Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alpine, Los Angeles County, California


 * 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. Randykitty (talk) 12:57, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Alpine, Los Angeles County, California

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Fails WP:GEOLAND. See also the essay Reliability of GNIS data. Only cited source here is a reference to the Geographic Names Information System. Zzyzx11 (talk) 17:57, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 18:33, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 18:33, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

So, if this is or was part of the Harold settlement then either it should be kept for improvement or merged under some wider title as a subdivision. Deletion is therefore not appropriate. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:27, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The irony here is that the Alpine Springs Mobile Home Park is by definition a populated place. &#9786; Arcadia Publishing to the rescue, again.   tells us outright that Alpine Springs is synonymous with the old settlement that was Harold, Palmdale, California, with an Alpine Station railway station and a Trego post office.  And before Little Rock Creek was dammed, there used to be a Harold/Alpine Reservoir.
 * Uncle G (talk) 20:04, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Not sure I needed a talk page message, I did not object to TheCatalyst31's deprodding last year after reviewing the topos, and Uncle G is correct. It still false to say "Alpine is an unincorporated community" because what was once Alpine or Alpine Springs no longer exists. It was on the 1937 topo and disappeared by 1958. I see no irony about the mobile home park because its existence as a populated place is not related to any notability. My house, my street, and my neighborhood are populated places too. The article should be in the past tense, since a search of newspapers.com and Google Books and News do not show continued use of either Alpine or Harold as still names for this area near Palmdale, and perhaps it should be moved to Harold to cover the history in Gurba. Reywas92Talk 20:51, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Uncle G seems to have established reasonable evidence of the place's history. The relevant part of WP:GEOLAND then seems to be"* Populated places without legal recognition are considered on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the GNG. Examples may include subdivisions, business parks, housing developments, informal regions of a state, unofficial neighborhoods, etc. – any of which could be considered notable on a case-by-case basis, given non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent reliable sources. If a Wikipedia article cannot be developed using known sources, information on the informal place should be included in the more general article on the legally recognized populated place or administrative subdivision that contains it."
 * Not sure I needed a talk page message, I did not object to TheCatalyst31's deprodding last year after reviewing the topos, and Uncle G is correct. It still false to say "Alpine is an unincorporated community" because what was once Alpine or Alpine Springs no longer exists. It was on the 1937 topo and disappeared by 1958. I see no irony about the mobile home park because its existence as a populated place is not related to any notability. My house, my street, and my neighborhood are populated places too. The article should be in the past tense, since a search of newspapers.com and Google Books and News do not show continued use of either Alpine or Harold as still names for this area near Palmdale, and perhaps it should be moved to Harold to cover the history in Gurba. Reywas92Talk 20:51, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Uncle G seems to have established reasonable evidence of the place's history. The relevant part of WP:GEOLAND then seems to be"* Populated places without legal recognition are considered on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the GNG. Examples may include subdivisions, business parks, housing developments, informal regions of a state, unofficial neighborhoods, etc. – any of which could be considered notable on a case-by-case basis, given non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent reliable sources. If a Wikipedia article cannot be developed using known sources, information on the informal place should be included in the more general article on the legally recognized populated place or administrative subdivision that contains it."
 * My general complaint, as per WP:GNIS, is that we have thousands of these U.S. community articles that only have a single source to the unreliable Geographic Names Information System. Some like this one have previously survived either prod or AFD and they still have not been improved. If editors say that they have found sources, why do they not add them to these articles? Or at least redirect them back to the relevant U.S. country article, such as . Otherwise, we have another in a long line of badly sourced, one or two sentence stubs that barely gets any daily pageviews Zzyzx11 (talk) 22:19, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * So what's the correct result here? "Merge" this to Harold? A mobile home park isn't really what we would consider a "legally recognised populated place" under GEOLAND. SportingFlyer  T · C  23:37, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Yet that is what the page says, and the mobile home park is both legally recognized and a populated place. Hence why it's ironic.  Clearly we do not want to follow that idea. Half the battle with these poor GNIS stubs is figuring out what they even are.  A poor reader or editor would follow the map reference and think that we were writing about the trailer park.  Well we know what Alpine is, now; what the name on the map was; and the question is indeed what to do next.  Is there enough to rename and refactor (or even keep the name and refactor, since it was named Alpine) into Harold/Alpine and all of its stuff?  At least this is in the history books, with  having a few things, which  in contrast is not.  I've found Arcadia Publishing good for showing the way, or indeed not showing the way, but it's not the only thing to look at. Let all of us have a look, now that we know (sadly, despite the article at hand) what to actually look for. Uncle G (talk) 06:07, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Merge/Delete - Even with evidence that this place exists/existed, there is no evidence of legal recognition (e.g., incorporation). In that circumstance we need a WP:GNG-pass and we don't have one here - at most there is one instance of WP:SIGCOV. FOARP (talk) 11:39, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It turns out that a second historian has scoured the public records for us. Somewhat bizarrely, it's in an application for a power plant.  Uncle G (talk) 12:27, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
