Wikipedia talk:Notability (geographic features)

Bhalu Khaira - Is this Notable?

I was reading through Bhalu Khaira and comparing with the SNG in WP:NTOWN, it doesn't seem notable, but rather WP:INDISCRIMINATE. The references are also government data, no real stories. Wanted to have an expert editor's opinion before nominating it for deletion. Kingsacrificer (talk) 17:48, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

A town with a population over 10,000 is all but guaranteed to be kept. Mangoe (talk) 18:21, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

But it's Indian! Every place in India is overly populated. That can't be a robust criterion, surely? Kingsacrificer (talk) 18:28, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

While I did find a site that puts the population at over 10,000, other sites repeat the 1,833 population figure from the 2011 Indian census. Bihar Khaira appears to be part of Rafiganj, Bihar. A description I see at more than one site is that Bhalu Khaira is a village in Rafiganj block of Aurangabad district, Bihar. I think we need someone who is more familiar with the administrative structure of Bihar to sort out if Bhalu Khaira is equivalent to a municipality, an administrative district, or a neighborhood, before we can decide what to do with the article. Donald Albury 20:07, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

One source mentions it as a village under Rafiganj assembly constituency, but it is a blacklisted domain: onefinenine(dot)com

No government source seems to mention Bhalu Khaira. Kingsacrificer (talk) 20:34, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

@Donald Albury:, could you link the sites mentioning the population? Right now we have nothing verifiable in the article and I'm having trouble locating a working search function for the Indian census. –dlthewave ☎ 23:07, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Did we reach any conclusion/consensus on this? Kingsacrificer (talk) 09:01, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

About those references:

• Census of India Search details - Deadlink. Source for 2018 population figure in infobox, retrieved in 2014.
• Falling Rain Genomics, Inc - Bhalu Khaira - Gazetteer page for Rafiganj, Bihar and the source of the coordinates which point directly to the middle of Rafiganj, dispelling any notion that Bhalu Khaira is a neighborhood or close suburb as the rounded coordinates in the article might imply. Falling Rain does not have a page for Bhalu Khaira.
• Census of India 2011: Data from the 2011 Census, including cities, villages and towns (Provisional) - 2001 Census. Does not mention Bhalu Khaira.

Google Maps points to a district with a sizeable village three miles West of Rafiganj, so I'm thinking this is likely a real place that would pass AfD but needs to be TNT'd to make a viable article. –dlthewave ☎ 20:06, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for checking the sources. My concern is, even if it get's TNT'd, what information are we going to add? There's nothing particularly notable about the place apart from its existence. Kingsacrificer (talk) 20:15, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Every populated place is allowed an article because people live there - the fact people live there is what makes it notable, even if it's nothing more than a stub. Otherwise we would be getting into arguments over what sort of place is notable, and our goal is to catalogue information in a similar manner to a gazetteer. If we can't verify people live there, or if it's not "legally recognised" (which means different things in different places) it can get deleted.

I will say you have stumbled upon an odd place, though, because there really isn't much about it online, and the population counts differ. That being said I would vote keep if you sent to AfD because it's verifiable. SportingFlyer T·C 20:21, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Okay, noted. Thanks for the clarification. I think the guidelines could reflect this more clearly, perhaps an edit is needed. Kingsacrificer (talk) 20:35, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features)#Settlements and administrative regions is the relevant guideline. The question is, does Bhalu Khaira have any kind of official standing beyond being a census enumeration district that reasonably meets the "legally recognized place" criteria? If not, then GNG rules. As it stands, the village may not meet the GNG, in which case it would be appropriate to merge the article into Rafiganj. Donald Albury 20:54, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Apparently it is a notified area which appears to be a form of municipality. Traumnovelle (talk) 23:16, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Is there a source that identifies it as a notified area? –dlthewave ☎ 23:21, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

The article is entirely unsourced bar census information. I guess WP:V can be a valid deletion reason even if it is technically notable. Traumnovelle (talk) 23:29, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Is this what you are looking for? Donald Albury 01:34, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

This website is just a Bootstrap template ripoff, with no mention to actual government institutions.

It could be hallucinated data, no way to know. Kingsacrificer (talk) 07:50, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm usually pretty skeptical of those aggregators and they certainly don't contribute to notability, but they do generally repeat the official census numbers with few errors in that regard. I did find the onefinenine(dot)com site mentioned above and a few other aggregators that all agree on the 1833 number. With the Indian census site being down, a good pragmatic approach might be to accept that figure as the best available for now. I do think that every single statement in that article needs to be verified. I removed a bunch of stuff which wasn't related to this village, and the article was originally written by a local resident's single-purpose account with a lot of unsourced information based on their personal knowledge and family tree. –dlthewave ☎ 15:22, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Would an image from Google Maps / Street View be considered CC BY-SA licensed? If yes, we can even add a picture in that case. Kingsacrificer (talk) 18:46, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

No, unless Google has released it under such a licence. Traumnovelle (talk) 19:43, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

"our goal is to catalogue information in a similar manner to a gazetteer" - It absolutely is not. A gazetteer is primarily a list of feature-names with locations. Wikipedia is not a gazetteer, it is an encyclopaedia, which is a summary of what reliable, secondary sources say about something. FOARP (talk) 09:53, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Looking at the 1971 and 1981 census it is described as a Development block. In India, a development block, or Community Development Block, is a rural administrative unit for planning and implementing development programs, distinct from land revenue administration. So therefore is it a legally recognised place? Questionable. Does it pass GNG - probably not.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:52, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Eh, it's clearly a village. If you search for "Bhallu Khaira" the local schools come up. Indian census website isn't working, but I remember the census2011 website has been reliable in the past. SportingFlyer T·C 09:31, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Development blocks are just government run areas, that manage developing areas for housing or industry. Bhallu Kaira was registered as that in 71 and 81. Based on that it does not meet Geoland. However, looking at the last census it is down as s village. However, as per discussions, Census data is not enough, and if there is no other references we should redirect to the nearest legally recognised place or local government area and record it there. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:32, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

IMO if it has some abstract legal status which isn't generally recognized as "place",(e.g. irrigation districts) the guideline specifically excludes using that legal status to meet the SNG. (and IMO rightly so) IMO "development block" is one of those types of situations. North8000 (talk) 15:42, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

What a mess. I don't see anything that is RS. I even found an entry for the village at Bharatpedia that cites an archived copy of a table from the 2011 Indian census, which, unfortunately, does not have an entry for the village. - Donald Albury 17:50, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

It is a mess indeed. But how do we gather consensus on this matter when everybody has a different opinion? Kingsacrificer (talk) 18:44, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

This is just how it works when GEOLAND comes up, lots of process arguments about what is a place and what is a legally recognized place because actual sources are lacking. You'll struggle to find a firm consensus. Doing my WP:OR on google maps this does look like its own village, so at least it's not like the hundred of Polish "villages" we apparently have which are actually suburbs. CMD (talk) 08:06, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Per this site, Bhalu Khaira is a village in the gram panchayat of Kotbara, electing one or two representatives to the gram panchayat. I found no mention of civicatlas.in in the WP:RS/N archives, so do not know if it is RS. As a gram panchayat is the lowest level of government in India, Bhalu Khaira is equivalent to a ward or local electoral district. So, I think it does not meet the criteria of GEOLAND nor of the GNG. If there were an article for Kotbara, any information that can be verified from reliable sources would go there, but... There might be useful sources in Magahi, Hindi, or Urdu, but my two quarters of Sanskrit 50 years ago won't help with that. - Donald Albury 20:17, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

So basically. Bhalu Khaira is not even a Gram Panchayat? I think that establishes that it is not Notable. I will try to look for sources in other languages to corroborate this claim. Kingsacrificer (talk) 07:31, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Here's a gov.in webpage listing all Gram Panchayats in Bihar. Bhalu Khaira, from Rafiganj, Aurangabad, is not present. Kingsacrificer (talk) 07:40, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Google Books has hits in both the 1971 and 1981 Indian censuses for Bhalu Khaira, but I can't access the actual page. That would potentially indicate greater notability than has been found so far, if villages are listed and not tracts. SportingFlyer T·C 21:22, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

I would say that just because a village is also a census tract does not make the village notable. And there are 11 other villages in the Kotbara gram panchayat, which are at an equal level with Bhalu Khaira. Moreover, I think it would be more important to have an article about Kotbara, where at least we could list its constituent villages. Unfortunately, as is evident above, we have not yet found any available reliable source that could be used in the article. It is clear that there is a place (a village) that is called Bhalu Khaira, but, as of our current efforts, it does not meet the GNG, and I will argue that it does not meet GEOLAND. Donald Albury 01:32, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

An example on why we should work on this SNG. My is (just a description and context info, not the actual wording which would need to be developed):

To use the NGEO "way in" (vs. meeting GNG which is also available) based on it being a populated place, beside currently or previously being a populated place, it needs to fulfill BOTH of these criteria:

1. Is generally recognized by the populace as a PLACE. This rules out abstract entities such as irrigation districts, electoral districts, census tracts etc.
2. If based on modern times it needs to be something higher level than a neighborhood, subdivision or development. In major populated areas, it needs to be at a level that has it's own somewhat full-spectrum government. If not in a major populated area (as in rural areas or historic times) having a strong (recognized by the populace) settlement or town-like identity fulfills this.

SincerelyNorth8000 (talk) 20:11, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't actually think anything is wrong with the SNG. I think the question at hand here is what qualifies an Indian settlement for an article. SportingFlyer T·C 21:16, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Well, that's the main question for that one article (and one could argue that this is not the place to decide individual articles). But even on that the question of the ambiguity of the "legally recognized" criteria came up. North8000 (talk) 21:40, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

• Kingsacrificer - You've basically stumbled on to one of Wikipedia's dirty little secrets: because some editors have in the past taken the stance that "every place where people live is notable", and went through databases creating articles for every entry, without properly understanding what the databases were even about or what they said, this means we have many articles about towns and villages that basically don't exist.

In the most extreme example of this, one editor went through the entire Iranian census creating an article for every entry. The problem is that the entries in the Iranian census don't correspond one-for-one with villages/towns/cities, and many entries are just for a particular counting-place (e.g., a shop, a bridge, a farm, a factory, a pump, in some cases just a random place in the desert or mountains) that isn't a village or town of any kind. Contrary to the claims made by some, yes, the existence of tens of thousands of such essentially-fake articles does clearly demonstrate that the guide is bad, has always been bad, and needs to change.

FWIW, Wikipedia is not a gazetteer, even if we have some of the features of one. We do not have articles about places that are simply a name and nothing else. In this case, there's a strong question-mark about what this place even is or where it is supposed to be. FOARP (talk) 10:24, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

There is some clarity through multiple people's WP:Original Research on Google Maps, that the place exists. Its co-ordinates can be confirmed. The big question mark is on its notability.

I really think we should clean up articles such as this, and merge with larger, more notable geographical divisions. Kingsacrificer (talk) 16:18, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

The next higher division is the gram panchayat of Kotbara (please excuse the misspellings above, which I have now corrected). The only source for Kotbara that I think possibly meets WP:RS that I have found so far is civicatlas.in. The site villageinfo.org has much more info about Kotbara, but it solicits contributions from users. Again, I doubt we can write much about Kotbara without finding reliable sources in Magahi, Hindi, or Urdu, which is going to require help from speakers of those languages. I have created Draft:Kotbara, Aurangabad. What are your opinions? - Donald Albury 18:13, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I wonder whether you mean Kotwara ? Ingratis (talk) 18:23, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Kotwara is a village in Kotbara. See the list of villages in Draft:Kotbara, Aurangabad. Donald Albury 19:17, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

It is potentially the same name spelled differently.

Kinda like New York City in New York (except in India, we don't use anything to indicate 'City' particularly) Kingsacrificer (talk) 20:02, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I suspected that the gram panchayat was named for the village, but I don't know why there was a change in the spelling. So, will Kotbara do for a redirect from Bhalu Khaira, or do we need something better? Donald Albury 21:53, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but your draft needs more references, which are more likely, it seems, to be found under the spelling Kotwara. It is not a question of a "change in the spelling" but of alternative transloterations. Ingratis (talk) 03:57, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

This document [1] from the Bihar State Level Bankers Committee shows the spelling of Kotbara, and the relevant hierarchy that relates to the village. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:15, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps you could add it to the draft, where it will doubtless be welcomed. The point is not to insist on one spelling or the other, but to recognise that there are (at least two) equally valid variant spellings, and that if searching is only carried out under one it is likely to miss useful references under the other. Ingratis (talk) 08:17, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that link doesn't work for me, and when I try to link to the Bihar State Level Bankers Committee page, it is in what I assume is Hindi, which I cannot read. Donald Albury 14:44, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I found it in Google by putting in "kotbara" gram panchayat it was the 5th result and is an excel spreadsheet. I wonder if creating a page is wise. There is very little other information. Maybe it is wise to add to Aurangabad district, Bihar. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 17:15, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

The problem is that I am not seeing sources that I am comfortable using without more information about their reliability. I have no feel for judging the reliability of most of the sources turning up in searches for Kotbara/Kotwara. It has been many years since I have been willing to create an article as short on references as that draft.

As for the spelling, a search for just "Kotwara" is flooded by sites about the "House of Kotwara", a fashion house. Limiting the search to "Kotwara Aurangabad" (to eliminate places elsewhere, such as Kotbara, Nepal) gets a lot of hits about the village of Kotwara, many of which state it is in the Kotbara gram panchayat. I found one site that says the village of Kotwara is in the "Kotwara" gram panchayat, and one site that states that the name can be spelled Kotbara or Kotwara, but the rest of the sites that mention both village and gram panchayat use Kotbara/Kotwara, so I think we should also. Donald Albury 14:36, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Questionable Notability

We really need to improve the notability standards. Look at this list of articles created by a user. I stumbled upon the geography section here, and they are mostly 1-2 lines of content about places.

List of geographic articles by a user

Should this really be acceptable? Kingsacrificer (talk) 09:00, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

After much discussion in the past few years, about all we have been able to decide is that GNIS is not reliable, and there is no definition of "legally recognized" that works in all countries. I am all for raising the standards for this notability guideline, but that will require an RfC that reaches consensus to do so, for which I am not holding my breath. Donald Albury 13:51, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

We also decided the same thing about GEOnet Names Server, and the Iranian census.

The problem is some people are real extremists on the idea that every single populated location deserves an article, without any real justification. The assertion that Wikipedia - an encyclopaedia - is not an encyclopaedia but instead a gazeteer (a list of names and location) has a lot to answer for. FOARP (talk) 09:51, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Why is 'legally recognised' enough for notability anyways. Just like BLP has notability thresholds, places should, too. I really wish we can get this sorted. Kingsacrificer (talk) 15:33, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree 100%. It's a nonsensical standard that clearly doesn't work. FOARP (talk) 09:51, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I always understood "legally recognized" in the USA to mean "incorporated", which is not a bad standard there because such places are are nearly without exception real towns/cities with enough recorded history to justify a decent if short article. If we changed to say "incorporated" for US places I don't think there would be any problem except by the people who object to having varying standards for different areas, which in my opinion is magical thinking: we already have this issue dealing with US townships and hundreds. At any rate, my suspicion is that it was set up to mean "listed in something like GNIS", and these listings are almost inevitably problematic in one way or another.

I think the only way forward is to WP:BOLDly state that there isn't a consensus anymore, because we argue over this endlessly and and it's always the two same positions, and say that therefore the guidelines all must go away— including the "include in enclosing area" AtD escape clause— and we revert to WP:GNG. If people have to have a subject guideline here, we need to start from a blank slate without the current guideline as the default if we fail to reach a consensus. Mangoe (talk) 11:53, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree with this 100% and think it is inevitably where we're going to end up. FOARP (talk) 08:52, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

@Kingsacrificer for some reason, discussions of notability in this area seem especially prone to baby vs. bathwater problems. Editors have difficulty deciding what counts as officially recognized in Iran, so they want to throw out the SNG for places and adopt GNG instead.

Now, the predictable consequence of adopting GNG/SIGCOV would be that any inhabited location written about at some length in two or more RS travelogues becomes notable, while actually significant places with population statistics and local government would become non-notable if editors can't find them discussed at length in prose (on the internet, and preferably in English).

That treatment, whatever one thinks of it, does not follow the principles of a conventional encyclopaedia, most of which aim to treat like things alike in each domain. What is more, basic functions of an online encyclopaedia - like list pages, categories, and hypertext links for places of birth - don't work well when the relevant articles don't exist.

I know some editors are irritated because it can be challenging to remove articles for places that fail to establish (through WP:V) that the place has been legally recognized. These editors may feel that it would be easier to delete based on GNG. They may be right: it might be easier, but it would require so many valuable infant articles to be thrown out that it would be a clear move away from core functions of a human-made encyclopaedia.

