WeirdNAnnoyed

Your submission at Articles for creation: Calmodulin (July 28)

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Fiddle Faddle 07:18, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Hello, WeirdNAnnoyed! Having an article declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! Fiddle Faddle 07:18, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Calmodulin

Hello, WeirdNAnnoyed. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Calmodulin".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.

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Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia! UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:53, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Spheroidene has been accepted

Spheroidene, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.

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Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for creation if you prefer.

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DMacks (talk) 03:20, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

re: AfDs of articles

Re your comment on the talk page for the article about turnin' the damn frogs gay, there is an easy way to AfD the article. First remove the scientific cites, since they violate WP:SYNTH; remove non-RS cites; remove anything else which violates WP content policy. The remainder of the article will be basically a stub that says two guys said something crazy, with a couple media sites for citations: that is a slam-dunk for AfD. AllGloryToTheHypnotoad (talk) 16:23, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Faith Christian High School

Hello, WeirdNAnnoyed,

You really messsed this page up. To start a new discussion on an AFD, you create a new AFD, you don't remove a previous discussion from the original AFD discussion page. Now, a new AFD page has to be created and all of this new content moved over to it.

Please do not ever do this again as it creates work for other editors/admins. Use Twinkle to tag pages for deletion or deletion discussions and Twinkle will take care of the process so we don't run into problems like this one. Oy, vey. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:18, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

"BEFORE"

I'm with the people who refrain from overusing these initialisms an acronyms, especially the ones that turn into words in sentences. They hide what the underlying things really are, and obfoscate more than elucidate, to the extent that they've been parodied with things like "OMG TLA WTF BBQ!" since at least 2006. "BEFORE" is, really, doing reasonable searches for sources beforehand and more. Of course when viewed that way it encompasses everything from the very reasonable reading the sources already cited in an article by the editors who wrote it, to doing far more than counting hits on one of Google's searches.

At this point, we're still in the GNIS mess, and we still have huge amounts of cleanup of what are bad data dumps to do. If you're looking for ways to approach this, there are several, but the most basic advice is that AFD is not a hammer. It's not meant to be an ultimatum to get other people to do the research.

To that end, quite a lot of us have undertaken quite a lot of cleanup projects, AFD not being cleanup. Hog Farm and I, for example, went over California with a history book of springs, and the resorts that blossomed and after a few decades withered around them, in hand; at the very least making Wikipedia correctly represent something as a "spring" or "resort" for the next editors to come along, so that they don't have to do all over again the work to find what the (at this point) zero-information "unincorporated community" in GNIS article text is obscuring. I took the Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data/Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection sources in hand and did some of that state, merging the creeks and tributaries into a sane coverage (some of them have lots about them to say, from all of the running-prose-documented tributaries to how the schools and post-offices moved around over the years) that actually reflects the history that Rennick researched rather than how the GNIS (and the cancellation of its further phases) has basically frozen dots on maps.

As to the research, there are several things to do when one first hits a bad GNIS data dump article:

1. Discount the GNIS for everything — not even the coördinates are reliable — and start from first principles. Not even the first sentence — especially not that — of an article should be linked to a GNIS citation. It is most especially a bad and erroneous source for basic definitions of what something is, which is what first sentences deal in.
2. As mentioned in Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data#Further reading, the Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they are usually historians specializing in the area, usually from local historical societies and working in conjunction with museums and libraries for their source materials. They show where the history is. If they do have something, it's a strong clue that there's more to be found. If they don't, then something is at best going to be bloody difficult to find sources for (although it has happened, rarely).
3. Find comprehensive good sources, such as Waring's Springs of California or Wood's Gazetteer of Surface Waters of California, for identifying what's actually what. There really are lots of good sources out in the world that have systematized the geography and geology, and indeed post offices and whatnot, of entire states. Avoid dodgy WWW sites with unidentifiable hobbyist authors, but don't discount actual published proper surveys with named and identifiable authors.

