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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 @Artemis Andromeda:, 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. – 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. – 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. – 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'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? – 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. – 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)

<sarcasm>But they're on the Ordnance Survey which means they're legally recognised</sarcasm>.
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)
  • 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'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'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'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)

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,[1] 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'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)
@FOARP: 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'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'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)

References

  1. ^ "Firozabad" (PDF). Census of India. p. 81. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2023-03-27.
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 may 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#Communities and localities. 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'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'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's Back (talk) 15:36, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
If the list is in 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'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.North8000 (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.

  • 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.

Do you think I should try starting one? North8000 (talk) 15:44, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

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. North8000 (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. North8000 (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:

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! —  Melofors  TC 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, North8000 (talk) 00:33, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
In the case of the articles you've listed above, they seem to be expansions of articles created by Dr. Blofeld 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)

Notability of latitude / longitude

There's a discussion at WP:VPP#Latitude and longitude articles 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)

Papua New Guinean LLGs

Are Papua Mew Guinean local-level governments, like Wewak Urban LLG in East Sepik Province, deserving articles per both WP:GNG and WP:GEOLAND? They appear to be similar to the Philippine barangays. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 22:36, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

If you look in items in {{Districts of East Sepik Province}}, you will see they contain lists of wards, i.e., some nontrivial information.

Wewak Urban LLG is unique in this respect in that it contains a single item, namely the town of Wewak, So I think Wewak Urban LLG may be copied/redirected to Wewak, the rest let them be. - Altenmann >talk 00:30, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

@Altenmann the town of Wewak does seem to overlap two LLG's (?). Wewak is also included in Wewak Rural LLG. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 01:38, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Plaskett, California

Would this be inherently notable? I do not see it listed as CDP at the Census bureau. Graywalls (talk) 13:35, 15 February 2024 (UTC) https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/Files/bas24/tigerweb_bas24_cdp_ca.html not listed as CDP. Graywalls (talk) 01:42, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't see any indication of official or legal recognition, or of any significant coverage by reliable sources. Most of the article is about the general area rather than the community itself. Donald Albury 17:49, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Comment - Google Maps shows Plaskett, California here and Wikidata shows GeoNames ID, GNIS Feature ID (Unincorporated Place) as well as other identifies. The article has been around since 2009‎ and has 18 sources. It is also listed as an unincorporated community for Monterey County, California. It seems like this citation [1] means it is a legally recognized place.

References

  1. ^ U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Notability (geographic features)/Archive 11

Greg Henderson (talk) 18:17, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

GNIS is not legal recognition. It is nothing more than a database of place names (many of which are based on dubious evidence). older ≠ wiser 18:33, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, then what is a legal source and how do you find it? Greg Henderson (talk) 18:38, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Incorporated municipalities (and former incorporated municipalities) qualify, but then, just about all of them (at least in English-speaking countries) will have enough reliable sources in English available to easily establish notability. Local government entities in non-English-speaking places may require more effort to find reliable sources, but we will presume such sources exist for entities that are defined and recognized by the relevant government, subject to discussion. Census tracts, most taxing districts, and such, do not qualify as exempt from the general notability rules. There is some dispute on whether Census-designated places in the U.S. qualify (I have seen an article about a CDP deleted as "non-notable"). As the guideline says, populated places without legal recognition are subject to the GNG. Donald Albury 18:59, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
There is no single authoritative source and previous discussions here have shown there is no agreement as to what "legally recognized" means in the context of this guideline. older ≠ wiser 18:59, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Looking at GNIS map sources, it looks as though this was a 4th class post office, which are generally not notable of themselves. At present there's nothing there but the campground and the nearby school. The text really doesn't describe a settlement, so there's a good chance this would not survive AfD. Mangoe (talk) 21:33, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Whatever it is, the article is of interest in the history of Big Sur and as a target for redirects from Plaskett Creek (ha! two or them :-) and two Plaskett Camping places), Plaskett Ridge (two of them as well), Plaskett Rock, Plaskett Creek State Park. Requires cleanup from original research, though, but expansion seems also possible. But I did fail to find a solid ref for a place called simply "Plackett" (alhtough I did see that the campground is called simply "Plackett" ) - Altenmann >talk 00:06, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
And any information worth retaining can be placed in some higher level article. Having redirects pointing to it is not a criteria for retaining an article. Donald Albury 01:54, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Based on the feedback here, I have boldly redirected the article to Monterey County, California. Graywalls (talk) 07:33, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