If what editors actually want is a digest or paraphrase of all prose text that's ever been published online, there are other tools for that, now. Wikipedia organizes content according to principles, and WP:SPECIES and populated places are perhaps the best examples of where systematic treatment competes with the "digest principle" that sometimes lurks behind GNG. Newimpartial (talk) 13:44, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand SNG/GNG... This for example "so they want to throw out the SNG for places and adopt GNG instead" is nonsensical... That isn't how SNG/GNG works and nobody is arguing that... Remember that "though articles which pass an SNG or the GNG may still be deleted or merged into another article, especially if adequate sourcing or significant coverage cannot be found, or if the topic is not suitable for an encyclopedia." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:50, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back Hi, HEB. I don't think I'm misunderstanding the relationship between WP:N, GNG and the SNGs. My digest version of that relationship is that:

• WP:N is the overall framework within which the GNG and SNGs operate;
• a presumption of notability can be achieved through the GNG and/or the SNGs depending on the domain;
• different SNGs offer stronger claims to notability than others, and some are more restrictive than the GNG while others are more inclusive;
• neither the GNG nor any SNG offers a guarantee of a standalone article; the community may determine that a topic is WP:NOT of encyclopaedic interest or is best handled as part of an article with wider scope.

I believe this summary reflects both the WP:N guidelines and the community discussions that have created and modified them - such as the promotion of WP:NSPECIES to a notability guideline last year. To give a parallel to what I was saying in this discussion, 2017 RfC that demoted NSPORT to being only a predictor of GNG notability was in essence (though not quite) "throwing out the SNG and adopting GNG instead". (This was even worded in an awkward way so as to bypass the notability guideline for people, NBIO, although athletes are, by and large, human beings to which NBIO would otherwise apply.)

By the way, there is currently also a discussion taking place on WT:NBIO that addresses SNG/GNG relationships. Newimpartial (talk) 15:15, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Hmmm ok that is more or less on track (it leaves out lack of sourcing/sigcov as a reason for deletion post GNG/SNG pass, but probably just an oversight)... I guess I must be the one who misunderstood what you were saying or didn't understand the contextual references being made. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:22, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Well, as a rule people take lack of sigcov as a lack of notability, so I don't think there's anything missing there. But behind this is the way that SNGs are understood, because of that phrase "others are more inclusive", as WP:GEOLAND is definitely in that group. A common enough situation in US discussions is that the "unincorporated community" is actually some sort of facility (e.g. a resort or an inn or restaurant). Well, if this identification is agreed upon, that usually ends up in a delete close because the standards for these are considerably higher. And my usual position as the chief nominator of US geostubs these days is to throw down the gauntlet for people to show that there is any documentation at all of the place as a settlement, versus its identification as a 4th class post office or as a named railroad location (the two most common alternatives), and thus save the article.

A lot of times they do get saved, but note the quality of the material. Far and away the two most common kinds of documentation in Indiana (which I'm going through now) are late-1800s/early-1900s county histories, which do typically document towns to some small degree, and passing references in newspapers to people being "from" said town. I personally don't think the latter is good enough, for reasons I've explained over and over, but the point is that it doesn't provide anything in the way of usable information to flesh out an article. The other two sources are maps, specifically US topo maps and plat maps. The latter are also a problem in that there are cases where a place gets platted and then they fail to sell enough lots to get things going, but the most important function of the topo maps is that I do a filtering on them and skip over any place that looks like a town (typically a street grid with buildings, but just a dense enough cluster of buildings will do). This is a matter of time spent: a place that looks like a town is more likely to have enough documentation to establish that, and as I have already submitted something like 250 Indiana nominations, I've probably looked at at least twice that many articles for the state. And that means these articles don't get improved. But even those that do, don't get better by much. Usually the only sources still are GNIS (for the location and name), Baker's book of placenames (which has its own reliability issues), and the county history, Forte's list of post offices (for dates thereof) and the occasional "where we live" story in a local newspaper. IF there is an NRHP site in it or nearby that will get mentioned. Few of these places have any documentation past about 1920 except for post office closures. There is a persistent problem that the only documentation of the demise of many of these places is that the name ceases to appear on maps, which really isn't good enough sourcing. I have to question whether we need individual articles on these, and third world sourcing is definitely worse and sometimes abominable. When I was doing Somalia my primary source was GMaps, because I was reduced to looking at aerial photography to see whether there was actually any trace of a village at the location given. Mangoe (talk) 12:24, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

'while actually significant places with population statistics and local government would become non-notable if editors can't find them discussed at length in prose'

Please point out an example of a significant place that lacks significant coverage. This is purely hypothetical. Traumnovelle (talk) 21:05, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

"actually significant places with population statistics and local government" - The only way to understand this is "places with population statistics and local government are all significant". The issue here is that "local government" can include a headman, local cadre (for example, the housing development I lived in in China had one), neighbourhood watch or similar, and population statistics are recorded for very low-level entities including individual houses in some countries (e.g., the UK census records the population of individual houses).

The reason we don't have articles about every house in the UK is that UK-based editors are numerous on WP and are familiar with the UK census and know that doing so would be ridiculous. The problem comes when editors based in one country write about another that they are unfamiliar with (the classic example is Carlossuarez46's articles about Iranian "villages" - he refused to back down even when Iranian editors came to his talk page and explained to him just what it was he had been doing). As an editor in the Philippines project said when they finally nuked Barangays - "I'd prefer doing this than explaining to a white man what a barangay is".

Here's where I really have to take exception to the idea that these "village" articles improve representation on WP BTW. The Poland project did not welcome Kotbot's "village" article spam. The Myanmar/Sri Lanka projects did not welcome Dr. Blofeld's "village" articles based on GNS. The Iranian project did not welcome Carlossuarez46's "village" spam. The Philippines project patently did not enjoy having non-Filipinos arguing with them that Barangays were notable or welcome this "help". FOARP (talk) 08:49, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

@Traumnovelle no, it isn't hypothetical. Two examples (ones that I found quickly through AfD archives) of places that have not been shown to have WP:SIGCOV but which have been !kept at AfD based on the current GEOLAND definition are:

• Thumbe, Sri Lanka, and
• Tri Phai, Vietman.

In one case, the only source sited is verification that the place exists/is recognized; the other article has some prose sources, but not ones that are secondary so as to count towards WP:GNG notability. I'm sure that many, many verifiable places currently have articles without offering what the median wikipedian would consider SIGCOV for GNG notability. But, as I say, such articles serve many encyclopaedic purposes in their present state (as species stubs do), as well as offering a straightforward path to add additional prose sources, including prose sources, when they are found.

As far as FOARP 's intervention is concerned - look, if a well-informed project decides that a certain level of geography in a certain jurisdiction is not well-served by a set of articles, I'd always be inclined to accept that judgement. NGEO doesn't require that each populated place have its own article any more than SPECIES requires one for each species. Sometimes there are good reasons to do something else, and often a systematic set of articles one level of geography "up" will be of more use to readers than an unsystematic set of articles at a more granular level. But again, babies and bathwater - the idea that we shouldn't have a systematic set of articles about inhabited places because some of them haven't had paragraphs written about them in sources we like is just not encyclopaedic, and is no more plausible for places than it is for species IMO. Newimpartial (talk) 19:02, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

The first one doesn't have local government. I agree that not all villages/settlements will have SIGCOV, but you said has a form of local government.

The second has a lot of sources in Vietnamese, which I cannot evaluate but I will presume they provide non-basic coverage given the length of the Vietnamese Wikipedia article. Traumnovelle (talk) 00:22, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

@Traumnovelle I believe it was FOARP who was talking about local government. As far as the second article goes, I didn't look at the vn.wiki article, but from Google translate I didn't see sources for the en.wiki article that would most editors' ideas of WP:SIGCOV. Newimpartial (talk) 19:48, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Clarification I think I see what happened here. I was giving examples of significant places (i.e., real places that qualify as notable under NGEO and have been kept at AfD on the basis of the current guideline), which would not be kept based on typical readings of GNG SIGCOV. I was trying to show that this was not a null set.

What I did not do was restrict my selection to places with local government institutions - I therefore haven't shown that some inhabited places with local government fail GNG. I believe that some of the places that meet WP:V as "legally recognized" also have local governments (or have had them, in the past), but that assertion is difficult to prove. In any case, I hadn't meant to define significant places as having governments - only a subset of them do. Newimpartial (talk) 20:48, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

RFC on the "Populated, legally recognized places" standard

The WP:GEOLAND guideline states "Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable".

Do you agree or disagree with the statement: "the "Populated, legally recognized places" standard is not fit for purpose"? FOARP (talk) 13:29, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Responses

• Agree, not fit for purpose. We have seen far too many instances of this standard enabling negligent mass-creation of tens of thousands of contentless stub articles - Iran, Poland, Turkey, Philippines, Azerbaijan, US GNIS articles, Sri Lankan and Burmese GNS articles - about places whose existence (at least as "villages" or whatever) is not even verified when this standard is passed. "Legally recognized" is an editor-generated standard that has no source in the real world, is originally from a US-centric perspective, and which, particularly when applied worldwide but even just for the US, repeatedly results in bad outcomes requiring large multi-year clean-up operations such as the California project.
  

The result has been many thousands of articles about what were ultimately individual houses (e.g., 17km), individual facilities (e.g., Colonel Bermand's Pump), individual farms (e.g., Ktery SK), and just plain nonsense (e.g., Monkey Box, Florida).

Knowing what is and what isn't "legally recognised" requires detailed legal knowledge not even known to the average lawyer from the jurisdiction in question - I'm a qualified, practising lawyer of my home country and at no point in my legal training was knowledge of local government structure something that was covered. You would have to be an expert in that particular field of law to be able to determine what is/is not "legally recognised" and the answer you would produce would not easily map on to this standard since "legal recognition" is independent of a place being populated. Now multiply this by the hundreds of different legal jurisdictions that exist world-wide, all with differing laws.
If you disagree with me on this, I challenge you to give me a straight answer as to whether Marine Ward in the village of Goring, part of the town of Worthing, in the county of West Sussex in England in the United Kingdom (i.e., the 6th level), is or is not a WP:GEOLAND pass. And then consider that many of our presently-existing "village" articles are for similar sub-village, special-purpose entities, just in countries with which the average EN WP editor is less familiar. FOARP (talk) 13:29, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree - this reflects the baby/bathwater problem that so often enters discussions of notability policy. In their !vote, the nom cites mass-creation as a problem with GEOLAND - but mass creation is already forbidden by policy, and undermining a guideline because people have used it as a pretext for mass creation is a cart/horse as well as a baby/bathwater problem.
  Could we use a definition of "legally recognized", or perhaps improve on that terminology? Most likely yes. But the principle - that even the lowest level of populated geography that is recognized officially within each national state should be presumed notable so long as its recognition is verifiable - is a good principle that serves the requirements of an encyclopaedia.
  The counter-argument appears to be, "but it's hard to know what official legal recognition is", but if that were the real objection, then the response ought to be developing a systematic treatment (like a table) showing recognized types of inhabited places by country.
  But this is not what happens; instead editors protest that everything ought to have WP:GNG coverage, that SNGs are some kind of historical error, and ultimately that Wikipedia should act more like a summary of reliably sourced prose (something LLMs can now do better than humans), rather than a human-curated wiki, serving the traditional purposes of an encyclopaedia, oriented to human needs and interests.
  One traditional function of an encyclopaedia is to show the placed of birth and death in biographies, and one of the affordances of an online encyclopaedia is to include hypertext links for those inhabited places. Deprecating GEOLAND (which this RfC looks like a roundabout step towards) would be a direct obstacle to this obvious encyclopaedic function, and would also impede the functioning of list and category treatment of inhabited places. Newimpartial (talk) 13:53, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  "the response ought to be developing a systematic treatment (like a table) showing recognized types of inhabited places by country" - such a table would be an improvement on the present standard (and indeed only be necessary if the present standard weren't fit-for-purpose). However, there are as many as 200 or more different legal jurisdictions world wide, it very clear that any such full treatment 1) wouldn't be very practical due to the number of jurisdictions but also 2) would regularly run in to the problem of inhabited places being "legally recognised, populated places" but clearly not notable.

  Again: is Marine Ward a pass or is it not a pass? It has an elected counsellor, it has a population. Surely it is a "legally recognised, populated place"? And if this sixth (?) level jursidiction is GEOLAND pass, then...

  Finally, having hyper-links to places in articles about notable people/events is no reason at all to have articles about non-notable topics: this is essentially an WP:INHERIT argument. FOARP (talk) 14:13, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  @FOARP to answer your question, whether a village ward in the UK should count as a GEOLAND pass is an interesting question in the abstract, but I don't think the viability of GEOLAND depends on it in any way. What I know better is Canada, and in Canada there are instances where municipal wards are stable over time, have substantial coverage of their elections and data for their demography, and provide the scope for NGOs etc. Wards in other municipalities lack all of these characteristics, so I'm not sure what the consensus would be about what wards should have articles enwiki. I'm not sure what level of legal recognition we should attribute to municipal wards in different situations. But what I am confident about is that all countries have at least one level of municipal-type geography that is in some sense official ("legally recognized") and which should carry the presumption of meriting an article.

  I am also amused, though nor surprised, that in your last paragraph you sidestep the use-value of working hyperlinks for places of birth and death to the wikicruft question of whether they are notable or not, then (implicitly at least) elided to whether they have RS prose written about them. That's not what notability is - notability is whether or not a topic is presumed to merit an article. And what kinds of topics are notable depends on consensus, not some abstract concept. Through WP:NSPECIES, the community has decided that verifiable eukaryotic species are notable whether or not they have been described at length in prose. That means they are notable, and the status quo for geography is similarly that they are notable. So as long as a birthplace or a place of death is verifiable in terms of what official geography it falls within, a link to it points to a notable place by definition. Newimpartial (talk) 15:28, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think theres more nuance than it than that... Remember to be recognized as a species it has to have be described at length in prose what is being bent in that situation is treating the scientific papers as sigcov even though they are technically primary in some aspects. The status quo for geography is also that they are typically presumed notable, not that they are notable. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:33, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think HEB's response is a good one. I changed course during the development of NSPECIES in part because I didn't think bacterial species descriptions could be relied on to produce enough prose for a satisfying standalone article (although of course many bacterial species do meet GNG). I'm sympathetic to the idea that for certain sets of topics, one should eventually be able to look up every member in Wikipedia for reasons similar to the ones you adduce; but "look up" could mean either an article or a redirect to a section of a more broadly-scoped article. Unfortunately, which sets of topics should be so represented is a matter of taste (cf. the current debate over Olympians) so editors strive to find creative rationales to claim that policy mandates imposing their taste. Choess (talk) 04:06, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  That principle "that even the lowest level of populated geography that is recognized officially within each national state should be presumed notable so long as its recognition is verifiable - is a good principle that serves the requirements of an encyclopaedia." is not in the current notability standard nor do I believe that such a principle has ever been adopted or endorsed by the community. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:27, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

• (edit conflict)Disagree. Newimpartial says it much better than I could. There are issues related to articles around geographical places (although not as many as some would have you believe), but absolutely none of them are a result of this principle. Issues around inappropriate mass creation should be dealt with by actually enforcing the policies and guidelines around mass creation (without deleting everything that some deletionists do not approve of and/or cannot be bothered to determine whether they approve or not). Issues around what is a legally-recognised populated place, need to be addressed by determining for each country what is a legally-recognised populated place. Thryduulf (talk) 14:17, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  "Issues around what is a legally-recognised populated place, need to be addressed by determining for each country what is a legally-recognised populated place" - Doing this would mean explicitly saying that some places with populations and "legal recognition" (e.g., Filipino Barangays, Iranian Abadi), are not "Populated, legally recognized places". If we could agree that this is the answer then we could go ahead and do it, though I think the number of jurisdictions would make any such guide very long. Would that be something you could agree to? FOARP (talk) 14:31, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  this would mean explicitly saying that some places with populations and "legal recognition" (e.g., Filipino Barangays, Iranian Abadi), are not "Populated, legally recognized places". no it wouldn't. There are two issues here - whether something is a legally recognised populated place or not (c.f. the railway junctions in that American database, the name of which temporarily escapes me) and, separately, whether something that is a populated, legally recognised place should have a stand-alone article or should be covered on a broader article (c.f. the fourth-level places in Indonesia/Philippines). Changing the principal being discussed here will not address either of those issues. Thryduulf (talk) 14:39, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  So if I've understood correctly: we should have a list of places that 1) are and are not "legally recognised", and also discuss in the list whether, 2) despite being "legally recognised populated places", they still shouldn't have stand-alone articles without passing another standard. That could be done, but it's going to result in a lot of passes for 1) not passing 2). If you want to think of that as leaving the standard in tact, then I'm OK with that. FOARP (talk) 14:53, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

@Thryduulf:, it seems to be useless to say "enforce the rules against mass creation we already have", because in the first place we have thousands if not tens of thousands already created. Whenever it gets discussed, opposition to mass action (which is to say deletion) always prevails and we're reduced to a few people laboriously going over these articles in the face of general opposition to deleting them, even though I must be frank: those that remain are generally crap, and the ones I look at and don't nominate remain crap because nobody is systematically improving these articles. And then someone comes along and spits out a few hundred more before they get caught, and enforcement never gets beyond telling them to stop, and there is always objection to deleting what they churned out, and so the workload of the reviewer gets ratcheted up a notch.

