Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2009 Inglewood earthquake

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 delete per WP:NOTNEWS. Someone may want to instead source the information on this quake in Newport-Inglewood Fault. Jayjg ^(talk) 02:56, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

2009 Inglewood earthquake[edit]

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AFD nomination by an IP who can't create AFD pages. I have no comment on the validity of this nomination. Woogee (talk) 21:02, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There was no one killed or even hurt, a small earthquake with no coverage outside America, just a news report of one day with no historic meaning and appears to violate the rule WP:NOT#NEWS.

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Events-related deletion discussions. -- (X! · talk) · @960 · 22:01, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. -- (X! · talk) · @960 · 22:02, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy Keep. Spurious nomination.--PMDrive1061 (talk) 03:16, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Quite clearly a notable event with plenty of WP:RS. Lugnuts (talk) 09:18, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Just because no one died doesn't mean it's not notable, and I would argue that earthquakes are inherently notable due to their relative rarity (<10 or 15 big ones a year, generally) C628 (talk) 13:42, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete You are correct about the relative rarity of "big ones". According to Richter magnitude scale, those in the range of 7.0 or greater would happen no more than 20 times a year. On the other hand, quakes in the range of 4.0 to 4.9 occur 6,000 times a year. Not surprisingly, it was mentioned on the news that day and the day after, but there's no indication that this was considered notable enough to be mentioned a month or even a week after it happened. WP:RECENT is right on point on this. It's been up for nine months, which is eight months and three weeks longer than it should have been. Mandsford (talk) 13:49, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per WP:NOTNEWS. Armbrust ^Talk _Contribs 18:35, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per WP:NOTNEWS.--DAI (Δ) 22:28, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per previous editors. --JokerXtreme (talk) 22:40, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Environment-related deletion discussions. -- JokerXtreme (talk) 22:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete an earthquake is SoCal where the only damage is one broken window? Must have been a slow news day for anyone to report this. But a lot of people don't understand the difference between an encyclopedia and a tabloid. Such is life. WP:NOTNEWS. Transwiki to WikiNews if they want it. -Atmoz (talk) 00:35, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The 2008 Chino Hills earthquake was a couple times stronger and also occured near Los Angeles but not as close to the main city. That one is now a WP:GA as it had plenty of references about damage and scientific data. And now this one is getting deleted for being a few times weaker? ~A H 1^(TCU) 02:15, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the confusion (I'll admit that I get confused by it) is the way the Richter scale is set up, on a logarithmic measure, whereby a 6.0 is one-thousand times as powerful as a 4.0 and a 4.0 is 1,000 times as powerful as a 2.0, etc. Under that "every 2.0 of magnitude is 1,000 times worse" scale, a 5.0 would be 31.6 times as violent as the 4.0; the 2008 quake was a 5.5 and the 2009 Inglewood was a 4.7, so rather than being a couple of times stronger, it would be more like ten times stronger. Mandsford (talk) 14:05, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment This AfD is likely to be a waste of time. I once tried to argue that a storm which never made land, lasted for only two days and never reached hurricane strength was not a candidate for a good artilcle but Juliancolton promoted it to GA (notability is not a GA requirement by the way) see Talk:Tropical Storm Nana (2008). Polargeo (talk) 11:52, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to agree with you, but it's still good to register comments. WP:AIRCRASH got reformed into something sensible after having been used to justify nearly every incident that ever happened on an airliner. The rule on earthquakes, bad weather, crimes, etc. is that people want to be the first to write about it if it's on CNN. Most of these things have zero historical notability and won't even be mentioned as a footnote five years from now, but as with the news media anywhere, "recent" and "local" get heavy emphasis. Mandsford (talk) 16:28, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment The thing is, five years from now, will these articles have been deleted or will they stay forever and make people reading them think they talk about something of great significance? --JokerXtreme (talk) 16:45, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that eventually, most of these will be purged from Wikipedia, but it won't happen until persons who are interested in earthquakes work out a reasonable policy on what would have historical notability, and what wouldn't. Right now, the standard is "it happened here today". Honestly, nobody really cares about a 4.7 tremor that happened in Inglewood in 1960, or in Indonesia in 2009. In the case of events that don't really merit their own article, one of the problems is that people really aren't sure where they can mention those, so they're left to writing "2010 earthquake in _________". I think that the most informative type of article would be based on location -- in this instance, it would make more sense to write about this minor event on the page about the Newport-Inglewood Fault. For whatever reason, one of the authors of this article acknowledged that fault, but apparently didn't want to believe there was a connection, tossing in an uncited statement that "The Newport-Inglewood Fault runs through the area, but it is currently unclear whether the quake occurred on that fault". Seems like faulty logic to me. Mandsford (talk) 21:01, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. WP:NOTNEWS applies. Niteshift36 (talk) 02:19, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Merge sourced, pertinent information to Newport-Inglewood Fault and redirect. This quake is already mention in that article, but without sources. If this were to be closed as a redirect, the sources could be pulled from this article's history and placed in the Inglewood Fault article. Wine Guy~Talk 01:17, 7 March 2010 (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.