Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Geographic.org

Geographic.org

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Note to admins/closers - per WP:IAR, although the nominated article has not been created, IMHO, this discussion should be allowed to run for a week, to get as full an input on the issues raised as possible. This discussion could affect up to 2,357 articles. Mjroots (talk)

Over the last few months, 2537 articles on villages (from Afghanistan, Kazachstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and a few from Iran) are created nearly-identical, in rapid-fire batches of five or more articles per minute, based on (or at least referenced to) an outdated or incorrect source, geographic.org (but sadly not referenced to the specific page about the village, but to the main page of the site). Geographic.org is a copy of an older version (or a poor copy) of the geonames database of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in itself a reliable source, which I used to check these articles.

These articles are now listed in Category:Articles only referenced to geographic.org, and I propose to Delete all articles in this category.

A lot of articles are correct (my estimate would be around 1,000 of the 2,500), but the other 1,500 have major problems (which each time one or two of many possible examples):

• Subject doesn't seem to exist: Ab Kalak
• Subject is normally known with another name: Khvoshi, Ahsham-e `ali ahmad khiari
• Subject is situated in the wrong province: Pitigal, Al ahramiyah
• Article title has the wrong capitalization: majority of the Saudi Arabia and Iran articles, and many Oman articles: As suwayriqiyah, Al ahramiyah
• An article for the location already existed at a better name: Al `utaybiyah exists as Al Utaibiyyah, Bandar jissah exists as Bandar Jissah
• Multiple articles for one location are created: Kabanbay and Qabanbay, Komsomol'skoe, Kazakhstan and Komsomol'skoye, Kazakhstan
• Multiple actual locations correspond to the single article created: Komsomol'skoye, Kazakhstan
• The subject is not a village, but a neighborhood, a district or even a farm: Al `utaybiyah, or Tokhmari (described in the article as a "large village", actually a farm)

Many articles have more than one of these problems, e.g. Kariz Dashak should be at Karez-e Dashak and is not in Farah province but in Herat province. User talk:DGG#More Afghanistan has an analysis of twenty articles (the first and last ten of the category at that moment), and only 7 of the twenty had at first glance no major problems. 13 of the other ones needed moving, correct content, or simply deleting, even though these articles only have one line of text. Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Geographic.org has some more discussion on this.

I started with an individual AfD, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dara-I-Pech, for a single problematic article I found, but looking more into this has shown that this is such a huge group of problematic articles, that the loss of a number of correct short stubs doesn't outweigh the damage of having so many clearly and seriously incorrect articles. I do not dispute that many of these places deserve an article, but we have no deadline, and it is better that for the time being we don't have an article on them, than that we have more than a thousand unreliable, dubious ones.

