Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alicel, Oregon


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 19:50, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Alicel, Oregon

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Moving on to Oregon, the very first place I look at consists of a grain elevator standing by the railroad tracks, and nothing else besides an adjacent farm. Searching turns up low levels of hits, largely clickbait but also a fair number referring to a soil series and a grain variety of the same name, and the usual rural name drops due to the post office which once sat here. Not seeing anything indicating a former town, though. I would also note that the bins shown in the picture are not those of the Minor White photo, which still stand by the tracks. Mangoe (talk) 19:35, 13 December 2021 (UTC) *Delete - No legal recognition, no WP:GNG-pass, just some bare mentions. Post offices and schools do not confer legal recognition as schools/post-offices can be opened by anyone anywhere. FOARP (talk) 12:48, 14 December 2021 (UTC) Happy to flip to Keep(ish) based on the new sources. FOARP (talk) 17:02, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 19:39, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Oregon-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 19:39, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment I can't tell if this was a town or not. According to the second reference it was platted, which is an indication, and then  says lots in town are for sale.  Whether or not anything was actually built is indiscernable to me.  There was a school there .  There were two businesses located there at one time., .   78.26  (spin me / revolutions) 20:54, 13 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Uh, I don't think a post office can be opened by anyone. Certainly not during that time period. You had to get government authority. Towns/wannabe towns would name themselves after the U.S. Postmaster in order to be granted a coveted post office.  Certainly there were addresses with an Alicel, Oregon address.  It has legal recognition, but I don't know if it was a "populated place" or just an "area" that a post office served (and thereby failing GEOLAND).  78.26  (spin me / revolutions) 14:18, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I think the issue we're highlighting here is that post-offices weren't automatically associated with populated place, but could be at stores, stations, and so-forth. Having a post office is therefore not legal recognition of a populated place per se. FOARP (talk) 14:56, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
 * There are perhaps minor quibbles/clarifications/exceptions, but I think we're mostly on the same page. This concerted effort on GEOLAND has deleted a few things here and there I disagree with, but has largely cleaned up a lot of WP:V violations and other such errors.   78.26  (spin me / revolutions) 15:31, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
 * No problem with any of that. Naturally any clean-up is going to have some edge-cases and the vagueness of the guides doesn't help. FOARP (talk) 17:05, 14 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete Keep - Surprisingly, buildings scattered to the East are the remnants of an honest-to-goodness street grid that appeared on the 1906 topo and gradually disappears by the 1960s. Newspaper searches bring back quite a few trivial mentions of school sports teams, "John Smith of Alicel", etc. I'm thinking this was an actual small town, but not one that was legally recognized or written about enough to sustain a standalone article. –dlthewave ☎ 00:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Changing to Keep, thank you for expanding the article and for your patience with our cleanup efforts. –dlthewave ☎ 16:28, 15 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Only slightly snarky comment as article creator: Re: "...grain elevator standing by the railroad tracks..." Oh, I see you are familiar with the American West. This was my 4th article and was created from this list. I think the Oregon list was added to from an Oregon Highway map. No one has added to it since 2006. I haven't been around much lately but is WP: GAZETTEER still relevant? Because I'm curious about the "I saw the name on a map and want to know more about it" factor. It's on roadmaps as of my 2008 Oregon road atlas, which is the most recent one I have at hand. Also, I realize that the term "populated place" per GNIS is being questioned, but this is listed as a populated place on GNIS. As an aside, I'm not sure why it matters that the recent photo and the reference to the Minor White photo not being of the same grain elevators is significant to the notability of this community. Here's a link to the photo. And here's the facility in 2005. Perhaps we need to either delete the photo or add a clunky disclaimer? If is around, maybe we can ask him why he took a photo of the grain storage bins and not the historic silos. SOFIXIT? Valfontis (talk) 06:28, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi Valfontis. As you allude to, GNIS is no longer taken as reliable evidence of a place being populated, or of it having legal recognition. This therefore isn't a WP:GEOLAND#1 pass simply because its mentioned in GNIS. Maps also aren't taken as evidence of notability, so we don't have articles on locations simply because they are on a map. Wikipedia is not a gazetteer per se - we don't host GNIS-style bare gazetteer listings, but instead encyclopaedic articles, because Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia.
 * Standards have been tightened up after tens of thousands of articles about locations in Iran, Azerbaijan, California, and Turkey had to be deleted/redirect en masse due to issues with them caused by simply transcribing data straight from a gazetteer or gazetteer-like database. An admin was also desysopped as part of one of these cases, and one of the most prolific stub-creators also had the autopatrolled bit taken away.