The way it seems to me, the current wording enables the mass creators because it tells them that they can take any government listing and turn it into articles, and really, who can blame them because it seems common sense that such listings can be trusted; and if there are rules against that, well, people don't read rules, especially when they have to go out of their way to find out what they are. So they spit out a few hundred more articles before they are caught, and the pile of unreviewed crap gets bigger. If you want to be serious about enforcing the rule against mass creation, then anything newly mass created needs to be summarily deleted, no discussion. And at this point I'm quite willing to sign up for deleting all the old mass-produced geostubs too, because I can never even finish just the US articles, much less the other countries where the material is very much worse. Everyone else who was doing systematic review has given it up. And I mean, if the consensus is going to be that this standard is fine in spite of there being an argument every time we come to a new country and we have decide what it means in that context, and consensus is going to be that it's OK to have all these falsehoods lying around in our geographic coverage, and the consensus is that it's OK that we have all these crappy stubs even when what they say is true, because it's so important to give every village in a district its own article rather than just listing them and showing a map like a real encyclopedia would do, then fine: I can just retire and get on with my life. Mangoe (talk) 04:00, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree with this and would also add that a big problem with the vast number of extant questionable geostubs is that the existence of so many of them sets a very bad example to new editors who are then going to go on and create more of them faster than anyone can fix them because they think that if these articles exist, then they must be ok Giuliotf (talk) 23:20, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

• I think its fit for purpose... But thats a really low standard, its certainly not the best of all potential option... But fit for purpose? Yeah, its workable. IMO the problem isn't what it says its what people pretend it says, "automatically reliable" "passes SNG so doesn't need sigcov" and such. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:25, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
• agree — As the person who generates far and away the majority of geodeletes, the standard doesn't mean the same thing to all people, and every single time there is a question about it at all, discussion erupts because of all the problems with its application in the past. As far as mass creation is concerned, the cat has long since gotten out of the bag, and the only solution (which is implemented, and is already ignored) is simply to ban mass creation of geostubs because of the problems we have seen with the sources typically used: legal recognition was an enabler of these misbegotten projects, but the issue now is the clean-up, which is proving beyond the resolve of the editing community to deal with. And we still have people wandering through saying "keep because GNIS" when the issues even in governmental listings are well-known.
  Consensus over this failed years ago; it's just that every time this comes up away from the actual editing of these articles, a bunch of people who aren't involved come in to shout down those that are doing the work. Mangoe (talk) 15:40, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  Also, I don't see how anyone can look at the last six-odd archives of this page and continue to insist that there is a consensus to keep the "legally recognized" language. It comes up as an issue in every single archive; the last several have it showing up as a specific subject. Mangoe (talk) 03:37, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree. At the last time we tried complete an RFC on Geoland, which I sort of started with a discussion, most people agreed that the wording was nonsensical, but couldn't agree on any replacement.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:31, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
• Agree, repeated discussions have demonstrated that the phrase "legally recognized" is effectively meaningless. As for the claim that removing this is equivalent to "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", it actually is more like a camel's nose situation. This creates a loophole that has been endlessly exploited. The only sane option is to close the loophole. There should be some caveats to prevent mass deletions without prior discussions. This will bring this guideline closer to the normal standard for most other Wikipedia articles. older ≠ wiser 16:40, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
• Disagree? – the standard as a whole is not fit for purpose, but I think the target for refining should be on the "typically presumed notable" portion. I support the principle of presuming notability for significant places, the emphasis should rather be on “legal recognition” providing notability to a place rather than being a one-and-done presumed notable topic.
  In practice, documentation about localities is uneven, especially in countries where online records are sparse. For example, I have been working to improve geostubs on Myanmar and most geostub expansion information exists only in local papers or Facebook travel videos. It's really a stroke of luck that there's one set of consistent official record as of 2019 that isn't locked away in township offices. A lot of the geostubs made before that relied on very shoddy and false data and there was no official info on legal recongition. However, even larger towns with hundreds of thousands of residents which are 2nd-level division capital and get covered in a couple scholarly works, wouldn't really meet GNG otherwise. Often, these works discuss things only at the township level, without distinguishing the urban core from surrounding rural areas. The documentation on these towns are inherently primary sources (government maps, reports, etc.) in such cases and GEOLAND becomes the sole crutch for notability for these urban cores as separate from the much larger and township. In my view, too many settlements are going to have their best information come from primary sources.
  The guideline should not and does not currently justify the mass creation of stubs for every village. It presumes notability, but there is still an onus to provide that information if prompted. "Legal recognition" isn't so much of the problem as people misinterpreting GEOLAND to believe that having legal recognition justifies the creation of any given geographic article. The guideline should be refined to reflect that the presumption of notability must account for meaningful documentation, with flexibility left to regional projects to define what standards make sense to be presumed notable by mere existence in the local law. I think the issues with mass geostubs in less developed countries is essentially a different problem altogether than people making geostubs for vaguely recognised places in more developed countries that have an excess of documentation of every nook and cranny.EmeraldRange (talk/contribs) 16:53, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
• Disagree. The guideline is fit for purpose, even if the wording could be improved. There is overwhelming longstanding consensus that villages are notable. There is overwhelming longstanding consensus that "populated places" means villages. (There is also consensus that villages generally satisfy GNG.) I do not care if you remove the words "legally recognised", but I must point out that the criticism of those words seems to generally consist of editors playing devil's advocate, rather than an actual dispute about their meaning. Since no-one is actually claiming that Iranian abadi etc are "populated places", the guideline cannot be said to be the problem. If a particular editor did not understand what an abadi actually was, that is not a problem with the words "Populated, legally recognized places", and changing those words would not have prevented that misunderstanding. James500 (talk) 17:34, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  @James500: can you link to those two longstanding consensuses? I imagine they are from long before I started editing, so it would be helpful to see what the actual consensus was and not just how it is remembered all these years later. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:34, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  You could start by looking at archive 1 (2010 to 2012), where it is repeatedly pointed out that such consensus has always existed at AfD. "Cities and villages are notable" was included in the first revision of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes in 2005, and has been there ever since. If you want me to dig up every AfD and community discussion, that could take some time. James500 (talk) 18:48, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think its unreasonable to expect you to dig up the consensus if you want to make an argument from it, that seems like the bare minimum that would be expected of someone making such a claim. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:51, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  In all fairness, I have already dug up the consensus by linking to the discussions in archive 1 in which the creators of this guideline say in express words what the guideline means. That said, these AfDs and these AfDs put the matter beyond all doubt. James500 (talk) 19:17, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  Then can you explain the mismatch between that and what the page currently says? If that really was consensus then (which it isn't clear that it was) when did consensus change to what it is now? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:00, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  What the record makes clear is:

  1. There were lots of proposals for a guide, some more restrictive than this one (eg 1 2 3). The main thing unifying these proposals was that they were to be looser than GNG, at least for certain classes of populated place.
  2. The "legally-recognised" standard seems to have come out of a "legally-defined jurisdictions"-type proposal (see 2 and 3) designed to exempt certain locations from requiring secondary sourcing. The problems we are discussing now were pointed out at the time.
  3. The discussion that turned this into a guideline was very low-participation. Twice as many !votes have been cast in this RFC so far than were cast in that (4 versus 8).

  FOARP (talk) 22:08, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  What the record makes clear is:

  1. There were more than three hundred AfDs in which there was a consensus that villages are notable.
  2. The "populated place" language used in the guideline is an attempt to describe in the site consensus established and demonstrated by those AfDs as a group.
  3. Those AfDs were very high participation as a group, so the site consensus they establish and demonstrate as a group is very strong.
  4. The number of those AfDs which took place before the guideline is so large we can say that the consensus established and demonstrated by those AfDs as a group did exist before the guideline, and the guideline was merely an attempt to describe the practice of treating villages as notable that was already long established at AfD by the time the guideline was created.

  James500 (talk) 22:51, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  So how do we get the current consenus as reflected by the project page here which differs significantly from that? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:59, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  WP:AFD explicitly states that it is not a forum for establishing precedents (it says that AFD ”… should not be used to form consensus around policy decisions such as "should Wikipedia include this type of article"). Additionally, saying “articles should be kept because they have been kept” is circular reasoning.

  But setting that aside: I have personally participated in the deletion of not just hundreds, but thousands of “village” articles (see particularly the Iranian deletions linked above, but also the California project, Azerbaijan, Poland etc.). Why do these not count for anything? FOARP (talk) 23:00, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  Firstly, WP:AFD is not a policy or guideline. In any event, as far as I can see, WP:AFD does not say that a large number of AfDs with the same outcome are not evidence of site consensus. That page does say that "bundling should not be used to form consensus around policy decisions" (my emphasis), but bundling is not AfD. The page also says "common outcomes may be checked to see if other articles on a specific topic tend to be kept . . . after an AfD discussion", though I don't regard that as important, either. In the olden days, it was said that Wikipedia policies and guidelines were supposed to describe existing consensus, so there would have been nothing unusual about basing a proposed guideline on an outcome that had already been reproduced in hundreds of AfDs.

  The deletions you have participated in are not evidence of consensus against the notability of villages because, as far as I am aware, none of the articles deleted for lack of notability actually were villages. Iranian abadi are not villages; Geonet errors are not villages; inadequately referenced or unverifiable articles have not been proven to be villages; and so on. In order for an article topic to be notable under this guideline, you have to produce a reliable source that verifies that it is actually a village. Sources like Geonet and the Iranian census don't verify that. They are either not reliable or they are not talking about villages. James500 (talk) 23:57, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  In which case, could you support changing the standard to something like ”Cities, towns, and villages are typically presumed notable, other populated entities may be presumed notable on a case-by-case basis (see list)”. FOARP (talk) 06:26, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  I like the wording Cities, towns, and villages are typically presumed notable, other populated entities may be presumed notable on a case-by-case basis. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:26, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  "Entities"?

  Cities, towns and villages (settlements encompassing a population of over 5,000 people or which have representative councils or governmentally recognised collective adminstrative bodies) are presumed to be notable. Other populated places may be determined as notable based on media coverage or historical importance governed by the General Notability Guideline. Does that help? Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 17:06, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Alexandermcnabb A completely new and arbitrary population of 5,000 for the SNG, consigning other communities to the GNG, would work directly against the principles of an encyclopaedia. Where I live, for example, it would take a currently well-established geographical level (towns and townships) and make half of them presumptively notable and half of them not. Articles on historical townships here have already been consolidated on enwiki based on municipal amalgamation, so deletions based on this unfounded standard would suddenly remove valid wikilinks from the birth places of people born in most of rural Ontario, and there would not even be clear targets at a higher level of geography (unitary municipal governance has been enforced through most of Ontario, so there is no consistent higher level to which towns and townships could be consolidated). If that is true in a relatively wealthy and stable polity, I imagine that the results of an arbitrary population standard in other parts of the world would be even more harmful to the purpose of an encyclopaedia. Newimpartial (talk) 17:48, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  There are villages with populations smaller than 5000 that are notable. We should not put an arbitrary figure. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:22, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  Notable by what criteria? If they are notable under the GNG, then there is no problem. There is nothing proposed here that would prevent small populated places from having an article, as long as sources can be found that provide significant coverage. I have created articles about places that never had more than a few hundred residents and were never formally organized (and have since disappeared) because I found sufficient sources. The question is, what should the criteria be to establish a presumption of notability for populated places? A significant number of us think that "legally recognized" is not enough. Donald Albury 18:47, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  One of the purposes of SNGs is to identify topics that are likely to satisfy GNG, in order to save time at AfD etc. If villages with a population of less than 5,000 are likely to satisfy GNG (and they generally do satisfy GNG), there is a problem with excluding them from the guideline, because the purpose of the guideline is to identify such topics. James500 (talk) 22:29, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think we should use numerical limitations. I mean, just to throw this out there, some mining camps had populations in the thousands (e.g., the ones in the old USSR... of a certain type... that you weren't exactly free to leave... - PS, if you want a LOL/bit of a fright, go to the location in that article on GMaps and click on the old camp canteen). FOARP (talk) 08:42, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  "Since no-one is actually claiming that Iranian abadi etc are "populated places"" - The claim that they are populated places is made again and again, reasonably, because most of them have recorded population. What they (mostly) aren't, is villages. FOARP (talk) 21:38, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

• Every inhabited house with a government-recognized property title is a legally recognized, inhabited place. Whether that is fit for purpose I suppose depends on what the purpose is, but it's certainly not a particularly useful or meaningful threshold. CMD (talk) 18:31, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Discussion of this comment, featuring goats, farms, and tiny islands, moved to the Discussion section below, Extended discission on the legally recognised, populated place standard

• Agree It comes down to what does "officially recognized" mean? and how do we determine that a place is "officially recognized"? I think we have been much too enamored with having articles about any place for which statistics can be placed in an infobox, without regard to whether there is anything beyond statistics that is significant about the place. - Donald Albury 20:32, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
• Disagree It really sounds like y'all just don't want to do the work to define what groups and organizations of places count in each country. That is what is needed and that is what should be done, rather than trying to attack GEOLAND piece by piece. It also feels rather telling to me that the AfD that prompted this whole thing was incredibly not an example of there being a problem with GEOLAND and what counts. Silverseren^C 01:17, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  1) I didn’t participate in that AFD.

  2) This is a long-standing problem. It comes up again and again and again.

  3) The issue we’re running up against, time and time again, is that making a list of places that are and are not “presumed notable” is massively hindered by the “legally recognised” standard. FOARP (talk) 06:31, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree The presumption of notability is too woolly and leads to far too much to and fro, but it is also very hard to set a bar as a 'catchall'. The issue behind the VPP discussion was the presumption that if one Indonesian village up for AfD was automatically a legally recognised place, then a further 84,047 Indonesian villages would also be a shoe-in for an article - although it turned out that the village in question was arguably notable on its own merits! The proposer was off to the relevant Wikiproject to gain consensus for a better 'filter' for Indonesian settlements, and that country level consensual approach to modifying the intent of GEOLAND is no bad thing (but that it is required is, perhaps, a bad thing). Maybe the standard for automatic notability we need is a settlement with a council or representative body of some sort (I'm not quite sure how you'd phrase that, but basically a community large enough to have some sort of community body is large enough to be notable). That doesn't stop the hamlet of 'n' achieving notability for any other reason, but it does limit the presumption of notability. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 05:57, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  I honestly would see a proposal that just flat-out said "Villages are automatically and irrevocably notable for ever and a day, amen. For other stuff see list." as an improvement over the present standard. FOARP (talk) 08:12, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  Then we would get into arguments over what is a "village" at AfD. Whatever the standard is, we will have arguments over whether it is notable. SportingFlyer T·C 18:55, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree It is clear that the guideline has simply allowed too many articles about non-notable places to pop up, solely because they are 'populated'. Since we have better notability standards for every other part of Wikipedia, there is no reason to exclude geographic features from this. Just because a place is 'populated' and 'legally recognised', it does not make it notable and there is no reason for it to have an article on Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kingsacrificer (talk • contribs) 10:03, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
• Agree - I would like the guideline to be less vague and open to interpretation, so that valuable editor time is not wasted at AfD and other places discussing whether instances of place type X do or don't meet the guideline. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 12:07, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
• Agree, this guideline has allowed far too many (often partially or entirely machine generated) permastubs which just consist of a few factoids, and for which there is really no more information available. Rather than treating those as standalone articles, such entries should be at something like List of populated places in Example County, Somestate (substituting "state" and "county" for appropriate administrative divisions elsewhere). When those few factoids (population, coordinates, etc.), are all that's available about a place, the list entry would suffice. For actually notable places, where there's substantially more than that available, of course a full article can still be written, but then it will actually be an article. At that point, the regular notability guideline decides whether a standalone article is appropriate, but the "gazetteer" function of the encyclopedia is fulfilled by the list entries. (And of course, an actual gazetteer wouldn't dedicate a whole page to a few factoids, either.) Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 18:14, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  But then the WikiLawyers and GNG purists will try to get the lists deleted too: "List of populated places in Example County, Somestate fails NLIST, not discussed as a group". ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 18:36, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  Every "Example County, Somestate" article already has a list of populated places "unincorporated communities". Mangoe (talk) 19:03, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  That seems to be sidestepping the question of whether it actually fails NLIST or not... If it does objectively fail NLIST we aren't talking about WikiLawyers and GNG purists then are we? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:29, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  See the part of NLIST that says "Lists that fulfill recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes often are kept regardless of any demonstrated notability". However, like I said, good WikiLawyers could potentially get such lists deleted for not having enough SIGCOV. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 16:27, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  And what would be the difference between a WikiLawyer getting such a list deleted for lacking SIGCOV vs a non-WikiLawyer getting such a list deleted for lacking SIGCOV? Lacking sigcov is after all a perfectly valid reason to get a page which passes the SNG and/or GNG deleted. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:36, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  Certain lists don't have to have SIGCOV. See above "Lists that fulfill recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes often are kept regardless of any demonstrated notability" ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 16:41, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  Not having SIGCOV is still a valid reason to delete... Even when that list fulfills recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes. You haven't actually addressed the point. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:37, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of years in Brunei ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 20:00, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  Is this supposed to be an example of WikiLawyering? This doesn't appear to address the point, you still haven't answered the question. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:07, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  "year in Brunei" obviously has no SIGCOV, yet the article was kept at AfD. I think the conclusion here is that there is no necessary requirement for the topic of a list to have SIGCOV. Katzrockso (talk) 03:21, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Nobody has argued that there is a necessary requirement for the topic of a list to have SIGCOV. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:19, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree the guideline causes far too many issues and the wording 'legally recognised' is just poor. Some editors take simple mention by a government source as legal recognition. Traumnovelle (talk) 20:29, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, I came here to say this. I don't know what 'legally recognised' means. Somewhere that appears on 'official' maps? Somewhere that can raise local taxes? Somewhere that appears in census returns? Somewhere that can be use to address mail? If a builder purchases a few fields, constructs a few thousand houses, and gives it a name, does it have legal recognition? In the UK, it would have needed planning permission. Does that count as legal recognition? --Northernhenge (talk) 23:47, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree per earlier responses and the "cart-before-horse" argument; the mass-creation incidents went against our policies and were not indicative of the policy being insufficient. I really don't like "articles" that are nothing more than gazetteer entries and agree that if we can't find anything about a village other than its location and maybe population, it should be a list entry instead of an article; theoretically I'd support minimum standards for content in populated place articles beyond the threshold for A1 deletion but there's no precedent for this. In my opinion the way forward to prevent this is to be alert for it, since it's happened before several times, and raise the issue early with mass-creators who are creating content-free microstubs or any pages about villages that aren't villages. And when it comes to dealing with existing mass-creations like this one that have been established as problematic, I am in favor of saving our time checking each coordinate and just nuking all such articles that haven't been expanded beyond the boilerplate text. Whilst I wouldn't agree with doing this when most or all pages in the batch are real towns, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and loses very little by being purged of these empty gazetteer entries. Passengerpigeon (talk) 20:51, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  "...raise the issue early with mass-creators who are creating content-free microstubs or any pages about villages that aren't villages..." - We've literally got people who do review for NPP in the discussion saying they don't even bother reviewing GeoStubs, because of the GEOLAND standard. Mass-creators tend to get autopatrolled early (because they've created a lot of articles!) and after that there's no stopping them until their articles become so numerous that they start being something you come across just randomly working on WP. And at that point, in the famous words of Warren G and Nate Dogg, "It's a tad bit late... to regulate".

