Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Homelessness services in Snohomish County


 * 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 delete. Spartaz Humbug! 19:21, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Homelessness services in Snohomish County

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This isn't really an article about what its title describes. There's a lot of content here about homelessness in Washington state in general, rather than being specific to Snohomish County at all, and there's a lot of even more general content about the basic phenomenon of homelessness without even being specific to Washington, such as entire sections which define things like "day shelter" and "drop-in center" and "halfway housing" and "rehab program" and "case manager" as generic, universal WP:DICDEFs of terms. And even the content about services, as expected by the title, is very general content about statewide or nationwide services like the Sally Ann and the United Way and the YWCA, not anything specific to Snohomish. Literally the only thing here that's specifically about Snohomish is a couple of statistics. Basically, this is not an encyclopedia article, but a really bad cross between an essay and a how-to guide. Bearcat (talk) 07:40, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete appears to be an essay written for a course. The topic itself isn't notable. Contains a number of references, but nothing that would make the article notable on its own. (Though you may want to give the writer a chance to save a copy if it's for coursework purposes) SportingFlyer (talk) 08:24, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Can you weigh in on whether your position has changed after my revisions? Daask (talk) 16:20, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Washington-related deletion discussions. MT TrainDiscuss 08:32, 21 February 2018 (UTC) \
 * I can't prove it, but it feels like WP:OR or WP:HOWTO to me. I'd stick with delete, but maybe Userify with the creator as it would be perfectly fine information for some other website. SportingFlyer (talk) 19:42, 24 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep - I have made substantial changes and believe I have resolved your concerns. Daask (talk) 18:01, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Sure, you've addressed some of the overreach issues — but I'm still not seeing a reason why this needs its own standalone article. Bearcat (talk) 23:17, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Do we need this article? Would Wikipedia be woefully incomplete without this article? Of course not. However, that isn't the standard we use. WP:GNG asks for significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, and this article has plenty of cited local journalism focused on this topic. The fact that the topic is local rather than larger in scope is insignificant. Daask (talk) 16:18, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * The standard we use also isn't just "local journalism exists on this" — for example, we also have to consider things like whether the topic falls under WP:MILL because more or less the same article could be written about hundreds or thousands of other nearly identical topics in other places. Local journalism also exists on lots of other things that we don't accept as notable, such as every town councillor and school trustee in every town, every fire chief in every town, every police chief in every town, local non-chain restaurants and retail stores, high school athletes who haven't passed WP:NSPORT for anything, unsigned local bands who haven't satisfied WP:NMUSIC, winners of high school poetry contests who haven't passed WP:AUTHOR, and my mother's neighbour who found a pig in her front yard a few years ago. If Snohomish were getting wider attention for doing something unique and innovative about homelessness that was significantly different from the services in place everywhere else, then an article might be warranted — but if all that can really be written is boilerplate content that would be more or less the same for every other county in Washington and/or the entire United States apart from the number of homeless people given in the statistics section, then there's really no point in a dedicated article. Bearcat (talk) 16:29, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for drawing my attention to WP:MILL, which I wasn't familiar with. However, I note that it is only an essay, and such an argument could easily be made against articles like Government of North Carolina. I have continued to make changes to address your concerns. Daask (talk) 19:58, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * State governments aren't MILL. There are only 50 of them nationwide, not thousands upon thousands upon maybe even millions, and there are many distinctive and reliably sourceable things that can be said about each one that make them very different from each other. Bearcat (talk) 22:25, 24 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete- Its just not encyclopedic and borderlines on WP:HOWTO. While it certainly is a great thing that there are resources available and would be useful to a homeless person (assuming they could gain internet access somehow), that's just not the purpose of wikipedia. And I really can't see creating an article like this for every county in every state, it just seems trivial.--Rusf10 (talk) 23:55, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't see any howto content. This article lists services, and may be excessive in this list. However, it describes things like history and funding of these programs, not how to access their services. Daask (talk) 16:18, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * "Where to access services" is pretty darn close to "how to do stuff". But the point is that one could write an article just like this about homelessness services in absolutely every individual county across the entire United States and all of Canada and the United Kingdom and any other country on earth that has counties and homelessness services, and that's just not useful or encyclopedic. There would need to be something unique about homelessness services in Snohomish County, significantly different from homelessness services in King or Walla Walla or or Clallam or Skamania or Okanogan counties or Pima County in Arizona or Erie County in New York, before an article about them was justified and warranted. Bearcat (talk) 16:29, 24 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep and work on it, it is well sourced, if not the best written article that needs a bit of help, not deletion. C. W. Gilmore (talk) 18:13, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete. Bearcat put it very well; there's nothing about this county's homeless services that's different from most other counties in most other states.  The causes are similar, the government, religious, and NGO service providers are similar, and so on.  -- RoySmith (talk) 18:41, 1 March 2018 (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.