The articles that tipped me over towards deletion instead of some other rescue mechanism (which would take much, much more time) were Bona see Buna (the ultimate evidence that no meaningful human check is being done when these articles are created), and Al madinah al munawwarah, which is not only badly capitalized, but is actually another name for the "village" of Medina, population 1,300,000. Fram (talk) 08:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• Comment. It is not clear that AfD is the appropriate way to address the problems cited by the nominator. In particular, it is obvious that WP:BEFORE has not been conducted on each article nominated for deletion. This is not to suggest that the bulk deletion of these articles (without prejudice to creation on a one-by-one basis) is inappropriate. And if the community decides that this is the appropriate venue for consideration of this proposal, then I will support it. ^Bongo_matic 08:39, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
  • How about this. Since this is Dr. Blofeld's horrid mess, Dr. Blowfeld should be the one to sort through all several thousand of these and pick out the ones that should be kept. If he's going to generate 2,537 one line articles, he should be the one to find the three or four out of that that warrant keeping. Looking at these, I doubt he can find more than that, if that at all. Sven Manguard Wha? 08:47, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Delete All I'm sorry, but what the hell was Dr. Blofeld thinking? One line is not an article, one line isn't even a stub. Every one of the 30 random articles from that category that I checked had less than twenty words. It's not useful, especially if it's not guaranteed accurate. Sure, we should shoot for encyclopedic coverage of every city and province in the world, but just like every other article, multiple reliable sources are a requirement. Wikipedia is not an atlas, every single insignificant town does not warrant coverage. If sources can be found that indicate some semblance of notability at the WP:GNG threshold, then yes, like anything else it warrants an article, but if someone were to tell me that this is an acceptable article, I'd assume that they were a brand new user and direct them towards WP:GNG or the more blunt WP:42. TLDR This is unacceptable, these articles are all worthless. Sven Manguard Wha? 08:44, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Regarding "Wikipedia is not an atlas, every single insignificant town does not warrant coverage", it has been the general consensus for years that if a town of any population can be verified to exist, it doesn't need to pass GNG (see WP:NPLACE). Jenks24 (talk) 08:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• Keep articles and reference them properly and fix problems. I have just done two. Mass deletion, without even placing a template on the artciles is definitely not the way to go about this. Jezhotwells (talk) 08:47, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I'm sorry, but you didn't. You edited one, not two articles, but you didn't fix the problems. Al hijar is after your edit still sourced to an unreliable source, and still incorrectly capitalized. Fram (talk) 08:54, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Note: all pages under discussion now have the AfD template (transcluded through the geographic refimprove template). Fram (talk) 09:00, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• Delete all unencyclopedic entries, without prejudice to re-creation subject to WP:RS etc. Mjroots (talk) 09:23, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• Keep This is a reckless approach to deletion and in my view sets a dangerous precedent. We don’t delete articles because a particular source is deemed un-reliable, we delete articles because there are no reliable sources to support notability of the article topic. In this case, even the nom admits that many of these geo-locations are valid and warrant articles. Nom didn’t get the results wanted in this discussion [1], but still choses to uni-laterally declare that geographic.org is unreliable. On an article by article basis, there may be instances where geographic.org is not a reliable source and/or contains significant content errors and no other sources exist to support notability of the article topic. However, if more recent or reliable data sources are available to support notability and content (must be available if errors in geographic.org can be validated), they should be used in the article. Unless WP:BEFORE is applied to each of these articles, we run the risk of creating a new and dangerous deletion tactic--find a way to discredit a source and then nominate all the articles that use that source for deletion. Categorical deletion as is being proposed here is a really poor approach to improving the encyclopedia. All that said, I do believe there should be more engagement with the creator of these articles to get the sourcing correct on an article by article basis.--Mike Cline (talk) 09:33, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