  You're then stuck trying to prove for each of the X000 articles created at a rate of X per minute, that a village doesn't exist at a location, in the teeth of a standard that says effectively that everything having a population and legal status is automatically notable. And you have to do this one at at time, hour after hour, which is a lot of fun as I'm sure you can imagine. FOARP (talk) 08:01, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  In summary, I support keeping inherent notability for villages and towns, but equally oppose the creation of "articles" that are just gazetteer entries and don't even have a couple of key facts, whether on populated places or anything else. Maybe requiring a source other than GNIS is the best way forward to prevent this, but there should be a much lower bar of entry for acceptable sources than for, say, biographies and company profiles. Passengerpigeon (talk) 15:11, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree. The problem is with people, including the OP for the VPP discussion that triggered this RFC, quoting typically presumed to be notable and then asking if that means automatically notable, regardless of a list of facts that have nothing to do with the sources. If you want to make reality clearer, try something like typically presumed (but not automatically guaranteed) to be notable. Also, looking at the VPP OP's complaint, it would probably be good to add a clear and direct statement that the effect that Reputable and authoritative government sources, such as the US Census, are considered sufficiently WP:Independent for the purpose of establishing notability. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  In general the US census and similar sources are not sigcov because they lack depth, not because they lacks independence. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:34, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  The US census contains enough information that we can write multiple paragraphs of prose from it. It's definitely WP:SIGCOV, and it definitely goes into detail ("depth"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:40, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Thats not true for all locations covered by the census. It is generally *not* treated as sigcov, but if there is consensus to do so I'm sure you can point to it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:45, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Agree with HEB here. Importantly, the kind of entities for which you’re most likely to not have any other coverage than that produced by the US census bureau, are the ones it produces the least data for.

  There is of course already a consensus on this very page that US Census Designated Places, which are exactly the kind of entity that may only exist according to the US census bureau, are not to be presumed notable. FOARP (talk) 18:20, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Name an actual town in the US (that the census handles separately) for which one cannot write about:

  • the number, race, and gender of the people living there,
  • the size of the households,
  • the age of the residents, and
  • the incomes for those households.

  Look at Mulberry, Kansas#2020 census: We have four encyclopedic paragraphs – over 300 words – on a small town in the middle of nowhere. That's proof of SIGCOV.

  If you can write several hundred words of appropriately encyclopedic content from a source, then that source is providing significant coverage – that's SIGCOV in the meaning of "a lot of coverage", not "coverage that an editor personally and subjectively feels important".

  (A Census Designated Place that does not align with a real-world entity is not the same as a town. We have a consensus not to create articles about what are effectively just leftover bits of land. That decision is based on our belief that they're not appropriate subjects for an encyclopedia article, rather than any belief that we don't have enough information ("SIGCOV") to be able to write an article.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  But the standard isn't "actual town" its "Populated, legally recognized places" (and "actual town" just seems to invite a No true Scotsman) Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:54, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  All towns in the US are populated, legally recognized places. I say "actual town" to differentiate it from a cluster of buildings that happen to be near each other but aren't legally recognized as a town/city/equivalent entity. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  But all populated, legally recognized places in the US are not towns which they would need to be for what you said to make sense. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:52, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Horse Eye's Back, please name a populated, legally recognized place in the US that isn't (using the ordinary, commonplace definition) "a town". NB that a Census-designated place is not "legally recognized" because there are no laws recognizing it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

  New York City is a populated, legally recognized place in the US that isn't (using the ordinary, commonplace definition) "a town". Villages and hamlets are also often legally recognized. There are also weird things like unincorporated communities which are often more of a housing development or collection of them than a town even if they may have some of the services generally associated with a town like a school, parks, fire station, and/or retail strip. I would note that a number of people in this discussion have drawn the line not at town as you do but below it at village. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:18, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

  and some consider those housing developments notable... Traumnovelle (talk) 19:25, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

  To be fair they often are notable... If we're really reaching into the weirdest the US has to offer Hutterite and Mennonite colonies are a real puzzler a lot of the time, each state they're in seems to treat them differently and there isn't a ton of accessible coverage because they lead very closed and pious lives. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:37, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

  These "colonies", from the POV of the US Census, are exactly the same as any other place where a group of 19th-century farmers that decided to build their houses close together instead of spread apart. Either they've since incorporated as an official government entity ("populated, legally recognized place"), or they haven't ("populated, but not legally recognized place"), and our rules should depend on that status.

  New York City – the only populated, legally recognized place in the US you've named that isn't "a town" – of course, is obviously notable and cannot possibly be the kind of place that this guideline shouldn't be recognizing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

  Thats an offensive stereotype which borders on outright bigotry. Please retract or amend, most Hutterites and Mennonites use modern farming technology. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:09, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

  Try reading it again. Hutterite and Mennonite "colonies" were mostly formed in the 19th century. That "populated, legally recognized place" (assuming it is one) is a place where, during the 19th century, a group of farmers decided to build their houses close together (we put all our homes near each other, and we have a long walk to the far corner of the field) instead of spread apart (we put our homes in the middle of our field, and we have a long walk to the road as well as to the nearest neighbor's house). See the Amana Colonies for a particularly well-developed and intentional example: all homes nearby; all fields outside of the village; each village within an hour's walk of the next village. It's very German, and the opposite of what you'll see in the US Plains States.

  As far as the US Census is concerned, there is no difference between a Mennonite group that immigrated to the US in the 19th-century and put their houses close together in the style of their German homeland and a group of non-religious German immigrants who did exactly the same thing: either it's now one of the ~20,000 legally recognized city/town/village entities in the US, or it's not. The fact that it was founded by an ethnoreligious group, and what technology those groups may or may not use, is of no relevance whatsoever to the question of whether a village founded by Mennonites in the 19th century has legal recognition in the 21st century. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:26, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

  Show me anywhere else on WP where 4-7 numbers would be considered SIGCOV. You can simply write numbers out as prose, but that is not encyclopaedic content: that's statistical data transmitted inefficiently. Just use a table if that's the info you want to communicate. That's particularly the case when it's produced for every entity for which the US census bureau produces data including entities we've already decided aren't presumed notable (and so no real selection going on).

  The article you're citing as a good example here was made by Rambot, algorithmically, by slotting numbers into a cookie-cutter produce paragraph. Stuff like this is why Rambot got shut down. Hell, stuff like this is the reason why we have BRFA in the first place.

  We've got consensus in the sports field saying that mere stats are not SIGCOV. I don't see why that wouldn't apply here: this is WP:IINFO. FOARP (talk) 20:17, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  If ordinary demographic information about a town/city "is not encyclopedic content", then why do all modern encyclopedias contain that information? How could those "mere stats" be something that Encyclopædia Britannica includes for all the cities it writes articles about, but not be appropriate for any encyclopedia to include – much less for one that claims that it "combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:52, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  And how many towns/cities does Britannica deem notable enough to include? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:06, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Wikipedia is 95 times as large as Britannica, that they have to include fewer geographic localities than Wikipedia is not reasoning that Wikipedia should follow that. The point WhatamIdoing made is that demographic information is encyclopedic content, as such information is regularly included in other encyclopedias. Katzrockso (talk) 22:18, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, Britannica has stricter notability standards than we do... But nobody is arguing that we substitute theirs for ours. So how many towns/cities does Britannica deem notable enough to include as stand-alone entries? If the argument is about what modern encyclopedias contain then yeah lets take a look at what modern encyclopedias contain and what it don't. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:36, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  You are completely side stepping the point, which is that demographic material is encyclopedic content. Katzrockso (talk) 23:58, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think the fundamental question here is if the only information we can find on a populated place is an entry in a population table in a census, is the best way to present that data as a separate page containing only that data, or as an entry in a table on the page for a higher subdivision (e.g. country)? Giuliotf (talk) 07:54, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  I'm not... You appear to be missing that there is a massive difference between some demographic material being encyclopedic content and all demographic material being encyclopedic content. Some demographic material is simply not encyclopedic in some contexts. In the case of Britiannica >99.99% of demographic material is not considered encyclopedic. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:02, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  No, the point is that 100% of the times that Britannica chooses to write about a town, they include this kind of information about the town. Demographic information cannot be unencyclopedic content if encyclopedias always include it whenever they are writing about a relevant subject.

  One could argue from the example of Britannica that articles about tiny towns are unencyclopedic, but one cannot argue from the example of Britannica that IFF you're going to have an article about a town, then that article shouldn't contain demographic information about the town. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think you actually checked Britannica before making that point, I can't find any article on there which includes the sort of extensive demographic coverage that we do. This article on Cape Coast, Ghana contains almost no demographic information [2]... There is no demographic information beyond population. They also call it a town while we call it a city. If you have an example where Britannica goes into the level of demographic detail you want to go into on wiki present it, otherwise we can assume that no such article exists. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:26, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

  That article has only four paragraphs (~300 words), and it still contains demographic information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:49, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

  It doesn't include out a lot more than it does includes... Meaning that the vast majority of demographic information (aka this kind of information) about the topic has been deemed unencyclopedic. You are clearly and unambiguously wrong that "100% of the times that Britannica chooses to write about a town, they include this kind of information about the town" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:17, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

  No:

  • 100% of the times that Britannica chooses to write about a town, they include demographic information.
  • How much demographic information Britannica chooses to include in any given instance does not change the fact that they always include demographic information.
  • Therefore, including demographic information is encyclopedic. The only thing that can be reasonably debated is how much demographic information to include – not whether.

  WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

  As for your IINFO claim, the answer is because ordinary demographic information about a town isn't indiscriminate ("haphazard, random"[3], "without thought"[4]). The census information may be comprehensive, but it isn't a thoughtless, confused jumble, so it's not actually indiscriminate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Britannica does not include all possible demographic information, even for the very small number of town sized places they cover they provide a very limited set of demographic information, in general less than we do for the same sort of places... Less than you can pull from the US census for example. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:25, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

  This highlights one of the contradictions in this discussion.

  On the one hand, we have editors saying that the US Census isn't SIGCOV, because it's only "4-7 numbers", and thus too little information.

  On the other hand, we have editors saying that there's too much information in the US Census.

  I wonder if we could make up our minds. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:00, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

  [WP:SIGCOV]] states sources should be secondary. WP:PRIMARY lists census data to be primary. Traumnovelle (talk) 00:02, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

  @Traumnovelle, WP:SIGCOV says:

  • "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
    • The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial coverage of IBM.
    • Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton, that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.

  In other words, SIGCOV does not "states sources should be secondary". You seem to have confused SIGCOV with the WP:GNG – and since this is an SNG, the requirements of the GNG are not exactly relevant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:48, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing It's not really about too much or too little information, but that such ephemeral details without any additional context is insubstantial. older ≠ wiser 12:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

  They're not ephemeral: the population in year X is just as valuable as saying that a BLP finished school in year X or did something interesting at age Y. Certainly things change over time, but that can be said about many subjects, like the name of the person who is the king of England, and even whether "king of England" is the relevant title.

  We shouldn't expect "additional context" in primary sources.

  A dataset that would take thousands of pounds of paper to print, and from whose data we can easily write a dozen sentence about each of the ~20,000 cities/towns/villages in the US, isn't "insubstantial". That sounds to me a bit more like a personal judgment that WP:WEDONTNEEDIT instead of a factual statement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:44, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

  It is absolutely ephemeral in that it is constantly changing. By itself, such data alone is insubstantial. We can provide such data for census tracts. But most would agree that is of extremely little value for an encyclopedia. What is required is something more than simple statistical data. older ≠ wiser 22:38, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

  @Bkonrad It is absolutely ephemeral in that it is constantly changing. - I am inclined to doubt this. For example, while I haven't followed the 1900 US census very closely, I don't believe that its reported totals at any level of geography have changed very much in the last hundred years. While of course we would respect any more recent demographic studies that have been published, I don't think historical census data has been rendered ephemeral. Newimpartial (talk) 15:03, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

  I think you may be misunderstanding. Ephemeral does not equate to meaningless or worthless. It is well worth noting how much these things have changed over time for places with some level of notability (and BTW, there have been truly dramatic changes in the reported totals for the US Census at many levels since 1900 as well as for nearly any other place on Earth). What is essential is context. An encyclopedia article consisting only of such transitory details is of dubious value as a stand-alone article. older ≠ wiser 16:39, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

  No, I don't think I am misunderstanding; I think we are disagreeing about what makes a population statistic of encyclopaedic interest. You seem to interpret such faces as "ephemeral" measures of an underlying characteristic (population of a place), while I think of them as stable (largely fixed) measures of a phenomenon defined in time as well as space (population of a place at a point in time).

  My go-to example is Dawson City, Yukon, which had a census-measured population of 9,142 in the 1901 census - having been at least twice as many, at the peak of the gold rush three years earlier, and which was scarcely 3,000 in 1911 - a level to which it has never returned.

  I don't think it makes sense to describe the population statistics for Dawson City as "ephemeral" - the city itself may have been ephemeral, but the significance of its rapid increase and subsequent decline in population are of as much encyclopaedic interest now as they were in 1901 or 1911. Newimpartial (talk) 00:12, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

  But you provided context about the gold rush, without that context all I'd see is it went up and down which tells me nothing. Traumnovelle (talk) 02:37, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

  Precisely. It is the context that makes the constantly changing (hence ephemeral) statistics meaningful. older ≠ wiser 02:44, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

  @Traumnovelle if there had not been a gazillion sources about the Yukon Gold Rush, I believe the sudden growth and subsequent decline of Dawson City would be just as relevant documented facts about a notable place as the demography of places that had 9,000 people in 1901 and still in 2001 with little change in-between. Newimpartial (talk) 19:49, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

  That demography section is an example of a meaningless statistics presented without any useful context, the 1901 population figure is to the side in an infobox and there is no prose explaining it. It really is useless without context.

