The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not change it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No more changes should be made to this discussion.

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Well then, unfortunately the activity in this discussion seems to have petered out. While this is a rather overdue closing, I felt that it might be better to at least give a closing statement for future reference.

• Closed as no consensus - the community generally dislikes en masse creation of stubs with generic content (eg. "X is a place in Y. It's population in nnnn was Z.") (also recalling previous such discussions in 2011, 2012, 2013), but the community remains undecided on how to handle such stubs on the wiki. Chenzw  Talk  14:13, 1 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A recent RfD brought to everyone's attention that we may wish to modify the notability guideline for geographic places to serve our own needs better. As things stand now, we are governed by the notability guideline of enwiki. There are sections of that guideline that relate to things like buildings and roadways. However, the following is the core text of the guideline, which I reproduce here in full:

Starting point for changes[change source]

I am not sure if we should change this or not. At the same time, I think we'd like to put something in place that requires that a geographical place name stub does better than "Zim is a place located in McDavitt Township, St. Louis County, Minnesota." So I'm going to throw the following out there, with no great passion about it, just to get things rolling. Feel free not only to offer changes, but to simplify any non-simple language here:

• Any true geographic location carries enough of a presumption of notability that it is not eligible for QD. However, an apparent geographic location stub may be deleted under QD if it falls under other QD criteria (nonsense, hoax, etc.).
• At an RfD, a geographic location stub must include at least one of the following to confirm its presumption of notability:

1. Explicit evidence of its status as a "legally recognized place" (satisfies paragraph 1 above)
2. Population data from a reliable source (confirms that it is a populated place; supports paragraph 1 or 2 above, and if the population is large enough [definition?] may be sufficient by itself to confirm notability)

   Note the word supports, rather than "satisfies". I think anyone would agree, for example, that Silver Spring, Maryland is a notable place, even though it is not an incorporated city. But I don't think we want to give housing developments, business parks, subdivisions and neighborhoods automatic recognition just because they're populated.

3. Any other information from reliable sources showing its inherent notability

• Any geographic area that is a second-level administrative division or lower, or that is city-sized or smaller, should include geographic coordinates. (That's always a good goal. But I specifically intend that recommendation to be forward looking, not that people have to go back to existing articles.)

OK. That's a starting point. Comments are welcome. StevenJ81 (talk) 22:09, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• I have never seen the purpose of collecting a large number of "A is a place in B" sub-stubs. What is their useful purpose? We collect these pieces of flotsam, usually submitted by new editors, who usually copy only the first sentence of the Enwiki article. We have thousands of these things. The presumptions are that other editors will improve the article and those new editors creating these minimal effort one or two liners will eventually contribute articles that are more complete. I have yet to see either of these presumptions pan out for us. Why is it so hard to ask that all new articles submitted here should meet a notability criteria and have a minimum length? User:Rus793 (talk) 14:12, 3 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Because there is no minimum requirement for length for any articles. Because people are volunteers. Because it is expected that every article will be expanded by others. We don't require fully written articles from anyone on any topic. All of these settlements already meet the notability criteria. All of them. -DJSasso (talk) 18:04, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Obviously I agree the present situation should be changed. At present we are running at about 20 place names a day that say nothing except 'A is a place in B'. Almost all these are factually correct, but almost none of them is of the slightest interest to the reader. Encyclopedia are expected to have readers, and people expect them to be interesting or at least to say something! We can't deal with them individually by RfD because there are too many. — This unsigned comment was added by Macdonald-ross (talk • changes) at 20:00, 3 June 2016‎.

We can't say what's of interest to a reader, but even if we could, that's not our criterion. (Just think what would happen if it were: large subject areas like politics, sports, actors, history, and more could be gone because there are people with no interest in them.) Someone could very well have heard the name of one of these places without knowing it's a settlement, decide to look it up, and learn at least that it's a settlement in a certain place. If we redirect instead if deleting, that would still be possible. --Auntof6 (talk) 18:09, 4 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• In many cases, I think the "X is a place in Y" articles could be redirected to list articles. The list articles might have to be created first (we might be able to copy some from enwiki). Each list could be in the form of a table that includes the name and where it is (US state, French department, or whatever). It could also include an image, geographic coordinates, and other things that would require only minimal text in the table List of settlements in Alabama is an example of what I'm thinking of. Any settlement article that has something notable that's not in the list could have a separate article. There are a lot of French commune articles that could be combined into lists by department. This approach would clean up our articles without needing to determine which places are actually notable.

Another consideration is whether there are links to the articles. It would be good not to delete the ones that have links in other articles. If needed, those could be improved. --Auntof6 (talk) 21:07, 3 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't for a minute have a problem with moving some information into list articles. And if there is a link to one of these in another article, a redirect to a list article still preserves the hyperlink in a positive way. So I'm ok with all that.

