Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Allentown Fire Department (2nd nomination)


 * 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 Merge/redirect to Allentown, Pennsylvania. --MelanieN (talk) 01:14, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Allentown Fire Department
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This is a non-notable fire department. The only sources available are from the fire department website. Tinton5 (talk) 00:50, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Pennsylvania-related deletion discussions.  Everymorning   talk  01:13, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:48, 4 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep There are plenty of sources available for this and so the topic is notable. They include:
 * Allentown: The Story Of A Pittsburgh Neighborhood
 * Living in the Allentown Area
 * Souvenir History of the Allentown Fire Department
 * Historic homes and institutions and genealogical and personal memoirs of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania
 * The Firehouse: an architectural and social history
 * Past, Present, and Future of the City of Allentown, PA
 * Statistics of Fire Departments of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000
 * Fire and Water Engineering
 * Men of Allentown
 * Allentown, Pa. Bicentennial, 1962
 * Andrew D. (talk) 10:31, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * comment- I really don't think it's a big deal to keep it but I agree that it does seem like a lot of superfluous information. The problem is that almost everything on the page comes from Allentownpa.gov and not a book or books about the fire department. It needs those things in order to meet the notability criteria.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 13:58, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Such work is not done by deletion. Please see WP:NOTCLEANUP, WP:NOEFFORT and sofixit. Andrew D. (talk) 20:07, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Andrew D., What about Tinton5's argument of not meeting the WP:Notability criteria?Monopoly31121993 (talk) 19:42, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Question Andrew D., you provided a number of "sources" but you didn't give enough information for me to know what they are. Are they books? Articles? Web sites? There's no way to verify them based on title alone. Thanks. LaMona (talk) 02:51, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
 * They are books. A search engine such as Google will readily provide more information about these titles and there is a Google Books search link in the AFD template above.  The snippets which Google provides indicate that these sources provide significant coverage of the topic.  For example, "Roberts' 1914 "Anniversary History of Lehigh County" devotes six full pages to the history of the Allentown Fire Department ... Allentown's highly trained well-equipped Fire Department is the result of a process of evolution dating back to the Ascension Day fire on June 1, 1848 ..." (Allentown, Pa. Bicentennial, 1962 pp 105, 108).  So, there are many pages out there covering over 150 years of detailed history.  The claims that the topic is not notable are therefore blatantly false.  The work of putting this information into this article is a matter of ordinary editing per our editing policy.  Deletion would disrupt this work and so is not appropriate. Andrew D. (talk) 07:39, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
 * OK, I have started to look them up on Google books, which is the only access I have. The first title returns two different books (a good example of why titles alone are not sufficient). The first is by Allentown History Book Trust and has one photo, but no info, at least not in the Google search inside. The other  is by Robert Kress, 1990, and there's no snippet display. The second book  returns information on various fire companies (Germantown, etc.) but returns zero on Allentown Fire Company. Of course, I can only do searches and it's not 100% accurate because bad OCR had thwart those. Therefore, since you appear to have access to the books, it would be good to provide 1)full citations and 2) page numbers. I don't think we can rely on snippets, snippets are only... snippets. Thanks. LaMona (talk) 17:07, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The first title is just one book - you seem to have found two different editions. It contains information about a fire station on Walter Street on pages 147-148.  The second book does indeed contain information about the topic.  For example, on page 35 there's a section headed Allentown Fire Department which starts "The Fire Department of Allentown is staffed by 158 salaried fire fighters.  Like several other city bureaus, that of fire protection is under the Mayor...".  These sources both satisfy WP:SIGCOV and so we're good.  The work of actually obtaining all these sources and fleshing out the article from them is not a matter for AFD because AFD is not cleanup.  We are not here to assess the current state of the article or to work upon it but rather to assess its prospects.  As these things go, these prospects seem quite good.  If the work takes some time, that's fine because we do not have a deadline.  If the article is poor in the meantime then that's fine too because Wikipedia is a work-in-progress and our articles are explicitly allowed to be imperfect. Andrew D. (talk) 17:06, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Davewild (talk) 21:13, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Allentown article; fails WP:GNG. —Мандичка YO 😜 08:13, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
 * Merge As said there is very little outside its own city websites. Reduce and merge back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allentown,_Pennsylvania#Fire_Department seems to be proper. Ozzyland (talk) 16:26, 15 May 2015 (UTC) — Ozzyland (talk&#32;• contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 02:10, 20 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Leaning Merge to Allentown, Pennsylvania § Fire Department. North America1000 17:12, 28 May 2015 (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.