Wikipedia:Lists as cruft magnets

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In some cases lists of examples have been split off from articles in order to keep the main article from getting "too long". Sometimes this is reasonable, but often these lists grow almost indefinitely. If the property described in the main article is commonplace, editors will find it easy to add new examples to these lists. Pretty soon we end up with listcruft: a catalog or directory of examples which does little for the reader's understanding.

Alternative approaches

There are other ways to handle this situation without spawning boundless lists.

Limit examples to the most notable cases

Many articles are best served by an internal list of the most notable examples, for example:

first or last occurrence of the phenomenon
a particularly controversial or notorious case
a frequently discussed case in the literature

Organize examples by type

It may be better to list subtypes of the phenomenon and then give a single example of each.

Resist the urge to embroider or show off

It is very tempting to "add" to any article by inserting a case you know about that isn't yet mentioned. But you should ask yourself this: is this going to improve the reader's understanding of the subject, or is it just adding to a catalog of already very similar cases? If the situation in your example is already covered by another entry, then you should consider resisting the urge.

Example discussions

Here are a few AfD discussions concerning lists, all of which were taken from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2007 March 27. Note that their inclusion doesn't represent endorsement of deletion; it simply reflects that the issues discussed here arose in the discussion of the article in question.