Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fires and impacts of the 2019-20 Australian bushfire season

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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. Delete rationales are primarily focused around the need to edit and fix the article, not about any policy based reason why it doesn't meet the Criteria for Inclusion. Thus based on policy arguments, there is a consensus to keep. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 12:18, 1 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

List of fires and impacts of the 2019-20 Australian bushfire season[edit]

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List of fires and impacts of the 2019-20 Australian bushfire season (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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We've been trying to work out how to handle these fires on the Australian WikiProject for a while, but this is a bit of a mess: its main purpose is to list operational firefighting names for parts of the fires that largely aren't in common use (or are in limited use) and have tended to change as fire complexes merge together. There's no indication of when these fires actually occurred or their relationship to one another (or not) - it's just a meaningless list of complex names. This is just a mess of a way to handle an extremely notable topic and there's a reason, in all of the discussion about how to cover it, no one has suggested doing this.

The "impact to towns" and "impact to national parks" sections are wildly all over the place and conflate damage from different fires in different states in ways that's really confusing, mashing the main east coast blazes that've made international news together with wholly unrelated fires. The whole thing is basically just unhelpful and needs to be either deleted or redirected to the main fire season page. The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:15, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 10:18, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 10:18, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This would seem like a happy middle ground of sorts until more content can be sorted if it was a choice between the two Nickw25 (talk) 07:05, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I think the topic would be notable as a list, maybe not the "impacts" but definitely the list - is there any way we could clean this up before deleting it? SportingFlyer T·C 11:39, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't think so because it's fundamentally a list of names used by firefighting services with limited common use. Some of these will be different names for the same fire, many wouldn't have enough sources to give more than a general idea of when they occurred, and it's information that's generally pretty meaningless to most people (many people would know that places like Cobargo or Mallacoota got smashed by fires, but couldn't tell you which complex hit them). There's a reason many of these fires are (quite literally) sourced to an New South Wales Rural Fire Service XML feed of incident reports. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:57, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Just a note. We should not be too quick to write off the relevance of the names of the fires. At least in the "local" areas, and by this I mean within a radius of ~200km, about ~120,000 km2, everyone will have heard of the "fires near me". These names are used specifically and explicitly in all ABC emergency information radio broadcasts, which during the "bad" days are updated literally constantly all day and all night, by name, and specific locality, and on the not so bad days if a fire goes to emergency status they will break into whatever progamming is on and refer to the fire by name too, and locality. Aoziwe (talk) 12:44, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Do they have any real usage outside the actual emergency broadcasts though? I'm less than 200km from the fire zone and like many people I've been watching the fire coverage constantly and everything on this list apart from the massive Green Wattle Creek and Gospers Mountain blazes is completely meaningless (and I still couldn't tell you where those two were except in the state of NSW). I really don't think I'm alone in this. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:53, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
With the naming of multiple fires that are really part of a single "complex", you will need to raise that with the NSW RFS to change their policies, but I doubt you would get far as large major fires are complex and this season has made it a bigger challenge. It has always been the case where a major fire moves into another NSW RFS district (which is done for operational reasons). But the person who has been impacted by a fire doesn't care of what the name or what fire it was part of. Bidgee (talk) 06:56, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Would agree there are issues with the list at the moment, although, a good amount of the raised issues could be resolved by reorganising the table logic to be around a single table per state, perhaps organised around place rather than incident, with a column that details allows for notes on the impacts (deaths, national parks etc) and not referring to individual fires that don't have a commonly used name. NSW seems to have quite clear conventions around the naming of fires, assigns them unique identifiers and tracks the outcome with those names quite widely used to describe the incident including outside of the fire service. Victoria is more less clear in this respect which is where some of those more operational names come from. Individual event level information will probably become more readily available after the season is over in the various reviews that will likely happen, and indeed I'd suspect some of them might get wrapped up under a larger banner at that point, although it would still make for an extensive list I'm sure. Looking at other articles for wildfires on WP there are examples of tables primarily organised around particular fires with the statistics for that blaze ... perhaps we're just not used to having so many notable incidents we need to give them all names when documenting them, which seems a fairly routine practice in some other parts of the world? Nickw25 (talk) 07:05, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Events-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 23:43, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Keep I can provide some context to why this article has come into existence. I was contacted by a cultural organisation who had been approached by a firefighting organisation (I do know the names but I don't know if I have their permission to name them) to ask if a Wikipedia article could be created that summarised the localities and impacts as a permanent record of events. They were aware of 2019–20 Australian bushfire season but wanted something tabular. I quickly knocked up User:Kerry_Raymond/sandbox4 to confirm I understood what they were looking