  • Based on GEOLAND, as it is not in the US Census (Legally recognised settlement are only recorded in the US census, it is written into law unlike elsewhere in the world) so notability reverts to GNG. Looking at the article does it meet it? Don think it does, so would redirect the article to Monterey County, California as per User:Graywalls Davidstewartharvey (talk) 08:58, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
    In the U.S., aside from metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, which are defined by the Office of Management and Budget, and census-designated places, the places reported on by the Census Bureau are legally defined elsewhere, i.e., states and territories, counties and county equivalents, some minor civil divisions (such as towns in New England), and incorporated municipalities. Entities below the state/territory level are legally defined by the states/territories, not by the Census Bureau. Those places have officially established boundaries. Any place in the U.S. that does not belong to one of those categories does not, in my opinion, qualify as a legally or officially recognized place. Donald Albury 19:24, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
    This is a good point, to be added to the guideline, to the definition of "official recognition": existence of the officially established boundaries. And distinction must be drawn between officia'ly recognized places and traditional, historical regions, which may not necessarily be strictly delineated. In some cases the delineation may be implied but hardly found now, e.g., for historical homesteads. (I believe that "Plackett homestead" may be cobbled up from available books, to replace the discussed hapless article). - Altenmann >talk 19:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
    Strictly speaking, I don't think census-defined places are "legally defined". These are statistical entities created to provide a means of presenting data for the areas. These CDPs are generally created in conjunction with state and local authorities, but the names and boundaries are somewhat arbitrarily defined. older ≠ wiser 20:02, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

IMO though a combination of factors, it shouldn't be a separate article. And agree that per the factors discussed above Ngeo does not confer wp:notability. North8000 (talk) 19:57, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Generally it sould also be in the primary division system. For example if there is a set of lines on a map which is an irrigation district which encompasses portions of 4 towns, the irrigation district is not greenlighted by the SNG. North8000 (talk) 12:26, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Lucia, California

I also feel Lucia, California lacks notability. There's considerable contents, but they're just things nearby and nothing specifically addressing this place in depth to demonstrate WP:GNG is met. Graywalls (talk) 00:39, 17 February 2024 (UTC)


A way to fix geoland?

On one hand, this SNG greenlights millions of future permastubs which don't have sourcing to make a real article and which aren't a real article. On the other hand, Wikipedia (IMO rightly so) tilts the scale towards geographic articles because it is a highly enclyclopedic area and there is no consensus for and resistance to totally eliminating this tilt. Elsewhere I proposed a new type of article where these could be grouped, but this post is about having separate articles on these.

IMO one can often find an answer by putting common sense / general consensus into words. For example, regarding the millions of settlements in China and India which don't have an article. More specifically, I'm talking about ones which meet this SNG but can't demonstrably meet GNG. If someone started a pattern of creating permastubs on all of these (even if not mass creation per se), I don't think that that is wanted. But if somebody created a more substantial article with several sources and substantial unique content on one of these settlements, but which does not have full GNG sources, I think that most people would be happy that the SNG allowed it in. They also don't want to do anything that would enable a deletion-fest on existing articles.

What if we put this into words in this SNG? That using this SNG for new article requires meeting all of the current SNG criteria plus having several sources and substantial unique prose content?

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:37, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

