Talk:Helen Hayes Award

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Awards

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WP:NOTDB

All of these articles were recently deleted by redirect without discussion by Toweli

At first I was surprised by the deletions, because these are lengthy articles with a ton of content and work. They are not kept up to date is meaningless because anyone at anytime could decide to update them. The question is the topic notable - not the content of the topic, the topic itself - because that is what determines AfD outcomes, usually. There is no question the Helen Hayes Award is a notable topic, and that these subarticles exist due to technical length limitations; the content if merged would exceed the maximum size allowance. So for practical reasons they are in subarticles.

Then I checked the HHA website and found the list of previous nominees and winners here. The number of entries is about 6,000. That a lot. It would be impractical to mirror the database on Wikipedia. Unless there were automated tools. And it's unclear HHA want their database mirrored to Wikipedia. Still, it would be nice since the winners names could be linked creating backlinks to the biography articles. However checking disambiguations for 6,000 entries and keeping it updated every year is again not practical due to the scale.

So in the end I conceded to the deletion by redirect by User:Toweli per WP:NOTDB. Nevertheless, if anyone ever decided to create these 6,000 entries - with 100s more each year - I would support them in that herculean effort (though I would generally advise against it for self-flagellation reasons), particularly if they could add some secondary sourcing to establish notability. The main reason I would support is because one day, eventually, the HHA website will disappear and Wikipedia may end up being the final word on a historic list of winners. -- GreenC 17:01, 4 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of links to award winners.

All of the links to award winners by year previously listed in the article are now dead and have been replaced by a database hosted by the Washington Theatre. Posting a single link to the database page seemed to be the simplest resolution rather than tracking down individual references at the Internet Archive or providing query strings for each year. This seems to concur with the WP:NOTDB conclusion made by User:Toweli and User:GreenC. As is the availability of these links ended in 2018.

I agree that should the HHA site disappear the information might be lost but then again, Wikipedia might cease to exist. Nothing is forever. I noticed that when I did a search for winners which lead me here, Google's Gemini was supplying an answer.

I'd like to add that this is intended as a friendly edit and I have no intention of stepping on anyone's toes. GelvinM (talk) 13:06, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Even in the old version, there's no reason to have a section in the body of an article for the purpose of providing no information but only external links, even if they're masquerading, as they had been, as references. I moved the link to the "external links" section, and also replaced the existing irrelevant link there, to theatreWashington's home page, to their main Helen Hayes Awards page. Largoplazo (talk) 14:05, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]