Talk:Martensdale, California

Martensdale, California has been listed as one of the Geography and places good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: March 24, 2021. (Reviewed version).

This article was nominated for deletion on 28 January 2021. The result of the discussion was keep.

A fact from Martensdale, California appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 April 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the settling of Martensdale, California, went so badly that the town's namesake spent the rest of his life as a fugitive?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/April. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Martensdale, California.

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Sources discussed in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Martendale, California

Some sources were discussed in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Martendale, California (note: name should be Martensdale). I am adding the ones I found here

Enns-Rempel, Kevin; Harder, Leland (1990). "Henry J. Martens and the Mennonite Land Company: Benevolence, entrepreneurship, or fraud?".
Froese, Brian (19 February 2015). "California Mennonites". JHU Press. p. 35. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
McClure, Heath (March 1996). "The challenge of yesterday: a history of the Mennonite Brethren Church at Rosedale, California". Retrieved 15 February 2021.

There are more in the AfD.--DreamLinker (talk) 12:37, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 02:24, 10 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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... that the settling of Martensdale, California went so badly the town's namesake spent the rest of his life as a fugitive? here, see inline citations for exact pages
- ALT1:... that the residents of Martensdale, California did not learn that the town was built on land they had to legal right to until after they had constructed houses? Ref 9 in the text

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Frances Theresa Peet Russell

5x expanded by Hog Farm (talk). Self-nominated at 05:07, 22 March 2021 (UTC).[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall:

Majestic! An excellent and heroic rescue of a "permastub". It warms my kokoro (heart). And an interesting tale of great drama, to boot! jp×g 21:16, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Martensdale, California/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: JPxG (talk · contribs) 20:59, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Copyvio / POV / stability

Y Earwig's checker says this is fine.
Y Quite stable. The article existed as a stub for eleven years, more or less untouched, until an AfD which it survived handily. Then it was expanded quite a bit -- there's been no controversy about content that entire time.
Y This doesn't seem to be pushing any particular POV. The statements are encyclopedic.

Media

Y Image is freely licensed.
Y High-quality, and illustrative of the primary drama the article covers.

Tone / prose

Y Follows MoS, is well-written and easy to understand. No oopsie woopsies here!
Y Does not editorialize, WP:SYNTHesize, or devolve into a go-off about anything.

Referencing

Y Three independent, academic sources in the bibliography, and four other sources referenced.
Y Everything is paired with an appropriate inline reference.
Y Every source except the Gazetteer could be verified using my computer, which I did, and everything that's in the article was also in the references. Great!

Scope / completeness

Y Article stays on topic, and tells you basically everything you need to know about Martensdale's rise and fall.
N What's there now? The land was given back to its original owners, and then what?
- Still looking. I found a newspaper statement mentioning a 1949 reunion picnic at the site, which I've added, but I haven't been able to turn up anything else
N Where is it? It says it's near Lerdo, in Kern County, but is quite scant on the details of its actual location. GNIS has no "Martendale" or "Martensdale", but surely there's some historical record that can be located (from Kern County, perhaps)?
- Took quite a bit, but I finally found another paper by Enns-Rempel, who states that Martensdale was near what is now a specific road junction. I think state that it was near what is now the junction of Lerdo Highway and California Highway 99 is about as specific as we can get; I'm starting to doubt that anybody bothered to take down the coordinates.
In the Fresno Pacific source, we see "Until about June of 1909 all Martens' promotional efforts focused on the land he had purchased in February near Wasco. In June he began showing potential buyers another tract of land in an area known as Lerdo about ten miles east of the first site." This looks like a clue...
- Yeah, I looked back into the context, which states that it was 10 miles east of Wasco, CA. I also found sources stating that it was 6 miles east of Shafter and 34 miles SW of Woody. But since we can tie it to the general location of a road junction with the new source, I'm not sure if the mileage distances would add a whole lot.
  - Would it be worth putting in 35.49976, -119.16361 as a coordinate, or would that be too WP:SYNTHy? That's the precise location where 99 intersects Lerdo Hwy, for lack of anything better: it might be able to populate an infobox or mapframe. jp×g 04:33, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Bakersfield Morning Echo clip says that a civil suit was filed in the superior court in Kern County by one H.H. Schultz. Maybe that'd have a location in it.
Here is the area on USGS's TopoView. Looking at the maps from 1906 through 1914, I cannot find anything about a Martensdale, but I might not be looking in the right place (and it may never have reached the USGS's attention, since Martensdale doesn't show up anywhere in GNIS either).
- I'd looked yesterday, hoping to find a public domain topographic map to add to the article. It seems to have been too ephemeral to make it onto USGS maps. I did a lot of searching and found some old Kern County oil field maps and some 1910 fire insurance plats, but nothing of the right place or time. For a map to show this place, it would have to be made over the winter of 1910 and show a very specific place of Kern Co.
  - Would it be nice to at least have the 1910 USGS map, so there's something at all showing location? jp×g 04:33, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Here is Kern County's GIS tool. Lots of layers, spent a while messing around with this. Maybe there is somewhere on their website to get historical maps?
- Unfortunately, I looked but couldn't find anything

Conclusion

I like the article. It rules! There is a little more information I would like to see (for example, what happened afterwards?), but apart from that, excellent and would be happy to pass. @Hog Farm: thoughts? jp×g 21:31, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, looks like we have a location, which is enough for me to feel good about passing this. Woot! jp×g 04:33, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox

@Hog Farm: It seems like there's enough here to have an infobox. I say this mostly because they allow for a map -- not sure where you stand on the general issue but it feels like at least worth bringing up. jp×g 04:36, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. Now that we know a general location, I think we can get one. The map doesn't have to be precise. I'll probably do what I did for awhile back for an American Civil War battle where the exact location was unknown. Plugging in the coordinates you found for that road junction should give enough precision to have a pushpin map be reasonably accurate, although since they're inexact, I'll probably mask them in the code, so they don't show in the article body. If I can turn up what happened to the land after the town in the future, I'll be sure to add it. I feel like there should be at least one map here, and the standard infobox map would be a little more helpful than the 1910 topo, which doesn't show Martensdale and only a few buildings in the general Lerdo area that could have been the town. Hog Farm _Talk 04:47, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The masking is what I was gonna suggest, too, since there aren't canonical coordinates (like GNIS entries have) so showing them would give false certainty. Great minds, etc... jp×g 05:18, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've added the infobox - coords are currently commented out, so the map isn't showing. I don't remember off the top of my head how to mask, but I should be able to figure it out again quickly. Hog Farm _Talk 05:26, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]