Wikipedia talk:Notability (geographic features)/Archive 14

Yet another mass geostub creation binge from a geographic database
It has been brought to my attention that over the summer a bunch of Polish geostub articles have been created using Registr TERYT and other geographical databases. I've looked at the English language front page of the former, and as best I can tell it is exactly the Polish equivalent of GNIS in that its purpose is to give definitive names to features. The other sites referred to appear Polish versions of sites like hometown locator and other such aggregator sites. It's not hard to find WP:GNIS-like problems, especially what look like single properties being represented in our articles as if they were notable towns and villages. Unlike with the "selo" diuscussion above, there does not appear to be some sort of "legal recognition" to fall back on, though I could be wrong. All the ones I've look at so far appear to be the work of one editor, who generated these en masse.

So, what are we going to do? How many of these mass creation efforts are we going to have to deal with? Are we ever going to come up with something that doesn't involve digging through every article so created, with a great deal of pushback from various "every dot is sacred" bystanders unfamiliar with the issue? Mangoe (talk) 04:32, 10 October 2023 (UTC)


 * There's already a really effective and easy solution, which is to just accept that sometimes people create batches of stubs on places, because they're actually fully permitted within current policy and appreciated by many other editors and readers, and when you find verification issues with a fraction of them, it's usually not a big deal and can be straightforwardly dealt with under the current deletion process. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 06:14, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Joe, the GNIS/Abadi-stubs have not in any way been "not a big deal", or even easily dealt with through existing processes. I've regularly had closing admins raising hell about how the number of bundled articles in each AFD in the abadi clean up (which was necessarily hundreds) exceeded the number that their deletion tool could handle. The GNIS process (which is still ongoing despite Carlossuarez46 quitting back in 2021 already) has been even more complex. EDIT: I've also got to say Joe, you gave evidence at the C46 Arbcom case and you seemed to recognise what C46 was doing as a net-negative for the project at that point, so I'm confused and disappointed that you've taken a position that none of the other article-sets we've discussed lately (particularly the Russian railway-stations) could be the result of similar behaviour, and then anyone pointing out the similarities must be part of a "deletionist cabal". It really is ABF. Do you really think that GNIS/GNS/The Iranian Census are the only sources that have these problems? FOARP (talk) 07:53, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes I did participate in the Carlossuarez ArbCom case. I was also the first person to raise the issue of the abadi stubs with him, starting the discussion that escalated to ANI and then ArbCom. So yes of course I recognised that they were a problem. I also recognised that they were an exception – an exception within Carlos' body of work, and certainly an exception within the many hundreds of editors who have worked on geography stubs over the years and have nothing to do with Carlos. That seems to be where we've parted ways. I don't think all geostubs are tarred by that brush, and I don't think "this reminds me of Carlos' abadi stubs" is a valid critique of a body of articles. I'm perfectly happy to consider problems with other batch stub creations on a case-by-case basis, but all the cases that have been brought up lately have evaporated on closer inspection, turning out to be, at best, failures of verifiability in a tiny percentage of what are otherwise perfectly fine creations. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 13:34, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Personally, I found the C46 case to be eye-opening, after initially being sympathetic with it (I !voted keep on the first AFD I dealt with on his articles, but after some discussion with the people working on the GNIS clean-up realised I had been wrong). The Lugnuts case also showed that C46 wasn't the only one.
 * I honestly don't know how anyone doesn't look at the Railway station/kilometre-stone place-names excerpted above and doesn't at least see the risk that the same thing is occurring, particularly when we're talking about a class of place where 20k out of 150k in that class in Russia are uninhabited - or at least acknowledge that the people pointing this out are doing so in good faith and not as part of some "deletionist cabal" - but I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on that. FOARP (talk) 13:50, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't believe I've ever accused you of being part of a cabal. My concern with your approach to this topic is that you've decided that it is a battle to be won, and therefore even if they do arise out of good faith, your (very frequent and very strong) contributions to the debate have long stopped being constructive. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 14:25, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Joe, a group of us spent months (it might have been over a year; I'm really not inclined to work out exactly how long) looking at most of the "unincorporated community" articles in California, and before that we looked through Arizona more than once, and Nevada, and Idaho, and a number of other states. Before all that I looked at most of the Somali villages (I eventually gave up). It is in fact a very big deal, unless one throws in the towel and ceases to care about the accuracy of this work. Yes, from my perspective all the geostubs are suspect until there is some verification performed against them, and really, fact-checking being a thing, it really bothers me now that every time we start on a different area and start finding problems, there is a great deal of pushback over something that should be routinely done to every article in WP. I'm sorry we keep finding problems, but the evidence is that geostubs (and athlete stubs, and so forth) created from databases are a bad idea. Sometimes the articles are accurate if incomplete, and a lot of times they aren't. And it bugs the crap out of me to be given grief for doing the work that article creators should have done beforehand themselves. Mangoe (talk) 06:10, 12 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Mangoe - Yeah, the Polish stubs issue is just another example of the problem. Kotbot created tens of thousands of them before Kotniski quit and resulting articles were... well... what you would expect from bot-created articles. This is the kind of stuff I was talking about when I said earlier that CEE countries were actually the biggest "beneficiaries" since they have easily scrape-able digital databases that are highly granular. The idea that the present standard favours countries in the global south is completely wrong - these countries are a lot less likely to have such easily-scraped directories. I lived in Poland and know a bit of the language (but wouldn't claim to be fluent) and have occasionally reviewed Polish geostubs just to check that we at least weren't hosting articles about petrol stations and super-markets, and can tell you that I have at least not seen any such listings in my brief reviews of these articles. What I do often see are listings of places that are blatantly just neighbourhoods inside other communities (e.g., *Żabiniec, Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship - a glance at the map shows it to be part of Złota,_Pińczów_County).
