Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Linwood, Iowa (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 delete‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. At the moment, consensus here appears against both retention and a redirect. However if information is sourced and added, this can be re-created as a redirect at editors' discretion. Star  Mississippi  20:11, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Linwood, Iowa
AfDs for this article:


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

Converted to a redirect to a township article which does not mention this spot, I've restored it so it can be deleted properly this time. It's the same story as before: we have no information about the spot except it appeared on an old map, which isn't good enough. There is no reason to redirect to the township because the latter's article has nothing to say about the spot, which is, after all, because we don't know anything about it except the location of a name on an old map. We need to stop this lazy solution for making these redirects as they do next to nothing for the reader; we need to just admit that there's not enough information for an article and delete it. Mangoe (talk) 17:01, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Iowa-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 17:45, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 17:45, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I'd rather pages may be redirected and links to them removed. I continue to appreciate your extensive efforts in tackling mass-created place articles, but there's not enough manpower to discuss each one of them. Even if not mentioned in the main article (sometimes perhaps it should be), leaving this record may be appropriate when there's at least some source on it, even if not enough for notability. Reywas92Talk 19:22, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Redirects get AfDs closed because they satisfy the inclusionists, but the problem with these "redirect to the larger area" pages is that they are misleading. We shouldn't try to trap searches for places we cannot tell anything about: in this case, we don't even have evidence good enough to say that Linwood was a real place of any kind, as we've found far too many such dots on maps that were entirely spurious. And while it would be nice to delete these redirects directly, often enough the people in the redirect reviewing side force them to be pushed through AfD again anyway in order to get rid of them. I hate to "waste" time on this too, but if we didn't have these IMO bad AfD outcomes— or I could just stop caring about the matter at all, which is a state I keep getting driven to by the way some of these discussions go— less time would be wasted all around. Mangoe (talk) 20:35, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Redirect, as before. I've added a bit in the Summit Township article. Firsfron of Ronchester  21:53, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete I agree with Mangoe. We already know these post offices are sometimes not located in towns or populated areas. Presence of a post ≠ populated place. Sometimes the post office is just somewhere in the middle of nowhere central to several communities, and provides shelter along the postal route. The claim is that nobody can find any info about the location. I agree with that, and the claim we don't need to redirect this to the township. What's the point in redirecting it anyway?James.folsom (talk) 22:15, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom..."shown on maps in 1905" is not the same thing as "unincorporated community", let alone notability per WP:GEOLAND. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 00:38, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The sad thing is how much that same logic is repeated here in Wikipedia. It's shown on the 1905 map because maps don't get magically updated immediately that post offices close.  Surveys happen at intervals of several years, rather.  And then some poorly researched WWW site turns that persistence of a dot on a map into a "ghost town of Iowa".  Uncle G (talk) 18:13, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Readers looking for the railway station that served the mine of the Linwood Stone & Cement Company, later the Dewey Portland Cement Company, at Linwood, Iowa, would likely be mis-served by a redirect for a barely documented post office in the wrong county. Of the two Linwoods, the railway station and mine is the one that is in the history books, such as William John Petersen's The Story of Iowa: The Progress of an American State (Lewis, 1952).  This should be a redlink until someone writes about the one of the two Linwoods that we have more than 1 sentence ("a discontinued postoffice") about to go on. Uncle G (talk) 02:13, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The previous AFD was closed as redirect in 2021 so why has this been restored? If deletion is desired it could be deleted at RFD.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 17:01, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Because, I suspect, over the past few months RFD has consistently undone such redirects when nominated there and sent them to AFD, to be nominated for deletion there. It's an enormous amount of bureacracy and buck-passing for what are in the main false articles misrepresenting long-extinct post offices as if they were current towns/villages. This post office closed over 120 years ago in 1903 and it has been open farmland all along.  We've been calling it an "unincorporated community" founded in 1905 for 7 of those years.  Welcome to how maddeningly difficult it is to clean up the GNIS mess and the geographic lies that Wikipedia has been telling the world for years. Uncle G (talk) 18:13, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * When a bold merge/redirect occurs and that's contested yes but if there was a previous consensus at least at an AFD then they should be deleted at RFD. There has been some debate about what can be deleted at RFD but everyone seems to agree that article content redirected/merged at AFD can be deleted at RFD.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 18:17, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * And yet it doesn't happen in practice. We cycled through this with a bunch of "unincorporated communities" that were in fact housing estates in California in December, for example.  Even though the will is there, the actual outcomes don't reflect it a significant fraction of the time.  I can understand why the nominator perceives RFD as just a place that sends things back to AFD when push comes to shove.  You can read Mangoe's own words above.  See also  for how much of a struggle it is to even get places that never happened fixed.  This is the nominator's experience.  Uncle G (talk) 19:26, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Leave as redirect:  Surely we have better things to do than decide whether this should be a redirect or not exist; restoring the article just to have an AfD seems unnecessary to me.  Its a plausible search term since it was at least once a post office.  Kudos to Firsfron for adding a bit to the township article; credit also to Mangoe for indeed finding place name articles over time that should not exist.   Also I am no Wikipedia parliamentarian but don't redirects get discussed at Redirects for discussion?; I raise that point of order to also support my inclusionist vendettas. :)--Milowent • hasspoken  14:23, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I think the "plausible search term" argument died about ten versions of Google and Bing search ago, never mind DuckDuckGo. Normal searching will find the thing where it is mentioned; after all, that's what we do to write the articles in the first place, or to find out that the information we have isn't any good. And that is exactly why this has come around: people keep wanting to create redirects so that people will come to read what we have to say about the thing even if we don't have an article, but we don't have anything accurate to say!


 * And as far as discussing redirects, it seems to be a coin toss as to whether RfD punts the discussion to here because the discussion is really about the article the redirect replaced. Mangoe (talk) 17:10, 29 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Comment This is here before us now and it makes no sense to argue over whether it was brought here the right way. What is done is done. Plus, Uncle G made a damn good assessment of why it shouldn't be redirected. It shouldn't just get put back to a redirect because someone thought it was improperly done.James.folsom (talk) 23:43, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete. Sounds like there is a good reason not to retain the redirect, and a good reason why sending this to RfD wouldn't be productive. We have no info beyond that this was named on a map, and it has no actual coverage at the redirect target, so it should be deleted.
 * JoelleJay (talk) 03:58, 1 February 2024 (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.