Wikipedia talk:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force/Archive 1

Format of county-wide list?
I have a few questions for people interesting in merging non-notable locations into list articles:
 * 1) What should the format of the county-wide list of locations be?
 * 2) Should such a list only include unincorporated communities in a county, or be a complete list of possible communities?
 * 3) If it's a complete list, should we somehow split List of places in California?

Looking forward to hearing opinions/suggestions. Thanks! — hike395 (talk) 01:25, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Every county already has a list on its main page, like El Dorado County, California. These would be expanded with any actual communities that are missing for a complete list. I basically reverted List of places in California to before it was split by letter (and removed the excess columns so the size is more manageable); I don't know how much has been added to or revised on the letter pages since then. A split of that by county would make it manageable to sift through the pages, and it does include incorporated places and some CDPs. However I think the focus should be on (a) cutting the crap that aren't actually communities that need their own articles by deletion or redirection and (b) improving the main county articles. Splitting the huge list by county would be a good place for redirections though. Maybe add additional columns for coordinates and notes or links for when we find something but there's not enough for an article. What are you thinking? Reywas92Talk 01:53, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Use of Durham's "California's Geographic Names" as a source
Looking at the ghost towns in Amador County, so far the only source for any of them is Durham's book, without reference to GNIS. I'm extremely dubious about this. One or two might be written about at some length and with some chance of getting past GNG, but my gut reaction is that most of them ought to be deleted. I don't have this book, and it isn't available on-line that I know of, so I don't know what it is saying about these places. Any thoughts? Mangoe (talk) 04:55, 2 June 2020 (UTC)


 * My library has it but of course they’re closed. apparently knew that it called a place a locale in a recent AFD so perhaps they can help.  Reywas92Talk 07:36, 2 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I own the Kindle eBook edition of Durham’s Place-Names of California’s Gold Country which covers Yosemite National Park, Madera, Mariposa, Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador, El Dorado, Placer, Sierra and Nevada Counties. I'll check those ghost towns. –dlthewave ☎ 12:08, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I put them in as a subsection of the "to be checked" in the Amador County page. Thanks for helping. Mangoe (talk) 12:23, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Aurant, California
I think this one should head to the dust bin. I AFDed it unsuccessfully once. Still think it should be deleted. Calliopejen1 (talk) 01:14, 8 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I've put it up for another discussion. You're right: it's just an obscure rail yard and station. Mangoe (talk) 04:28, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Plumas Junction
I'm having a great deal of trouble with the many spots scraped in from Durham, because (as it turns out) they are a mixed bag of all sorts of issues. Plumas Junction, California is a particular thorn: lots of people refer to it, as if everyone knew where it was, but I cannot find anything that says where it actually was except for two flat assertions that it is the same place as Hallelujah Junction (and another that it was nearby), which I doubt; Durham apparently locates it wrt Cuba, California, which is another problem place: it's supposed to have been a place on the WP line, but GNIS hasn't heard of it and I cannot find a good reference for it either. It was definitely a real place in that it's where the N-C-O Railway met the Sierra Valley & Mohawk Railway, but I cannot find a map of either line that shows enough to help. I've also found the assertion here that Cuba and Plumas Junction were different names for the same place.

If anyone has any other sources for sorting this out, I'd appreciate it. Mangoe (talk) 03:40, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Yet another source of GNIS errors
We've come across two placenames in Marin County which were copied off NOAA nautical charts. Judging from these examples, entries like this should be treated with extreme skepticism. In the first place, I have no idea where the NOAA is getting their inland placenames from, but a lot of them seem to be figments of someone's imagination. The second problem is that the location copying between the charts and GNIS are extremely sketchy. In one of our two examples, they just got it wrong and put the name a few miles away from where the chart showed it; in the other the scale of the chart was too big to allow more than the vaguest location.

Nautical data is well-nigh unto infallible when it comes to navigational aids, especially when taken off the lights lists. Inland, not so much. Mangoe (talk) 19:18, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Missouri
Y'all look busy, but just as a heads up, I've started a similar project at User:Hog Farm/GNIS Cleanup/Missouri. Well over 2000 in Mo., mostly created by a single user. A few are notable, but appears to be a lot of country stores, fourth-class post offices, and a few mines and railroad facilities. Hog Farm Bacon 03:25, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Wrote up plan for Task Force
I wrote up the plan as I understood it from our discussion in April. If I've gotten something incorrect, please feel free to fix. — hike395 (talk) 05:13, 27 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the summary. It matches how I've been approaching it. The one exception is the suggestion to PROD the non-notable articles. I've been submitting them for AfD. PROD would be easier but I'm under the impression that it isn't as reliable an approach to deletion. What's been your experience? Glendoremus (talk) 17:48, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I have little experience in deleting articles. The suggestion for PRODding came from . Perhaps they can answer? My read of WP:MERGE is that we don't need to go to AfD to merge, as long as the merge is listed on the pages. — hike395 (talk) 06:51, 28 September 2020 (UTC)


