Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hot Springs, Lassen County, 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 delete. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 10:57, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hot Springs, Lassen County, California[edit]

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This is a curious case, because it does look like a mistake, but one that can actually be seen. When you go to GMaps, there is a farm at the location specified by GNIS. But going back in the topos at Historic Aerials reveals an interesting editorial mark. I do not know where the copies they have scanned came from, but up until the 1990 version they show, there's a building, a benchmark, and the road, and that's it. But the 1990 copy has "Hot Springs" handwritten across the road from the house, and the benchmark altitude (4181 ft) handwritten as well under that. The next copy in 1996 has the label and the height in a bold, sans serif font; after that, the label moves across the road to where the building was indicated and changes to the town name font, and finally it disappears altogether in the 2018 copy. Going further afield, the maps show an area labelled "Kellog Hot Springs" and a "Hot Springs Slough" running north from there. Meanwhile, I find the following in Fairfield's history of the county (p. 101): "This year a man named Wasson settled in Long valley at what is sometimes called the Upper Hot Springs, or the Hot Springs ranch." A book of California hot springs doesn't list anything I can identify with any of this. The upshot seems to be that there is no such community and never was. Mangoe (talk) 00:09, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment for now - An unincorporated place doesn't have to have people to exist. For example, in NC, each country is subdivided into 6 or 8 "Townships", basically unincorporated "towns". This was done for fire and police enforcement. Google maps shows "Hot Springs, Lassen County, California", which means a little but not much. btw, they don't need a hot spring to be called Hot Springs. It's just a name. I want to look a little more, but if it is a legally defined area according to the laws of California, it would automatically be included as a geographical location. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 00:47, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - I found that it is shown as a township here [1] if you zoom in right, way up in the NW corner of the map, north of Leonard. It's just all farm land. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 00:56, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

From what I can tell (because the thing isn't working all that well for me) that's a survey township; the GNIS location appears to be in Township 38N 8E, Section 10. These townships are utterly lacking in notability, for the most part; they are just coordinates. In any case nothing shows that this 6 mile by 6 mile square is identical to this supposed community. My larger comment on your first response is that you give me the impression of fishing for a reason to keep an unexpandable and problematic stub rather than being able to show that it is a notable and actual community— which really means, given how GNIS defines "populated place", that it's a town or village or at least a neighborhood. Look, if you can find something that even says what this "Hot Springs" at this location was, it would help a lot. My problem is that the only thing I can find is the passage from Fairfield, and it suggests that it is indeed what the aerials and topos show: a single ranch or farm. Go ahead and find something else talking about the place, under that name, which elucidates things further. Mangoe (talk) 02:30, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

They are geographical designations. They have legal standing in the real world, and we've always kept accepted geographical places, be they mountains, counties, townships or whatever that a government would designate an official "place". An example is one I started, Browns Summit, North Carolina. As for policy, Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features), which in part says "Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable, even if their population is very low.". By virtue of being a township, it is legally recognized. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 03:25, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Look, you are not seriously suggesting replacing this article with a different one on the survey township (which would have a different name), nor starting a series of thousands of articles on all the survey townships—or for that matter, thirty-six times as many section articles. "Hot Springs" is not a township: the spot that GNIS assigns to the name Hot Springs lies in a particular section within a particular section township, but they are not identical, and you have produced nothing to the contrary. We have been over this before: GNIS was only ever intended to specify which name is used for a feature, and even that has no legal standing: it only dictates government information processing. Mistakes in classification of features are common enough to where I and most other people dealing with it here on WP do not consider it reliable in that wise, because to be reliable, it has to be correct, and we have too many cases where it obviously is not. And GNIS does not assign names to survey townships, because they already are designated differently, using a numeric grid system.

Your NC example is completely irrelevant, as there is ample current testimony to its existence as a town, seeing as how, for starters, it has its own zip code and a middle school. An article on a place whose town-ness is easily demonstrated is no argument at all for an article on a place where that demonstration is lacking. I would also remind you that WP:GEOLAND is not policy, and that its interpretation as a guideline is frequently re-argued because of the phrase "official recognition", which isn't as unambiguous as you seem to think. Finally, there is the problem that "populated place", as GNIS defines it, is not a synonym for "community". We have found many cases where the "populated place" is a single, isolated building and was never anything but. Mangoe (talk) 05:53, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It is a guideline. And as I stated, we generally allow articles on govt. designated areas, irrespective of population or incorporation status. Being snarky doesn't change that. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 11:08, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I do get tired of having to point out that mention in GNIS does not constitute government designation. Mangoe (talk) 13:12, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 12:48, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 12:48, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete California does not have townships as governmental subdivisions like other states. There is zero evidence this has "legal standing in the real world" or is otherwise a notable place: survey townships are not automatically notable. We can see on the 1931 topo there were two instances of "Hot Spring" in this location, and the 1967 map has those Mangoe mentions, but no evidence of a community. Reywas92^Talk 18:02, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This looks like a hot spring that was labeled as such on a topo and then miscategorized as "populated place" by GNIS. "Unincorporated community" is a WP:OR label applied by an editor, not supported by any source. Appearing on Google Maps is meaningless because they scrape location data from Wikipedia and GNIS; see WP:GNIS for more on this. The only sources we have are maps and tables which are specifically excluded from establishing notability per WP:NGEO. Despite the speculation, we have zero reliable sourcing for the claim that this was a community, township or any other sort of officially-recognized place, much less a notable one. –dlthewave ☎ 20:02, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete WP:GEOLAND only gives near-automatic notability to recognised populated places, if this isn't one of those then it has to pass the WP:GNG, and it clearly doesn't because we're struggling to even show it exists. This isn't a recognised subdivision of California, if it was then you wouldn't need to zoom in on random maps selling land to prove it. There are places in Lassen County called Hot Springs (e.g. a peak in the Amedee Mountains called Hot Spring Peak, which once had a town), but none of them seem to be anywhere near this place, and there's blatantly no community there now. Hut 8.5 20:22, 13 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom Devokewater (talk) 20:46, 13 July 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.