Talk:List of shopping malls by country

Article List of defunct shopping malls listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion July 1 to July 7 2004, consensus was to redirect to here. Discussion may be found at Talk:List of defunct shopping malls/Delete.

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Is there any point to this page? Do we really want a list of every shopping centre in the world? Secretlondon 19:23, Nov 2, 2003 (UTC)

I think it would be good to have a list of the ones we have articles on, for ease of finding the articles. However I'd be for getting rid of the ones with red links, and maybe a title change. - Hephaestos 19:25, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

On the other hand, the list doesn't need its own article (yet, anyway); I've moved it to shopping mall. - Hephaestos 19:32, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Assertion: Wikipedia should have an article on any institution or activity that is bigger than wikipedia. Shopping malls attract millions of people a year who spend hours and dollars there, they are the centers of activity in many suburban areas, the core of the Edge City. Most of the malls I listed did have wikipedia articles (or should).

At what point the list should be its own article (when the article > 1 page, > 2 pages?) I don't know, but I suspect it will be sooner rather than later. We have articles on minor league baseball teams, surely a shopping mall impacts more people.

The point ultimately is when there is a WikiProject:Shopping Malls, we can do some comparative analysis and gain a deeper understanding of these beasts. dml dml

Criteria for malls on this page

Here are the criteria I used to prune the page down to a manageable size:

• Biggest mall in its country. (Mall of America)
• Nationwide or worldwide brand recognition.
• Historic importance.
• Tourist destination in itself (South Coast Plaza).
• Just freakin' HUGE, man. (West Edmonton Mall)
• Sited in, or near a world city. Most of the malls in small American and Australian states don't fit this category because they are 300 miles away from the closest world city.
• Not just another suburban mall---there is something very special about it. For example, Pruneyard remains on the list not because it's particularly huge, unique, or popular, but because it was involved in a famous U.S. Supreme Court case that is still a key component of American free speech law.

None of these was conclusive; each criterion was one of several factors for why I kept or deleted any given mall.

--Coolcaesar 08:00, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

At least add,

• someone has bothered to write an encyclopedic entry on

dml 18:52, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Coolcaesar, this page is called "List of shopping malls", not "List of noteworthy shopping malls". If you want to create the latter, then go ahead, but let's keep this list as comprehesive as possible. -- EagleOne 19:28, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

This has already been debated heavily on the Votes for deletion page. As eager deleter Radiant! has persuasively argued (he/she has convinced me), there are (1) simply too many shopping malls in the world to list all of them; and (2) most people don't care enough about the vast majority of those malls to draft a Wikipedia article about them, let alone read someone else's article about that mall. The list was already growing to an unmanageable size; over time, the result would be a gigantic monster of a page, half of which would be full of unresolved links in red, and which no one would actually read.

The sad, simple truth is that the vast majority of malls are very similar to each other, especially as more and more segments of the retail industry are taken over by multinational chains. Most of them have the same tacky design by the kind of mediocre architects who will never have one-name recognition like Gehry or Wright. Most of them have the same basic layout, at least in concept. The only thing that varies is the shape of the site, the height and shape of the building, and the amount of parking.

Once you've visited about 50 or 60 malls (I have), you've seen virtually all of them. Trying to incorporate all of them into Wikipedia would turn Wikipedia into a free advertisement for thousands of malls that are unknown outside their local communities, and which in a local history book might get only a page or two. If I wanted to waste my time skimming such a huge list, there are many online Web directories and Yellow Pages available.

Finally, I think it was agreed on the Votes for deletion page that a comprehensive list of shopping malls is more appropriate for the Category pages.

--Coolcaesar 00:24, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't see the VfD page on this article before I commented earlier. I've voiced my objections to the deletion over there, but I'll summarize it on this page. I think it best if we break this page up into several pages, sorted by country/state/province/etc. That we, we can keep the complete list, but we reduce each individual page down to a much more manageable size. It's been done on other humungous lists, why not here? -- EagleOne 04:06, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)