Honestly, I'm more interested in defining a policy for new articles going forward. We can eventually go back and fix what's already here, but I'm more looking at what we do with new articles introduced today. In a way, my proposal does little more than formalize the requirement for proof of notability that we normally require of all pages. But because of this "presumption of notability" with respect to geographic locations, we often get less than we expect for other articles. With respect to articles that remain as articles (as opposed to entries in a list), I think it's fair of us to try to get to that standard. StevenJ81 (talk) 02:53, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• I really don't get why people keep getting hung up on these. They are clearly notable. We are clearly not paper so they aren't taking up room. I think people just don't like them because they are not personally interested in them. I think the English notability guidelines are already good enough for our uses. If we end up deleting them that would be a huge tragedy for this wiki as it would go against everything that Wikipedia is about. I also don't think redirecting is reasonable either, because at least in their current form they might get expanded, redirect to a list and they likely never will. -DJSasso (talk) 12:36, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  DJSasso, I guess my main issue on these is that most articles need to say something demonstrating their notability. Because of the presumption of notability in this area, many of these articles say no more than X is a place in Y. Yes, the places may be notable, but an article that says no more than that is just not encyclopedic. No, we're not paper, but an article that says no more than that doesn't make us look like a valuable resource, either. If I thought that these articles were likely to get expanded on their own, I would agree with your perspective on this. But history says they don't get expanded. People drive by, drop one of these off, and don't come back to them. What's more (for what it's worth), I think that passing articles like this through RfD is probably the most productive way to make sure someone goes in and says something about the place beyond X is a place in Y. In a way, all I'm asking for is to make sure that presumption of notability is actualized with a sentence or two in the article, nothing more. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:58, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Don't confuse quality or completeness with whether an article is encyclopedic. These are definitely encyclopedic. They are about topics that are appropriate for an encyclopedia and they are written in appropriate tone. --Auntof6 (talk) 16:24, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, but I disagree with that. All these pages are potentially encyclopedic, and are potentially appropriate for the encyclopedia. But if all a page says is X is a place in Y, it hasn't attained that status yet. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:25, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it actually has, there is no time limit on wikipedia. They could take 50 years to be expanded and that would be perfectly fine. If all it says is X is in Y then it is still conveying information and that is the point. Saying that it is a place is conveying its notability because all settlements or former settlements are notable. For settlements, just existing is enough to be notable. It is very very very very bad to delete these. If we were to delete them we might as well shut down the wiki because we will be done following the idea of covering notable topics. It isn't a presumption of notability, they are inherently notable as in we already know they are notable outright. Settlements are one of the rare topics that just are notable, no matter how small they will have been written about in all kinds of government documents, and atlases, travel guides, map books and on and on. -DJSasso (talk) 17:54, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I see how strongly you feel about this. Fair enough.

I must say that technically speaking, the enwiki guideline says that "legally recognized", populated places are inherently notable. Places that are not legally recognized need to demonstrate notability, and we do this because while a place like Silver Spring, Maryland is clearly notable, not every neighborhood or housing development is. And to some extent the fact that "legally recognized" or populated places are considered to be "inherently notable" is because it is assumed that finding evidence of notability is generally trivial. I guess I don't understand why we can't ask a contributor to go the extra step to add 1–2 sentences to add the population (or what have you). All that really does is fulfills the enwiki guideline. And, of course, such an approach does help protect us against hoaxes.

I need to add here that Zim, Minnesota was not going to be deleted, because most of us (me included) were reluctant to start deleting legitimate place articles, no matter how trivially they are written. (Really.) (And separately, the article has been improved, anyway.)

I would be more than happy to discuss any other mechanism we can use (besides an RfD discussion) to make sure every geography article has a look-see, and that at least for places in countries with pretty accessible census data (or places with articles in other wikis), we can add a population level (and maybe coordinates). That's actually all I am hoping for; I'm really not looking to start deleting articles. StevenJ81 (talk) 18:30, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The biggest reason I can say for not doing it is that we want to keep the barrier to editing low. I for one love to snag every possible IP drive by edit possible since we are such a small wiki and need as many edits as possible from wherever we can get them. (assuming they are good faith edits of course). And expecting every IP editor to go above and beyond for just a single specific topic is more likely to piss off a new user who may have otherwise decided hey I like it here and stayed around. -DJSasso (talk) 18:53, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think that WikiData may come to our rescue on this soon. It is already possible to grab certain categories of data from WikiData, automatically, by simply using the right query. I think that as soon as it becomes possible to grab not only the data but the source of the data, we might consider revising some of our templates to grab common information automatically. While this may still result in cookie-cutter articles, individually they will still say more about these places than is currently the case. Meanwhile, I object to removing these articles if they are about actual (or formerly inhabited) cities, towns, villages, etc. (legally recognized or not). These articles still need sources however. I don't want to give a pass to editors to create articles about fake communities, hoping that we won't delete them based on a presumption of notability. I personally believe that non-trivial content about sub-units of such communities (neighborhoods, trailer courts, apartment complexes, etc.) belongs within the article about the larger community, unless there is so much information that it threatens to overwhelm to larger article. Etamni | ✉ | ✓  07:30, 8 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not change it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No more changes should be made to this discussion.