Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vroomanton

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (X! · talk)  · @275  ·  05:36, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Vroomanton

Vroomanton (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

Contested prod and declined speedy. Clearly has no notability for this subject. ApprenticeFan ^{talk contribs} 23:47, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. -- TexasAndroid (talk) 00:14, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
• Keep - Sources are indicating it was a population, even with its own post office and general store. [1][2]--Oakshade (talk) 00:30, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
• For the record, this exists only because the article's proper title, Vroomanton, Ontario, was redirected as an unsourced stub to the municipality that it's located in; whenever that happens, the creator (who seems to only create poorly-referenced stubs about ghost towns) has an irritating habit of subsequently recreating the same article again at an alternate title. While a properly referenced article about a ghost town is certainly acceptable, an unreferenced stub is not — the standing policy at WP:CANSTYLE is that communities, ghost or otherwise, which are within the boundaries of incorporated municipalities are to exist only as redirects, not as separate articles, until such time as a properly-referenced and reasonably detailed article — a one-line "Vroomanton is a ghost town" doesn't cut it — can be created about the community as a distinct topic. Although that rule isn't without controversy, it's pretty much exclusively the "everything that exists should have an article, legitimate references or not" crowd that take issue with it, not the people who are familiar with Wikipedia policy around verifiability and reliable sources. Move to Vroomanton, Ontario if expanded and sourced by close; redirect to Brock, Ontario if not. Bearcat (talk) 00:37, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
• Keep This is a prime case study of how merging to another article will prevent the wiki process, as described in editing policy, from getting encyclopedic information into Wikipedia. What if an editor wants to add coordinates to the article? Do we want Brock, Ontario to have this sentence:

Smaller communities in the township include Ball Subdivision, Blackwater, Cedar Beach, Creightons Corners, Derryville, Gamebridge, Layton, Maple Beach, Pinedale, Saginaw, Sunderland, Thorah Beach, Vallentyne, Vroomanton (44°16′23″N 79°7′25″W), Wick and Wilfrid?

I can't imagine that any editor would be happy about disfiguring Brock's article in this way, and this wouldn't be considered to be enough for a standalone article by those who are arguing here for deletion, so that edit probably won't get done. And what if another editor wants to add some information about the local Catholic church? Should they edt that sentence to say:

Smaller communities in the township include Ball Subdivision, Blackwater, Cedar Beach, Creightons Corners, Derryville, Gamebridge, Layton, Maple Beach, Pinedale, Saginaw, Sunderland, Thorah Beach, Vallentyne, Vroomanton (site of St. Malachy's Catholic Church founded by Father John Lee in 1857), Wick and Wilfrid?

Again, that's unlikely to be accepted as enough by those who object to separate articles, and unbalances the Brock article, so that information won't be added anywhere in Wikipedia. The same will apply to an editor who tries to add a snippet of information about the Methodist Church or the influence of the railroad or the reason why the town was abandoned. All of this information is available from reliable sources about Vroomanton, and absolutely relevant to a comprehensive non-paper encyclopedia, but if we insist on not having separate articles it will never get into Wikipedia. And then we come to the arguments about articles with just one or two facts in them not being encyclopedic. Have the people making these arguments ever read a print encyclopedia? I have one to hand, and have just opened it at random. I see an article whose whole content is:

Eccles 53 29N 2 21W A town in N England, in Greater Manchester on the Manchester Ship Canal. It manufactures machinery, textiles and chemicals. Eccles cakes originated here. Population (1973 est): 37 370.

This is perfectly typical of encyclopedia articles as they have been known over the centuries. I don't know where people have got the idea from that an encyclopedia consists only of long, detailed decriptions of a subject. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:39, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not have a requirement to allow unsourced stubs to stand permanently on their own on the basis that their content might be expandable and referenceable. We evaluate articles as they are, not as we might wish them to be in an ideal world. Nobody, least of all me, is saying that we can't have a separate article about Vroomanton if a proper article about the topic is created. But it most certainly is not entitled to an unreferenced article. Bearcat (talk) 21:08, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

What's with this word entitled that people keep using in AfD discussions? Articles don't exist in Wikipedia for the benefit of subjects that may or may not be "entitled" to them, and the whole concept of a ghost town being "entitled" to anything is obviously ridiculous. The people with entitlement are our readers, who are "entitled" to be able to find information about the subjects that they are looking for without wading through articles about something that they didn't ask for - such as readers who want to go straight to the information that we have about Vroomanton, and then, via links, find out about the surrounding area. This article has sources, described as external links, which you may or may not consider reliable, but I have demonstrated above that several cast-iron reliable sources exist to verify information that could be put into this article, but would not be relevant to the article about Brock. Can you demonstrate how, if we are to keep this as one word in one sentence in an article about the larger area, our editing process will ever lead to our readers getting the information about Vroomanton that they are "entitled" to? Phil Bridger (talk) 22:00, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not have an obligation to provide anything except properly sourced, good quality articles. The reader's "entitlement" to information about a topic is not so pressing that we have any requirement to keep an unreferenced stub forever just because somebody might eventually come along and improve it. I'll quite happily rescind my delete if the article actually sees some improvement before close — if you've got such cast-iron reliable sources handy, then it really shouldn't be a problem to, like, y'know, actually add them to the article today — but until that actually happens, we have to look at the existing quality of the article as it stands right now. Bearcat (talk) 23:58, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

• Keep sourced stub for a real (now former) place. Part of first of the 5 pillars is being a Gazetteer; deletion of this is counter to that as well. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 07:12, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

The pillars say that Wikipedia incorporates elements of gazetteers, not that Wikipedia is a gazetteer. And the sources need to be in the article before we can say that the article is sourced — as currently written, it isn't sourced at all. Bearcat (talk) 08:27, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

• Keep There are lots of sources for this place and so the topic is clearly notable. Please see WP:BEFORE. Colonel Warden (talk) 23:21, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

As has been pointed out more than once, the fact that sources are possible for a topic is irrelevant to the discussion if those sources are not actually physically in the article now. If just one person would take five lousy minutes to add some real sources to the article, there'd be no problem — but nobody's doing that. Instead everybody keeps mentioning all those wonderful keep-worthy sources here instead of actually doing anything with them there. Bearcat (talk) 02:03, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.