But the SNG is flawed. Legally recognised is not standard that can be used. As per last year's attempt to clean up the SNG, it is different per country (even if they have one). The original SNG was US biased, based on the fact that settlements in a census are Legally recognised, but most other places are not. A question from an editor before Christmas was should they create Sri Lankan villages based on a census, but Sri Lankan government census only legally recognise the region. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
IMO this modification of the SNG would solve that. If they want to use the SNG way in, besides meeting the existing SNG criteria, a new article would need to have multiple sources and substantial content. North8000 (talk) 18:39, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
But was the failure of the RFC last time being editors worrying that multiple sources and substantial content was too much like GNG. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 21:10, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
The last time IMO the problem was that the proposal essentially WAS GNG and also applied to existing articles. My idea is more lenient than that in both areas. A major GEO editor (who creates high quality substantial articles and whose opinion I consider valuable) flatly opposed it. IMO many of their articles would not pass GNG, but all of them would pass under my idea. North8000 (talk) 21:39, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
The problem is that NGEO simply requires WP:V that it is or was a populated place. Many permastubs don't even get there. I don't think anything really needs fixing. SportingFlyer T·C 15:53, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
There lies the problem. Because a census has a "place", editors take GEOLAND and state its a legalised populated place, and is verified by the census. Against GNG it would fail. Census data can only be legally recognised place in the US where it is stated in law. As per the thread above "Do my articles pass notability guidelines?" Sri Lanka only legally recognises the district not the village. That's why GEOLAND is flawed. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:12, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
  • Keep in mind that Wikipedia functions as a comprehensive gazetteer. Check out WP:5P1, one of Wikipedia's core pillars, where it states, "Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers" (bold emphasis mine). I prefer things the way they presently are. Having a comprehensive encyclopedia regarding geographic information is superior compared to having an incomplete online encyclopedia based upon whether or not certain articles are considered by some to be subjectively a "real article" or not. If you don't like "permastubs", then don't read them. North America1000 14:26, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
I mostly agree with the first half of your post. It's something that I basically already stated in my OP. But there is a problem or at least an ambiguity. There are millions of settlements and entities that qualify under this SNG which don't have articles which do not demonstratively qualify under GNG and many of which couldn't qualify under GNG. Again, setting aside the possibility of mass creation...should we welcome creation these as articles even if stubs or likely permastubs?
  1. Maybe the answer is as you imply, "yes" and we should just clarify that.
  2. Or maybe it is as I proposed here to add a criteria that there be multiple references with content beyond "it exists"
Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:03, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
Is there enough information in the article to verify the settlement as a "legally recognised" populated place? That's all we need. (Legally recognised is in quotes because it's doing the job of "distinct hamlet, not neighbourhood" here.) SportingFlyer T·C 16:09, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
To answer the question in your first sentence, for my example/question, the answer is "yes", there is enough information in the article to verify the settlement as a "legally recognized" populated place, and meet the other SNG criteria (not a neighborhood or abstract district) . North8000 (talk) 16:25, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia does not, in fact, function as a gazetteer. It has features of a gazetteer, which is the only thing you are demonstrating by that reference to WP:5P. FOARP (talk) 10:30, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
"Keep in mind that Wikipedia functions as a comprehensive gazetteer." Keep in mind that this isn't true. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:07, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
  • But what exactly is being fixed here? GEOLAND or the SNG? It seems the conversations about this have no resolution as there's no exact uniform definition for a populated place. If there's documentation of the place from the respective authoritative entity and can be verified, I would say that's a good start. The focus shouldn't be if they end up as perma-stubs. – The Grid (talk) 17:27, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
  • The presenting problem with the guidelines is the irony that, however much one may want WP to function as a gazetteer (and on top of the dispute over that, it also seems to me that we do disagree on what information a gazetteer ought to contain), the official gazetteers are not reliable enough or get baldly misinterpreted. In GNIS and GNS, we've been over and over this: they are derived partly from the interpretations of maps and partly from certain other sources, and those maps and sources were frequently misinterpreted or were outright incorrect (the latter especially in GNS). I'm also concerned about the indexes of old commercial maps being used in the same manner, as for instance we see old commercial US maps being used as sources for the population of places, when it's not clear where they got that information. Census data tends to be somewhat better by its nature but we keep having similar issues with interpretation. It seems to me that we need to spell out that gazetteers and maps are at best reliable sources for names and locations, but are not reliable for the character or notability of a place. Mangoe (talk) 23:11, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
  • What this guideline needs to say, in express words, is "villages are presumed to merit an article". Villages generally satisfy GNG, and that includes villages in India, a country that, amongst other sources, has more than 146,000 registered newspapers and periodicals, and that number is still increasing. (In 2010 there were more than 55,000 newspapers in local languages (out of a total of 62,000), of which more than 44,000 had a circulation of less than 10,000, and about half their content was local, according to Knowledge at Wharton.) Further, the number of villages in India is not "millions". There were less than 665,000 villages in the census of 2019. James500 (talk) 05:40, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
As stated, "millions" referred to ones that meet NGEO in China and India combined. North8000 (talk) 18:47, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
  • Really, the way to fix this remains the same as it's always been: A distinction between having information about something on Wikipedia, and having a standalone article on that thing. Even a gazetteer normally wouldn't devote a full page to just providing coordinates and population of a place where there's really nothing else to be said about it. So what really should be done is to roll up those types of "articles" into lists (in the US, that would look like List of populated places in Example County, Somestate, and generally other countries would have similar administrative divisions), with basic census information on the non-notable ones and of course standard wikilinks in addition to that for an actual article on the notable ones. I would generally tend to agree that we should have information available about verifiable populated places, but we shouldn't pretend that a few census factoids makes it an "article" or worth presenting as such. Seraphimblade Talk to me 10:53, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
