlines (I don't think they are a good idea and there were probably good reasons to get rid of them way back when), but what possible benefit is there in redirecting any given airline name to flying? Apparently some of those redirects are the product of some former article being merged somewhere. Where were they merged? And is the merged content still there? Or was redirect just a weak compromise because we could not agree on getting rid of them? I mean really, if we have redirects for any given airline, why don't we have them for any other given airline? And what benefit would a redirect for any given airline be over not having it? We went by fine without a redirect from Air Berlin to Flying, so why is some other redirect so earth-shatteringly important that we have to keep it. Attribution issue may be an argument, but I have actually looked at the way the United Airlines article looked before being redirected and I fail to find the "merged" content anywhere on this site. We could of course allow airline articles and "feature" a different airline any given month that FTT is empty, but I don't think anybody wants that. So what point is there in having these redirects? How many people will put any given airline name into the WV search bar instead of a)doing a google search for the airline b) searching the airline on Wikipedia or c) going to the website of the airline itself. And how would any of those hypothetical people possibly benefit if some weird entirely random assortment of those airlines then redirects to flying? I can see how someone would look for Amtrak (I did way back when) and find the redirect to rail travel in the US handy, because that's what they searched for, but a redirect from Major Airline X to Flying? What's that supposed to accomplish? Hobbitschuster (talk) 02:04, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As I pointed out, having redirects from likely search targets such as this one helps guide users to placing content in the correct place. If a user wants to contribute information on a minor airline, and she searches for a major airline to find out what an airline article should look like, she will be redirected to an article where that content would be welcome. Having redirects in place also discourages potential contributors from trying to write new articles with those titles. And it reserves those titles and histories in the case that articles like Air travel in the United States get too long and need to be split into individual airline articles. Powers (talk) 18:08, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, the content from this article and the other American airline articles was merged to Airlines in the United States (now a redirect) in this edit by User:Nicholasjf21. User:PrinceGloria "merged" it to Flying but claimed at the time that no actual text would be merged. Air travel in the United States now contains some of the same information, but its initial text was copied (by User:Hobbitschuster) from United States of America, not from the Airlines article. I would be wary of deleting the article histories behind these redirects nonetheless, as it's useful to be able to track the history even if it's not clear how much of the verbatim text survives. Powers (talk) 18:08, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Outcome: Kept. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:08, 30 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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