   Why springs and waters and stuff? Because the actual towns and cities were put into Wikipedia by Ram-Man years before the bogus GNIS record dumpers came along, and it's the hundreds of thousands of things that were imported as (usually) "unincorporated community", a term that has been so abused that it effectively means nothing in terms of a Wikipedia article, that are the problem. They turn out to be anything, from springs, through reservoirs ("tanks" ), and landings on rivers, and survey corners that mark the corners of the boundaries around the encyclopaedic subjects, to places where steam trains on long routes through unpopulated areas stopped for water and refuelling (sometimes, we've found, named after railway employees).

4. Look for local histories, such as Smith's Historical Overview of the Western Tehama County Foothills or the Rensch+Rensch+Hoover Historic Spots in California that was heavily revised by William S. Abeloe in the 1960s and republished by Stanford University Press. (There's even a further SUP edition, revised again by Douglas E. Kyle, from 2002.) Back in the 19th century these are positively obsequious in places, so the Internet Archive has to be used with care, but they're useful if one sticks to the factual bits. Revised editions like that are improvements. Proper historians show their colours in contrast to all of the "highly respected gentleman of the town from a good family who joined our joyous community in 1832" fact-free fawning.
5. Look — after looking for the histories, geologies, and whatnot — for eneyclopaedias! For example: The GNIS data dumpers gave us GNIS records in their thousands for Antarctica around 2010, and by 2012 someone had already pointed out (in a little-frequented Wikiproject, in a comment that's in Wikipedia's analogue of a filing cabinet in a basement now) that the GNIS data scraped from the WWW site by the data dumpers contained errors. The stupidity of the dumping GNIS approach is reflected in that before Wikipedia even existed there had been Alberts's Names and three encyclopaedias of the place (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Antarctica#Resources) already published, and much better guides than a computerized database dump to what's encyclopaedic. After all we set out to write something at least as good as the other encyclopaedias, not make a text re-hash of something that couldn't even get names properly spelled because it used EBCDIC.

Of course, these examples are just from the states that have got the most attention; what applies to California in terms of looking for comprehensive histories and geographies and geologies and whatnot, applies to other places as well.

Uncle G (talk) 06:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• @Uncle G:: Thanks for those sources. I suppose I did jump the gun with the Loybas Hill nomination, at least. I appreciate the work you've done. I have been trying to clean up several GNIS stubs and there were some that I was able to expand (slightly) with online info. I have a small collection of offline rare books on Northern California topics and have been using those; so far no one has challenged any of them. McGie's History of Butte County is one of them. I didn't have anything on Tehama County, however, which is why these recent AfD's have not gone how I thought they would. But I really do appreciate you and others adding info, even if I don't agree about significance they're actually informative now, not info-free "x is an unincorporated community in y county that had a post office from 1890 to 1891" wastes of space. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 14:34, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
  • You'll not hear the end of it if you let on that it was published by the Butte County Office of Education and has the word "teachers" on the cover. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 20:26, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Mary V. Clymer has been accepted

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S0091 (talk) 15:50, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Humboldt Wagon Road has been accepted

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~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 01:34, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

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deleting nonnotable place stubs

I was looking for stuff todo (on vacation, and got sick. So anything is fun), and started adding seconds to deletion requests from the list. I noticed you were doing a lot of them for nowhere cities in California. I did remove one because it was actually notable, but hey even a broke clock is write once or twice a day. I also added one you hadn't got to yet. But, after a few of these I began to sense something bigger was going on.

I can spend a little time helping here and there. A read of your talk page and some of the background pages seems to show there are many thousands of these todo. I'm curious why your not speedy deleting them, and I'm wondering do the admins really expect these to be reviewed one by one in such great detail as described by Uncle G? I want to help with it since is so huge, but I sense if I plow in without some background that I might irritate more help.