There have been extensive discussion of these articles, the sourcing, and whether the mass creation is appropriate in other fora. See, for example, the RS/N discussion, including the rough poll where everyone opining agreed that articles should not be created with single sourcing to geographic.org. As I mentioned above, I agree that AfD is not an ideal way to address these articles that were created in violation of what turns out to be (wasn't known at the time) community standards. ^Bongo_matic 09:44, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• • (ec)The WP:RSN discussion you quote did produce the result I wanted, thank you. In the end, there was clear (but not unanimous) support that geographic.org is not a reliable source. Apart from that, this is hardly reckless (or dangerous), but well thought out. Article deletion should be as easy as article creation, easy come and easy gone. If WP:BEFORE doesn't apply to article creation (even for experienced editors), and it can be coupled with mass article creation (basically a violation of WP:BOTPOL, then the only way to check such flood of poor articles is deletion with recreation allowed on a case-by-case basis. Way should the only way of improving be "keep rubbish until someone cleans it"? Knowingly keeping around many, many clearly and fundamentally incorrect articles is a much more dangerous and reckless approach than mine, and a typical example of the way WP:BEFORE gets misused. Fram (talk) 09:48, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Actually, it doesn't appear to be "basically a violation of WP:BOTPOL", but an actual, specific violation of it (see Wikipedia:Bot policy#Mass article creation. However, as mentioned above, that suggests that this may be the optimal forum to address the issue. ^Bongo_matic 11:21, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Re: "we delete articles because there are no reliable sources to support notability of the article topic" - I would be happy to keep any one of these articles which gets updated with a reliable source in the next week, or however long this AfD runs. A week is plenty of time to find a source for a notable subject. Deletion is the best way to deal with the remainder - those which were produced en masse from an unreliable list and for which nobody has yet been able to find any alternative source (let alone a source which gives the in-depth discussion required by WP:V). If a bot operator finds it harder to automate the task of writing articles which meet wikipedia standards, rather than simply creating one-line articles from a list, they have my sympathy; but that's no reason to keep the bot's earlier indiscriminate output. bobrayner (talk) 12:05, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Bob, my objection is the Categorial Deletion of 2500+ articles without subjecting each to the normal debate in AFD. If indeed as Bongo said above that the creation was a violation of WP:BOTPOL and such a violation is sanctioned with mass deletion, I have no issues with that. If a violation of BOTPOL is a valid reason for mass deletion, so be it. But mass categorial deletion, claiming no RS is wrong. And you are wrong when you say nobody has yet been able to find any alternative source because even nom has said that National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in itself a reliable source, which I used to check these articles. --Mike Cline (talk) 12:30, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• Delete all. Nominator's argument is compelling. WP:RS fail and no other sources => delete. Tijfo098 (talk) 09:38, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
• Delete I can understand the argument that incorrect information in a stub can be fixed, but improperly titled pages can't even be found, so are very unlikely to get fixed. For example, say I am looking for Al Qal'i. Blofeld created an article at Al qal'i, but this does not show up in the search results. Trying to fix the issue will simply take way more time than massdeleting them and recreating from a proper source. Yoenit (talk) 10:03, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Even worse, it seems the article is at Al qal`i, using a non standard accent. What a mess. Yoenit (talk) 10:05, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
• An unusual nomination, and I'm reminded of WP:KITTENS. I'm rather tempted by Mike Cline's view, but on balance I don't want to apply a simplistic one-size-fits-all measure to 2,500+ articles—irrespective of whether that measure is "keep" or "delete". In the circumstances, can we please incubate the whole lot of them so that each can be considered in the way that Mike Cline recommends?—S Marshall T/C 11:31, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
• Delete all - and I dearly hope that future recurrences can be avoided. This project is not a race to create as many zero-quality placeholder articles as possible from an unreliable list, in the hope that somebody else will come along and clean up the mess later. Commendable research by Fram (talk · contribs) and others. The Bona see Buna example is really telling. If anybody is able to properly source a subset of these articles, I would be happy to keep that subset. bobrayner (talk) 11:57, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
• Delete all per nom, with mass incubation an acceptable alternative (with some special measure to identify the articles within the incubator, to avoid swamping everything else in it). This sort of unreliable content does not enhance the encyclopedia at all. These articles also appear the result of a mass creation effort of exactly the sort which Wikipedia:Bot policy#Mass article creation is supposed to require prior authorisation for, to prevent the need for exactly this sort of deletion discussion. Rd232 ^talk 11:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Keep all and expand

First of all, lets please assume good faith people. Quite frankly the tone here is disgusting and good faith attempts to work towards a fuller coverage of what are generally all legitimate populated settlements should not be responded with "what the hell was Blofeld thinking" and"what a horrid mess". So please drop the personal attacks and anguish. This a wiki and content can be expanded, stubs are only useless until they are expanded. I agree that content is not best started in this way and should be started with sources beyond genames but given the sheer amount missing I felt the need to create them. As for "what the hell was Blofeld thinking" I did a google book search for some of the articles listed in geonames and I also looked them up on google maps. The VAST majority were legitimate settlements which can be expanded, even if these countries typically have very poor web coverage. It was intended in good faith as a basic start to build up coverage like Alishang which can be expanded at a later date. The idea is so eventually we have 2500 articles like Alishang. Not what people want? How sad. I expanded many of the Afghan villages I started and they are clearly notable. Nuke the whole lot because a few might not be perfect and may use different transliterations is a lousy solution to a problem blown into massive proportions by Fram who didn't get any support an ANI so has resorted to this. It is a fact that the vast majority of these articles are legitimate places and could be expanded. To delete them all would be contrary to the nature of wikipedia and a waste of time. People have friends who died in many of the villages I started in Afghanistan and could quite reasonably expand them. I'm very disappointed in you all that you a completely blind to the potential of these articles. What the nominator and others are missing here is that the vast majority are genuine populated settlements even if a few might now be in different districts or occasional duplicates (which could easily be spotted and eradicated. As for Ab Kulak not existing, bull shit, [http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.059722,66.043333&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=37.059722,66.043333 zoom in here'. The apparent mass problems have been greatly exagerrated by the nominator , besides in regards to Afghanistan I have a UN directory downloaded to sort them into districts so the vast majority of problems would be fixed in the process of that. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:05, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