  Demographics need context to be encyclopaedic e.g. 'At the peak of the gold rush Dawson City had a population of 9,000, just 10 years later once the gold had dried it up the population had declined to 3,000.' That tells a reader so much more than 'In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Dawson had a population of 1,577 living in 770 of its 836 total private dwellings, a change of 14.7% from its 2016 population of 1,375. With a land area of 30.91 km2 (11.93 sq mi), it had a population density of 51.0/km2 (132.1/sq mi) in 2021' Traumnovelle (talk) 19:57, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

• Agree this is long overdue as many other "presumed notability" requirements have been removed in last few years as not fit for purpose and this is the same. Just because a place with 10 people "exists", if we have to rely on just 1 or 2 sources to even verify its existence then it isn't notable. Thus presumed notability here is incorrect, and this should be marked historical or reworded to something along the lines of "most places that legally exist are notable, but they need to demonstrate they pass WP:GNG". Joseph2302 (talk) 07:32, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  I would like to question this (apparently rather Whiggish) reading of wikihistory. Subsequent to the 2017 NSPORTS RfC, the enwiki cormmunity reaffirmed four years ago that, in fact, some SNGs can offer not a presumption of GNG notability (a presumption that sources exist to satisfy SIGCOV), but rather a direct presumption to merit an article. Then two years ago, a "new" SNG along these lines - NSPECIES - was promoted to a notability guideline with clear consensus. So the idea that enwiki is marching closer and closer to perfection applying GNG/SIGCOV to all topics does not appear to be any more grounded in reality than other Whig historiography. Newimpartial (talk) 20:35, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree There could be some refinement, as the presumption of notability should not extend to (US-centered) neighborhoods, home owners associations, or census blocks, and globally should not apply to fourth-or fifth-level (below state, sub-state, county, city) communities (even if listed in a government database). However, tossing the verifiable standard or relying only on significant secondary sourcing would be even more problematic (per NewImpartial). --Enos733 (talk) 17:00, 17 October 2025 (UTC)
• Disagree - as per NewImpartial and others. The problem with "legally recognised" is not that it attempts to define a standard but that it doesn't define it nearly enough. It's absolutely not unfeasible to come up with definitions for each country (or federal unit etc). The comparison with what has happened with sports shows exactly what would happen, and under no circumstances should be allowed to happen, if there is a reversion to GNG and SIGCOV alone. (I liked FOARP's suggestion, even if it were not intended seriously, that villages shd be automatically notable - if there were an ironclad definition of "village" that would not be discussed to death before it got off the ground). Ingratis (talk) 17:31, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  if there were an ironclad definition of "village" It's quite possible that such a definition could be arrived at - if confined to a single jurisdiction. However it couldn't be universal as the real world is multiple orders of magnitude too messy for that. In the United Kingdom Lancing claims to be the largest village in England with a population of about 19,000, yet Fordwich is a town with a population of 372 and St David's is a city with a population of 1,751. In contrast, Villages of Indonesia notes that the term is as formal legal definition in that country. In central and eastern Europe there is commonly no distinction made between the English terms "city" and "town", Stad (Sweden) implies that there is no legal distinction made between urban and rural areas and so no distinction between hamlet, village, town, or city. Administration in other parts of the world is likely going to be even more different to one that corresponds well to a structure familiar to UK and US editors. Thryduulf (talk) 17:57, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  And in Florida, incorporated municipalities may call themselves "city", "town", or "village". The smallest "cities" in Florida, Lake Buena Vista, Florida and Bay Lake, Florida, have populations of less than 30, while the "village" of Wellington, Florida has a population of more than 60,000. Donald Albury 19:03, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  I'm all in favour of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction definitions. Ingratis (talk) 19:44, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  In the UK, the term "city" is defined and reserved, and although most are large, some are very small. A non-city settlement in England (the rules for the rest of the UK differ to some extent) is, by and large, free to decide for itself whether it is a town, village or hamlet. Generally, towns have borough councils or town councils, and villages have parish councils - the distinction between them isn't clear cut (at one time, a borough had a market charter whilst a town didn't - but Abingdon-on-Thames and Banbury both have market charters going back centuries, and both have town councils that replaced their former borough councils about fifty years ago). Hamlets might have a parish council, or not, in which case the council duties of the hamlet fall upon whichever town or village's boundaries the hamlet lies within. I expect that Lancing (Sussex) has a parish council, not a town council. That's certainly the case for Kidlington, another claimant to the title of "largest village in the UK". In short: there is no clear distinction. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 06:11, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  In England (and elsewhere), there are distinctions between villages and hamlets based on size, population and the presence of a church etc: [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]. Typically, depending on who you ask, the village has at least one to five hundred people, and at least 20 buildings, traditionally including a church (but now possibly some other communal or public building). Hamlets have no church or public buildings, less than 20 buildings, and fewer people. It does not matter that these distinctions are not universal or absolute. James500 (talk) 07:58, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  Brief aside: I spent my teenaged years in Lancing. Happy summer days on the beach there… FOARP (talk) 21:02, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree - The purpose of a system is what it does and no matter how much we insist that it shouldn't, the phrase "Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable" creates endless confusion and justifies the creation of countless stubs that turn out to be non-notable or worse, factually incorrect. I think there's a general sentiment that villages and settlements of a certain size or significance are usually notable, but attempting to define that is useless without also halting the efforts of editors who think they've stumbled upon a list of such places that they can simply copy onto Wikipedia. "But Dlthewave, surely the government maintains a reliable list of every settlement!" No. No they don't. Until demonstrated otherwise, we have no choice to assume that every list of populated places is unreliable and require every GEOLAND article to have at least one SIGCOV source to tell us what type of place is actually is. –dlthewave ☎ 19:25, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Dlthewave surely the purpose you describe would be served by any independent, reliable source? I don't see the need to import the WP:GNG to do work that WP:V ought to do for us - this looks like another example of using notability to solve problems for which it is not designed. Newimpartial (talk) 19:54, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  Newimpartial, see my comment on significant coverage in the discussion below. "'Significant coverage' addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content" comes straight from the GNG. A certain depth of coverage is necessary to understand exactly what the subject is that we're talking about; as we've seen time and again, database entries are so scantly detailed that we have editors adding "village" or "unincorporated community" to articles that are simply described as a named place or location in the database. I don't think we need to get hung up on whether or not "significant coverage" should be the standard (I'm just following the wording used at WP:SPORTCRIT) but it does need to be something more than a vague database entry. –dlthewave ☎ 20:38, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Dlthewave well, the threshold I think relevant, as articulated in my comment below, is that a place is verifiably both officially recognized and populated. For encyclopaedic purposes - given the way users follow links and "raid" for information - populated places are like species, in that verifiable "tombstone" information in itself satisfies the requirement to be able to "write a whole article" on these topics. Community sentiment is divided on these short articles, but they have been part of English Wikipedia since the beginning and there has been no consensus to stop creating them, so long as MASSCREATE and other guardrails are respected.

  The flip side of this is that, as with species, I think verifiability of the claim to significance (in this instance, being a populated place) rather than WP:SIGCOV, is what matters (or should matter). SIGCOV belongs to the GNG, and various SNGs specify a more demanding threshold (WP:NORG), a more inclusive threshold (WP:NSPECIES), or simply a different threshold (WP:NPROF) of sourcing for a topic. As long as a database entry is reliable, and offers sufficient detail to verify that the place meets the criteria and is where it's supposed to be, then we don't need a couple sentences of RS travelogue prose to establish that an inhabited place should have an article. Newimpartial (talk) 13:35, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  Dlthewave’s excellent comment highlights the problem with the idea that we can simply refer to US census bureau or other government documents: there is no “list of villages and only villages” maintained by the US government or any other government. All of our worst cases have stemmed from this problem: treating government-produced lists of populated places/selos/abadi/rural localities etc as a “list of villages”. The Iranian census does not list villages and only villages: it lists them in the same class as entities that patently are not villages. Ditto the Russian government. Ditto the Polish government. FOARP (talk)| FOARP (talk) 20:58, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

• Conditional agree I'm not comfortable with all of the ways that "fit/unfit for purpose" can be interpreted / used. But it would be beneficial and needed to significantly change / modify this wording. North8000 (talk) 19:31, 17 October 2025 (UTC)
• Agree I stopped participating in AfD conversations for places because I have no idea how to apply this policy. I was seeing people !vote keep for some railroad junction that might have had 10 houses on it between 1870 and 1895, and is only mentioned in passing in two state history books and a plat map (or something), but then WP:GEOLAND says if the class of division is not notable (e.g. townships in certain US states) its members are not notable either, even though technically recognized in law. Super confusing because the US has many townships with large populations and a bunch of SIGCOV that easily meet GNG. One of several problems is that "legally recognized" is never actually defined; the only information provided is a few (fairly confusing) examples of what is is not. Change, likely to a definition incorporating SIGCOV, would be welcome NicheSports (talk) 22:32, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Agree I think this statement is a needlessly ambiguous and confusing and is not something that applies uniformly across national borders.

I would however go a bit further. The problem we have is that we have a vast number of geography stubs that were mass created in previous years by well-intentioned editors, which used questionable, unreliable or incomplete sources.

These articles might be missing location data, making it very difficult and time consuming to conclusively identify the village in question, particularly if in a country that doesn't use the latin alphabet which introduces a while new level of complication with different translation variants.

On the other hand they might only have location data that points to the middle of a jungle with no conclusive evidence that a village ever was there.

There are a huge number of these articles, some of which might be accurate articles about locations, but a lot of them are not and which have started polluting other sources of information that use Wikipedia as a source, and which makes us lose credibility.

I think WP:GEOLAND needs to also include a minimum requirement to ensure these locations are verifiable, we need to at least have a location and a reliable source showing that people actually lived there (there may also need to be a minimum threshold to what qualifies as a notable inhabited place, but that is a separate discussion). Anyone who works in tech is familiar with the term Technical Debt, these articles present us with the same problem, they were created far too quickly and not to a sufficient standard and its going to take many editors a very long time to fix them and/or remove them, if that is even possible. A change to WP:GEOLAND to make this at least more streamlined would help a lot. (exceptions can of course be made on a case by case basis, for example there may be a notable settlement that is recorded in a number of sources that was abandoned a long time ago and the exact location is lost to time)

The unfortunate consequence of this is that we will likely lose a lot of places, particularly in countries where online, or English language sources are not readily available, but I think that is preferable to us being a source of inaccurate or incomplete information on these countries.

PS: Had a very long day and I'm tired so apologies if my English isn't up to scratch right now. Giuliotf (talk) 23:08, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree - Notability guidelines are supposed to provide a means for establishing presumed notability, such that we believe sufficient sources will exist to write an encyclopaedic article. It is clear from many AfDs and the existence of many unimprovable permastubs that this guideline is ambiguoously understood, uncritically accepted, and unsuitable for the purpose for which it is written. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 10:39, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
• Disagree. We can adjust the wording to be less ambiguous about what it means to be legally recognized, but the standard of "a place large enough to be recognized as a town by the government that controls it" works well in practice and would be extremely disruptive to replace by some other pie-in-the-sky substitute. And this RFC, aiming to remove this wording without even any hint of what its substitute would be, is even more dangerous. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:18, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  The intent behind this motion is not to remove the guide with no replacement, nor would a reading of most of the agree-!votes show that this is what they want either. Instead, it’s exactly what it says on the tin: a chance for the community to indicate whether or not this guide is considered fit-for-purpose.

  I don’t own this process obviously, but my thinking on it is if it passes, then we might start a WP:NSPORTS2022-like process to replace it, looking at a range of different proposals. It just wouldn’t be possible for people to claim (as was claimed in previous RFCs on this topic) that there is no problem to be addressed. FOARP (talk) 02:30, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  What you think the intent is, and what I think the effect would be, may well be two different things. I am reacting to what is written in the proposal, which to me reads as "let's scrap geographic notability without replacing it with anything", rather than something else which the proposal may well have been intended to convey but did not convey to me. And what you think the intent is, and what the result actually would be, may also be two different things. I think we should oppose well-intentioned proposals that have a strong possibility of disastrous outcomes. But your quoting NSPORTS2022 as something favorable rather than disastrous does not give me confidence in this process: if you think our current geographic coverage needs to be gutted the way our coverage of Olympic athletes was gutted, then I strongly disagree. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:12, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  If you think the Wikipedia community was wrong to declare that we won't have an article for every one of the 160,000+ people who ever competed at the Olympics, consisting of nothing but bare statistical data taken from a data-base of marginal reliability, well, you're welcome to argue that. I also tend to think the same logic applies to the legally-recognised sub-village entities (selo/abadi/GNIS-or-GNS populated place/rural locality etc.) that tens of thousands of WP:IINFO bot/meatbot-created articles have proliferated about, and don't think I'm alone in saying that.

  Your reading of the proposal is your own, it definitely isn't the way it's been understood by those in favour of it as can be seen just by reading their !votes, nor do I think any closer is going to close it in the way you suggest if there is a consensus in favour of the standard being not-fit-for-purpose. Logically, a standard that is not-fit-for-purpose can remain in place even with that declaration, it just will be one that the community will have declared wasn't fit-for-purpose. FOARP (talk) 07:42, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree with the "not fit for purpose" proposition (which I dislike more as a tired cliché). And David Eppstein makes a good point – if there's a better wording, let's hear it. In the meantime, this is a guideline and therefore is supposed to provide general guidance rather being a rigidly codified regulation. Andrew🐉(talk) 20:16, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
• Disagree as the phrasing is fine as far as it goes and articulates a reasonable general principle; what's lacking, if anything, is elaboration. I do agree that this RfC sounds like an attempted prelude to nuking the standard completely. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 16:35, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

• A question for all who disagree: how is a standard that has generated nearly continuous conflict and disagreements in multiple protracted discussions leading to no improvement fit for purpose? Precisely what purpose is such a vague standard fit for? older ≠ wiser 16:44, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

• The conflict is not being generated by the guideline. The conflict is being generated by the refusal of certain editors to accept consensus, and their mistaken belief that they can get their own way by talking loudest and longest. James500 (talk) 01:09, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

  Well, there is a lot of talking past each other going on, but there is (and never has been) any clear consensus about what the guideline actually means and which resulted in the creation of a LOT of very bad, poorly referenced, permanent sub-stubs. older ≠ wiser 11:11, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

  My reply to this comment is at the bottom of the "extended discussion". Newimpartial (talk) 21:20, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Disagree. Honestly, a random village in Mongolia is more notable than stuff like a subspecies of a wasp. However, things that I don't think are notable are singular stuff like town halls - those can get like a Commons category max. Brickguy276 (talk) 19:24, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree and strongly so - the entire premise of WP:GEOLAND is that populated places don't have to prove they are notable to be notable - in short, WP:V applies instead of WP:GNG. I have absolutely no problem if the wording is reworked, but this is the simplest, most concise definition we've found so far that works for all 200+ countries in the world. SportingFlyer T·C 18:52, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  It also appears the argument for "agree" boils down to either the fact that people used it to mass-create stubs ("Negligent mass-creation", "Allows generated permastubs"), that it's vague ("effectively meaningless", "Less vague and open to interpretation", "What does officially recognized mean?"). The first was a problem, should not be a problem anymore, and if it continues to be a problem can be something we deal with separately. The second could be dealt with similarly to how we used to deal with whether a football league was fully professional - with a list explaining what "legally populated" means for each country. For instance, where I live, there is a very clear hierarchy of settlements, and the standard would be very clear if any settlements actually were up at AfD (they haven't been it doesn't look like.) Obviously that doesn't work for many other countries around the world, and we need to come up with better standards for those. SportingFlyer T·C 19:08, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

• Agree. Several commenters above have already mentioned the barangays in the Philippines and we Filipinos have essentially carved our own exception (or specifically, a clarification) to WP:GEOLAND that barangays—while being populated and legally recognized—should still meet WP:GNG to have standalone articles. That to me indicates that the guideline in question is no longer fit for purpose because GEOLAND is an exception to GNG and we now have an exception to an exception. —seav (talk) 19:59, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Seav I want to point out that the SNGs are not "exceptions to GNG"; the framework of WP:N has two parallel frameworks to establish notability: GNG and SNGs. Neither offers definitive proof of notability, and one of two SNGs point to GNG as a standard that needs (eventually) to be met, but they are parallel paths.

  Now of course it is fine for an active and well-informed project to decide, for example, that "we don't think bagangays should have articles, even though they meet GEOLAND, because we don't think they get enough coverage in good sources to build articles we're happy with". Projects have originated other, higher notability standards before, like the rule in WP:NFILM that unreleased movies don't merit an article - even if they meet GNG - until they reach a certain stage of production. In that case the rule was adopted by the community as a guideline.