Can you spare a minute to catch me up on the situation? James.folsom (talk) 00:02, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

@James.folsom: Sure, I have an interest in California geography and have improved several sparse articles over the past year or so (I've only been editing on WP for 3 years). I have found a surprising number of stub articles on places I have never heard of, despite living just a few miles away for many years of my life, and after some digging I learned these articles are based solely on "populated place" entries in GNIS (see WP:GNIS for why this is absolutely not a source we should use as a basis for articles). Many but not all of these "articles" were created by a single user, Carlossuarez46, during a few-week span in 2009, and if you look at the date-time stamps of the articles' creation, you'll see that the chronological order of creation matches the alphabetical order of the places, first by county, then by place name. So this Carlossuarez46 literally sat down with GNIS and went down the list from top to bottom, creating an information-less stub for every place in California with an entry (until reaching the counties starting with S, at which point he got bored, apparently, as the T through Z counties are not so overburdened with stubs on nonexistent places).

For some of these places, I've been able to find published information and expand the article by adding sources and a few sentences of actual facts (see Newville, California for an example). But for most there is nothing to be said except that there is a spot at xyz coordinates that someone thought to tag with a name. I personally think Wikipedia should summarize the world's knowledge, not back up the world's data, so I think these articles are pointless. Worse, because many sites scrape Wikipedia for data about locations, these articles actively pollute our information sphere with unverifiable, irrelevant, and often flat-out false statements. If you Google "things to do in Fruto, California", you'll find garbage like [1], listing a bunch of activities that aren't within an hour's drive of Fruto (which I have been to, and it is a depressing cluster of a few trailers surrounded by miles and miles of pasture).

So I have decided to clean up misleading junk articles like these. I haven't nominated any for speedy deletion because I don't think any meet the criteria (they're not patent nonsense, vandalism, without content, etc.). And as you'll see if you look at my AfD's, even low-effort junk has its defenders. But I just finished creating a major new article and don't have any other articles planned, so for now cleaning up this clutter is my project around here. If you'd like to help out I would be happy to have you. And if you disagree and think these articles are worth saving, that's valuable, too; adding some information to these stubs would at least make them into actual articles. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 00:52, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to find them? If there is more than you can handle, let know how to easily find them and I will swat at them too.James.folsom (talk) 01:09, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, something else helpful. I noticed you have been tagging his talk page each time. My reading of the policy on "prod" is that this is only "reccommend" while also being polite. I think in this case no one would fault you if you stopped doing this, in order to do these faster. Especially if the author is not responding to any of them. James.folsom (talk) 01:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, just look up any town in California (or most other states) and at the bottom there should be a template field called "Municipalities and Communities of XXX County" or something like that (in yellow; you may have to expand). Under "unincorporated communities" is where you'll find most of the garbage stubs. (I also think many listings under "CDP's" are not notable, but CDP's are at least legally recognized so they technically pass WP:GEOLAND, which IMHO sets the bar far too low, but I digress). When I do these, I first make a good-faith Google search and Google Books search to see if I can find any substantial information about the place. If the site has an Arcadia Publishing book about it, that's a good sign it's actually notable and worth keeping. I also search newspapers.com archives for any articles about the place, limiting my search to the county where it's located or sometimes neighboring counties. If all I can find is ads or legal notices, that's bad; if I can find actual articles that's a sign it's notable. Probably a third of these articles actually are worth keeping by my criteria, and I expand those. But the other two-thirds are just a waste of space. Oh, and when I do a PROD or AfD I use the Twinkle app, which is super-helpful as it automates all the little tasks you're supposed to do when listing an article for deletion, such as tagging the creator. Saves a ton of time, I strongly recommend using it. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 01:33, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

• If you are prepared to do the hard work, I'm randomly accruing a list of places for Jengod and Cielquiparle that should not be deleted, but where the rubbish GNIS mess should be swept entirely aside and replaced with a proper article that has what history books say about actual towns and stuff. Dealing with this GNIS mess is hard. It's not just about deletion. Many of the "unincorporated communities" in Eastern Kentucky, for example, are in reality post offices on the creek system, and what we need is articles like Troublesome Creek (North Fork Kentucky River). Writing things like that and tidying up all of the redirects and the bloody county navboxes is a lot harder than drive-by deletion nominations, but the entire state of Kentucky is thoroughly documented by WP:RENNICK alongside geographical reports of the creek system when coal mining was a boom industry, and that is actually what needs to happen there, not deletions at all.