 * Compared to Iran/GNIS/Russia, at least we don't have the situation of places that blatantly aren't even populated and for which there is no evidence that they were ever a village being present, and a prima-facie case that they weren't a village. FOARP (talk) 08:02, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi :) So, ok, first of, I don't generate them en mass like some kind of bot. I wrote them by hand, and they happen to look simplar because I did indeed copied text and changed data. And why they should stay? Because those are populated places, and with official status of such. All populated places are notable and deserve an article. And that rule has been been established as such for years. I don't understand why somebody always tries to delete articles about small villages, and frankly, with all due respect, you don't have a standing to demand their deletion, as they are with the compliance to Wikipedia notablity standards.Artemis Andromeda (talk) 11:35, 10 October 2023 (UTC)i
 * I think I can anticipate what Mangoe is going to say here which is that "All populated places are notable and deserve an article" is not correct - legal recognition of a populated place is required under WP:GEOLAND, and it creates only a presumption of notability - a presumption that may be rebutted - and even if it passes this we don't necessarily have to have a page per WP:NOPAGE if the article is only going to be a one-sentence stub. Just picking a couple of your recent creations at random using this search:
 * It is not clear to me what notability standard makes Embassy of Kuwait, Warsaw notable, perhaps you could explain your thinking on this? I mean, it's a building in Warsaw, and people live there, and it has some level of legal recognition, but the part of the guide for buildings is WP:NBUILDING, not WP:GEOLAND. Significant coverage in multiple independent secondary sources are needed for this - no?
 * Picking another at random, I see Mokradła, West Pomeranian Voivodeship. Clicking on its location I see empty fields. The sources appear to be www.polskawliczbach.pl, which appears to be an algorithm-driven website, and a link to a Polish law on place-names that is at least 1500 pages long. Page 1309 lists three entries named Mokradła with no details about any of them other than there existence as places. One of the entries is listed against Swiezno and says "Osada", which translates alternatively as "Settlement"/"Hamlet"/"Colony" or "Plantation" according to the dictionary. I don't see any actual confirmation in these sources that this is or ever really was a real populated place. Again, I don't know everything, but perhaps you could explain?
 * Again, just another one picked at random, I am not cherry-picking these, but Gładysz, Gmina Choszczno has a location that points to the location of a branch of the state archives in Biała Góra on the Baltic coast. It is not clear to me what this is supposed to be. The sourcing is www.polskawliczbach.pl, which does not appear to be a reliable source, and an official list of Polish postal addresses - it hardly needs to be explained that postal addresses can be given to places that are not inhabited and do not have any real legal recognition. The link is anyway 404 so I can't check what it says.
 * Again, I've got to emphasise here that all I did was pick three articles at random, and every one of them is highly dubious in terms of notability, at least based on the sourcing on the page. It also appears that by spending ~30 minutes of my own time to run down the sourcing and locations of the three articles above, I spent more time just doing this brief check than the creator did creating the articles. FOARP (talk) 13:13, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * That is not an accurate understanding of our notability standards, but if thats genuinely what you think then this does appear to be an honest mistake and not in any way malicious or purposefully disruptive. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 16:38, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Per WP:ONUS, move to draft space/redirect, and require the creator get consensus for their creation. BilledMammal (talk) 12:24, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I was going to say "no, this is an over-reaction", but then I did the check above and now I'm very much more sympathetic to this idea. Really, though, this is an WP:ANI issue and I'm not sure we can do anything here. I can see people already tried to raise these issues with the editor in question on their talk page. FOARP (talk) 13:17, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * These are sourced article creations. How on earth does WP:ONUS apply here? –&#8239;Joe (talk) 13:35, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * The three linked above? One (Gładysz) essentially has no reliable source, Mokradła is sourced to a law on place names that literally just provides a place-name without any indication it was ever inhabited, Embassy of Kuwait, Warsaw is sourced for WP:V at least but there's no indication of WP:N. FOARP (talk) 13:42, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Here is the full text of WP:ONUS, part of the verifiability policy:
 * While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article. Such information should be omitted or presented instead in a different article. The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content.
 * I remain confused about how any of this applies to this situation. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 14:28, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I think the intended link is WP:BURDEN. EDIT: and apparently WP:ONUS basically used to go to WP:BURDEN which is why I've seen so many more veteran editors using it to mean this. FOARP (talk) 15:02, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I support mass-draftifying these. Really, creation of any articles, at any pace, based solely on statistical databases should just be prohibited. It only serves to pad article creation stats at this point. JoelleJay (talk) 18:57, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