 * None of this should be taken as a judgement on your creation of this article, simply an indication that (as in many areas) there's stuff that Wikipedia used to have articles for that it now doesn't. FOARP (talk) 09:15, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply. (Spoiler Alert: I try to stay professional on the wiki but I am going to be taking deletion discussions like this one personally so most of this is going to be boo hoo about my hard work and my feelings. See also WP:USEFUL.) See my !Vote below. Feel free to ask me to take this general chat elsewhere, but since Mangoe has indicated they wish to go through the whole state, I might as well get it out of the way here. Thanks for the background on the Arbitration stuff. Most of the Oregon articles on communities were written from scratch (not plagiarized or data dumped), by people dedicated to building an encyclopedia, using sources, including books. Wikiproject Oregon made a great effort to keep garbagey geography content out of the Oregon-related articles. We had a few drive-by editors who created a dozen or two microstub articles on communities each, but I and others managed to "save" (I kind of hate that term) them from deletion with a few hours of research. Anyway, I stand by my judgment on what makes something notable, despite not keeping up with the current state of geographic notability.
 * I started on Wikipedia after working on a project that involved addresses from the 1950s. I was jotting down odd little town names I hadn't heard of to look up later, and kept getting hits on this page ("city" loosely defined, obviously) and decided to do something about it. In Oregon we also have road signs for historic places that one might want to be able to find some information about. Globe and Austa come to mind. So I feel like Alicel, for example, is not a completely garbage article because there are many current (mostly about the grain shipping there but it's all behind a paywall) articles and historic references to it. (In that rural county, that grain shipping complex is a Big Deal and probably a big part of the county's economy). Speaking personally and as someone who is too tired to go read all the WP:WHATEVER essays, it seems foolish to delete articles like Alicel. I think I'm pretty middle of the road between deletionist and inclusionist. I wasn't heartbroken about this highway junction I created (there was an effort to get the redlinks out of highway articles since it was an effort to convince other editors that they shouldn't be links at all) and I was instigator of the takedown of this funny little place.
 * Upmerge to the county article if you must, but since not everyone owns a copy of the 3-inch-thick Oregon Geographic Names (Oregon has a lot of place names), it might be nice to have well-sourced histories of various small communities accessible on the Internet, even if they are short. I'm trying to think of a non-petulant, reasonable way to say that depending on how this goes, I could be disappointed enough in the process to finally take my toys and go home, but it's not coming to me at the moment. Valfontis (talk) 11:19, 15 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep per my recent expansion with cites, WP:GEOLAND, and 78.26. There are multiple citations to reliable sources. It was small, and now is smaller, but this was and is a community, and Notability is not temporary. It exists and people call it their home. I don't believe "legally recognized" (define this--does that mean "incorporated"?) is a criterion for notability of a(n) (unincorporated)community, but feel free to show me where to find the relevant guideline. (If you are interested in multiple passing mentions of people being "from," "born," living at, and moving to Alicel, you may see my most recent clips as of today. [I realize these are trivial mentions.]) I feel as if WP:BEFORE was not applied here. Valfontis (talk) 11:19, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * More comment - I am somewhat aghast that something as fundamental as WP:5P was allowed to be changed so significantly with only local consensus with participation by only four editors, and the implications it has for precisely these types of discussions. 3 weeks. 4 editors.  One of our core pages, with concepts that had been in place for 13 years.  Was this discussion widely publicized?   78.26  (spin me / revolutions) 15:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * 78.26 - It was discussed also at WP:NGEO where there was a similar consensus to change. It was also much more discussed than the original undiscussed BOLD edit that put the term "gazetteer" into WP:5P simply because "I think [this] reflects the reality of WP today". Whether or not WP:5P really is all that pivotal is also disputed by the FAQ at the talk page of WP:5P which states that it is not "a policy or guideline, or the source for all policies and guidelines" but "a non-binding description of some of the fundamental principles" (that is, 5P summarises other pages, it does not control them). FOARP (talk) 16:46, 15 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep This has many more mentions to people living there as a community than usual. It should be corrected to "was a community" if there are no recent sources, however. Reywas92Talk 15:19, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep There's even a sign on the road announcing this as a current community. If that's not GEOLAND I don't know what is. SportingFlyer  T · C  13:32, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep While this article is short, it has lots of good, well documented information about the subject community. Sources includes hard copy books like Oregon Geographic Names (an extremely important sources for articles on Oregon communities and geographic landmarks) and Main Street: Northeastern Oregon published by respected publishers like Binfords & Mort and Oregon Historical Society; sources also include well-established newspapers like the La Grande Observer as well as historic newspapers like Crook County Journal which was an important sources of local information in its day.--Orygun (talk) 21:00, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Meets GNG per sources in article. Had a population of 300 at one point. ~ EDDY  ( talk / contribs )~ 13:49, 20 December 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.