  Even for California, there are a whole load of things that are hot springs, with histories of resorts and stuff from when that was a booming industry, which Hog Farm re-stubbed three or so years ago, that need writing, not least from an excellent hydrographical report documented all of the hot springs in California that we found, which indicates which ones we should go looking for in the history books as resorts. And there are things that turn out to be hiding entire histories of past ranches and suchlike underneath dots on maps, that also need writing. There are in-depth histories of the individual counties of California that need combing through, to find out the GNIS "unincorporated communities" that are really, for example, Gold Rush boom towns; or well-documented stops on settler trails; or what old Mexican land grants had turned into.

  Project:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force is not for the drive-by taggers. The history, geology, physical geography, and human geography of the states in the U.S. has actually been fairly well documented in places like Kentucky and California, not least because people mined them, and it involves hard work writing stuff to fix the utter GNIS mess of thousands of "unincorporated community" lies that people have left us with.

  If you want an easy task, get out a copy of Lippincott's gazetteer (several of which, for different decades, are freely downloadable on the WWW) and fix each "unincorporated community" that's actually a "post-town" or "post-village" (which Lippincott's distinguishes from mere post offices) and correct "unincorporated community" to "town" or "village" to help the next editor at least have a fighting chance at knowing what the Hell some of these "unincorporated communities" are, to research them further, like Hog Farm did for the hot springs. Half the work in researching one of these things at AFD is still getting over the hurdle of what even to look for. Is it a railway stop? A town? A village? A landing? A cave?

  We already did a mass-deletion of the Carlossuarez46 substubs, for which talk to Alexis Jazz et al.. Much of the low-hanging fruit was picked some years ago. This is a harder phase, now.

  Uncle G (talk) 01:58, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  Yeah I don't know how to fix everything on Wikipedia but the GNIS-bad agenda is pushing me to make sure I de-stub everything I can in *my* county and then work my way outward. We will do what we can. jengod (talk) 02:14, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  I've found a lot of the fun is the heavy research to identify these places. When we went through California, I found that two GNIS stubs actually represented redlinked California State Parks; the articles are now Smithe Redwoods State Natural Reserve and Reynolds Wayside Campground; you never know what is buried beneath a seeming permastub. It just takes some research - the Wikipedia Library is quite helpful, as are old public-domain county histories you can find online. Yes, there's junk - I've seen everything from a small pond to an overlook in a national park labelled as "unincorporated communities" - but the most of the worst has been culled by now. Another thing to keep in mind is that the spelling GNIS uses is sometimes a variant spelling of the most common one - Hiner, Kentucky is actually spelled "Heiner" in most of the sources - and GNIS will as a rule omit apostrophes from place names. I think the trickiest ones are those where so little is provided in the stub in the way of content/referencing that the true nature of the site cannot be determined and the name is so common that searching is impossible. The contextless stub at Bob, West Virginia some time ago made me just throw my hands in the air and PROD it. Hog Farm _Talk 02:45, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  Amen to all this @Hog Farm. Challenge for everyone and/or deletion target: I can't find a thing about Boiling Point, California except it's maybe hot in the Mojave this the name. If anyone else has thoughts (including that it should go in the bin) they would be welcome. jengod (talk) 02:50, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  Jengod - I think Boiling Point is an old gas station. Found an old USGS topo map which has this point labeled as "Boiling Point Garage", which was per this The gas station at the top of the old Mint Canyon grade It was run by a Mr. and Mrs. Tex Miller. I haven't found enough to establish notability for this gas station although others might be able to find more now that we know what it is. Hog Farm _Talk 03:27, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  Nice work @Hog Farm 😊 jengod (talk) 03:35, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Uncle G@Hog Farm, @Jengod. This is a really great crusade you guys got going here. I might come around to you guys for some assignments from time to time. Uncle G is clearly an honest to god historian, either figuratively or literally. What I heard here today was that you guys view the remaining articles as something to be thorough investigated to exhaustion before admitting defeat. So I'll help you when I can. But I have a real research scientist job that keeps me busy, too.