    +1 Donald Albury 12:51, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
    Agree 200%. But we need to think about how to make that happen. The most viable way would be to accept a new norm where once someone has has enough info to create what is now a geoland compliant stub, it gets an entry in a table in an list-type article as @Seraphimblade: describes. The new norm is that we need a different term than (or a different meaning for) "list of......" because often it can't purport to be a full list. For example, if there are 100,000 towns in in the XYZ province of China, and for 100 of them an editor has put enough together to have a barely geoland-compliant stub, then that article will have 100 entries and not purport to be a list of (the 100,000) towns in the XYZ province of China. (Side note; I don't think there's a tidy way to go one level down from province, e.g. prefecture). North8000 (talk) 15:30, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
    What functional difference would bundling them into a list make? It seems like an arbitrary stylistic/navigational choice to me. – Joe (talk) 15:41, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
    It makes quite a lot of practical difference. The first is that list inclusion criteria discussed on a talk page is a lot easier to arrive at: "Don't include something here just based on (questionable source X), it must at least be cross-referenced with (better source Y) and show up there with A and B as characteristics." Doing that on a list's talk page is going to be a far smoother process than hashing stuff like that out at AfD, which is what happens (or fails to happen) when they're all separate. And the lists will have more watchers than forlorn permastubs that may have only been edited by a bot, which both makes enforcing something like that easier, and also watching for sneak vandalism like changing numbers in a way that doesn't match the source. It also in the end makes updates easier to coordinate and do, when something like a new census comes out. Volunteer time and attention is a finite resource, and a lot less of it would be consumed maintaining one list than hundreds of separate things in which almost no one takes any sustained interest. It's more or less the same reason we have notability inclusion cutoffs for, well, anything. And then it eliminates the tangential issue of notability that often tangles up and derails those discussions, since notability does not matter for something going into an existing article. Seraphimblade Talk to me 18:30, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Strong agreement with Seraphimblade's comments. The whole point of having an article is to provide readers with information in context (see WP:PAGEDECIDE). To be blunt, some editors like to make thousands of permastubs to satisfy some personal urge or goal, and are forgetting that we are building an encyclopedia to be of service for readers. I think lists of settlements more likely to be useful to our readers than reading a one-sentence article out of context. — hike395 (talk) 18:42, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Seconded. THe blurb in NGEO It is advised to include identifiable minor geographic features within articles for larger features must be rephrased in stronger language and a section with advice must be added: with particular examples of cities and rivulets. WP:RIVERS/WP:LAKES must be notified; I am sure they have ideas on what/how to do about this. Also, a strong recommendation must be given about merging of existing nanosubs, to prevent edit wars when someone starts merging and "owners" start reverting (been there). With a special mention about Category:Antarctica: Long time ago a HUGE USGS database on Antarctica was dumped in Wikipedia (I myself am guilty of wikifying of quite a few of them cold stubs, such as Gillick Rock and the likes:-). Over later years editors did a great and surely painful job of merging them into larger features.- Altenmann >talk 19:54, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
But how would it be easier? It seems to me that right now we have an entrenched disagreement between editors who think that the verifiable existence of a populated place is sufficient for inclusion, and editors who would prefer something more towards the GNG (or at least multiple sources). Wouldn't that just reappear in the form of debates about list inclusion criteria?
Usually when we talk about notability it's a question of inclusion, full stop. Like if a company fails WP:NCORP, it's not because we'd prefer it as an entry in List of spammy startups, it's because we don't want it included at all. Something that seems quite unique to the reoccurring complaints about GEOLAND is that there is that practically nobody says we shouldn't have coverage of all populated places in some form; it's the specific form of "standalone article" that is objected to. I can see that the list model has advantages, but it also has obvious disadvantages: difficulty of maintaining stable links to specific places, added complexity when linking to Wikidata and other structured data sources, ambiguity in where a place should appear (e.g. should Birstall, West Yorkshire be in Districts of Batley, Towns in Kirklees, or Towns in West Yorkshire? Local people will have strong feelings about each!), etc. Unless the inclusion criteria are different it's basically a coin flip of one imperfect content model (standalone articles) vs. another imperfect content model (lists). Only we've already chosen one, and the cost in volunteer time of moving to the other would be immense. That's what I meant above when I asked about a functional difference: how would moving to the list model change the inclusion criteria? – Joe (talk) 07:49, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
A place can appear in multiple lists, with links to the other lists as well. And I disagree that notability usually == inclusion; a nontrivial proportion of the AfDs I come across close as redirect, and some of those that don't only close otherwise because the subject is mentioned in multiple equally plausible pages. It's not like deletion discussions are advocating removing the article and erasing all info surrounding links to the subject in other pages. JoelleJay (talk) 15:52, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Actually that outcome is so common that XfDcloser has a function to automatically remove list entries that link to a deleted article. Because the majority of lists that have explicit inclusion criteria exclude entries that are not individually notable. – Joe (talk) 16:50, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Singular links in lists with no other info, yes, but not ones where the link is within prose context. JoelleJay (talk) 16:54, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
No no, it'll also remove those. Anything with a bullet in front of it, I believe. – Joe (talk) 17:02, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
"practically nobody says we shouldn't have coverage of all populated places in some form" thats not true, we can't even get consensus on whether we should have coverage of all legally recognized populated places (an order of magnitude smaller than all populated places). I don't actually think I've ever come across anyone who says that we should have "coverage of all populated places in some form" are you such a person? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:00, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I am paraphrasing the guideline we're talking about (which I agree with and which has long-standing consensus behind it): Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable. – Joe (talk) 16:27, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
"practically nobody says we shouldn't have coverage of all populated places in some form" does not paraphrase that sentence... populated places =/= Populated, legally recognized places... And "typically presumed to be notable" means that typically they are but sometimes they aren't. That is not a competent paraphrase, its a completely different point. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:02, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Offtopic collapsed. A large wall of text already. Take personal to user pages and give slack to some unfortunate phrasing