  In the case of barangays, though, I don't think it makes sense to apply a decision made in a regional wikiproject to the rest of human geography. It would be a bit like taking the NFILM rule and applying it to unreleased music albums and unpublished books that meet the GNG, which I don't think makes sense either. Newimpartial (talk) 14:30, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

  I agree that a local decision on WikiProject shouldn't apply to the the rest of Wikipedia or to GEOLAND, but the original question in this discussion is whether the guideline is "fit for purpose". The only reason why the Philippines WikiProject had its decision about barangay notability is precisely because GEOLAND exists and this resulted in over a decade's worth of AfDs and numerous talk page discussions that we Filipinos finally said that enough is enough. The Philippines is not alone in this regard and this goes back to the aforementioned question and I say that the guideline as currently written is not fit for purpose and should be rethought. —seav (talk) 01:15, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

Disagree GEOLAND states “populated, legally recognised places are generally Presumed to be notable. This doesn’t guarantee notability for all populated places that are listed in a census or another form of government registry, each individual place must still on it’s own merit, pass the GNG which includes WP:Sigcov. Proper enforcement of the GNG would deal with the issue of auto-generated stub articles of census subdivisions and other similar issues. Also many of these stub articles may appear to be non-notable due to the lack of information or short number of sources, but in many cases there is large quantities of information available on the web or in books about these places that would be enough to satisfy the GNG, therefore I don’t think this policy needs to be changed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by N1TH Music (talk • contribs) 14:10, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

” This doesn’t guarantee notability for all populated places that are listed in a census or another form of government registry, each individual place must still on it’s own merit, pass the GNG which includes WP:Sigcov.” - this is the opposite of what the GEOLAND standard says. The GEOLAND standard, as presently drafted, is a complete exemption from having to pass WP:GNG. If you want GEO articles to have to pass GNG, you have to change it to explicitly reference GNG. Just look at SportingFlyer’s comment above where they literally say that GEOLAND articles don’t have to notable: that is what you are lining up behind. FOARP (talk) 19:50, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP I'm not concerned as to what SportingFlyer said, I'm reading the guideline as written, and I think it is clear enough. Presumption of notability is not a guarantee of notability, there obviously must be ample source material with which to write an article. For example one of my own articles, Eitermillen, was brought to AfD a few months ago, the deletion discussion in question was not focussed on whether the place was simply populated and legally recognised in order to pass GEOLAND (as there is ample sourcing to verify that it is, from old census data to current electoral registry, to official government maps, traffic guidelines, communal documents, etc...) rather the question of the matter was as to whether the sources in question provided enough coverage to pass WP:SIGCOV. The discussion would have closed very quickly if GEOLAND was the only relevant guideline but it wasn't and that's the way it should be altered, it is fit for purpose. N1TH Music (talk) 17:20, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

The relevant section of policy is WP:N which explicitly states "A topic is presumed to merit an article if: It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG); and It is not excluded under the What Wikipedia is not policy." If a locality meets WP:GEOLAND, it is wiki-notable. Not every notable topic needs an article and it is always editorial judgement as to whether a notable topic should be covered in a separate article or in its own article, which is why WP:PAGEDECIDE exists. In the AfD you mention, editors disagree about whether the sources prove notability, which is not indicative of the fact that wiki-notability can be met by WP:GEOLAND without any WP:SIGCOV. Katzrockso (talk) 18:04, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

Actually let me clarify, while I believe that WP:GEOLAND doesn't overrule WP:GNG, GNG should be assessed in a more relaxed and less stringent way with articles under the scope of WP:GEOLAND as opposed to say WP:BLP. N1TH Music (talk) 17:52, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

But WP:GEOLAND does overrule GNG. It's an WP:SNG which "...operate[s] according to principles that differ from the GNG." FOARP (talk) 09:06, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

You have also twisted my words - I merely am restating the rule that if a settlement is recognised as populated, WP:V applies, not GNG. SportingFlyer T·C 10:59, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

@SportingFlyer: Can you maybe point to where that rule is in the first place? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:27, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back: It's inherent in WP:GEOLAND - look at the distinction between legally recognised and not legally recognised, the latter requires GNG while the former does not. It's also inherent in our function as a gazetteer, and in how geographic AfDs for settlements have worked for long periods of time. It also makes sense, considering a town of 10,000 in Africa may have less available online sourcing than a village of 500 in Europe, both deserve articles. SportingFlyer T·C 10:11, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

So as a rule it doesn't actually exist anywhere besides your head? If it isn't written down then it isn't a rule at all, not even a suggestion or a guideline... Its nothing. We do not function as a gazetteer... We only have some of their features, "Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers." Also note that verifiability does not guarantee inclusion, passing V is never enough for either content or stand alone articles. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:11, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

You're accusing me of making this up from cloth, which I'm not. Look at WP:GEONATURAL, which also does not require the GNG to be met: The number of known sources should be considered to ensure there is enough verifiable content for an encyclopedic article. That just requires there to be enough information to actually write an article. Now back to WP:GEOLAND, which presumes notability "even if population is very low." If we can verify a settlement is or has been populated, the place is usually kept: look at something like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gestrins. The project isn't specifically a gazetteer, which is just a list of places, but clearly the intent is to include populated places without much debate. SportingFlyer T·C 17:45, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

You are literally piecing together different bits of cloth because we don't actually have a shirt that fits what you claimed was a rule. If its actually a rule then you can point to it in the plaintext, no inherent or implied involved. GEONATURAL opens with "Named natural features are often notable, provided information beyond statistics and coordinates is known to exist." so there is clearly still a requirement for sourcing beyond V. We do not function as a gazetteer, that is what you claimed and that intent does not appear to be clear to most editors. Its a tiny tiny minority who argue for the inclusion of all populated places without much debate (notice how most people draw a line at town or village?). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:56, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

You are not understanding me.

The reason this guideline is important is that places are inherently notable because people live there. If a settlement is or was populated and is recognised as a settlement, there should be a source verifying that we can link to. If the only thing in the article is that X is a village in Y with a population of n as of the Z census, along with a specific co-ordinate, that's absolutely fine if all of the information is verified correct. There's nothing wrong with a perma-stub, and it invites improvement.

When I say without much debate, I am referring to the debate which occurs at AfDs. If you look at Gestrins, the analysis is simply verifying these are legally recognised and populated, without debating which sources are enough to show notability. This is how AfDs have worked at GEOLAND for a long time - it is really very simple, and a lot of geographic AfDs are kept because nominators are mistaken.

There are also many instances where "populated places" don't meet our standards and need to be deleted, such as poorly sourced neighbourhoods or GNIS entries or railroad stops which have been entered in as places. Perhaps they can't be verified at all, and there are no good sources showing that they're actually considered a place. Mangoe has identified the problem that there are a number of problematic perma-stubs out there, because the database we used to populate the articles is incorrect, especially GNIS articles. Those need to go, but they're not a reason to exclude all perma-stubs.

Finally WP:5P1 specifically states Wikipedia combines features of gazetteers. SportingFlyer T·C 22:05, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

Hear me when I say that nothing on wikipedia is inherently notable. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:10, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

• Comment - I'm concerned that a "legally recognized" status might end up deleting informally recognized areas such as Boracay, but keeping some random gas station in Iran that has a single family living there. Bearian (talk) 00:03, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

  Why would it? WP:GNG will still exist. Traumnovelle (talk) 02:51, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

  I too have concerns over "legally recognized" status because many historical places often existed without legal recognition since administrative geography wasn't universally important over time and space. This makes the standard much more difficult to apply in many areas/time periods. Katzrockso (talk) 03:09, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think we've ever had that issue, to be honest. It's certainly not one we're managing for here. SportingFlyer T·C 10:57, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

• Agree This standard allows for the creation of numerous un notable stubs and as per the above examples the enforcement of it in practice is just adding complication to the notability system it is not fit for purpose.GothicGolem29 (Talk) 15:03, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
• Agree Abaciscus (talk) 15:17, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Disagree. The statement is fine and maybe refined, but if the issue is stub articles, then the action needed is to stop mass creation of articles and not remove potentially valuable places from an encyclopedia. Arutoria (talk) 09:35, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree. I haven't seen any reason to suggest this guideline has produced problems other than in some editors' selective readings of it. Misattributing problems produced by other editing issues (mass producing articles, disagreements over sources) are not issues with this guideline in particular.Katzrockso (talk) 11:25, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
• Agree. Ultimately, writing articles requires sources; it is not appropriate to have inclusion criteria, like this, that make no reference to sources at all, and which do not really touch on something that would imply the existence of sources. And this has caused significant damage, since many of the most controversial mass-article-creations have fallen under this criteria; the stark way it contradicts our more typical notability policies (not to mention WP:V and WP:RS) has wasted untold amounts of editor time and energy on unusable stubs. People above suggest other methods of dealing with mass-creation, and of course we should also do those, but this poorly-worded criteria has been a major factor and is one easy fix for something that has done serious damage to the encyclopedia in the past - especially since, historically, policies against mass-article-creation have proven difficult to enforce. Someone who wants to create an article must find sources for it; that is the crux of article creation, notability, WP:BURDEN and so on. --Aquillion (talk) 15:42, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

  How does one determine whether or not something is a 'legally recognized populated place'? It can be only be by reference to sources, if someone went to AfC and claimed that a place was a legally recognized populated place based on their mere belief that it was and cited WP:NGEO they would be laughed away. So obviously sources already come into play with this guideline, despite no direct reference to them. You might disagree that the sources people provide are sufficient to establish that a place is a legally recognized populated place, and that is definitely reasonable! I think that's the crux here: people disagree as to what kinds of sources are sufficient to establish what places are 'legally recognized populated places'.

  The same goes for other aspects of notability. Nobody can simply claim that an article meets WP:NAUTHOR because "The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors" by an assertion of mere faith. There are always sources involved to establish whether or not "this person is regarded as an important figure". On this front, WP:NGEO is no different than other SNGs that don't directly mention the existence of sources in the guideline, because making a claim of fact on Wikipedia with respect to notability guidelines implicitly assumes some means of adjudicating that claim of fact. Katzrockso (talk) 20:04, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

• Disagree although Polish localities is not something I'm too familiar with, in the case of places in Ukraine and the United States and many other countries, there's troves of WP:RS that cover each specific locality with lots of encyclopedic info (usually gazetteer or national dictionaries). With the history of Poland especially, every locality has notable information. It's more just a matter of it being offline, which makes it tough to add in into the articles. Having the articles is helpful for building this part of Wiki, and I might say from personal experience and I think other's would agree, it's easier to add on to an existing article than to create a brand new one (page creation is also limited to account holders only, which gives another benefit for expanding rather than recreating these articles). Concerns about WP:SIGCOV are valid but for the same reason random towns in the U.S. have articles, or why any populated place would have an article, is because they have histories, cultures, economies, and overall information inherently encyclopedic. Plus, Wikipedia is a gazetteer in itself: Wikipedia:Gazetteer explains it better than I would. Dan the Animator 22:08, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

  I think most people commenting here agree that actual localities are nearly always notable (as in having reliable secondary sources providing sigcov), the issue is the standard 'legally recognised' being terribly vague and poorly defined which leads to 'places' which lack history, culture, and economy having an article. I think the majority of editors here would agree that actual villages and towns are notable. Traumnovelle (talk) 07:19, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  @Traumnovelle I might be misreading or misunderstanding the earlier threads but I got the impression that this RfC takes a critical approach of the mass-created Polish locality stubs. Apologies if I am misunderstanding it. I agree it could be more precise (which would hopefully prevent repeats of the mass-creations of non-existent articles for census places in California and Iran) but it should in no way endanger legitimate stubs, like the 99% of Polish locality stubs which have great potential. Dan the Animator 07:27, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  The issue with Poland is a bot created articles based solely on the census and not everything in a census is necessarily a village. Wikipedia has more Polish village articles than there are actual villages in Poland. Traumnovelle (talk) 07:37, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  I believe Dantheanimator is arguing that 99% of these localities, even if not villages, are otherwise notable and have significant information in offline sources. Correct me if I am wrong. Katzrockso (talk) 07:42, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  @Traumnovelle@Katzrockso not quite. I just checked with a random article and I'd assume this is the case with most/all of the rest of the stubs: it uses the Polish census database source. When accessing that source, it allows users to categorize by municipalities, rural communes, urban-rural communes, etc. Unless I'm missing something, that source makes it very easy to distinguish between real populated places that have local governance rights/are defined/recognized outside of the census in national legislation. Dan the Animator 07:47, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  Also re Wikipedia has more Polish village articles than there are actual villages in Poland. this would make sense. Villages, as well as other settlements, have and will continue to be deregistered/registered/merged/split/etc. Also, not all of the articles in question are potentially about villages: although I'm not a Polish local governance expert, some may be about separate local government entities like communes (which reminds me a bit of Russian okrugs). Regardless, they too are notable though in some cases, depending on their boundaries (i.e. if they're co-extensive with a single settlement) then I think it would be fine to merge into the settlement article (similar case: Odesa & Odesa urban hromada, which are coterminous). Dan the Animator 07:52, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  If you look at the coordinates you can see that whatever it is it is not a village. Dolny is Polish for lower and there is a Młodawin Górny, just south of it with a lot more houses [15].

  So what we really have is the census dividing Młodawin into two different entities for statistical purposes, the actual place here is Młodawin, but because the bot only went with census information we haven no article on Młodawin, despite it being an ancient settlement dating back to the 16th century according to Polish Wikipedia. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:10, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  I just checked with the coords for Dolny and it looks like a run-of-the-mill small village on Google Maps (I used 51°34′5″N 18°58′17″E as the coords when searching). Is this off?

  Re Młodawin, unless Google translate is really off the mark, it identifies that as the commune/local government entity, while the actual villages are Dolny and Górny. And about it historically being called Młodawin, this makes a lot of sense. Most likely, as implied by the names, the gov/residents decided to split the former historical settlement into two. I can't think of any good comparisons readily but the correct thing to do would be to have the two separate articles, as the settlement is no longer one. Dan the Animator 08:24, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  Note Google Maps also shows less, but still a fair amount of, houses for Gorny. Dan the Animator 08:25, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  Gorny is similar is some ways to villages like Sakko i Vantsetti: very small and insignificant, but nonetheless still villages. Dan the Animator 08:28, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  Thats a hamlet not a village, the article's sources make that apparent. There is also actual sourced information on it that establishes it as a real place, for example the history of how the Soviet Union established it as a commune and named it after two Italian anarchists. The article was not created solely on census information. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:35, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  A dozen homes can be a separate village. Even just one house can be recognized by the government as a village if they chose to do so (usually those cases get lots of interesting media coverage). Or a one-person village. That said, your point and example with Warkworth is well taken. I think the census database should make it easier to find out what is census-defined and what is legal-defined by having all the categories and labeling though in any case there should also be national registers of all registered populated places.

  Also about Sakko i Vantsetti, no, legally, it is not a hamlet. Some reporters who like to use familiar words sometimes use "hamlet" but no such classification exists in Ukrainian law (and the traditional closest Ukrainian word for it would be khutir, which Sakko i Vantsetti was never labeled). Same is true for the one-man village linked above. Dan the Animator 08:38, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  A village has something such as a church or hall that serves as a focal point, a hamlet in English is a place that lacks these, these are not legal terms so it can still apply to these Ukrainian settlements regardless of the law defines them as there, although this is digressing beyond the NGEO standard which is simply 'legally recognised'.

  Not all countries really have a national register, some of that do have ones that are not well maintained and lack entries, and some like WP:GNIS have a lot of errors. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:47, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  Ah, I see what you mean. Not to digress as well but ironically, and some other American editors may have the same experiences, for places that would usually be called villages or towns in other countries are called hamlets here in some states (I actually live close by to a few "hamlets" that each have a number of churches/temples on their grounds).

  And about registers, wondering hopefully Poland has one that's alright. Just thinking, maybe it might not hurt to contact the Polish government to see what can be done about it though not really sure where'd be the best to find the info. Since it (usually) takes a legal act to register a populated place, there should be some sort of record somewhere in Poland. Just a matter of finding out where I guess? Dan the Animator 08:59, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  >Since it (usually) takes a legal act to register a populated place, there should be some sort of record somewhere in Poland.

  This ultimately varies by country and isn't how many editors have interpreted the standard, which is why I think the guideline's wording is ill-suited.

  I do agree that a settlement established by an act of law or announced/proclaimed in a government gazetteer is almost certainly notable. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:08, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  That's a fair point. I think the priority in so far as figuring out what to do with existing mass-created stubs should be to to go and locate these registers where possible. I know Ukraine has them, the US I'm also quite confident on, for Poland I would lean towards saying there exists a register since their laws are heavily influenced by other European/EU countries, which do indeed have registers. It might not be the traditional proclamation/published bill, but documents enacted by governing bodies are much the same. Any case, I get the sense we're mostly on the same page: the current guideline wording can indeed be improved, and having an accurate national register is an important tool for verifying. Dan the Animator 09:19, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

  Just to be clear here, Poland has a number of locality types which are not villages, but which we have articles saying are villages. For example there was the recent case of Rynek, Lesser Poland Voivodeship. Our article said it was a village, but "Rynek" is simply "market" (or "market square") in Polish, and the register says its a part (część) of the village of Brzezówka. The reason why we have thousands more articles about Polish villages than actually exist is not because we are documentating historical villages, but because we have articles calling parts of villages, foresters-lodges, farms, railway stations, mines (etc.) "villages". FOARP (talk) 22:22, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, in many ways this is a more significant issue than whether Census data without any other supporting source is sufficient for an article. We should not have articles with such misrepresentation. We should not sacrifice accuracy in the quest for of some version of 'completeness'. older ≠ wiser 22:50, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

  Hence the need for a government register source. Government registers of populated places, or the legal documentation actually registering the places, is supposed to make it clear what exactly is being registered as what. That's been my experience with Ukrainian populated places and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case with neighboring Poland too. Dan the Animator 00:18, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

  But as per the previous RFC showed, most governments do not have a register of places. Thats why legally recognised is impossible to use. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:40, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

  Yeah, again just to emphasise this, the reason why the Rynek, Lesser Poland Voivodeship article existed is exactly because it was on the government register. There is no government register that corresponds one-for-one with the articles we want to create. FOARP (talk) 09:41, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

  There a dozen homes there, that definitely isn't a village. There is no evidence of the settlement being separate from the larger one besides the census, but censuses often split areas in north/south/east/west for statistical purposes. Take the New Zealand town of Warkworth, which is split into Warkworth East and Warkworth West in the census but these are not actual 'places', just a division of an actual place. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:29, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Discussion

• This is intended primarily as a survey of whether the standard still has consensus. Replacing it with something else would obviously require further proposals. FOARP (talk) 13:31, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  A convenient way to reinterpret a no-consensus outcome as a positive outcome. I think not. No consensus means "this proposal to replace the wording with anything or nothing" did not gain consensus, not that the original wording no longer has consensus. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:38, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  Well, you can jump straight to ABF and skip past any discussion or anything I or anyone else supporting the motion has said, that's definitely one thing you can do.