  I want to say this though: I came to this viewing these "carlos" articles as illegitimate because they don't meet even the most basic criteria for Wikipedia. Even many of the improved ones are not really establishing notability. So I immediately became a "deletionist" as you'd call it. I think this viewpoint is fine as well. Of course I'm not saying this because I think your wrong, but to give an entirely opposite counterpoint that you can look to when you need a clean escape from the deeper rabbit holes. God speed guys.

  Oh and somebody check out Ricardo Califonia, its a camp ground in a state park, I actually removed the prod on it, but put back on second thought. On third thought, maybe you guys should look at it.

  @WeirdNAnnoyed When you get sick of this clutter on your talk page, let us know. Also I think the link below will be the most useful tool for finding "carlos" articles. It is a direct link to his 2009 edits. Just scroll down to where he started California.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Carlossuarez46&target=Carlossuarez46&dir=prev&offset=20090415191328&limit=500 James.folsom (talk) 21:13, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

  • Really, I'm an encyclopaedist, who relies upon historians to have done the legwork. And geologists. See User:Uncle G/The "dirty '-ista's". Fun fact: There are 91 books in the six Kentucky Geological Survey reports series up to 1929. There's a picture of a bookshelf full of them in JSTOR 23370088. I've just discovered that I have to revisit Goose Creek (Oneida, Kentucky) and all of the tributary articles with another source in hand. Uncle G (talk) 01:40, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

@Uncle G:@Hog Farm: Thanks for your advice and suggestions. I'm going to try to take it slower with my next round of nominations, as some of the places I nominated recently did turn out to have fairly accessible information about them. I'm still a relative noob...if the worst has already been deleted then I would hate to see what the situation was like 5, 10 years ago. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 15:01, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

<3 You're doing a great job. It's a bit of a dilemma bc even though we can and should save some of the dregs, wiki-energy could possibly be better spent improving mediocre articles about places of unquestioned notability, but that's not as much fun as winning the research game with something really obscure and knotty. It's ok we're all just doing our best (in good faith!) to contribute to this crazy experiment. Cheers and have a great weekend. jengod (talk) 23:53, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

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TWL n.c links

Very good to see somebody filling out those old town articles. Something that's needed done for a while... I have one request though. With diffs like this I humbly request you make a clipping first -- even after the bot fixes the TWL proxy link, the URL goes to a page and not to a clipping, i.e. nobody can read it unless they're logged into newspapers.com, versus a clipping which can be seen by anyone. I wrote a browser extension that helps with this by automatically formatting cites for n.c, if it is any use to you. jp×g🗯️ 04:14, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

@JPxG: Thanks for this tip. I tried it but for some reason I can't get Greasemonkey to work in my browser; if I try to open it, it just hangs. I'm using Firefox, Win 11, if that makes a difference. I'd really like to do this because I haven't figured out how to make clippings the normal way (see thread below), but I just can't get the extension to work. Any advice? WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 01:40, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Pacific, California

Hey there. I'm working on the List of California tornadoes, and there was one in October 1972 in Pacific, California. NOAA mentioned the location in their October 1972 edition of Storm Data, which is viewable here. Just wanted to give you the heads up, regarding your proposed deletion. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 22:57, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Links to newspapers.com articles that require a WP account

Howdy. I've been very happy to see all your good work recently cleaning up non-notable WP articles. I see that you are also updating articles with links to newspapers.com.