After looking last night at an article that popped up on my Google feed, I looked up the resultant page of what was originally described as the village of Little Henny, in reality a hamlet these days, to find a stub that didn't meet GEOLAND Legally recognised place nor GNG. I have worked on it to bring it up to scratch, but I decided to look at the Category:Hamlets in Essex. First on the list Abbess End, a place I know as I have seen the road sign, but the page is based on a map, while the other two refs don't even mention Abbess End! I have put on the talk page a plan to move what information there is to Abbess Roding, to see if there is any objections. However looking at the next few in A I find most of these are just again based on an A-Z of Essex with no other references! So how many other pages are there out there that are this bad!Davidstewartharvey (talk) 14:49, 10 October 2023 (UTC)


 * But they're on the Ordnance Survey which means they're legally recognised.
 * No need to blacklist the A-Z series as it is already excluded form sustaining notability as just being a map with an index. FOARP (talk) 15:26, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Some of the UK stubs were based on the Ordnance Survey gazetteer; a few were already deleted. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Peter_James/sandbox&oldid=1180270083 is a list of articles created by Epbr123 (the editor who created the Abbess End stub) on 13 August 2007 or later, probably about a place in the UK, with stub class and a size below 1,000 bytes. Peter James (talk) 15:53, 15 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Proposal - At the very least the places listed as "part of [village name]" (część wsi [etc.]) in column 2 identifying the type (Rodzaj) of place in this 1500-page law on Polish place names issued in 2015 should not be getting a GEOLAND presumption of notability. Adobe counts 36,263 such entries. These appear to be universally just buildings/features within villages, and are not independent villages or hamlets. I'm not saying we need to codify this into GEOLAND explcitly, just that it seems evident that these at least are just not actual settlements (unless evidence can be found showing otherwise) even if Kotbot auto-generated articles based on them. FOARP (talk) 20:46, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * And having looked into this in more detail, the classification "settlement" (osada) shouldn't be translated as "hamlet" since the closer term under Polish law for that is przysiółek which is a separate classification. Additionally, both from the letter of the law and from reviewing a number of these, it is apparent that osada are not necessarily inhabited communities, but can be individual farms/forestry offices, and also can be part of a village. FOARP (talk) 17:26, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Just to add to this - many of the articles listed as osada are just forestry offices and former state farms, with no secondary sources available. FOARP (talk) 18:31, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
 * support— at least delete all the kotbot-generated articles Just from the "small" sample of the latter which have shown up so far, it is a waste of everyone's time to have to sort through these. Once again we have a source which is not reliable for the purpose to which it is being put, used to create a lot of articles which are all suspect because the articles themselves have no content which demonstrates that they are valid, which now have to have a bunch of people have to review them rather than the one person creating an article writing something which is in itself enough evidence of accuracy and notability, thus obviating a lot of work which is inevitably carried on against a bunch of "every dot is sacred" pushback. Delete the lot and if anyone reviews the material and finds some that are actualy real notable places, they can write them from scratch. Mangoe (talk) 21:24, 14 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Most of the places smaller than villages should be redirected; there is usually a list in the gmina article; any that are part of a village can be redirected to the village and mentioned there. If the names are not verifiable then delete. Peter James (talk) 15:53, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Now we're getting somewhere. However, we are talking about a very large number of articles (30-40,000 or more potentially) - I think it would take a bot to undo this bot. We'd need to:
 * 1) Scan for locations name as osada and "parts" in the Polish register of place-names.
 * 2) Identify the Gmina these were located in.
 * 3) Scan Wikipedia for articles created by Kotbot/Kotniski with the same title that has not been improved significantly since creation.
 * 4) Redirect these articles to the Gmina, but not the villages with the same name as the Osada/"part". FOARP (talk) 19:21, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I had assumed osada meant somewhere typically smaller and less notable than a village, but that isn't always the case. I looked for statistics for places in Template:Gmina Świerzno, and with two exceptions - Mokradła, West Pomeranian Voivodeship (currently at AFD and probably only the site of a farm) and Grębice (in the village of Kaleń) - all have a population recorded. Stuchowo, an osada, is the second largest in the district with 647 (Świerzno is the largest with 690), the Polish Wikipedia says it's a village, and it looks more like a village than many places that officially are. There are also some villages for which no statistics are available; one is Głogowiec, which is included in the area of Pietrachy village council. Peter James (talk) 20:51, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Kotbot articles
We've discussed this above but probably a separate discussion down here would help.

