Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Harmon, North Dakota


 * 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. Consensus does not lean in the delete direction, issues with content can be fixed through editing. Tone 13:04, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Harmon, North Dakota

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

OK, here we have a weird case, in which part of the US government seems to have misled another part into creating a phantom town. The historical Harmon, as far as I can tell, was nothing more than a siding which may have been used for car storage in the early 1970s and which disappeared shortly thereafter; the earliest topos I could find show a few scattered buildings, but they don't show up in aerials at all and the pattern looks more like a farm than anything else. At any rate, in 1997, log after everything else was gone, a development was started up by the road, and in 2005 the county dug out a lake and a rec area across the road. A few years later, another development of estate homes sprung up north of the lake. So along came the census, and for whatever reason decided some or all of this needed to be recorded as a census designated place, and they called it "Harmon". I couldn't find a name for either of these developments, but it's hard to imagine that either was called just "Harmon"; someone with access to the Bismarck Tribune might be able to look at old real estate sections and find out. Regardless of that, there's just no connection to the old rail spot. We have almost never found notability in a subdivision, and while CDPs are typically taken as notable, it's because usually they do represent the Census's attempt to put boundaries on unincorporated towns and even cities in order to give them a population count, not because it represents some legal recognition; it's the places themselves that are notable. Two subdivisions outside Bismarck are not notable. Mangoe (talk) 01:41, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
 * And while I'm at it: before someone says, "but it is an unincorporated community", well, so is the subdivision I grew up in, and heck, the Episcopal parish I attend is, from someone's perspective, an "incorporated community". It's not good enough to say it's a community. Mangoe (talk) 01:46, 12 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 01:54, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of North Dakota-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 01:54, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete I have looked and looked, and here's what I've got. There is a place called Harmon Lake in the nearby town of Mandan, North Dakota that seems to be very close to the place identified as Harmon, which could be another source of the name or the name of the lake could come from the siding. Furthermore, according to the Morton County Planning & Zoning Commission there is an approved planned subdivision known as Harmon Village in Morton County, approximately where Harmon is located per its coordinates on the wikipedia page. Having said that, I think that it's possible that due to GNIS calling this location Harmon and it coming onto google maps likely caused the subdivision to gain this name. It is important to note there are already houses in this place though, so if they refer to themselves as being from Harmon that + CDP could push it over the line. Also, for what it's worth, there is an article that mentions a plane crash happening near Harmon, but that does not really mean anything and likely is from it being on google maps as Harmon. TartarTorte 02:47, 12 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep This is a bit of an odd situation. I looked through the Bismarck Tribune's archives, and there isn't a whole lot specifically about the community of Harmon. There was a train crash near Harmon in 1951; the contemporary article calls Harmon a village, and a 2006 article about the only victim's son describes it as "scattered rural homes on small acreages near where the little town of Harmon once was". There are also lots of articles about the development of Harmon Lake Recreation Area, to the point where I think it would pass GNG in its own right, but the lake is a different topic and none of those articles described Harmon Lake as a community of any sort. That brings us back to the CDP designation. I'm not sure why the Census Bureau chose to designate Harmon as a CDP specifically - even within North Dakota, I'm pretty sure there are larger and more cohesive communities that still aren't recognized by the census - but since they did, it means there's now a lot of demographic and geographic data about Harmon which can be used to develop an article. I think that the coverage provided by the census, combined with the newspaper evidence that the Census Bureau didn't make up this place out of whole cloth, amounts to notability, but I agree that this one's borderline and rests heavily on the CDP designation. (There's also Articles for deletion/King Arthur Park, Montana as precedent, which seemed to conclude that CDP status counted as legal recognition for a place that was unambiguously a modern subdivision, but since that AfD was two years ago and predates some of the changes in our consensus on the notability of populated places, it only holds so much weight.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 03:21, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
 * As I said above, I've always been unhappy with the idea that CDPs are by nature notable. For one thing, early on there were a bunch of combined CDPs where for whatever reason they took two towns and lumped them into one CDP. Apparently that turned out to be a bad idea, because in every case I've come across they more recently split them up. We've had articles on some of these combined CDPs, but we shouldn't, as the two parts are as a rule notable in themselves, and currently are represented each by its own CDP. Then there are other cases similar to this one, where it isn't clear why one development gets a CDP and another does not. As far as the newspaper references, permit me to direct you to this news item, headlined "Silver Spring man killed in Laurel crash". In fact the location of the accident could be better described as Scaggsville, and the spot is some four miles from the Laurel city limits down MD 216. But apparently since Scaggsville addresses are in a Laurel zip code, the reporter just got it wrong. It's also unclear whether the victim actually was from Silver Spring proper: there are a host of CDPs representing what were once distinct towns until the suburbs all grew together, all of which have "Silver Spring" addresses. That's why I don't put a lot of weight to these passing references used to locate places or events in news stories. If it's actually a story about the town, that's one thing, but the point of a story about an accident is to tell you about the event, not to describe the local geography. Mangoe (talk) 04:49, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 * This is not about a combined or hyphenated CDP, which has been noted elsewhere is of the type that no longer exists and so doesn't really pertain to this discussion. It is not really Wikipedia's place to divine why one place is CDP another not, that is up to Census Bureau. Djflem (talk) 20:54, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   17:49, 19 January 2022 (UTC) Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   09:33, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep A fairly settled precedent and aspect of the gazetteer function of Wikipedia has been to consistently maintain articles on all American CDPS, which makes Wikipedia better and more complete as an encyclopedia, rather than willy-nilly in it's coverage.Djflem (talk) 16:17, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment - Neutral on whether this should be kept or not, but there is no such thing as a "A fairly settled precedent and aspect of the gazetteer function of Wikipedia has been to consistently maintain articles on all American CDPS". There isn't even an agreed "gazetteer function" of Wikipedia. FOARP (talk) 10:28, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. There's enough additional information besides the mere designation in a list. or map.  DGG ( talk ) 18:45, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep I'm of the opinion that being recognized as a CDP counts for legal recognition. ~ EDDY  ( talk / contribs )~ 15:04, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * 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.