One minor issue is that when we WP users use the WP:LIBRARY, the urls have https://www-newspapers-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/ in them, which is only useful to WP editors who meet the WP Library requirements and are logged in to the WP Library. Fortunately, on a daily basis, the User:BsoykaBot fixes those and changes them to https://www.newspapers.com automagically, so it is not a problem.

A more significant issue is that links to newspapers.com images will only work for people with newspapers.com accounts, the fix is to clip the article and use that URL. For example, https://www-newspapers-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/image/47174163/?terms=dinsmore&match=1 will get fixed by User:BsoykaBot to https://www.newspapers.com/image/47174163/?terms=dinsmore&match=1 which probably won't work for WP:LIBRARY users. The fix is to clip the article, see Wikipedia:Newspapers.com#Using_the_"Clipping"_function, which results in https://www-newspapers-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/article/the-times-standard-dinsmore-battle-of-t/137967887/ Either that URL can be used and User:BsoykaBot will fix it, or the URL https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-standard-dinsmore-battle-of-t/137967887/ could be used.

A little nitpick, It seems that people who use the WP:newspapers.com, cannot clip articles. Any thoughts on work arounding that?James.folsom (talk) 21:09, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Actually, they can! Or at least I can, and I believe that other people can clip articles. My account might be a special case because I had a WP-sponsored newspapers.com account before the proxy system was installed. See Wikipedia:Newspapers.com#Using_the_"Clipping"_function. You might need to toss some cookies or try from a different browser. Message me if you have problems. Apologies to WeirdNAnnoyed for so much chatter on your talk page! Cxbrx (talk) 21:37, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

An additional benefit is that https://archive.org will archive those clippings. I added the clipping by hand (see https://web.archive.org/web/20240103185822/https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-standard-dinsmore-battle-of-t/137967887/) but I believe that archive.org will automagically archive similar links. Newspapers.com might not be around forever, but I'm fairly confident on the longevity of archive.org

I realize that this is all minutia, but as you are a prolific editor, I thought you might want to know about the issue. I'll see about Again, many thanks for all your cleanup efforts. Cxbrx (talk) 19:01, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I made this mistake too until I came across a discussion and discovered WP:Newspapers.com but have not even considered archive.org and did not know about the bot. The other thing I found it is if you use the correct URL, Visual Editor will automatically format them which saves a ton of time, though it will not fill out the author so has to still be added manually. Also, when making the clipping I save it under the title of the article, which I think the example above shows as well. Live and learn! :) S0091 (talk) 19:19, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I probably should have written less here and included refs to WP:Newspapers.com instead. Also, I struck out a sentence fragment in my initial comment above. Thanks for the tip about Visual Editor, I'm old school, but I should try VE again sometime. Good point about using the title of the article - I do that already, but not everyone does. I'm not sure what to do about all the links to www.newspapers.com articles that require a WP account with 500 edits and are to the entire page, not a clip. It looks like there are 20,696. I'll follow up to Wikipedia talk:Newspapers.com on that topic. 20:56, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Grr. Typo alert in above. A better link to search is links to www.newspapers.com articles that require a regular non-WP newspapers.com account and are to the entire page, not a clip. I've struck out the offending text above. Follow up to Wikipedia_talk:Newspapers.com#Lots_of_links_to_newspapers.com_/image/_that_are_not_readable. Cxbrx (talk) 21:32, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I'm post VE so I use it almost exclusively. VE will automatically format most URLs, including GBooks, JSTOR (ex. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24713962), DOI links/ids, ISBNs, PMIDs, etc. As for existing links, one of the issues is folks like me and WeirdNAnnoyed with WP:Library access who simply did not know better and Newspaper images show up on Google searches so someone without access will understandably cite them. S0091 (talk) 21:35, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Hey—it's me, the guy behind the bot! Popping in to say that BsoykaBot and the work it does are actually very new additions from the past few days; just hoping to make a few people's lives a bit easier. I'm also considering having the bot send messages (like the one above!) to people who add non-clipped links, but life is busy and I need a bit more time to put together a nice proposal and ask the community what everyone thinks. Bsoyka (t • c • g) 21:39, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