Kotbot, a bot operated by Kotniski, created perhaps ~50,000 articles in the period 2008-2010. As far as I can see these were all stub articles about locations in central and eastern Europe (CEE) - a request to run it to automatically generate articles from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was turned down. I think it unquestionable that many of these were about notable topics. I think it equally unquestionable that many were not.

A representative article, selected at random (and I should stress not looked at by me until I started writing this very sentence) is Kraszyn. This is not selected as a particularly good or bad article, just one that is representative of the whole. No reference is provided in the article that would, without consulting other sources, actually allow the user to confirm the existence of this place. Only a link (an essentially broken link the database has moved) to the TERYT database is provided, without the key information that would allow the user to search that database (the SIMC number). The only supported facts provided in the article are that this is a village in Gmina Zadzim. A location is provided, but the location is potentially wrong (though probably not by much) since it appears to be one possibly located in the neighbouring village of Górki Zadzimskie.

I don't think I am being unfair in saying that such a bot would not be approved now. Were such an article at RFA, it would likely not be passed. We can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the GEOLAND standard is correct, but at least for Kraszyn, it would be better that at least the information allowing the user to confirm that it meets that standard exists were in the article. And this is one of the articles that would likely at least pass that standard, if not necessarily WP:NOPAGE or WP:IINFO. Fixing Kraszyn is fairly simple - you could probably get at least a reasonable stub based on the PL Wiki article. Fixing 50,000 Kraszyns much harder.

As far as I can see these were created automatically from data on PL Wiki, with the link to the TERYT database being added to every article, either when it was created (like Kraszyn) or later. At no point did any human being actually confirm these articles were actually supported by TERYT - probably the overwhelming majority are, but there are enough that aren't for it to be clear that TERYT wasn't checked.

Going over Kotbot's creations in detail I have found repeated entries for things that palpably aren't the villages/settlements they are presented as being in the article. These include things that are, on the face of them, former state farms, forestry-offices, and individual farms and houses. They also include erroneous articles about places that don't exist. Many of these were found simply by looking at the place names displayed on Google Maps, where a place-name could be found in empty forest or fields - and this worked because Google Maps appears at some point to have scraped its data from Wikipedia and thus our errors have metastasised onto the wider internet to create places that don't exist on a whole range of online services. I think we have a responsibility to clean this up.

These need to be dealt with, either by deletion or being redirected in some way. @Peter James above suggests redirecting non-village articles to the local county and deleting the ones whose names can't be confirmed. This is not a bad suggestion, though I can also see the reason in @Mangoe's "gordian knot" solution.

I think it blatantly obvious this needs to be done by bot and am open to suggestions as to how to do that. @BilledMammal - you have some experience with doing searches, can you suggest anything? @Hog Farm - I know you've worked on something similar in the past? FOARP (talk) 08:39, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm extremely leery of using a bot to clean up a bot, perhaps a suitable cadre of editors could be recruited at WikiProject Poland to help? I would love to help but as a non-Polish speaker I am effectively useless at this and couldn't in good faith determine whether a topic was notable. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 14:31, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I don’t know if any wiki project in existence could handle a 50k-article clean-up. FOARP (talk) 14:43, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * A thousand articles a year and we'l be done in fifty years, five thousand a year and done in ten, or ten thousand a year and done in five, very manageable. No deadline on cleanup, we pretty literally have forever. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 14:50, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Unless and until the good people of Ktery finally have enough of Google Maps and Wikipedia randomly dividing their town into three parts (Ktery A, Ktery B, and Ktery SK) for no reason whatsover, leading no doubt to occasional confusion amongst taxi and delivery drivers. FOARP (talk) 15:38, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I know you're being funny but I think that is actually more or less the answer... Increased participation from English speaking Polish editors will be the primary thing which cleans up this mess (both in terms of removing or redirecting stubs and in terms of expanding them). IMO such increasing global participation is more or less inevitable. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:43, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Ktery A is Ktery, Ktery B is Nowe Ktery (also a village). I don't know what Ktery SK is, and the Polish article was deleted as it could not be verified. Peter James (talk) 17:32, 16 October 2023 (UTC) Ktery SK is probably Ktery Majątek which has its own boundary but seems to be part of Ktery - the only other "SK" place is Łęki Kościelne SK which seems to be Łęki Majątek although the SIMC IDs for these (named as Ktery and Łęki) have been deleted so it's unclear what they are. Peter James (talk) 18:35, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm with you in spirit, this would further reinforce the sentiment on geostubs, particularly mass created ones. But perhaps we should concentrate on strengthening against mass creation of stubs even by humans to keep this from happening again.  I don't think getting a mass deletion done on these would be doable, doubly so since it could be argued that these meet this SNG, as do the 1.5 million yet-to-be-created stubs on villages in India and China. North8000 (talk) 15:09, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't think anything is going to move on that this side of the new year. I don't think deletion of the lot is going to work, but if it's redirection then it's got to be at least partly automated - too big a task to do by hand. FOARP (talk) 15:25, 16 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Just as a further note here, there appear to be at least some of these Kotbot articles cited to TERYT that don't actually have TERYT listings. Hard to say how many, but certainly in the hundreds. It doesn't appear that there were any checks that these places were actually included on TERYT when these articles were created. FOARP (talk) 09:14, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Parks
Does parks and recreation areas come under GEOLAND? It doesn't seem to mention much here how a park can pass GEOLAND. Govvy (talk) 10:09, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I think the only aspect of GEOLAND that would apply is WP:GEOFEAT - although I suspect any park that meets GEOFEAT will easily meet GNG. They might come under WP:GEONATURAL, but I would interpret them as man-made features, not natural ones. BilledMammal (talk) 10:30, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I would just expect there to be multiple substantive independent sources, excluding any generic homepage by the local parks agency and excluding routine local news briefs. There are so many small, local parks that are not notable just because they're public spaces. Reywas92Talk 15:43, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Yet another mass creation problem
We are now seeing a bunch of articles at AfD of Sri Lankan villages which may have been entered from the government statistical site. At any rate, that is the only citation, and it is a link to the whole site, so finding the supposedly cited data is already a major chore.