 * It depends, I've gotten a number successfully deleted with Prod, but there are a number of inclusionists who will just bulk de-prod pages, and admins who aren't familiar with the gnis issues. Carlossuarez has largely not been engaging with any of this so you could certainly try it and see what gets through. Twinkle tools make it pretty easy if you don't have that already. Reywas92Talk 22:48, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

I've got it!
,, , , , I finally got a hold of Durham's California's Geographic Names! It's a massive 1,676-page tome but it proves what we've known all along: the mass-creation of these articles is a massive fraud. Virtually every one of these places is classified as "locality", e.g. "Lakeview Junction [MODOC]: locality, 1 mile south-southeast of downtown Alturas along Southern Pacific Railroad (lat. 41o38'30 N, long. 120o32'05 W; near S line sec. 13, T 42 N, R 12 E). Named on Alturas (1961) 15' quadrangle." Now, what is a locality? Page 1493: "Locality –A place that has past or present cultural associations." There are separate listings for City ("An inhabited place that has a population greater than about 25,000 in an urban setting."), Town ("An inhabited place that has a population of about 500 to 25,000 in an urban setting."), and Village ("An inhabited place that has a compact cluster of buildings and a population less than about 500.). The level of incompetence and negligence it took to mass-produce this many articles with such blatant errors is astonishing. Thanks FOARP for starting a list of articles sourced only to Durham: they all need to go. A random one from that list: Bartons House, California cites page 462 which says: "Strawberry Valley: village...Wescoatt's (1861) map shows a place called Bartons House located 1.5 miles southwest of Strawberry Valley." yet somehow this fool got "Bartons House is a former settlement" out of it. How? What justifies an article for that? And there are hundreds of these. What a massive fraud. Reywas92Talk 20:58, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Good work . Not surprised that Durham seems to have been misunderstood. So many of these California locality articles are suspect even just from the names which very often sound exactly like the name for someone's house, a mine or a geographical feature. How do they get "ghost town" from a location that was almost certainly just some guy's house that was shown on a map at one point and then not later? Agree that the best way to proceed at this point is just WP:TNT every California "Ghost town" stub that is sourced only to Durham, GNIS, or Durham+GNIS and doesn't mention a post-office. Make sure you vote on that thread so the closer knows your view of the listed articles. The presently-inhabited unincorporated communities list is probably also equally riddled with problems but we can see about how to tackle this later. FOARP (talk) 21:36, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. If you're willing to email me scans of random pages, I'm willing to look through the places on the pages and deal with them. Hog Farm Bacon 23:23, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Excellent news ! If the book was a bit cheaper, I'd buy it and get it in to the Internet Archive, but the price is just too high for me.  If need be, I can check out a copy from our local library.  I'll review the list for post offices, though in the absence of non-trivial coverage, they can go.  We should also check Gudde as need be, which I can do.  I think we should try the first batch A-D and see what happens.  I'm sure there will be some editors who are new to these that will need to be brought up to speed.  I think we should focus on the cleanup and avoid rehashing the past other than noting that they were all created by a single user a long time ago.  Cxbrx (talk) 00:43, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Funnily enough my public library has it but because it's only one of two copies in the state, it's for in-library use only, but even with it closed they won't let me access it. This is the second copy, from the university library, which I had a friend check out for me now that they're doing contactless pick-up. Hog Farm, since it's so big and pages are also filled with streams, springs, passes, peaks, lakes, etc. it won't be efficient to just send random pages but I can still check on (or take a picture of) anything. Basically everything is along the same lines as my recent AFD comments: entries match the articles' location and naming descriptions, except they're described as either "place" or "locality" without further information. Yeah I think I've made my point about the past enough so I should stop harping...time to figure out how to bundle. Reywas92Talk 00:59, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * - agree that we should wait and see how the A-D AFD goes. If they are deleted then let's extend that through the other California "ghost towns" E-Z. I'll admit there is a tendency (and I've been guilty of this) of saying "look, there's a GNIS listing, so probably it was inhabited" without realising just how bad a source GNIS is. I think a full RFC at WP:RSN deprecating it might be a good idea. It think one thing that needs looking at is the fact that GNIS accepts volunteer submissions and it is not clear that these are checked at all - in essence it is a user-created system not so different to other crowd-sourced information services. FOARP (talk) 09:24, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Nice catch! I have a regional edition of Durham (San Francisco Bay Area) and I've found it to be a very reliable source for distinguishing between a non-notable "locality" and a true community. I've plowed through three Bay Area counties and posted dozens of "unincorporated communities" for deletion. If Durham calls it a locality and there are no other supporting references (GNIS doesn't count), it's an easy call to submit for deletion. By the way, there are other regional editions of Durham--if someone has an interest, you can sometimes find a cheap used copy online.Glendoremus (talk) 04:30, 9 December 2020 (UTC)