 * delete It shows up on one topo, and that's it; there's no evidence it wasn't just someone's house, or a named point on the rail line. Mangoe (talk) 13:56, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete No evidence of legal recognition.Jackattack1597 (talk) 01:09, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep. I'm calling Heymann on this. It certainly looked delete-worthy as it appeared at time of nomination, but the edits made since then have cleared that up. A couple editors have suggested that the lack of legal recognition requires deletion, but I agree with Andrew Davidson's interpretation of WP:GEOLAND, above. I don't think it's a candidate for merger, because not only can it be developed using known sources, but it has been so developed since the time of its nomination.
 * Nor do I think we are declaring that the mobile home park is notable; rather that the settlement is notable. Yes, it happens now to be the site of a mobile home park, but that fact that has no impact either way on its notability. The place, not the mobile home park, is the subject of the article.
 * It will always be a small article, given its low relative importance, but that's not a strike against keeping it. TJRC (talk) 21:31, 8 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Weak keep The article as it stands is overly reliant on the Gurba source and probably needs further cleanup, and there's a reasonable question as to whether this should be at Alpine or Harold. WP:GNG is marginal, but there's at least an argument it was a recognised place. SportingFlyer  T · C  22:15, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Weak keep. I agree with  that the article relies too much on Gurba.  I wrote a book for Arcadia and although Arcadia is by no means an academic publisher, my book did get a fairly thorough review by an editor.  The unfortunate thing about Arcadia is that footnotes and references are limited in the final publication. It would help the article if someone would go find the original sources for the Gurba references.  This location did have a post office (Trego and Harold), which for me meets the legal recognition requirement of #1 of WP:GEOLAND.  However virtually no one agrees with me on this, so I would not want to see the article remain merely on the basis of my post office opinion.  The coverage of the location is quite trivial, other than passing references in Gurba, I was not able to find much.  Newspapers.com has only trivial mentions of ' "Alpine Station" Kern'.  I agree that a mobile home park does not make this location notable.  If it weren't through the post offices, I would !vote for delete.
 * BTW -, I mildly question these orphan redirects you created. As they are orphans, perhaps they should be deleted?  I don't have strong feelings here, it is the bolding that caught my eye.
 * Alpine Springs - Orphan redirect. GNIS (insert rant about GNIS reliability here \s ) does find an Alpine Springs Park, which is a variant of .  GNIS also finds 8 other springs named Alpine.  As nothing links to this redirect, is it necessary?
 * Trego Post Office - Orphan redirect. Searching GNIS for "Trego" and Feature Category "post office" finds three post offices.  I would think that the post office in one of the places listed at Trego is far more notable.  Perhaps the redirect could be changed to "Trego California Post Office" or removed.
 * Alpine Station - Orphan redirect. Searching GNIS for "Alpine Station" returns 25 hits, none of which are for this locale? What's notable about this Alpine Station?
 * Cxbrx (talk) 16:10, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
 * See Redirect. Redirects at alternative names are cheap and prophylactic, and all of those are alternative names by which this subject, which encompasses the station and the post office as sub-topics, may be reached.  Redirect explains some of this.  Notability does not apply there, as the subject is here.  That's just something that takes the duplicate article builders and people looking for alternative names to here.  And if ever another article turns up that has Alpine Station as a reasonable alternative name for a topic or sub-topic, we grow headnotes and disambiguation pages, just like Harold and Alpine already are.  This is how the encyclopaedia develops. And the good thing about Arcadia is that it does, as I've seen myself from the books, choose bona fide local historians and isn't a self-publishing service for just anyone who rocks up as some other local history books turn out to be.  Norma H. Gurba, museum curator and historian, is much more like an identifiable expert in the field who has done the research and the fact checking for us, poring over the records and newspapers and photo libraries and whatnot, than all of the self-published authors of histories that I've come across (and discounted) researching things over the years.  Also see what I said earlier in this discussion. Uncle G (talk) 10:56, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply and the kind words about Arcadia. About the redirects, I agree that in general they are cheap and can be helpful.  We have a minor disagreement, which is no big deal and I'm happy to move on.  Cxbrx (talk) 13:59, 14 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Weak keep per . Riteboke (talk) 07:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep for the reasons advanced above (i.e., there are at least some people living there according to the sources, there's at least some meaningful coverage of the area, the place has a relatively well documented history, the article is in better shape than at the time of nominating).DocFreeman24 (talk) 06:07, 15 April 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.