Are we ever going to do anything about these? Mangoe (talk) 13:37, 1 November 2023 (UTC)


 * According to this SNG this and another 3,000,000 villages that don't have articles are wp:notable. But I think that it's been shown that the crowd doesn't want a strict GNG to apply, so as to preclude an editor building a real article on one of them when they don't have GNG sources.  So I think that the solution is to have a policy or guideline against mass creation of stubs. While one could argue that that is a wiki-wide job, it is really most applicable to NGeo because it is the "loosest" SNG. Maybe we should create a geo-speciic one here. The main tenets would be:


 * IF you are relying on this SNG for notability, you need to create real articles, not stubs. Multiple sources and several sentences of text including some info that didn't come from database entries. This applies (only) to new articles.


 * So technically, this is merely a requirement to use the Geo SNG


 * North8000 (talk) 14:04, 1 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Mangoe - These are I think mostly the articles Dr. Blofeld/Ser Amantio di Nicolao churned 12+ years ago, probably based on GNS data (which is unreliable). I don't think they even actually used Sri Lankan data to do this, because the names are often wrong and antiquated - it was just assumed that the Sri Lankan statistics database would have something on the article-subject because "of course these are villages!". They aren't new but they are a big problem because the articles are basically not supported by any reference, and GNS has a lot of bad location-names in it because it used old military maps that in the case of Sri Lanka were likely poorly-transcribed colonial-era maps. I would support deleting all of the unimproved articles citing no other source than a general hand-wave at the Sri Lankan statistics authority where no data about them can be found. This is especially because the location data is also unreliable (in every instance it appears to be to a location that is not the place named in the article) and is unsourced meaning there is nothing that is verifiable in these articles.
 * You can see the articles created by Ser Amantio di Nicolao on 18 January 2011 here. As you can see by scrolling down, the run of articles ran straight from Sri Lanka to Hungary, and the speed of creation makes it very unlikely that data from Sri Lanka was being used - more likely an alphabetical database of names was being used, most likely GNS.
 * For the avoidance of doubt obviously 2011 is a long time ago and I am not attaching any particular amount of blame to the creators of these articles. However, the articles they created clearly do not pass GEOLAND as created, and most of them cannot be improved due to lack of verification that would allow anyone to even understand what the real topic of the article is.
 * And yes, this does show why GEOLAND has acted as a loop-hole for effectively spamming Wikipedia with articles about "villages" whose existence as such cannot be confirmed. FOARP (talk) 16:30, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Unordered lists
Does anyone mind if I were to change the unordered lists (i.e. bulleted lists) to ordered lists (i.e. numbered lists) under the "Settlements and administrative regions" and the "Engineered constructs" sections? I feel like this would make referencing the individual lines easier in AfD discussions. — Red-tailed hawk  (nest) 03:10, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

On the notability of places sourced solely from census data
For your edification: older ≠ wiser 15:56, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Rampur, Tundla (census code 125462)
 * Rampur, Tundla (census code 125497)
 * Baghai, Firozabad (census code 125443)
 * Baghai, Firozabad (census code 125495)


 * Census tracts, at that. The creator has been around for almost 6 years, and was just given a barnstar for creating a lot of start-class articles! Donald Albury 22:29, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I have dropped a reminder about the requirements of GEOLAND on the creator's talk page. Donald Albury 22:41, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

If it is populated and generally recognized as a place (not some abstract entity like an irrigation district) this guideline mostly gives it a green light regardless of db type sourcing. This is an inherent problem with this guideline as it mostly green-lights about 2,000,000 yet-to-be-created village stubs. We should probably tweak this. North8000 (talk) 23:25, 22 November 2023 (UTC)