Oh dear, I'm not a competent paraphraser in Horse Eye's Back's book? Whatever shall I do? – Joe (talk) 10:17, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
Please do not mock me, WP:CIVILITY is expected to be maintained. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:26, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
@Horse Eye's Back: Ahahaha – read back the comments I have made here, and the way you have responded to them, please, then talk to me about civility. I'm not going to respond to you further on this issue. – Joe (talk) 15:53, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
I have read the comments again, now we can talk about civility. Per aspersions I am requesting that you provide diffs which support your claims of incivility comparable to [1]. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:56, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
100,000 towns in in the XYZ province of China - not that bad: common sense advices to merge into the lowest subdivision; in this case, see, e.g., Dongzhi County- Altenmann >talk 19:54, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
I took one dive into China geographical hierarchy seeking such a solution. Maybe not deep enough of a dive, but it seemed that there was no consistent hierarchy between towns and provinces. But I could be wrong. Or maybe we don't need a consistent hierarchy, since, as described it's unlikely that they could be considered to be a full listing anyway. I think that the main way that Wikipedia is searched anyway is the search tool and a search for the specific town would find it wherever it is.North8000 (talk) 20:19, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
@Altenmann@North8000 or, delimit inclusion to township-level divisions only. The towns appear to be the closest in equivalence to towns of other countries. Even county-level cities and counties tend to be oversized: the ancient Confucian village of Qufu is now a 600,000+ CLC, but it was likely that it amalgamated with other divisions, just like the current practice of turning prefectures into a prefecture-level city. So I think township-level divisions should also treat the same recognition in GEOLAND. But all village-level divisions must be deleted from enwiki, and should be merged as listings in township-level divisions. The huge quantity of township-level divisions is natural for a country with more than a billion inhabitants and has complexity in hierarchy of local government units. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 23:53, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Joe another difference is the format of what we are...an enclyclopedia built up of articles, by the common meaning of "articles". (using a bit of hyperbole to keep this simple): Scattering factoids and calling each one of them an "article" really isn't that. And reversing the "functional difference" question, given the argument towards not doing that, why structure a factoid as an article when it could just as well be a line in a table? Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:29, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
@North8000: The most compelling reason is that we already do structure them as articles, so switching to a list model would be enormously time-consuming. There should be very clear and very strong advantages to the list model to justify making that change, and I've never seen anyone offer anything more than e.g. marginal (and hypothetical) improvements in maintainability. The problem with 'why not?' questions is they are so easily reversed. Why bother structuring things into a table when you could just put all the information you have on one place in one place? It ends up just being about what you subjectively feel is the default, 'cleaner' option.
I've never thought about how the word 'article' changes expectations, but I think you might be on to something there. I wonder how much of this debate we would have been spared if (like most encyclopaedias and gazetteers) we called them 'entries' from the start? – Joe (talk) 07:54, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
@Joe Roe: Well, going 100% on your last idea would mean fundamentally changing what Wikipedia is and how it is organized. But if you are talking about settlements that meet NGeo, that is the status quo except that we do call them articles. North8000 (talk) 14:26, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
It's not a suggestion. It's an observation that if some people (like you) understand the word "article" to imply a certain length and/or depth of coverage, and others (like me), just see it as equivalent to an entry in an average paper encyclopaedia, which looking at examples on my shelf range from one sentence to several pages, that would go a long way to explaining why debates around GEOLAND and stubs in general are so intractable. I've long noticed that these tend to devolve into a camp that intuitively dislikes stubs and a camp that can't see the issue with them; the lack of a definition of "article" in current policy might be part of the reason why. – Joe (talk) 16:56, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
We have a perfectly good definition of what makes a subject appropriate for an article. The issues often come about when we try not to follow that. Seraphimblade Talk to me 20:10, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I don't think that's quite the same thing. – Joe (talk) 10:12, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
I agree with North8000 that this would mean fundamentally changing what Wikipedia is and how it is organized. We are not a gazetteer, and I think you know that even if you've conveniently forgotten. If that is too time consuming we can just delete them without creating a list... That would save time if thats what you want. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:38, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I believe Wikipedia is a gazetteer. – Joe (talk) 16:31, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Can you point to any policy stating it is? All of this is "gazetteer" stuff is coming from part of one sentence in an essay that says it has aspects of a gazetteer, not that it is one... JoelleJay (talk) 16:52, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I don't think it's a point of fact, either way. In my opinion Wikipedia should be a gazetteer and has de facto operated as one for a very long time. The essay links above offers a brief explanation why, but it does need to be fleshed out. I do respect that others think differently and I don't think any progress is going to be made by one side yelling "Wikipedia is a gazetteer!" and the other yelling back "No, it just has elements of one!" – Joe (talk) 17:01, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
We don't need to yell, we already have consensus that Wikipedia isn't a gazetteer it just has elements of one. If you want to change that consensus this is not the venue. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:55, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
And agreement on that wording has conclusively resolved any and all disputes about gazetteer-like content on geographic places, right? – Joe (talk) 10:06, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
The only issues seem to come from people who deny the existence and/or validity of such a consensus, as you just did. Long term such WP:IDNHT would be an individual behavioral issue and would be addressed through individual behavioral remedies. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:22, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
"This is an essay." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:55, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
WP:Wikipedia is not a gazetteer. FOARP (talk) 16:26, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
+2. There is no reason to have standalone articles on topics with such meager information when they can easily be covered in an umbrella article. JoelleJay (talk) 02:35, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