AFD daily log

Hello, WeirdNAnnoyed,

You added {{Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ranch House Estates, California}} to the AFD daily log for January 5th but this is a closed AFD discussion from 2020. Perhaps you meant to add a different AFD discussion page. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 08:58, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

DYK for Humboldt Wagon Road

On 26 January 2024, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Humboldt Wagon Road, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that stagecoaches on the Humboldt Wagon Road could make a 400-mile trip in under four days? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Humboldt Wagon Road. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Humboldt Wagon Road), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Z1720 (talk) 12:02, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Non communities Yakima

I've been going over some of the places you skipped over and doing much deeper studies on them as you may have noticed. I don't know if you have an opinion on Goose Prairie, Washington? It was never a community,just what I'd call a Bald, but the lingo differs in other parts of the country. It's obviously notable, but I think it should be moved or merged and the language about it being a community removed. I was wondering what you think about that.James.folsom (talk) 22:15, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Also what about Fruitvale. I can't pin it down, and the only thing that gives me pause is https://www.newspapers.com/image/857930665/?match=1&clipping_id=141306728. That says it's in different county, though. All the other mentions in the papers are so vague, I can't say for sure whether it's a town or just an area. I would argue that lack of information is reason to prod it. But I thought your local knowledge might help here.James.folsom (talk) 23:29, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I would say Goose Prairie is a pass for notability (just barely) but I didn't exhaustively search for sources on it. It seems to be a recognized place among locals...has a sign on the road, a few houses, a Boy Scout camp, and a store (or did until recently). All of that is OR, but based on that I figure there must be sourcing out there that I just haven't found. That said, I would not oppose a deletion if nothing could be found. Fruitvale I very nearly nominated for deletion, since all the information I could find was passing mentions in local press. But it at least (again) seems to be an area that locals would recognize as a defined place. I don't feel strongly about it having an article--especially as uninformative an article as it does have--but I've done enough AfD's that I know any place with any mention, anywhere, is going to attract a significant number of keep !votes. Fruitvale isn't a pointless enough article that I feel like fighting for its deletion. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 23:44, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Let's kick 'em on down the road then. Lower hanging fruit first. James.folsom (talk) 00:00, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't have time for them myself, but I have collected a source or two starting at Talk:Yakima River#Geological History. Enjoy. Uncle G (talk) 04:41, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Meany Sourced Places that likely don't Exist

I'm going through that Meany source looking for things that fit the pattern of not existing as candidates for AFD. (See below ) @Uncle G@Mangoe

• Eden,_Washington Only sources are GNIS, Meany, and the self published post office guy. I can't seem find any other trace of the place otherwise.
• Ehrlich,_Washington Only sources are GNIS, Meany, and the self published post office guy. I can't seem find any other trace of the place otherwise.

James.folsom (talk) 22:58, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

• I would not discount Edmond S. Meany entirely, but after Artesian, Washington (AfD discussion) ("Gans" instead of "Gano") and Ping, Washington (AfD discussion) (page number wrong) it does seem wise to treat Meany as if it had not been proofread and go through Meany back to the original sources where possible.

  Have you considered working up a list page for Washington, like the ones for other states at Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data#Cleanup efforts?