 * But, GEOLAND specifically says that a census tract is not recognized as a place and thus, not presumed to be notable. Donald Albury 00:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Rampur, Tundla (census code 125462) is listed as a village in the census, so the prohibition against census tracts is presumably not applicable. Whether this village is recognized by any government, who knows? — hike395 (talk) 01:23, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
 * "this guideline mostly gives it a green light regardless of db type sourcing" I'm sorry but maybe I'm missing something, this guideline doesn't appear to give any green light. It doesn't appear to modify which sources count towards notability at all. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 04:01, 26 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Some comments on this:
 * GEOLAND is broken. That's been known for a very long time. The article-sets that we have already are problematic, the ones coming down the pipeline will be worse.
 * If people are going to write articles based on super-long documents, they need to give page numbers to show that they did actually check the source. Asking readers to check PDFs that are hundreds or thousands of pages long is asking too much. FOARP (talk) 23:25, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Do you think we should emphasize that census data is not evidence of legal recognition? Or is it? (as you say, the guideline is not fit for purpose). — hike395 (talk) 23:49, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
 * @Hike395 I think the RFC that was raised only a couple of months ago show the mixed feelings about the SNG. GEOLAND is broke, as there is only such a thing as a "legally recognised place" in the USA. How To fix it? Think that is impossible without the whole community actually acknowledging that it is. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 08:43, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * @Hike395 - I think "legal recognition" was always just a wrong turn. Editors are not lawyers. Especially they are not Indian public law lawyers (or, to take another recent case, North Carolina constitutional lawyers from the 19th century). Even speaking as a lawyer (but not specialising in anything like the relevant area) I have no insight at all into what exactly Iranian law says about the status of any specific community. But the GEOLAND requires us to know what forms of "legal recognition" a place has - something even the average inhabitant of that country won't know.
 * Just as much to the point, law in this area varies wildly between countries so we end up with hyper-granular coverage of what are essentially individual houses in some countries, and broad-brush coverage in others. I actually don't object to articles about Indian communities of several hundred people nearly as much as I object to Russian "villages" of 2 people, which in reality are railway stations in the middle of nowhere and for which we have no evidence have ever been anything else. With the Indian communities it is credible that there's some more coverage out there, for a place of 2 people this just isn't likely at all.
 * Finally we are effectively breaking NPOV by predicating our coverage of a country not on any objective criteria, but on what the local authorities in that country have decided should have a particular status. FOARP (talk) 09:58, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * How does GEOLAND require it? I just double checked and it doesn't appear to. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:32, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Require what? Obviously knowing what "legal recognised" is for a particular country means knowing what the law in that country says. FOARP (talk) 12:06, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, though it would have been completely obvious what was being referred to: "But the GEOLAND requires us to know what forms of "legal recognition" a place has - something even the average inhabitant of that country won't know." Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:10, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

We need to formulate a fix to this SNG in a way that would pass and not be a radical change from what is currently widely in articles. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:57, 25 November 2023 (UTC)


 * The issue with "legally recognized" was that it was a backhanded way of saying "incorporated", that is, established in law. Instead, people keep trying to push it as meaning "has an entry in some governmental source", which really isn't the same thing. My personal stance is that just having a entry in a census database isn't good enough: at the very least I want a location, and even then it's reasonable to argue that such places can be listed in a table, and don't need to be padded out into an article by slapping on an infobox.


