Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force

Plan
Per this discussion, there are many stubby Wikipedia articles on California locales that have been created sourced to a GNIS entries. GNIS has errors and may contain locales that are not notable, per WP:NGEO.

The plan for the cleanup is the following. For each county in California:
 * 1) Create a work page as a subpage of this one, using this template
 * 2) Fill in the work page by sorting articles by notability
 * 3) When finished sorting, create a list article (e.g.,  List of unincorporated communities in Modoc County, California), with formatting described here
 * 4) Modify the county navboxes (e.g., Modoc County, California) to refer to the new list article and remove non-notable entries.
 * 5) PROD or merge the non-notable articles.

Members

 * 1) CJK09 (talk) 23:32, 17 April 2020 (UTC) - Gold Country, Sierra Nevada, Bay Area
 * 2)  Titan  Andromeda  03:03, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
 * 3) — hike395 (talk) 01:24, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * 4) – dlthewave ☎ 03:12, 20 April 2020 (UTC) I have access to urham’s Place-Names of California’s Gold Country.
 * 5) Reywas92Talk 05:36, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * 6) Mangoe (talk) 11:02, 22 April 2020 (UTC) I am working on the Nn Place articles first but will switch to by-county once those are done.
 * 7) Glendoremus (talk) 03:45, 31 May 2020 (UTC) Contra Costa
 * 8) Hog Farm Bacon 18:57, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Progress by county
TODO: make county progress map

Resources

 * WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force/Template - Template for starting a county page
 * USPS Report on the evolution of mail delivery: it explains what a fourth-class post office was. At the height of pre-RFD service there were 76,000 of these, and yes, often enough they were just a spot in someone's house.

Books to check against

 * Any Arcadia Publishing book for the locality such as (to take Lake County, California as an example):
 * Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they do point the way. Arcadia (and other local history) books helped sort out  and Escalle, Larkspur, California; helped identify what  actually was; and conversely made the cases stronger against the likes of .  All of these were two-sentence GNIS-only stubs at the time of deletion nomination, all claiming "unincorporated community".
 * Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they do point the way. Arcadia (and other local history) books helped sort out  and Escalle, Larkspur, California; helped identify what  actually was; and conversely made the cases stronger against the likes of .  All of these were two-sentence GNIS-only stubs at the time of deletion nomination, all claiming "unincorporated community".
 * Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they do point the way. Arcadia (and other local history) books helped sort out  and Escalle, Larkspur, California; helped identify what  actually was; and conversely made the cases stronger against the likes of .  All of these were two-sentence GNIS-only stubs at the time of deletion nomination, all claiming "unincorporated community".