  Uncle G (talk) 08:32, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

  • I'm willing to help on it. This google search found ~50 possible candiates for such a list. "U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: ?, Washington "Post Offices". Jim Forte Postal History. Archived from the original on ? Meany, Edmond S. (1923). Origin of Washington geographic names. Seattle: University of Washington Press? site:wikipedia.org" James.folsom (talk) 23:09, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
    • Thanks for that info. I would fully support any effort in cleaning up the list in Washington, since I lived in the state for many years and am fairly familiar with its geography and culture. In fact, I may borrow your Google search and get started on nominating some of those places myself. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 00:12, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
      • That's the idea, so feel free. James.folsom (talk) 00:32, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
    • What you need to make are lists like Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force/Contra Costa County and Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force/All. I have started off Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington/GNIS cleanup for you. Uncle G (talk) 04:27, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
      • I've started adding the hits from google to here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Washington/GNIS_cleanup/tempgoogle. At the very least lets update that when we PROD them, there are a few already obvious ones that would be little effort. If more people get involved it might start to take the shape Uncle G wants. James.folsom (talk) 00:16, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
        • The exact form of the list is less important than that there is a list, so that people can track what has been reviewed/ticked off/fixed/found wanting by other editors. Uncle G (talk) 03:57, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
• @Uncle G@Mangoe Going through Thurston County I found a case of an editor hastily misclassifying a place for an article (Helsing Junction). So I starting try to do a targeted find for such things, and found ~30 Thurston county geography features that each have and article Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington/GNIS cleanup/Thurston county. Probably not all of these should. Any thoughts about whether its worthwhile to try to deal with them?James.folsom (talk) 19:29, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for finding all those. I didn't have a look at all of them, but I would say that Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve, Tumwater Falls, and Scatter Creek Unit are all notable and should stay (although the last two need better sourcing; I will get on that). Otherwise, the ones I looked at are all minor natural features that happen to be listed in the Thurston County Place Names guide, which means nothing for notability. Probably they should be PRODded, but it would be nice if someone more familiar with Thurston County than me would go through them first (I have lived in Benton, Yakima, King, and Snohomish counties, but seldom ventured down I5 farther than Sea-Tac). WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 23:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

  Shortiefourten would be good at that, but is not going to cooperate on such a thing. I'll pick at it and see which are likely low hanging fruit. James.folsom (talk) 23:55, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

• @Uncle G@Mangoe I don't know if you would normally look at a natural feature AFD or not, but I'm curious if you have thoughts on this one: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Balls IslandJames.folsom (talk) 23:41, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

What do you think about merging Hyak, Washington into Snoqualmie Pass, Washington or even more extreme merge both into the county?James.folsom (talk) 21:59, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Also this one Suncadia, Washington, is a resort development.James.folsom (talk) 22:16, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

No, I think both of those are notable enough (barely) to be kept. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 23:44, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Whats you opinion on CDPs? I ask because I notice a particularly tricky one in Yakima county. That Wiley City, Washington and West Valley are in Ahtanum, Washington CDP. Ahtanum also appears to be the name of an unincorporated community, but has no mention anywhere. Something ought be done to make this clear on Wikipedia. I see several options, 1)leave the Wiley City article and add info about West Valley and Ahtanum to the CDP article. Add the CDP peice to Wiley city 2)Put them all toghether in the CDP article. 3)convert the Ahtanum article to be about Ahtanum, (probably meets resistance). What do ya think?James.folsom (talk) 20:16, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

4)Move the Ahtanum Article to Ahtanum, Washingtion (CDP)? I think all the CDPs should be that way anyway, because of these situations. James.folsom (talk) 20:19, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

My opinion of CDP's is that they're a headache. Many of them not recognized as "places" as such by locals, but since they're "legally-recognized places" (and many of the articles are nothing but context-less political and demographic statistics, but sourced) I can't hope for an AfD to come to a delete. For these particular locations, I would just leave everything as it is. Ahtanum may be the CDP, but it has little local recognition; Wiley City does (although as Yakima expands the recognition becomes less and less). Maybe a "see also" link would be appropriate for these articles, linking each to the other. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 23:01, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I think I will try version 1 and see what happens. Additionally, those CDPs can be changed or removed by county authorities at any time. I don't think CDPs are legally recognized according to my understanding of the term. But Wikipedia is too spineless to define it. James.folsom (talk) 00:13, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

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