If you (or anybody else) find good sources for any of those articles, they would no longer be in the category, and could be kept. I'm unsure why you're angry with somebody wanting to delete minimally-sourced articles if you say they can get properly sourced; why aren't they better sourced, then? The best way to avoid deletion here is to add a source - any source, even a passing mention in Google Books - and move the article out of the category. The bar has already been set much lower than is usual for articles at AfD; the proposal here is merely to delete those which lack any proper source, whereas other AfDs generally require that notability is established, which would be considerably harder, even if we're really sure that Village X is visible if you zoom in on Google Maps.

I'm unsure about the relevance of the "people have died" comment. People have died in practically all settlements, but that doesn't guarantee notability, and I doubt Dr. Blofeld intended to imply that soldiers from the western world are the only people who really count. Media coverage of a combat death might be a good way to establish notability, though; feel free to add such coverage to articles. bobrayner (talk) 12:22, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Guess what? Ab Kalak does indeed exist, but is called "Ab Kuluk" or "Ab Kolok". I just spent 5 minutes looking that up, which I could have used to recreate 20 of these stubs from a proper source. Also, what on earth possesed you to use grave accents for the titles? That is 500-1000 unnecessary page moves (and useless redirects) which could have been avoided if you had thought about it for a second. Yoenit (talk) 12:30, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

A post on another page sums this up well:

"Fram, absolutely acceptable (although doing so would be pointy if the sole purpose was to expose errors in the source). Given the existence of multiple reliable sources related to geographic names, geo-locations, elevations, et. al., any error that geographic.org data might contain would be easily rectified by data from another source. Especially considering the online mapping we have today, geo-locations are extraordinarily easy to validate. Geographic.org may not be a perfect (error-free) source for geographic data, but neither is GNIS or PCGN (UK). That said, a great many NY Times articles contain factual and other errors when viewed in the light of history and new evidence, but does that make it an unreliable source? No. "

I agree its not a good idea to create "sub stubs" using geonames and no other source but they have been created now and it would be far more constructive to try to expand/correct as many as possible or at least move them into Incubator until reliable sources can be added. @Yoenit Virtually every geographic place created exists There are almost entirely genuine places, this is what Fram has failed to identify even if a few have awkward transliterations or are now in a different province. At the time of creation the articles did exist in that given province... Additional sources can be found to update and filter into correct districts and where possible find google book sources.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:33, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld, if you want people to assume good faith, don't talk bullshit: "At the time of creation the articles did exist in that given province..." is pure and utter nonsense. All the articles nominated were created this year, in 2011, and those with an icorrect province were equally incorrect at the time of creation. "There are almost entirely genuine places, this is what Fram has failed to identify even if a few have awkward transliterations or are now in a different province." Have you read my nomination? Where do I claim that most are not "entirley genuine places"? However, the problem is not "a few awkward transliterations", the problem is many, many errors of all kinds, as explained in the nomination. Fram (talk) 12:49, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

BTW Anomie has the UN index downloaded so any mistransliterations can easily be sorted. Google search [PDF] Afghanistan Settlements Index and you'll find it. The plan is to sort into districts and built a comprehensive coverage on what we have. Also note that one of those Kazakh villages was AFD d before and it ended up being fully expanded. The best way forward would be to add a UN source to verify place name and district and a source from google books, just like Ab Kolok. Gradually more and more info would become available on the web about it but that would be far more productive. Sorry I do NOT think the existing minor errors are serious enough to validate this mass deletion. Any minor errors can be easily corrected and the articles improved a little.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:44, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

