Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of potential National Monuments of the United States

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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. postdlf (talk) 16:20, 12 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

List of potential National Monuments of the United States[edit]

Moved to List of proposed National Monuments of the United States. (see details below)

List of potential National Monuments of the United States (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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While this article seems to have good intentions, It is poorly sourced (though that alone is not a large part of this nomination) and already out of date (Boulder-White Clouds was being considered for a national monument if wilderness wasn't Congressionally designated, which happened in summer 2015). This article mainly deals with speculative or wish list type of sources from special interest groups advocating for the protection of specific areas. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 01:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep I would like to comment on the points of criticism raised by Fredlyfish4:
    • "poorly sourced": Although, there is little research or official documents (see second point too), I added - if applicable - campaign websites or similar for each potential National Monument (NM) and further information, e.g. a New York Times opinion dealing with the potential "Greater Grand Canyon Heritage". Knowing that campaign websites are no scientific source, I argue - however - that they show that there is support for creating a specific NM. Even if there were (only) highly critical voices / references, it would show that a potential proclamation of a NM is discussed and thus real.
    • "speculative or wish list": Of course a list about potential NMs will always be speculative to some degree until a presidential proclamation of a new NM confirms the validity and at the same time makes it obsolete. Therefore, giving references (see first point) to each single potential NM is essential and was my motivation for the column "External information". Entries like e.g. the "Greater Grand Canyon Heritage" NM are - in my opinion - not speculative, rather heavily debated, which gives it even more backing to be listed here (see first point about critical references too). However, there is of course also the "secret" Interior Department memorandum of 2010 - see http://robbishop.house.gov/uploadedfiles/states_for_designation.pdf - which could be added as on "official" (somehow fact-based, thus non-speculative) reference, which directly leads to the next point of criticism:
    • out of date: Here the example of White Clouds Wilderness vs. Boulder-White Clouds NM was mentioned as a proof for the list being outdated: first of all, I linked the White Clouds Wilderness directly when mentioning the potential Boulder-White Clouds NM and I already added some footnotes to make clear that the links lead "to the protected area which will be extended". This leads directly to the second part of my comment to this point: The wilderness includes 90,769 acres compared to around "570,000 acres" mentioned by Georg Wuerthner in his list which is included as second reference in my list. Thus there might still be some support for a "Greater NM'" which extends the existing wilderness. However, this seems to be hard to decide (for me alone and especially as European).
→ In consequence, I would suggest to add an additional column "Remarks" / "Description" or similar to explain exactly such debates in a few words, preferably with some "more up-to-date" references about the discussions (@Fredlyfish4: Do you know more about the Boulder-White Clouds debate? Some references to add?)
In a nutshell, I believe that the list can safely be extended and updated together, so the mentioned, alleged points of criticism can be resolved. Chstdu (talk) 16:25, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Additional Comment: Now I added a section about the Interior Department memorandum which I mentioned above already. In consequence, there is now much more fact-based information in the article/list than only "speculative or wish" entries. Furthermore, I would like to quote the section "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" from the "What Wikipedia is not" page:

All articles about anticipated events must be verifiable, and the subject matter must be of sufficiently wide interest that it would merit an article if the event had already occurred.

— Wikipedia is not a crystal ball
As I am sure that if a NM had already been proclaimed, it would merit an article (itself), I guess the list of potential new NMs is "of sufficiently wide interest". On the other hand, adding the internal memorandum mentioned above should make the the list (more) verifiable. Thus the point of criticism of being only/too speculative / a crystal ball, should be disproved. --Chstdu (talk) 22:03, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Environment-related deletion discussions. North America1000 08:08, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. North America1000 08:08, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 15:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, I just created Category:Lists of proposals to connect these all together, and populated it with 28 members so far. --doncram 11:32, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 10:43, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment. Thank you @doncram for your support, the newly created category and the other proposals. Consequently, I merged the two lists, sorted the resulting list alphabetically and marked the proposed monuments from the memorandum with a blue-green background color, in order to make clear that they are "proposal[s] as of a certain date". --Chstdu (talk) 20:04, 6 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Moved to List of proposed National Monuments of the United States according to suggestion by doncram, because every item on the list has been "proposed specifically" rather than only being "potential" which could be anything. Furthermore, I added more photos and several more links to maps in the "location" section. --Chstdu (talk) 15:22, 7 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Sorry I haven't been around for a while, but this article has been greatly improved since I nominated it, and I will support keeping it. However, I want to mention a couple of issues. First, I do think it still needs better sources or at least a better reference list rather than only links to organizations that have proposed these monuments. Second, the "established?" column doesn't seem appropriate because everything on this list should not be currently a national monument or would become part of one through expansion. The three areas on the list that are now monuments shouldn't be here as they are on the list of actual national monuments. Similarly, I don't quite understand the need for the red X (or any of the other icons in that column) as again, these all shouldn't presently be national monuments. I think a "status" column would be much more appropriate and informative where you could mention any pending legislation, incorporation into other proposals, designations as other areas (e.g. wilderness), speculation that the president could issues a proclamation, etc. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 02:54, 10 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment. Thank you for your response, Fredlyfish4, and especially for supporting the community in keeping it. Adding more / better sources will probably remain an ongoing and important process. Hopefully, my addition of the "dynamic list" template, which says You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries., helps a bit. Concerning your other major point of criticism, namely the "established?" column, you are totally right: Keeping areas which are already an NM or protected in a similar way is not appropriate for a list of proposed NMs. The reason how this occurred is easy: I merged the lists of areas included in the memorandum mentioned above and the list of other proposals and kept the "established?" column, although it was only used for the memorandum list initially. However, deleting these areas altogether seems a bad idea to me, as the memorandum list would be incomplete then. For now, I changed the column name to "status", but I am unsure how to deal with the already established areas: shall we add a new section for those (officially) proposed and meanwhile (to some extent) established protected areas? The big advantage would be to keep items like "Boulder-White Clouds" too which definitely need some explanation: They are not NMs like originally proposed, but e.g. wilderness preserves with a smaller area or, maybe in the (near) future, areas incorporated into larger protected areas like in the "Cedar Mesa"-"Bears Ears" example. --Chstdu (talk) 13:42, 10 March 2016 (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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