Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wangtang, Guilin

This discussion was subject to a deletion review on 2011 May 29.
For an explanation of the process, see Wikipedia:Deletion review.

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. Spartaz ^Humbug! 04:16, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wangtang, Guilin

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no reliable source (databases such as GEOnet do not qualify), no Chinese, no pushpin named "Wangtang" in the vicinity of the coordinates given. I do not have any tolerance towards articles like this that don't even give Chinese or a more specific administrative division. Nothing named "Wangtang" on this list for Lingchuan County, or for Yangshuo County, the two likely locations of this purported settlement. –HXL's Roundtable and Record 16:52, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also, the following have similar, if not the same issues, and I will amass evidence later, as I have to go to sleep:

Note: This debate has been included in the list of China-related deletion discussions. — • Gene93k (talk) 02:40, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep GEOnet is a reliable source, and HXL49's intolerance for stubs is not a reason to delete. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 03:56, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you are going to dismiss all of my evidence so quickly, then there is no point in duking this out with you. I create stubs myself...so by your logic, I display intolerance towards them? Regarding sourcing, see the big mess that could result when only a database that merely lists settlements, which are subject to merging and creation, is sourced, as in this discussion? –HXL's Roundtable and Record 05:13, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - HXL49, the administrative divisions list for Lingchuan county that you linked to lists a 旺塘村. Also, doing a search on Google Maps for 广西壮族自治区桂林市灵川县旺塘村 will show it immediately. I will update the article with the new information in a bit.--Danaman5 (talk) 05:59, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No. Your wording has never been a problem. I can clearly read the great majority of the place names, but of course it is a hassle as there often are several hundred villages in a county. –HXL's Roundtable and Record 13:05, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I have updated the article with some references. I have to say, the GEOnet coordinates were not very accurate, so I doubt it a bit for that reason. Also, we will probably have to disambiguate eventually, because there is another Wangtang village just outside of Nanning, in Guangxi. This is not the same as the "northwest of Guilin" one that HXL49 linked above, which I can't seem to find.--Danaman5 (talk) 08:50, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Also, notice that I am nom-ing four others for deletion. Because of this, you should make your vote more specific. –HXL's Roundtable and Record 13:05, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I didn't realize that the other articles were formally a part of this deletion discussion. For now, my vote above only applies to Wangtang, Guilin. I will try to look up the others tomorrow.--Danaman5 (talk) 14:54, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wangtang, Guangdong: it is not a city but a village, and is some 15 miles to the NW from where Geonet places it. Corrected accordingly. -- Vmenkov (talk) 15:52, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
None of these purported locations are cities. Hence Carlos can continue to spew forth his nonsense about GEONet's reliability, as GEONet classifies many locations as cities when they are officially designated otherwise. –HXL's Roundtable and Record 16:13, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You seem to want to personalize this way out of proportion. Remove chip from shoulder, first. Open eyes and ears, second. GeoNet doesn't distinguish between "cities", "towns", and "villages" or however China describes various places. They have "Populated places", which is the convention Wikipedia now has. Decided well after these were created; not every article that has not been updated to the latest nomenclature of Wikipedia's editors is to be deleted as implied in your arguments. Otherwise, you'd be wasting your time nominating for deletion all the US cities having 2000 census data, rather than the recently released 2010 data, including status changes reported by the census. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 18:49, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Personalise this? Look who began here with "HXL49's intolerance of stubs". If you call it a city after given the administrative division type or after given the Chinese, then you would be distorting it, but I guess since GEONet does a sloppy job anyway and leaves no information, you are not at fault for writing "is a city".

Poor, if not silly, even stupid, comparisons here. The Census is conducted every 10 years, and of course, in between state and county governments can decide whatever they want in terms of abolishments or mergers of places. Same deal with the PRC. And where the hell did I imply that "every article that has not been updated to the latest nomenclature" is to be deleted? Stop twisting my words. I only said that articles with only a single unreliable source should be obliterated. –HXL's Roundtable and Record 18:59, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Wangtang, Hunan - the locations for all 3 villages are more or less correct (within a few miles), as compared to Google Maps. Nothing much important about them, of course (typically, each one would be something like one village out of 20 in a town/township of 10,000-20,000 people), but one of them (the 3rd) actually was a township of its own some years ago, later merged into another township. Looking at the maps, I am guessing these particular villages got into the database behind GEONet because they are located at road junctions (of provincial-, county- or township-level roads), and thus a detailed enough map (1:1,000,000 or more detailed) may want to put a pushpin at such a place. But I am guessing that what we have here (and in Guangdong) is a very "unfair" sample: there easily may be a dozen or more Wangtang villages in each province, and we list one (or 3) out of them due to a rather accidental factor of being included into some (maybe old, and obviously not too precise) map from which the GEONet data were sourced. I would abstain from expressing an opinion on whether we should represent such partial and non-too-precise data, but feel that the labor involved in checking and improving them could certainly be applied be geography-minded editors to something more worthwhile (such as writing decent articles about counties). -- Vmenkov (talk) 03:37, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I'm starting to feel like this is a fool's errand. There are at least four villages called "Wangtangcun" in Guangxi alone, plus a bunch more that are just identified as "Wangtang", so I don't know if they are areas or villages or what. I think that Vmenkov might be right - our time would probably be better spent making articles for counties. Regardless, I can't find any Wangtang that matches the description of "northwest of Guilin", so I'm going to vote Delete on that article.--Danaman5 (talk) 11:54, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Another Comment: I see that besides this sampling of Wangtangs, we have a bunch of other articles that consist of one line, "A is a town/village in the province of B, C km to the N/E/W/S of the city of X", and one data source, namely the infamous GEONet. (Their server has been down for a while, so I don't even know what it is like!). As the above research indicates, most of them, theoretically speaking, could be "redeemed", but with a non-trivial amount of effort for a rather small reward: we still end up with a tiny article about a very small populated place; nothing extra beyond what a reader can get looking at Google Maps or a detailed printed map. Unless a decision is made to actually delete all such "non-redeemed" articles, perhaps we can place a special template (named, say, "Template:GEONet-coords-unverified") into each one, which would expand into a text like this:

This article about a populated place is based on one data source, namely the geographical coordinates servers at GEONet. While this populated place likely does exist and can be found on detailed maps, it is probably quite small, and may in reality be several km, or several tens of km, away from where the coordinates currently in the article indicate. You are welcome to improve the article by adding information from other cartographic and statistical.

One can probably train a bot to insert such a template into each stub article of this type. -- Vmenkov (talk) 20:53, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 01:37, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Why delete? I see references. I see a very marginally valuable contribution to this vast body of knowledge that is Wikipedia. I see not a need to meddle. The Sound and the Fury (talk) 01:31, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you see references. Not so reliable references, though. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 01:37, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Then put the disclaimer language suggested by DOE. That'll work, will it not? The Sound and the Fury (talk) 02:40, 29 May 2011 (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.