for. As I am rather busy with other projects, I took the project to Wikimedia Australia where it was discussed in a teleconf, where some people expressed interest in working on it. I also discussed it separately with other Wikipedians who expressed interest in working on it. While there is an element of WP:NOTNEWS involved (fires are still raging), equally there are fires which are now "old news". I was not aware the article had been started until the cultural organisation contacted me about what to do about this AfD. I don't think we have a question of notability, we appear to have willing volunteers to work on it, so I think we should let it contine. Also I don't like the thought of the media reaction if we delete it. No matter what the reality of the situation, it will be "spun" as "Wikipedia doesn't think the Australian bushfires matter"; lets not feed the trolls. We have plenty of list articles that provide an alternative viewpoint onto a situation; I see no reason not to have this one. Kerry (talk) 02:04, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't think it's a matter of notability exactly (no one is arguing that the fires aren't notable), just that this way of presenting it is a hot mess that's a largely meaningless way of presenting the information. I don't think there's a problem with a decent and properly-sorted summary of the affected localities and the impacts on them (as your sandbox example would have come closer to doing) as opposed to this mess of fire complex names but this article isn't it and nothing in it is actually helpful (even the impacts would need to be completely reorganised). I'm a bit dubious that the media would care about us deleting a crappy list - it's not like it's even a key part of our coverage. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:51, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • I agree with you about how the content is being presented. On the talk page of the article, I have proposed that the table of fires be merged into the table of towns/localities. I agree that the fire names are not terribly helpful to our readers. I have also added coords to the table of towns/localities (where there are articles on Wikipedia that I could quickly grab the coords from) and added a {{GeoGroup}} at the top of the article as a quick way to get a map of the affected areas. My point about the media is that the muckracking end of that industry wouldn't worry about the existence of the other article, but whether they could simply sensationalise the fact that "Wikipedia deleted an article about the bushfires". At work we used to call it the "Courier Mail test" (whether some perfectly legitimate action could be twisted into a shock-horror exposé in the CM). Kerry (talk) 08:48, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'm not concerned about anyone sensationalising the deletion as a reason for keeping or deleting. Part of the problem here is the scale: the smaller fires are notable because they're a part of the whole, and the article may ultimately be useful as a guide for people doing research in the future. The names of the fires though aren't in common use really - I can't tell you the name of the fire that impacted me the most, for instance, but I do know the media has called fires by specific names, and we should use those names here even if they're not obvious to the people affected. If there's anything we can do to clean this up properly I would prefer that to deletion, so any suggestions you might have are welcome. SportingFlyer T·C 12:56, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment - @Kerry Raymond: it sounds like the best option would be for you to work with the WikiProject to find a way to incorporate this information on some other page on Wikipedia. The standalone article as it currently stands doesn't really work, but the information would be useful if it was set out better. Bookscale (talk) 00:10, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • KEEP Articles about fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other such things are quite encyclopedic. Dream Focus 18:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Dream Focus:, please read the deletion rationale. No one is arguing that articles about these fires are not encyclopedic. We are arguing that this article is not encyclopedic, for specific reasons. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:12, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • Look at the valid referenced material in the article. Don't try to delete it just because some places are empty. There should be a government website somewhere listing the damage done to these areas. Dream Focus 23:27, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        • No one is trying to delete this article "because some places are empty", nor is anyone opposed to more content about the fires. Please actually read the deletion discussion. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:41, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the Article Rescue Squadron's list of content for rescue consideration. Dream Focus 23:31, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to 2019–20 Australian bushfire season which is the main page on the fires where substantial work has already been done, and where anything useful in this article should be placed. The article the subject of this AfD is not in an encyclopaedic format. It contains duplicate entries on the fires and would need constant updating to be accurate; the list of towns/places impacted is probably selective too. I have no issue with draftifying the article either. Bookscale (talk) 00:06, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete – this list is basically an OR fork of 2019–20 Australian bushfire season. I don't think a redirect for this search term would be useful. Levivich 01:59, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep for now as a valid WP:LISTN. In regard to the list/article, WP:NOTCLEANUP. I also believe that merging with 2019–20 Australian bushfire season would make the target article too long and relevant information would be lost. Lightburst (talk) 15:27, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Lightburst: Why do you think a list of internal firefighting names for parts of bushfires is a valid list and should be "cleaned up" instead? The Drover's Wife (talk) 21:39, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I usually !vote to keep lists that are informational or aide in navigation. Wikipedia advises us to do so. There is WP:NORUSH - we can delete this in a few months if we are inclined. That is why I !voted Keep for now. Lightburst (talk) 22:24, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Popular culture-related deletion discussions. Tyw7 (🗣️ Talk) — If (reply) then (ping me) 02:14, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Tyw7 (🗣️ Talk) — If (reply) then (ping me) 02:14, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Environment-related deletion discussions. Tyw7 (🗣️ Talk) — If (reply) then (ping me) 02:14, 31 January 2020 (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.
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