Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Winter 1894-95 in the British Isles


 * 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. --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 17:47, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Winter 1894-95 in the British Isles

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Not an encyclopedia article, otherwise there would be tons of articles about weather in particular islands/cities during a particular year. DimaG (talk) 19:42, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 20:19, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Assuming someone can verify this information as accurate, I'd say Keep (unless someone finds a suitable merge target). A weather event of that magnitude should be just as notable as February 2009 Great Britain and Ireland snowfall or Winter of 2009–2010 in the United Kingdom, and no-one's suggesting deleting them. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 20:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep, unambiguously. Needs a rename and could do with improvement, but it's a perfectly legitimate topic for an article. Articles on particularly unusual climactic periods are historically quite useful and certainly of lasting significance; Winter of 1946–1947 in the United Kingdom is an excellent article and a demonstration of what this sort of thing can aspire to. It certainly wouldn't lead to "tons of articles about weather" any more than having biographies of notable people leads to having millions of articles about non-notable people - there's a distinction to be drawn between notable periods and normal ones. Shimgray | talk | 21:01, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've moved it to Winter of 1894-95 in the United Kingdom, for consistency with the other three such articles. Shimgray | talk | 21:08, 29 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep Notable topic, as per the other winter articles in the UK.  Lugnuts  (talk) 05:50, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete WP:V "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—whether readers can check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." You know what sets the other winter articles in the UK apart from this one? The other ones had these things called "sources" that showed that the topic was notable, or that the climactic period was "particularly unusual".  It wasn't just somebody pulling a bunch of numbers out of a hat ("-23.9!" "-21.7!" Ooh, that's cold!!! BRRRRRRR!!!!!!) without telling us where he or she got them.  It wasn't proven by some sepia pictures of a frozen river (Know what that is?  That's what the Thames River looked like in 1895.  I was there.  BRRRRR!!!!)  What a load of garbage.  Mandsford 22:58, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The article is now (at least minimally) cited. Proving the validity of the topic was not particularly difficult; I recommend it to you. Shimgray | talk | 11:46, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep I accept the recommendations to look at the improved article. Shimgray added two key sources, one of which is drawn from the research of a British individual named Martin Booty  and which describes the event in detail (it begins "Exceptionally cold / wintry from 30/12/1894 to 05/03/1895. To horticulturists and ice skaters in East Anglia, it was the winter of the ' twelve week frost '...").   The other, entitled | "Britain's lowest recorded temperatures for each month of the year, 1875-1990" shows that the lowest recorded temperatures in February during that period were in Scotland, with February 8 recording -25 C (-13 F), and -25.6 and -27.2 (-14F and -17F) on February 10 and 11.  Very good work.  It's a shame that the article's original author must have been looking at something, but didn't take the time to tell us what it was.  Sourcing is nothing new, and country preachers have done "chapter and verse" citations for centuries.  Mandsford 15:21, 31 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. The very premise of the nomination is, in my opinion, wrong.  Significant and notable weather events can - and should - have their own articles.  The question is can notability be supported with more than primary sources?  What we have at the moment is statistical evidence that it was cold, but were others talking about it (i.e. did it (or does it) receive significant independent, reliable coverage?  I think it did, although it takes a while to browse news archives to find them.  But here are some I fould quite quickly:  Gray River Argus (NZ), 1895, New York Times (US), 1895, Poverty Bay Herald, 1894 (NZ), which mentions 105 deaths in just 2 days of storms, Hawkes Bay Herald (NZ,) 1895, The Argus (AUS), 1940, which mentions the event 45 years later, and The Argus again, this time in 1895.  These are from Australian, New Zealand and US newspapers - I am sure that British newspapers would have had something to say about it too!  Wikipeterproject (talk) 18:13, 3 August 2010 (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.