As an overview of this thread:

  1. My original proposal was to say that for new articles, the article has to have a teeny bit more in it than a geostub.
  2. Seraphimblade brought up the idea of list articles for places, which could be a hybrid of links to those that have real articles (presumably with more content than a geostub) and a list entry for those that don't
  3. Some folks are discussing various general issues with NGEO and also regarding bein/not being/ partially being gazetteer

IMO we really shouldn't try to tackle #3 in this thread. So we have two ideas. BTW they can coexist. North8000 (talk) 14:59, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Well, if you really want to go somewhere with this, I'd suggest that the number of recent failed proposals to either tighten GEOLAND or institute minimum sourcing requirements for new articles is a strong indicator that #1 is not going to find consensus. The idea of bundling geostubs into lists is the only suggestion I've heard from the anti-stub crowd that sounds like it has a cat's chance in hell. The challenge is to present a strong, positive argument for doing so that does not rely on passive reasoning (i.e. "there's no reason for...") or an intuitive dislike of short articles that all Wikipedians demonstrably do not share. – Joe (talk) 17:10, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Taking the last big proposal as an example, it was basically saying that articles in the discussed area had to meet GNG. That would been a huge change. I don't think that failure of a huge change proposal indicates that a much smaller change like #1 would fail. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
This discussion already mntions a strong positive agrument: it is very convenient to have these small things in context, keeping in mind there is close to no other information about these obscure villages. It is good both for villages themselves and upper level subdivisions as well. - Altenmann >talk 18:50, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Right. The question is whether the community will agree that that's a strong enough reason to start merging hundreds of thousands of articles. – Joe (talk) 10:10, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
I just don't believe this is going to happen. Nobody is going to take on the work of doing that merging, and if anyone tries people will come in behind them and demerge it (as has happened with Lugnut's Turkish village article-spam which was merged after we had an ANI discussion and multiple AFDs but apparently those count for nothing).
Deleting or improving these articles is the only workable option. Failing to do either just means seeing the problem continue to get worse, and articles about places that we have nothing to say about at all, and which may well not exist, continue to proliferate. FOARP (talk) 11:52, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
just don't believe this is going to happen -if you think that merging hundreds of thousands is a tough job, think about hundreds of thousands of AfDs to process (unless you want leave the status quo). And I am pretty sure that there will be a strong opposition to group AfD nominations. But I dont think there are really no hundreds of thousands, so merging is a feasible solution. As you know, there is a way how a man can eat an elephant.- Altenmann >talk 16:19, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
Mass deletion was what we did with C46’s fake Iranian village articles, and there were tens of thousands of those. In contrast merging on Lugnuts’s Turkish village stubs took longer and just ended up being undone making the whole process pointless. FOARP (talk) 16:31, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

We can partially try out Seraphimblade's idea (#2) idea without any guideline changes. This type of article exists already. (e.g List of cities in Iowa ). Start these for the provinces in China. When one gets too big divide it up by smaller divisions. The only change is that we need to accept and make it a norm that these do not attempt to be a complete list. Start a tradition that when the only content of a geostub fits nicely into a line in the table, than that's a better way to cover it. North8000 (talk) 17:08, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

I kind of like the idea of doing a trial run on something like that. If nothing else, we could set that up as a standard for new place articles. In the meantime, there's no deadline for changing anything existing, so I think the concerns by Joe Roe on that aren't that big of a deal. If someone doesn't want to participate in doing the merges, it's not like anyone will force them to, so they can be gotten to as they're gotten to. Anyone who doesn't think it's worth their time to do can just, well—not do it. Seraphimblade Talk to me 23:48, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
You absolutely need to get a prior consensus for this, whether or not it involves a change to the guideline; these are not obvious and uncontroversial merges. – Joe (talk) 07:35, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
Even when you get a prior consensus for merging (as happened with the Turkish villages - see these discussions: 1 2 3) what then happens is that consensus is simply ignored so long as the articles can still be easily re-created, which they can because the redirect is still there. What's the point? FOARP (talk) 08:02, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
Well, I think you know my answer to that question: there is no point. Putting aside the question of whether geostubs are a problem that needs to be solved in the first place, if there's a group of good-faith editors that are convinced that a certain type of content is useful and a group of good-faith editors that are convinced that it isn't, the latter is always going to face a steep uphill battle, because Wikipedia is deliberately set up to make it easier to create content than to remove it. We've seen this with portals, with the reference desk, with outlines, with infoboxes, with schools... the list goes on. But judging from the tone of this talk page over the last year, a good number of people are not ready to move on from the geostub issue to problems that are easier to fix, so here we are again. – Joe (talk) 08:46, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
Mostly I'm remembering that we did actually manage to delete the C46 Iranian "village" articles in spite of there being tens of thousands of them. I don't think it's wrong to advocate that as a broader solution to large sets of articles sourced only to a single source, and I think people will adopt something like it when the problem becomes bad enough. FOARP (talk) 08:52, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
The latter currently enjoys consensus... On wikipedia the uphill battle is generally choosing to fight against widespread and longstanding consensus. You're acting like we don't already have a consensus here and there is an open question between two groups of editors not a closed question with one group doing their best imitation of an ostrich. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:45, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
Any changes in merging is not an inherent part of such a trial run. IMO no changes in policies guidelines or are needed. The only change is some nuances....that we need to acknowledge that these are expected to be only a partial listing. Sometimes only 1% complete. And we should probably organize it a bit here. My ideas
  • OK to start an area that will eventually get too big. (e.g. a province) And when it gets too big, divide into a lower level division
  • Probably best not to use the word "list" e..g. call it "Cities and towns in XYZ province (China)" because it does not purport to be a complete list. But regarding wp:notability, still treat it as a list article.
  • No big data dumps into lists.This is for where the editor has least done what's needed for a valid geostub and put it individually into a row in table in the article.
  • Table form, e.g. like current practice at List of cities in Iowa
North8000 (talk) 12:49, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
No changes in policies guidelines or are needed. The only change is some nuances - One of the nuances I was suggesting is to put a stronger wording on the advice about merging, with explanative section -- What it you opinion about this? I am asking that if there is a preliminary agreement, I can put it to RFC for policy update. - Altenmann >talk 16:47, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
in XYZ province (China) -- beg to disagree. It is a too large subivision, with literally thousands of populated places, even if we don't have info for all of them. If you take minimal subdivision, you will not need separate articles for lists and have built-in lists. - Altenmann >talk 16:47, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
One more remark, about table format. I dont think it is a good idea. Suppose you found a sentence-worth info for some of the places. To add it into the table, you need something like "Comment" column. But then line widths in the table become irregular, decreasing readability and waste of screen space. It is OK to relatively short lists, but for longer ones, scrolling them is a nightmare. - Altenmann >talk 16:58, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
On your first point, I agree but that should probably handled separately. Would probably be hard to write, had to pass, and right now there is no target for many of those merges. On your second point....I realized that...actually tens of thousands. I was just throwing it out there as just a practical way to get started on a small scale. I was thinking that for a long time under "This is for where the editor has least done what's needed for a valid geostub and put it individually into a row in table in the article. " it would just be dozens, of the 10's of thousands of possibilities. And after that it could get divided up. On your last point, what would suggest. Probably should have a way to gracefully fit geostub type data. Sincerely,North8000 (talk) 18:04, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Why is GNIS different?

