Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fine Gold, California

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. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:08, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fine Gold Creek (neé Fine Gold, California)

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

Contested PROD. Only passing mentions to a Fine Gold Creek and a Fine Gold mining district could be found, with no clear evidence that these are connected to the supposed "community". Cited sources are either broken (ref. 2) or passing mentions that establish existence but not notability. The name does appear on the USGS topographic quads for Millerton Lake (1945, 1:62500) and Mariposa (1947, 1:250000) [1], but no other maps before or since that I can locate. Satellite images reveal a rural intersection with a few scattered farmhouses in the area. Clearly not a notable location and without any other documentation than GNIS this is a failure of WP:GEOLAND. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 01:33, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Geography and California. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 01:33, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For obvious reasons it's not really worth checking the 1888 Lippincott's or the 1893 Polk's, but I did so anyway just in case the article was wrong about the dates. Nothing. The Arcadia Publishing book on Madera County (ISBN 9780738529844) has nothing, too, which is usually indicative.
However there is plenty in Wood 1912, p. 34 about three Fine Gold creeks (the main one and two forks, Little and North) for this to be renamed and refactored into Fine Gold Creek. The town might be lost to history, but we still have geography. As is commonly the case with California, we look to the hydrology. Sometimes a place is a hot spring, or a creek.
And for a second source there are an awful lot of documented old mines on Fine Gold Creek in Crawford 1894.
The icing on the cake is that the Guddes (Gudde 2009, p. 115) say that this is a gulch/creek too. There are plenty of confirmatory statements about things being "in Fine Gold Gulch" in Crawford 1894, such as the Neversweat and Little Willie mines for example.
There's even stuff about a Fine Gold gold deposit, although beware of the self-published book that you will turn up. The truth seems to be that the GNIS and the Durham book are misleading us, and this wasn't a town but a mining camp that was all along a gulch with a creek that we have plenty of documentation for down to the individual mines. Fine Gold Gulch/Creek do turn up in the history books, even. They're in Kyle et al. 2002 (and also in the older non-SUP-revised edition).
This seems a prime candidate for the Project:WikiProject Kentucky/GNIS cleanup document-the-creek-with-mines approach.
Uncle G (talk) 09:29, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- I found a source that specifically states it was a mining camp, and updated the article accordingly. It's a self-published source and not reliable, but more likely correct than what GNIS has to say. I maintain that notability is not met, but if you'd be willing to look up some data on the mines and add it, I would reconsider. The truth is, nearly every minor stream in the slopes of the Sierra Nevada was prospected for gold at one time; the fact that somewhat more documentation exists for this creek than most isn't by itself enough to make it notable in my opinion. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 15:27, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  - I'll give it the Kentucky treatment. Uncle G (talk) 16:09, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

references

Wood, Beatrice Dawson (1912). "Fine Gold Creek". Gazetteer of Surface Waters of California. U.S.G.S. Water-supply papers. California State Water Commission.
Crawford, J. J. (1894). "Gold — Madera County". Mines and Mineral Resources of California. Report of the State Mineralogist. Vol. 12. Sacramento: California State Mining Bureau. pp. 153–167.
Gudde, Erwin G. (2009). "Fine Gold: Creek/Gulch". In Gudde, Elisabeth K. (ed.). California Gold Camps: A Geographical and Historical Dictionary of Camps, Towns, and Localities Where Gold Was Found and Mined; Wayside Stations and Trading Centers. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520261440.
Kyle, Douglas E.; Rensch, Hero Eugene; Rensch, Ethel Grace; Hoover, Mildred Brooke; Abeloe, William (2002). "Madera County". Historic Spots in California (5th ed.). Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804778176.

Californians. Writing about water. Uncle G (talk) 20:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep now that it has been refactored; discussing the topic as a notable geographic region using in-depth sources is much better than the original miscrostubs sourced only to directories of place names. At least in my judgement, there is enough coverage existing for this area for it to meet WP:GNG. Hog Farm _Talk 16:39, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as improved it qualifies under notability and also Heymann Principle etc. jengod (talk) 05:34, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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.