  But any other notability standard on WP would pass this test with flying colours. If this standard can't, that certainly would say something undeniable about it. FOARP (talk) 08:21, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

• Comment: I find WP:GEOLAND quite confusing, to the extent that I now rarely choose to patrol new pages that relate to geographic locations unless they meet WP:GNG too, and likewise skip over unreferenced articles about geographic locations unless I can find a source with significant coverage. I would personally find it very useful to have a more black and white list that said place type X may be presumed notable and place type Y may not be presumed notable etc. Though I can see that compiling such a list would be fraught! One of the things I have mulled, without doing a lot of research on whether it had been previously discussed, was maintaining GEOLAND, but with an additional requirement like WP:SPORTSIGCOV, along the lines of All geographical articles must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources. Meeting this requirement alone does not indicate notability, but it does indicate that there are likely sufficient sources to merit a stand-alone article— Preceding unsigned comment added by SunloungerFrog (talk • contribs) 09:10, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  That did solve a lot of the seemingly intractable conflicts in the sports area... Perhaps the addition of such a standard or a similar one could solve the seemingly intractable conflicts in this areas as well. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:52, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  An often overlooked purpose of WP:SIGCOV is "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Enforcing this solves a common issue with geostubs and Olympics stubs (athstubs?) where we often have so little information that it's unclear who/what the subject of the article actually is, or whether two sources are even discussing the same thing. Were there two John Smiths playing baseball in the 1884 Olympics, or did one database just get his date of birth wrong? Was this place actually an unincorporated community or is it one of the thousands that were changed from "populated place" even though no source calls it that? Was the post office part of a community or did it serve a dispersed rural population?

  Notability is important, but the most pressing issue here is having enough information about the subject to write a factual article. –dlthewave ☎ 15:26, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

  Yeah I do feel like an RFC to clarify existing GEOLAND with something like this might make more progress rather than these proposals that imply removing it or replacing it with something. I have a feeling people opposing changes to GEOLAND are worried about losing aspects of it that people who want reform aren't looking to remove. EmeraldRange (talk/contribs) 20:16, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

• Comment I think that we must have a sort of standard for settlements to have an article other than GNG. However, settlements can have a lot of small pieces of sources regarding the settlement and its history, which when added up together can show more notability than just one significant source.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:37, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
• Comment - One thing that’s definitely coming down the pipe, if it isn’t happening already, is AI-generated Geostubs. This is already a problem in the WP:SPECIES area (see the recent ANI case where someone was using AI to generate spider articles - problem was they had hallucinated sourcing and made-up facts in them). Once that happens, even the kind of only-very-partially effective clean-up we did with C46 and Dr. Blofeld’s stubs (mostly based on searching for repeated phrases to find the worst ones - eg “population not recorded” for the fake villages that C46 added) becomes ineffective.
  We need better standards here before someone just points an LLM at a list of “villages” and adds even more tens of thousands of problematic stubs to the encyclopaedia. We also need a fit-for-purpose standard that allows the clean-up of the stubs we already have. FOARP (talk) 20:01, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
• Comment I second Ingratis' call for more detailed and ramified guidelines. SNGs like this should be descriptive: they should identify a set of topics for which we have high confidence that we can eventually write a substantive, accurate article on any member of the set. The early SNGs which have since been overturned generally overpromised by postulating the existence of sources that, in retrospect, in many cases don't exist. Accurately judging which topics can be written about requires some degree of subject-matter expertise. FOARP's comments about the reception of stubs at country WikiProjects are very much on point, and suggest the way forward. Engage relevant WikiProjects and content creators; editors who have written detailed (say, C-class and above?) articles on geographical features of a country. These are the people who will be able to best judge whether in practice enough reliable sourcing exists to write useful articles on individual barangays. Choess (talk) 02:49, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  The proposed list of editors is WP:OWN. Anyone can join or not join a WikiProject. Many article/content creators do not join them. Some editors join WikiProjects to try to shut them down or disrupt them on purpose. WP:LOCALCONSENSUS says that WikiProject members should not control the content of policies and guidelines. Members of country Wikiprojects do not necessarily know about geography, local history, local government, local newspapers etc. Article assessments often do not reflect article quality. Article/content creation does not necessarily reflect knowledge or the amount of reading that a person has done. What about content creation on sister projects such as Wikisource? I agree that country-specific guidelines would probably be helpful, but to put them under the control of the proposed list of editors is not compatible with the consensus policy and is not likely to improve their quality. James500 (talk) 05:25, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  You're reacting to things I didn't say. Any proposed guideline is still subject to community consensus. But if we are making guidelines to try to predict whether a task (writing a substantive article about certain topics) is reasonably possible, we should start by consulting people who have already done very similar tasks (writing substantive articles about closely related topics). They may not be the only people who can make constructive contributions, and some of them may not be very constructive. But they have already grappled at least once with the issues (what sources exist? where can they be found? what are their strengths and weaknesses?) that inform an SNG. They don't have to control the process of developing an SNG, but it would be a mistake not to try to involve them. I think the participation of editors like this was materially helpful in developing Wikipedia:NSPECIES, and I think Wikipedia:NASTRO is also a good example of an SNG largely developed by editors of a WikiProject because they thoughtfully combined their specialist knowledge with an awareness of what the community would and wouldn't support. Choess (talk) 17:30, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  I apologise for misunderstanding your comment. James500 (talk) 00:28, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Thank you, that was gracious. I think and hope we largely agree. Choess (talk) 04:33, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  After reading through the rest of the comments and having a think about it I think I have also come to the conclusion that the best way forward that has a reasonable chance of gaining consensus is to basically have a precise standard. This of course is going to be a big task as this is likely to be different for every country/jurisdiction and would involved going all the communities that have relevant experience (e.g. all the country wikiprojects). Another complicating factor is that distinctions might not be very clear cut for some countries.

  For example a country like Italy (which so far doesn't seem to have been the victim of mass creation campaigns) would be fairly straight forward: The country is divided into 20 Regions, these are then further divided into Provinces of which there are 110 of them and then there are the Comuni, of which there are ~8000 of them, these generally have a local government, Mayor and local police force (though since some of them are very small I assume there are plenty of exceptions) and I would say that up to this point everything would would be presumed to be notable and it shouldn't be difficult to find sources for them. Below Comune level are Fractions (of which google tells me there are ~37000) and localities which are usually different settlements within a Comune, and there is a lot of variation here. For example Mira, Veneto has 8 frazioni, and while aside from Oriago none of them has pages on enwiki, Italian wikipedia has fairly substantial pages for all of them, while it has many localities listed with names like Ca' Martin (Martin's house) or Molin Rotto (broken mill) and while these localities on a map appear to mostly be small settlements Italian wiki doesn't have articles for any of them. So in this case I would be ok with Frazioni being automatically considered notable, while localities on a case by case basis depending on if they meet WP:GNG or some other criteria. On the other hand somewhere like Trento has a long list of frazioni, including places like Vaneze (46.05089522097086, 11.06850669994356) which look very small (I is suspect that the list on en-wiki is incomplete as it-wiki also lists nearby Norge and I'm not sure we can automatically assume places like this would be notable. But either way we can have a clear dividing line here, Comune and above are presumed notable, frazioni may or may not be presumed notable (would require a consensus or maybe it is something that would varies by region but it should be a fairly straight forward conversations with well defined options), while localities would not be presumed notable. The convenient thing about this system is that while these divisions may change occasionally it doesn't happen very often and these features generally map onto a town or city, or a small cluster of settlements quite nicely.

  On the other hand somewhere like the UK is more complicated: the political divisions are constituencies, and wards. These are not a useful way of determining what is a village as these are divisions are required to have a certain population level and so can change substantially every few years as the population changes and moves, and while a big city might have lots of small constituencies, rural areas might have enormous constituencies (e.g Ross, Skye and Lochaber (UK Parliament constituency)) which include many distinct and small, but likely notable settlements), so this is not a good system to use to describe populated places. The best option would have to be using something like this Rural Urban Classification - GOV.UK which I don't particularly like as a definition because it as a statistical thing as opposed to legal recognition and is likely to not be consistent (i.e. the classification of places is likely to change any time a census happens). Giuliotf (talk) 15:17, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

• A basic question as I have not followed discussions for other notability guidelines for a long time now. What other guidelines have any statement stating an entire class of essentially undefined character is presumed to be notable? older ≠ wiser 11:48, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think any other standard goes quite this far. WP:NSPECIES states "In general, all extant species that are accepted by the relevant international body of taxonomists are presumed notable". That is, it requires groups of people working to more-or-less common standards internationally to identify something as a species. They will also typically write at least something describing what the species is. Now, here isn't the place to get in to a discussion about whether this is correct for WP, but at least it's something that the work of deciding what is in and out is already outsourced.

  By contrast, the "Populated, legally recognized place" standard throws the decision to what any one of the 200+ legal jurisdictions world-wide decides to give any legal status at all to, so long as the creator can argue that they're populated. Not only that, there is no guarantee (quite the opposite) that anything at all other than statistical data will be known about it. It would be great if at least there was a requirement that these were at least villages (as woolly a concept as that is) but there isn't in this standard, so sub-village entities can and do get articles. FOARP (talk) 13:38, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  Beyond that, it is not even a safe assumption that "official" sources are completely reliable. While it certainly has happened throughout history, there are now governments deliberately attempting to re-write history and distorting statistical data in support of partisan ideologies, coupled with AI technology that can make sifting out what is 'real' even more challenging. I don't see how anyone say that such a vague guideline as GEOLAND is 'fit for purpose'. older ≠ wiser 15:23, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  One of the problems we've come across with Soviet and Russian official sources is that they are modified to fit strategic considerations... That is information may be purposefully wrong, the location of a settlement offset by dozens of kilometers, the official population messed with, or a significant settlement omitted entirely or more commonly given a cover name or even multiple cover names. I think that the Closed city article has some general background on that. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:29, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  I see what you mean, but I think "completely reliable" is poorly phrased. Probably very few sources are "completely" reliable, if any. But some sources are so unreliable that they can't reasonably be used as the sole support for article creation (because the rate of subtle errors is unacceptable); I think we've established this for GNIS, and it's probably true of many other geographical datasets as well. Choess (talk) 17:37, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  I don’t know if (with prominent exceptions) they’re necessarily unreliable rather than just not saying what Wikipedia editors want them to say. Governments don’t collect lists of cities, towns and villages (and only these) because that kind of information would miss that part of the population that lives outside them. So instead they produce data covering the entire population, including the part that lives in lonely farmsteads, railway stations, factories, prisons, mines etc.

  The problem is when we try and turn that data into articles thinking it’s a “list of villages” when it isn’t. FOARP (talk) 22:01, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

  A thought that's been bouncing around in my head for a while now is that there doesn't actually seem to be much disagreement about what constitutes a settlement. I rarely see editors saying "This single homestead is an unincorporated community" or "That worker dormitory meets my definition of a village." It's almost always along the lines of "This village must have been depopulated", "Maybe it's actually that cluster of houses half a mile away from the coordinates" or "Some factories have full-on towns on site." It's like there's an assumption that it must be in the database for a reason, maybe due to overly trusting it because it's a government resource. Surely they wouldn't "legally recognize" a "populated place" that doesn't cut the mustard. –dlthewave ☎ 03:00, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  It goes through a number of steps:

  1. ”Selo/abadi/populated places etc. translates as “village”, therefore every item on the government list of Selo/abadi/populated places etc. is a village. Per WP:GEOLAND these are all notable and so all get articles”.
  2. ”Of course 17 km/Colonel Behrmand's pump/Monkey Box, Florida are villages, they’re on the list! Can you prove that they’re not villages?”
  3. ”OK, so they’re not villages now, but can you prove that they never have been villages?”
  4. ”OK, so they’re just exceptions, the remaining 99% are OK.”
  5. ”OK, so a substantial number of listings aren’t villages, that just means that the source is unreliable, not that there was anything wrong with the assumptions originally made in step 1. and the guideline that was based on. Also the editors who created the articles were bad, not the guide.”

  FOARP (talk) 09:09, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  @FOARP: Oh, the Russians have been obfusticating locations well before we came along. Best example I can think of is Baikonur Cosmodrome#Name, which is hundreds of miles from Baikonur (Ulytau Region). The cosmodrome got that name by 1961, long before the city of Leninsk was renamed Baikonur in 1995. Don't imagine for one moment that the Russians see us as a bigger threat than NATO. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:40, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  Indeed. It's actually kind of cool seeing how some of these super-low population blatantly-not-village selo are actually Russian military bases. For example 1214 km is clearly just part of the big military base at Pibanshur (EDIT: I was looking at the vehicle park there and was like "are those.... TELs? Surely not!", but it turns out, da, tovarisch, that's exactly what they are). Another Selo I checked the population stats for (I can't find the page right now) had its population massively increase from just a handful or so to close to a thousand in 2021 - checking the satellite photos, there's a big new military base (or possibly a prison, but the forest-cover and workshops looked like a military base - the tell is always the dead-zone and path for the guards surrounding the facility) visible at the location. FOARP (talk) 10:42, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  I disagree that we're talking about "an entire class of essentially undefined character". We have a working definition for this for modern places, but perhaps we need to spell it out.

  The problem we're up against is that every country has their own idea of what counts as a city/town/local equivalent and different ways of organizing their affairs. The meaning of "populated, legally recognized place" is a place:

  • within whose boundaries there exists a unique/separate government entity that has the exclusive duty to provide general local government services to that local area, and
  • said unique/separate government entity is officially recognized by the country/state/higher levels as holding that role ("legally recognized").

  An example of general government services is deciding whether this year's tax money is going to be spent fixing sidewalks or inspecting the storm drains or building a playground or buying a new fire engine. An example of non-general-government services is only running the sewer system or only fighting fires.

  In the US, that includes various incorporated or chartered entities (counties, cities, towns, villages), but not other, non-general-government entities (e.g., Water district), not most geographic entities that have no government entity at all (e.g., Survey township, Census tracts), and not places administered through non-local means (e.g., National parks, Military bases).

  Every country has different words for these places, but every country also has local government entities. Whatever that government entity is called, the place where it operates is a "populated, legally recognized place". These places are the core for NGEO. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:19, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Perma stubs aren't a problem if they are well referenced and structured. Big difference between a good perma stub(like I already mentioned before, there is a GIANT amount of perma stubs about species, yet no one bats an eye) and a shitty perma (sub)stub with no referencing and no structure. Brickguy276 (talk) 12:24, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, they are a problem, even with the species articles, where they are essentially worthless and discourage people from taking an entry in a list and expanding it into a reasonable short article. But the problem with geostubs is that mostly they aren't well-referenced: they usually do have a reference, because someone ran them in from some official, hence "legally recognized", source which is the sole reference; it's usually either some government's gazetteer or from a census. And the consistent problem is that the articles often aren't true. They claim that all sorts of place are settlements when they are not, when they are other sorts of human features other than settlements or when they represent small arbitrary areas used in census data collection. Or in the case of a lot of third world mapping from GNS, there is no corroboration of their existence at all. People keep acting as if the sourcing of geostubs is a trivial thing, and it isn't. Even in the USA, because the hard heads are insisting that we go over every one of the thousands of stubs entered from GNIS one at a time, it is taking an eternity to review them all. Right now I'm the only person doing it systematically; I started Indiana in the spring, and I will not finish by the end of the year. It took a group of us most of a year to do California, and we never finished. And I'm taking considerable shortcuts in doing this, letting stand a lot of articles where I can see from the maps that there is clearly a town there with streets and buildings even though I don't really have a solid text reference to ratify that. In the meantime we have deleted articles claiming that hills were towns, that isolated rail sidings and junctions were towns, that rural post offices in people's houses were towns, that groves of trees were towns, that inns and hotels and resorts were towns, and that the headquarters building of the Petrified Forest National Park was a town. The Indian articles are generally better because the census was the source, but there are often issues with locating the place because they used another source which isn't cited for that, and the correlation between that and the census is iffy. The species stubs are space-filling trash that also presents a maintenance problem when the taxonomists rearrange things, and it isn't that nobody bats an eye; it's that everyone knows that any attempt to get rid of them isn't going anywhere because of the false assumption that having a vacuous article is better than having an entry in a list. The issue with geostubs is worse: for the most part nobody needs to go through the species articles to determine whether the species even was defined by someone, whereas it wouldn't surprise me at all that there are a hundred thousand unreviewed geostubs, a substantial fraction of which are untrue or are even about places that do not exist at all and never did. Mangoe (talk) 12:43, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

If I understand this comment correctly, Mangoe is making two points:

• they disagree with the community consensus clearly established in 2023 about species notability, embodied in WP:NSPECIES, and
• they feel that (actually existing) geographical articles are worse than actually existing species articles.

So Mangoe's first point is an essentially aesthetic argument; any editor is entitled to disagree with community-wide consensus, but shouldn't expect that position to be an effective argument to change hearts and minds of other editors.

Mangoe's second argument proceeds, I think, in two stages. The first of these is a cri de coeur that we have unverifiable geostubs. To me this is a serious problem, but the problem is with "unverifiable", not with "geostubs", and Mangoe's preference to sweep out all geostubs (by dispensing with the "populated places" provision) isn't a targeted response to the ones that aren't verifiable. If we need a footnote or guideline page offering a better guide to what counts as reliable sourcing in this area, that's fine, but this issue isn't a logical objection to "legally recognized, populated places" as a standard.