So, it's now mostly accepted, at least amongst people who frequent this page, that GNIS shouldn't be the only source cited for GEO articles and if it is the only source available then probably the article shouldn't exist as an article. This was achieved mostly through the trench-warfare of continually pointing out the massive mistakes that are on GNIS ("Monkey Box", LOL - though that should have been straight-deleted) until people gave in, and was confirmed in an RSN discussion.

GNS has also been generally accepted as a bad source, mostly just by association with GNIS since it comes ultimately from the same source, with this again being confirmed in an RSN discussion.

The thing is there is absolutely no reason at all to dismiss the accuracy of the official gazetteer of the United States of America whilst assuming that, for example, the gazetteer of, for example, Poland, remains a valid source for basing an entire article on. It's not like we haven't seen systematic errors in other gazetteers (in the case of Poland, the issue is that a whole load of former state assets - state farms/factories and the like - were added to their gazetteer as "settlements").

I just don't get it. FOARP (talk) 08:20, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

One possible edit to the guideline is The Geographic Names Information System, the GEOnet Names Server, and other national gazetteers do not satisfy the "legal recognition" requirement and are also unreliable for "populated place" designation. We could possibly also remove the links to RSN. — hike395 (talk) 11:36, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
I don't see that. The issues with GNIS, in particular, have to do with its methodology and the peculiarities of its classification of entries, and how the latter have been misinterpreted in WP. Similar publications/databases from other countries are going to have different issues— or maybe similar ones, because mass stub creation has led to mass errors and mass cleanups, the latter frequently opposed on various principles. Mangoe (talk) 16:46, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure the issues with GNIS really are all that specific to how the USGS did it. "Populated place" is a concept not so different from eg "settlement" in Polish, which ultimately just indicates that someone may have lived there, once. We've also seen places that are manifestly just train stations labelled as "villages" in Russia.
My honest view is that we dismiss GNIS because it is the gazetteer which we are most familiar with and thus have fully explored the flaws of. We are still assuming that other national gazetteers are good when they may well just have exactly the same issues as GNIS. FOARP (talk) 21:07, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
When you say "there is absolutely no reason at all to dismiss the accuracy" of GNIS and GNS: "dismiss" is your word. What we have said is that there enough issues that the translation of "populated place" to "unincorporated community" (which is a WP neologism/euphemism anyway) has to be verified. Part of this is due to errors in the GNIS compilation itself, but the largest part is that "populated place" in practice covers too many kinds of things, and one has to go outside of GNIS to find out what sort of thing it actually is, even if one were to keep the article. As far as the accuracy of names and locations is concerned, we've never found reason to doubt the former, that being its purpose after all. We have found some location errors, but these either result from ambiguities in the maps themselves, or on rare occasions, from simple data entry typos. We've also found that geophysical feature entries are generally well-classified. But that "what is it really?" question means that, yes, articles on settlements shouldn't be written with GNIS as a sole source. Since that is almost entirely water over the dam at this point, it has meant that when discussing one of these essentially sole-sourced articles, the fact of a GNIS entry isn't enough, as has been explained over and over. In reality, what I've found in going over the articles for many states is that the ate of problems varies a great deal. In some of the upper midwest and plains states, there is recognizably a town for most "communities"; in California and Arizona there were many problems. Right now, going through Indiana, I'm finding that most settlements can be verified from maps, and I don't put those up for consideration.
The issues with GNS are quite different. We've found many countries in which there simply isn't anything where GNS says there should be something. These problems tuned up first: I an across them in Somalia. It appears that in many areas GNS just didn't have good information to work from. Mangoe (talk) 16:46, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
Don't forget that GNS is based on many sources, including local gazetteers. Military maps are also heavily-relied on source. I remember reading about US troops having problems with the wrong names for villages in Afghanistan and non-existent villages being on their maps and thinking "LOL, this is because of GNS, right?" FOARP (talk) 21:12, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
Two other things to add: unincorporated communities are U.S.-centric. Most settlements in say Europe will be "incorporated" somehow. Also, for places like Somalia, the GNS is generally accurate but can be very imprecise, especially where it was digitised from paper maps. SportingFlyer T·C 21:13, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
FYI In Russia there are inter-settlement territories [ru], a concept introduced in 2019, kinda unincorporated areas with low population density. - Altenmann >talk 21:20, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
Unincorporated communities are a bit of a red herring. Most of what are called "unincorporated communities" in the US here on Wikipedia are also incorporated "somehow" -- i.e., they are governed as part of a larger administrative unit, such as a town/township or county or county-equivalent. There is little practical difference between this and various small settlements elsewhere. The term is meant to indicate these communities are not incorporated as a separate municipal organization. older ≠ wiser 21:32, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
Of course, in that case, the smaller units with no sourcing other than the local gazetteer would be mentioned in the article about the more notable higher-order unit. FOARP (talk) 13:23, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
"Unincorporated communities" in the U.S., other than Census-designated places, do not have any defined boundaries, and so there are no reliable sources for area, population, etc. Yes, they are usually in a wider entity such as a county, parish, or borough, but some unincorporated communities span two or more such entities (Melrose, Florida spreads into four different counties, for example). Donald Albury 16:49, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
Case in point: I am still not clear where Gorgas, Alabama actually is, and I created that article. It had an entire book written about it so I have to assume it's notable, but these "unincorporated communities" seem capable of shifting location over time, have no actual centre. This recent comment on the talk page indicates there are two places called Gorgas, neighbouring each other, but it would be great to get more sourcing to confirm this. FOARP (talk) 09:32, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I completely agree that unincorporated communities can be difficult to describe and to source. However, my point about them being a red herring is that the same issues apply to small settlements throughout the world and are not in any way unique to the US, apart from the Hypostasis of the descriptive term "unincorporated community" into some sort of actual thing. older ≠ wiser 11:16, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
Entirely agree on this: small settlements or apparent-settlements exist the world over and this is not just a US issue. They can be very hard to describe and we have made the issue worse by trying to cram them in to the mould of a particular terminology. FOARP (talk) 13:00, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