 * I'm beginning to think that the whole notion of notability guidelines has gone off the rails. they've turned into a way to protect articles on things that will never satisfy GNG when they are mass-created from listings. Mangoe (talk) 16:05, 25 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Exactly this. I had always understood "legally recognized" as being an entity that has legal standing in a court of law (it can be a party to lawsuits). Unfortunately, this is based on US-centric legal distinctions (or at least may not accurately represent situation in large portions of the world). older ≠ wiser 16:16, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Precisely. This concept of "incorporated" is entirely US-centric. All countries work differently. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:32, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I've got to say I get particularly frustrated when people say that a potential GNG or at least a coverage-based notability standard for inhabited places is "anglocentric". The present standard isn't even "anglocentric", it's specific to a single country: the United States. It definitely was not written for the countries of CEE. FOARP (talk) 12:04, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, place them in a list or table. If sources sufficient to meet GNG are found, then a stand-alone article can be created. We shouldn't be creating stub articles with inadequate sourcing on the assumption that sources exist "out there". Donald Albury 18:23, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe an easy way to ease into this and solve the problem is to make articles on regions which have towns, settlements as sections, or table entries.  They would still need sourcing to be in the article but not GNG sourcing.  This would also allow a graceful way to handle geostubs via moving the info leaving a redirect. These could start out as being for largerish areas (like provinces) and then get divided later if needed. North8000 (talk) 18:49, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * To combat the issue of one user making one-line stubs of any named locality in the Prairie Provinces, this was what was done in Alberta -> Big Lakes County. List approach used instead of a table. Redirects were then created for all localities to this article heading. Because I created the redirects I was able to see on my watchlist when someone tried to created an article on them. My concern at the time wasn’t GEOLAND but more so unreferenced one or more lines of garbage, often using incorrect assumptions like that these places were hamlets when they were not. Hwy43 (talk) 20:16, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Thats a behavioral issue not an issue with policy or guideline, if an editor is being disruptive then bring it up with them and if they don't stop bring it to ANI. WP:COMPETENCE after all. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:34, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I did something similar to what User:Hwy43 points to in Historic communities of Alachua County. I didn't create redirects to places on the list, but I have placed anchors on some of the entries to allow linking in to the small bit of content that is in the list. Donald Albury 02:34, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Might be a good idea to promote this. The folks who like to make a lot of geostubs might switch over to creating such articles for all of the states and provinces. And then we have less of a potential issue for the 2,000,000 settlements which meet the SNG requirement but don't yet have a separate article. North8000 (talk) 15:29, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Why can't we just get rid of those folks? Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:34, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The vast majority won't have the sort of coverage we would need for the stand-alone list to be notable... Making a list of non-notable things isn't a solution if the list itself isn't notable. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:36, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * If the list is the article about the containing entity, and that entity meets GNG, then there is no problem. The question then is whether such a list in a subarticle would fail GNG because it is a seperate list article rather than a section in an article. If it is determined that Historic communities of Alachua County should not exist because it does not meet the criteria of GNG, the list could be merged into the Alachua County, Florida article. By all means, though, let us discuss how GNG applies to list articles. Donald Albury 17:50, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I was thinking more of something with substantive entries (such as a section or substantial table entry) for each item rather than a list article. On a different note, I doubt that such an article would get deleted for notability. Or maybe we could explicitly cover it here. It's hard to imagine that this SNG greenlights each of the 1,500,000 future articles on cities and settlements in China and India, but not an article on the cities and settlements of the Hunan province of China. North8000 (talk) 17:36, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe something like: "Articles collectively on cities and settlements within one of top two levels of the primary administrative divisions of a country are presumed to be notable." North8000 (talk) 17:52, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * We've been over the idea of a level-based notability and it's never found consensus and basically just repeats the problems of the legal-recognition standard (i.e., you need to understand the legal statuses of communities in every country in the world). FOARP (talk) 08:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
 * If the list is in the article about the containing entity then it is not a stand-alone list. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:12, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

List articles (and similar) do need a lot of clarification. What makes it difficult is that it is a topic that is completely scattered amongst several policies and guidelines, and none of them really handles it.<b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 17:40, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I could try a test example, a province in China. Going in it would be "eyes wide open" regarding these challenges. Do you think I should try starting one? <b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 15:44, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It straddles the fence between a "list article" which only has entries and an article which briefly covers each entry (in a table line or a section). But I think that Wikipedia could really use that possibility
 * There are a mix of entries.  Some rightly already have a  separate  article.    Some have content for the entry, some don't.
 * If it really got built out, it would get too big and need to be split. A province in china might have ballpark 50,000 villages/settlements.


 * I think what you are talking about is quite different from something like List of township-level divisions of Hebei. That type of list currently exists for some administrative divisions of China. I think what you are proposing sounds much like what I did at Historic communities of Alachua County. That is a list of 47 items of two to six sentences each (plus a couple of pointers to an alternate name for a place). Some of the items link to a stand-alone article. For places that do not meet GNG, the item includes what can be verified from reliable sources. The trick will be choosing the administrative level in each case that will produce a list of reasonable length. Donald Albury 23:10, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, I agree. But I think that one difference between the historic communities item and my idea is that your historic communities article is a more or less complete list whereas I'm thinking about something which typically would have only have a tiny fraction of it's stated scope. Basically to handle this case:  An editor is considering making an article on one of the  approx 1,000,000 villages in China that don't currently have an article. They have a few factoids on it, maybe a thumbnail-suitable picture.  Likely to become a permastub. It complies with GEOLAND. The article I'm think of would be good place for them to put that entry into a row in a table or as a section. <b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 15:03, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It might work. I suspect that some editors get a kick out of starting thousands of new articles. Even if you create a nice framework for someone to place their information, I predict that there'll still be editors who make geo-permastubs. — hike395 (talk) 17:14, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I phrased it that way to clarify the difference. It could also be a place for others to merge articles into. <b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 17:53, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Do my articles pass notability guidelines?
I have created numerous articles for Sri Lankan villages using a single source: an 1896 gazetter written by a local British judge:


 * Alanduwaka
 * Alutgama (7°42'N 80°35'E)
 * Alutgama (7°22'N 80°38'E)
 * Alutgama (7°31'N 80°35'E)
 * Alupotawela
 * Alkemada
 * Alawattegama
 * Alayaya
 * Alanduwaka
 * Alakolamada

The above are just a few. (Note that I actually didn't create the above articles, only revamped a bunch of old unsourced village stubs created in 2011 using this source, but I plan to nonetheless create new articles using the same template for the ones without articles.)