"any mistransliterations can easily be sorted."? You used this to "correct" Ab Kalak, but how are people to know that this is the same as the "Ab Kuluk" from the UN index? Ab Kalak is not listed in the actual geonames database, only Ab Kuluk and Ab Kolok, so you still have an imaginary or at least very obscure form of the name inlcuded in the article, together with the unreliable source. Had you just created an article on Ab Kuluk, your time would have been better spent. The original article didn't have coordinates, so there was no way to match the two apart from a similarity in the names, which is a dubious method. Anyway, the argument is not that the articles can't be cleaned (apart from those that are really beyond help), merged, moved, improved, properly sourced, ..., but that the effort to do so would be better spent in starting from scratch, and that so little actual value is lost by deleting these articles, and so much incorrect info is removed at the same time, that deletion is the best option here. Fram (talk) 13:01, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, but you seem to intentionally be making life difficult. You are being excruciatingly tough picking holes in content. Can we be certain about any village in Afghanistan? Its a nightmare especially when double names exist. Its a difficult topic to get right but that does not mean pussying out of it is the correct answer. I agree, I'd rather create them properly first time with some additional sources but because of the sheer amount missing I'd like give up. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:06, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• Comment Create Geographic.org from [2] promptly. Then all of us can know about the source of these articles. Just a brief glance at this website tells me that it is a very valuable resource.--DThomsen8 (talk) 13:09, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
  • This source has been discussed at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Geographic.org: basically, it is a commercial, outdated and poor copy of a reliable source, containing things like A Sherton, which is actually the place Asherton, Texas. It is a site that should not be used on any articles, since it is a bad mirror of a better, more reliable source (I have no idea if the errors were in the older version of the Geonames database, or if geographic.org took those from somewhere else or fabricated them out of thin air). Fram (talk) 13:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
    • This is rather tangential (it shouldn't have any effect on how we treat articles which cite only a geographic.org entry), but we do have articles on sources which are themselves notable even if we don't put much trust on content from that source. Consider Youtube or Twitter, for example. However, those two are a lot more notable than geographic.org (regardless of their relative reliability). bobrayner (talk) 13:29, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

The thing is, even beyond geograph names compiling information is incredibly difficult. FOr instance you identified Khvoshi, which is actually now Bala Deh, we've established that. However, the UN directory listed five or six villages named Baladeh and none of them appear to be in Logar Province. The information about the village of Bala Deh with 1000 inhabitants and suffering from drought in 2005 is likely Baladeh, Kabul. Its incredibly tough to know which source refers to which village and then it also becomes increasingly complicated when villages names Deh Bala pick up. Are they the same or different or not. Very demanding, and I really don't think eliminating all stubs on them is the answer as problems with accuracy and confusion of place names will continue even after they are expanded.. The UN directory at least is the best up to date guideline we have. Deleting all stubs certainly won't do anything to improve wikipedia and i believe wikipedia would be better of as a resource if they could be expanded and sorted out properly. Some day they will be recreated by somebody else and the tough taks of compiling accurate sources still stands regardless of geographic.org.♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:26, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Who is the "we" that established that Khvoshi is Bala Deh? Khvoshi is an error from geographic.org, Khoshi is (part of) Bala Deh. And that it may be hard to find good sources is no excuse to create poor articles from a poor source in a bot-like manner, but should be an indication that we should have proceeded extra careful instead. Fram (talk) 13:32, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

I would agree that getting accurate information on these things is difficult. This is an encyclopædia; if there's a high probability that a page is wrong, due to confusion over names &c, then why create the entry? If all we have is the name and coordinates &c, and we're not even sure of those, I cannot fathom how keeping it is a step forward for encyclopædic quality bobrayner (talk) 13:35, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Incubation

Would incubation be an acceptable compromise, if we can find some way to avoid overwhelming any existing incubated articles? (Which is surely technically possible; just a subcategory of Category:Articles in the Article Incubator could work).

• For those who have so far argued delete, incubation means that the contentious articles are removed from article-space (and noindexed).
• For those who have so far argued keep, incubation means that the contentious articles still exist, and any editor can improve / expand them, add other sources, tweak names &c and they can freely return to article-space after improvement.

Comments / complaints / criticism? bobrayner (talk) 13:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

No objection, as long as they are independently checked before returning to mainspace. Fram (talk) 13:27, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that even after they are independently checked it is a minefield in regards to settlements of the same name and google books/web having a bit of info about the village but not knowing which village it is. I think the problem with Afghan settlements would continue beyond checking them.♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:32, 11 May 2011 (UTC)