What other national gazetteers are we using, anyway?

Most of my participation in this has been with US locations and with places where there is no obvious national mapping authority. I've come across issues with articles taken from UK OS maps, where people have taken labels and assumed they were towns/villages. But what about other countries? Mangoe (talk) 02:23, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Polish settlement articles are based on TERYT. The Russian articles are usually based on the Federal State Statistics Service database. Hungarian articles are based on the Gazetteer of Hungary published by the Hungarian statistics office. Pretty much every country has a mass of "village" articles where the national gazetteer or a gazetteer-like-database is the source.
I think it's important to recognise that more-or-less exactly the same thing that was done in the US based on GNIS was done also in every other country with a comprehensive GNIS-style online database. Typically gazetteers include a "populated place"-like designation that has been translated as "village" when this may not be accurate (e.g., in Polish "village" would be wieś, but there is another designation osada, or "settlement", that we have also often translated as "village"). Similarly, many Turkish "village" articles have been generated about places designated as mahalle (or "neighbourhood"). FOARP (talk) 07:32, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Looking back over our Talk archives for GNIS-like sources or gazetteers in non-US countries:
— hike395 (talk) 07:38, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
The source for the Iranian abadi was the Iranian census and is a shining example of why it's just totally wrong to take censuses/gazetteers as a list of "legally-recognised populated places" (a concept that exists only on Wikipedia). I think everyone on here is familiar with the story but - briefly for anyone who isn't - abadi are just places where the census was counted and can be literally anything, including pumps/shops/petrol stations/bridges/factories/farms etc. FOARP (talk) 08:55, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean by more-or-less exactly the same thing that was done in the US based on GNIS was done also in every other country with a comprehensive GNIS-style online database. If you mean the automated creation of articles for US places, Rambot used Census data, which is entwined with GNIS as a source. And Rambot was limited to incorporated places (places with officially recognized municipal governments) and CDPs, which with some exceptions are generally well-established localities. Apart from some small number of CDPs, most of the Rambot-generated articles were for valid places that could pass notability criteria (even though some of these have seen little improvement over the past nearly 20 years). Some editors later harvested additional categories of places from GNIS, and to my knowledge this was done manually, although there may have been some usage of tools that resembled bot-like behavior. These later additions were often problematic. I guess my point is that use of a national gazetteer is not in itself problematic, but rather indiscriminate usage without good understanding of the data. older ≠ wiser 10:32, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
Rambot wasn't the only bot operating. The Polish articles were mostly created by Kotbot, directly transposing poorly-validated information from PL Wiki on to EN Wiki. FOARP (talk) 10:34, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
I was referring only to the creation of articles on US places based directly or indirectly on GNIS data. older ≠ wiser 11:01, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
That's fine, but I am not referring specifically to Rambot, but instead to the mass-created stub-articles that cite only GNIS and no other source. I don't actually object to Rambot specifically, though Rambot's work did inspire a lot of bad stub-creation. I don't object specifically to bot-creation, but to mechanistic article-creation in which no checking takes place. FOARP (talk) 13:04, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
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