Do these articles pass notability guidelines with the one 1896 source? The opening of the book states "I confess to innumerable errors. Those who use the book will, I hope, pardon these errors on finding much that is accurate and interesting."

So I do not know how to go about this. What I have done and can do is state "according to such and such gazetter..." before any historical facts about each village. I don't think we need to assume the quote from the book applies to the population data, since this is obviously just taken from officially published government data. But if this is a real issue I can remove this demographic info if you deem this source unreliable.

I don't want to go ahead and create 300 of these articles only for them to be AFD'd. I would like an opinion on this. Thanks! — <b style="border:1px solid black"> <b style="color:black">Melo</b><b style="color:#f2b611">fors</b> </b>  TC</b> 09:45, 11 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your work and for posting the question.   I think that it reflects recognition that the there are millions of settlements that could pass wp:ngeo where I don't think that most wikipedians would figure  is appropriate for our encyclopedia  to have millions of new articles on.   May I suggest creating a broader article on "municipalities of xxxx" and put the content of those potential article into substantial table entries or article sections which have basic info on them including general info and a small image) While current policy/guidelines do not give guidance towards this, IMO it is a route to handle these types of entries with the objective of being an encyclopedia of articles. . Sincerely, <b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 00:33, 12 December 2023 (UTC)


 * No. I would vote delete if I saw any of these come through AfD. Yilloslime (talk) 20:28, 12 December 2023 (UTC)


 * In the case of the articles you've listed above, they seem to be expansions of articles created by that were based off what appears to be the Sri Lankan Census. Those are fine; they meet the threshold of legal recognition and they're populated, so they easily meet the first bullet in WP:GEOLAND. Continuing to expand those sorts of articles makes plenty of sense and improves the encyclopedia.
 * As for creating new articles that are solely based on the old work, I would advise trying to pair them up with at least some other source before making a standalone article. There's a good chance (if the village is still around) that the transcription/name may have changed in the past 125 years, and we want to try to avoid duplicate articles on the exact same subject. If the sole source is the colonial-era Gazetteer, it's not clear to me that the threshold of "legal recognition" would apply; the work appears to be a description of remote villages more than a document with legal authority, and you would need to meet GNG absent evidence of legal recognition even though it's a populated place. In that case, it may be better to add the villages with attribution to a relevant list article/article on a broader geographical area as North8000 has suggested above. If you can find other sources that talk about a particular village (such as censuses or other similar works), then we may well have a case for a standalone article while reducing the likelihood of accidentally duplicating an existing article. — Red-tailed hawk  (nest) 20:55, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry but they dont meet WP:GEOLAND. In the US, census data states if the settlement is recorded it has legal recognition. However as stated in the last RFC this rule is not the same for all census across the world. In fact looking at the Sri Lanka census rules it looks like the only legal recognition is for the district, not the settlement. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:30, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

We need people to expand the existing stubs rather than create more!♦ Dr. Blofeld  09:48, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Please don't use the 1896 gazetter at all, it is not a reliable source. Almost nothing of that age is. Horse Eye&#39;s Back (talk) 15:59, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
 * How do you know which Alutgama is which? FOARP (talk) 13:33, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Notability of latitude / longitude
There's a discussion at WP:VPP which may be of interest. RoySmith (talk) 14:52, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

And here we go again: another huge DB dump
I have discovered in looking at an AFD for a spot in Myanmar that essentially all the populated place articles for that country are sourced to GMaps, Bing maps, and/or Maplandia. They are all just dots on maps, not even as good as GNS (which itself is bad, particularly in a country like this one) because we have no idea at all where the names next to the dots are coming from. At least they are in Latin characters, but picking one at random, I couldn't find it at the supposed (somewhat vague) location on GMaps.

Whatinthehell are we going to do about these? Nobody should have to take these hundreds if not a few thousand articles through AfD; it's not even clear that there's anything we could rigorously verify these against, and even simply checking them against the maps is a massive effort. Can someone please tell me why we shouldn't just delete the lot and start over with something more like a reliable listing (e.g. a census)? Mangoe (talk) 00:14, 18 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Hi @Mangoe, I finally got the time to go through all the villages in Sagaing Region that were using coordinates to disambiguate them better. For the most part, the villages did tend to exist. There were quite a few villages with the same name that didn't have wiki articles. The database that Burmese language Wikipedia uses is the Mimu Place Code Database (rather than Google maps, which is unreliable wrt. Burma). I've found that most of this DB dump is pretty much limited to Homalin Township and Banmauk Township for whatever reason and does not match the place code database.
 * Not sure what my point is here, but I figured you may be interested in an update.  EmeraldRange  (talk/contribs) 19:47, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, all of them must be merged into the upper-level subdivisions, if there is no info except their mere existence. - Altenmann >talk 20:16, 18 March 2024 (UTC)