Also, I wanted to point out that Mangoe is presenting the problematic geostubs as something that happens "even in the USA", when actually it's probably something that happens especially in the USA. GNIS was a uniquely flawed data source for human geography - which, as I understand it, is why it was deprecated for that purpose. GEOnet for places outside the US is even worse, for many parts of the world. I get that it's frustrating when editors leave "untrue" articles out there for other editors to fix, but that's a problem with editor behaviour (e.g., mass creation), not with NGEO.

Just to give a sense of how US-specific the issues are arising from GNIS - for Canada, you could create thousands of articles using the CGNB and census data - pull the English place names for villages and hamlets from CGNB, match them to historical census data, maybe set an arbitrary cutoff of population at 10 if you want to be cute - and none of the articles you create would be "false positives"; they would all be (or have been, in the past) both legally/officially recognized and populated. In fact, all of the resulting stubs would have two reliable (and independent) sources, though until you hit the stacks to look for prose sources none of those stubs would be a GNG pass. To me, this is a much more typical case than the dreck that came in from GNIS, and each of those place articles would be of encyclopaedic benefit (though I would not condone any editor mass-creating them; for one thing, determining whether a redirect already exists for many of them, possibly under a variant name, would require a slower approach to creating or un-redirecting for each topic). Newimpartial (talk) 13:54, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

This is specious, because you are applying a multiple-source method (i.e., cross-referencing the census with the gazetteer) here that GEOLAND doesn't require. GEOLAND specifically endorses taking a single source (e.g., CGNB) and using it to create articles. This approach, as I'm sure you know could (has?) create exactly the same problem as using GNIS did. because CGNB also includes many things beyond towns/villages/districts but also post offices and similar, and can have multiple listings for the same place.

To test this I zoomed in on a random spot in Manitoba in Google Maps and noted the nearest place-name. It was Fisher River Cree Nation. This is actually three different "populated places" on CGNB (Fisher River Cree Nation - listed as a "Community", Fisher River 44 - an "Indian reserve", Fisher River 44A - ditto), all of which are officially "populated places". Without cross-referencing with other sources, you wouldn't know that these were the same place and you could end up with three articles about one place.

EDIT: To show this wasn't a fluke, I did the same thing again in Labrador. The name I got was Twin Falls. CGNB describes this as a "Unincorporated place", and a "settlement". In reality it's a hydro-electric dam with nothing else at the site - no habitation. FOARP (talk) 14:53, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP I don't think there is anything specious about my example, and I somewhat resent the insinuation you seem to be making. GEOLAND is entirely silent about the number of sources to use, and I don't see anything in the guideline that specifically endorses taking a single source to make articles. Perhaps you could point me to the relevant policy language, because I just don't see it. And I would point out that neither of your two examples, where you seem to be insinuating problems with CGNB, would result in any problems in the methodology I suggested in my comment to which you were replying - even if your suspicions about either place were correct (which they aren't, really).

In reality, though, neither of your test cases points to a problem with the CGNB of any kind. The CGNB has many layers of "populated places" - they use this as a blanket term for human geography as opposed to natural features - and within "populated places" they distinguish, e.g., between administrative geographies (with boundaries) and community locations (designated as points). The three "Fisher River" entries you found are not, in fact, the same place - one is for the "community"/settlement, and the other two are for two parcels of (non-contiguous) first nations jurisdiction (44 and 44A). In fact, CGNB has a fourth entry for the band office, as well, but the enwiki article Fisher River Cree Nation, remains unconfused and handles all of this perfectly. It's important to remember that CGNB stores in the "populated places" some information that is official recognition but that doesn't imply a separately inhabited place, and it will always be up to editors to interpret CGNB as they would any other reliable source.

You're right that your Labrador case shows that your Manitoba example is not a fluke, but in the opposite sense from what you probably meant - it actually shows the robustness of the CGNB. Twin Falls is not a "false positive" as an unincorporated settlement, at least not if you consider WP:NOTTEMPORARY - with a quick search I found a scholarly source about the archeological remains from the period when this industrial site was functioning and inhabited, which is when the name was given. CGNB deprecates old names for places when renamed, but it doesn't deprecate old places when they cease to be inhabited, at least not in its point geography. Nor do I think it should do so, and for encyclopaedic purposes it is a good thing that it retains entries like Twin Falls - otherwise one might look at the satellite images and assume the site was never inhabited. 😉 (In this case, the article Twin Falls (Newfoundland and Labrador) would benefit from adding material from the scholarly source and probably also from contemporary news sources, since the view of the subject in our article is partial - but the topic is clearly notable, just with more and better sources than the article now uses.) Newimpartial (talk) 16:01, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

Our articles for these places are fine, because they don't use CGNDB as their sole source. Since my point was what would have happened had we simply created them based on CGNDB (a strategy GEOLAND endorses by conferring near-automatic notability on every entity listed in a census/gazetteer) I'm not sure what you think pointing to that proves.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make about Fisher River, and I'm not sure you are either. The issue here is this is three (or four) listings on CGNDB, meaning that simply converting CGNDB listings into articles results in multiple articles about the same topic, which is a problem we regularly have with GNIS, the Iranian census, and similar sources. Even the Canadian census wouldn't fix this, since Fisher 44 and Fisher 44A are separate census subdivisions.

Regarding CGNDB's description of Twin Falls, the issue here is still that CGNDB describes this as a settlement (i.e., a place settled now), and in reality it only appears to have been inhabited briefly as a temporary camp. CGNDB does have a class for former settlements, but they haven't applied it to Twin Falls. Twin Falls is also listed in the 2021 census under Division No. 10, Subd. D, so even the census wouldn't clue you in to it not being inhabited now. FOARP (talk) 16:20, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP To clarify briefly: the CGNDB doesn't use "settlement" to mean a place settled now, nor do I see why it would matter to GEOLAND whether it is inhabited now or not.

In fact, I don't see a class for former settlements in the CGNDB at all. Its metadata notes that entries within the "unincorporated areas" geography may be labeled "former locality", "former post office" and "former railway point". However, those are what CGNDB calls "generics" not classes, and more importantly there should be no expectation that all formerly inhabited places are listed with those terms. For example, the database includes former - no longer inhabited - hamlets, but I don't believe "former hamlet" exists in its metadata. As I mentioned earlier, the CGNDB stores the former names of places, but it would be mistaken to interpret those entries as the names of former places. The name may be deprecated while people still live there, or people may vacate while the name remains valid.

As far as what counts to you as a temporary camp, the scholarly source I linked describes the community as having a hospital, school, recreation centre, water tower, and grocery store, and describes the settlement as inhabited for the 10 years of hydroelectric operation at the site. I don't know about you, but that's not what a "temporary camp" brings to mind for me. Newimpartial (talk) 17:06, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

You realise camps tend to have all of these things right? Because they have to be self-sufficient? And that if your proposed standard was adopted many mines, factories, military bases etc. would also pass? And since when was the notability standard for any thing “has a water tower”? FOARP (talk) 18:02, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

I wonder if we actually have that many stubs under NGEO. At least in the US, I'd expect us to have very few. Mulberry, Kansas#Demographics, for example, has 843 words, from three successive US Census reports. A stub is usually less than 250 words/10 sentences. At no point in time has that article ever been a stub, much less a doomed permastub. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:25, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP to answer your question, I dispute the premise that "camps" are a specific thing and that "populated places" can't include some kinds of camps, or other facilities that house the people working in them. In partucular, I don't see "temporary" as a relevant aspect (or even one that would be practical to use). I am not proposing any kind of novel standard, here - I'm talking about the existing guideline, as I understand it. Anywhere that is included in official, government human geography as a place and that is documented as being inhabited is presumed notable. Note that "permanent" (the alternative to "temporary"?) is not and never was a criterion: to have a recorded population and to be named by a government, a place logically has to exist at some point in time, but neither the guideline nor external reality set any minimum duration, much less an intention of permanence which seems to underly your idea of what's notable.

Perhaps this is a narrowly Canadian perspective, but many places that are clearly notable in our country were either intentionally or accidentally temporary in nature. We deliberately flooded Aultsville, we currently host CFS Alert, and our history is littered with places like Paris, Yukon and Gagnon, Quebec. Fur traders never intended Fort Saint Jacques as a permanent place to live, but I can't imagine questioning its notability. So, to me, it seems counterintuitive to set a minimum time of inhabitation for a place to be notable. I mean, you've objected to Twin Falls, and people lived there for more than a decade after it was built - that wouldn't be what I would consider "temporary", and in terms of intention I also suspect it wasn't supposed to be obsolete quite so quickly. (Sometimes being a strong proof of concept is a double-edged sword.) Newimpartial (talk) 18:36, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, things that have coverage in secondary sourcing are notable. You're not answering the question of why every single mining, logging, oil, hydro (etc.) camp, shut down after a relatively short period, should be notable even if no-one chose to write anything substantial about it.

And the reason why these camps have typically been excluded, is because they are not really villages/towns/cities, but instead industrial/military facilities. FOARP (talk) 08:08, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

To try again to answer your question: I think the line should be drawn where the current guideline has it, and you think it should be drawn somewhere else (apparently between "villages" and "facilities"). And I am not saying that every single mining, logging, oil, hydro (etc.) camp, shut down after a relatively short period, should be notable. That would be a typical staw goat argument. I am saying they should be presumed notable if (1) they were officially recognized by the government and (2) they demonstrably had a population. I can guarantee you, for example, that the vast majority of tree planting camps and exploratory oil drilling sites in Canada meet neither criterion - so they are not (presumed) notable. But places the government has recognized and documented as having a population - and I'll accept a source minimum of pop 10 to hold the peace - are presumed notable, as they should be.

One good reason not to delineate an exclusion of "camps" is shown by the Twin Falls example we've been discussing. Your OR presents it as an "industrial facility", though my secondary sourcing shows it as a "community". But for Wikipedia as a whole, it would be better IMO to avoid those arguments entirely by accepting the official geography ("unincorporated settlement") plus RS population. Arguing about whether places governments document as settlements are "really not settlements" is a waste of time, encouraging amateurs to make speculations in human geography for which they are generally not qualified. Newimpartial (talk) 09:39, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

"encouraging amateurs to make speculations in human geography" is exactly what the current GEOLAND does. It means editors try to interpret various databases or listings in old books to figure out if a place is a place, and as this discussion shows bringing up definitions of place that range from containing an individual's entire life to just being location which had at least 10 people at some time. CMD (talk) 09:47, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

To clarify, I don't see it that way. If RS document official recognition as a populated place, then that meets that criterion. If RS documents a population, then that meets that criterion. Both of those avoid OR, while scouring satellite images or land registries (e.g., to count buildings) necessarily involves OR. To be clear, I've floated the trial balloon of a threshold of 10 human inhabitants purely as an operational matter to avoid debating edge cases. Conceptually, there is no difference between a place with 9 inhabitants and one with 11 (or 100). Newimpartial (talk) 16:43, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

We had a long discussion because you disputed my note of official recognition as a populated place. I understand the trial balloon, it's just a significant drop down from the previous definition. Official recognition and 10 people has circled the definition right back to individual properties. CMD (talk) 02:59, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis to clarify, then: there is a difference between the conceptual definition of place - where one can be born, live and die - and what governments choose to recognize. For practical purposes, the latter is what matters. But if a government gives a "populated place" designation and name to an individual property somewhere, so what? Why would that be a problem with the definition of populated place? And if that place is RS inhabited with 11, or or 9, or 2 people, then it fits the formal definition. I completely fail to see why this is a problem, or how it leads to the can I haz article straw goat problem. Just because an official gazetteer includes one inhabited train station as a populated place with a name, that doesn't mean all houses have suddenly acquired state-sponsored names and recognition. Newimpartial (talk) 09:45, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

You're literally declaring that a standard that renders individual buildings and facilities listed in a directory automatically notable, when Wikipedia has declared itself to be solidly against such content from its earliest days (years before even WP:5P), is not problematic, and then turning around and accusing people who point this out of arguing in bad faith. You've spent a substantial part of this argument denying that this even occurs, or that there are editors who in good faith have interpreted the words of GEOLAND as conferring notability on such places, and now you're saying it happens but it's not a problem.

BTW gazetteers in the UK do collect house-names and street-names. We also have a listed-building system established by legislation that something like half a million buildings are included in. See this discussion for an example the fun that this can create. But then I suppose this is just me raising another " carefully curated example" in bad faith? FOARP (talk) 10:41, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

To answer your question: no, I don't think you're acting in bad faith, but I do think you've missed the point. I don't know UK geographies very well, but I imagine that the listed building system and the list of settlements and other populated places are maintained separately, or at least with the data necessary to distinguish them (if not, then like GNIS, it isn't fit for identifying places). Obviously something identified as a listed building isn't a place, although I imagine that there might be a great many formerly inhabited, legally recognized places in the UK of which only one building remains. That isn't a problem with GEOLAND, and neither are street names or named buildings - unless the database doesn't distinguish between named places and named buildings. If that happens, that would be the same problem as a database not distinguishing between officially recognized, named natural features and populated places, which would render it unsuitable for this guideline - but it wouldn't render the guideline itself NFFP.

A directory of individual buildings and facilities will never render them notable, and that wasn't something I ever proposed - it seems like a straw goat again. And a directory of populated places where some of the places are single facilities would only indicate presumptive notability if the place has a RS population. Now I haven't looked at the sources for Alert (which is clearly notable under GNG anyway), but I imagine that it meets both of the conditions I've set, even though I understand it to be one "facility". To me, Alert should fall under GEOLAND (if I understand the source situation correctly) because people live there (as an official, populated place). And by "live there" I don't mean "like people live in a house"; I mean "like people live in Ottawa".

I don't think I've been denying that any single-residence localities can be found as officially recognized places with census data - I mean, I keep pointing to my great-aunt's upbringing (though I don't know how if there was a census while they were there, and certainly don't know how the aggregates from any such census were published). Of the cases brought into this discussion, we have a few Russian places with very small populations, and we have a supposed farm in Luxembourg that turns out to be a hamlet of perhaps a dozen buildings. Oh, and we have Twin Falls, which turns out not to have been a "facility" at all but a community that was around for more than a decade until it was rendered obsolete by larger-scale hydroelectric development. So, so far, no avalanche of inappropriate content has been found that I can see - and I've proposed the threshold of 10 mostly to respond to the feelings the NFFP have about very small populated places (even though I don't feel that way, myself). I'm not saying it's never happened, but it sure hasn't been shown to have been a recurrent issue.

And to be clear, what I have been calling a "straw goat" is the argument that because someone lives in a building, or on a property, that therefore it becomes a "legally recognized, populated place". I have never seen that argument made except negatively, as a caricature of GEOLAND. Now governments have at times designated "populated places" that consist of one facility, and possibly only one inhabited building. That isn't a straw goat, but the arguments I've seen that such places are notable are based on RS recognition as a place within the jurisdiction, not on address registers or the like. If you continue to feel that places that have never had many inhabitants are a problem for enwiki - and I've never seen more than a handful of cases discussed - then I've proposed a threshold of 10 so we don't have to deal with them. But whatever this discussion is, I think I've been pretty specific that the thing I say doesn't occur really doesn't occur. Meanwhile, the related thing that does occur has only been shown in a few cases (with many shouts in this discussion thqat turn out to be false positives) - and I've proposed an operational threshold to deal with that issue. even though I'm not actually convinced it's a problem. So I'd really appreciate if you could not accuse me of eliding between very small but legally recognized places, on the one hand, and "it's notable because it's a house with an address and people live there" on the other. I'm really tired of people bringing in the latter as though it were an argument "the other side" has made in deletion discussions without showing one single time that this has actually happened.

TL;DR - an editor can hold the view that a single inhabited building on a single property can be notable as a "populated place" because a government says so in its official geogeography and census; that doesn't mean the same editor thinks it's notable because it's an inhabited house, and that inhabited houses in general should be presumed notable. And the same if you replace "house" with "camp" or "facility" or whatever. Newimpartial (talk) 12:43, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Once again, the issue is not with GNIS data, it is with editors misinterpreting that data and using it inappropriately. That is something that is common with many other national geographic databases. And the vagueness of GEOLAND does nothing to stop (or perhaps even encourages) such misapplication. older ≠ wiser 13:10, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps I should have said "not fit for identifying official, populated places"? I haven't heard any complaints about the part of GNIS that still exists: the designations for natural features. Newimpartial (talk) 13:18, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

"I've proposed the threshold of 10 mostly to respond to the feelings the NFFP have about very small populated places" does not read as a serious statement. 10 is very very small. It is, again, less than can live in a house (and do in official government records). The claim about the Luxembourg farm remains OR. The supposed meaning of GEOLAND has shifted from "I'm afraid that isn't what WP:GEOLAND - or the discipline of human geography which is the reference point for this guideline - means by a "place"...Essentially no-one can be brought up, live and then die within one freehold property - and those are three key elements of one popular geographical definition of place." to "But if a government gives a "populated place" designation and name to an individual property somewhere, so what?" CMD (talk) 17:22, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

CMD: the government database linked above notes the place in Luxembourg as a hamlet, covering many properties and buildings. Please stop calling it a "farm" - at this point you are either misreading the source or trolling.

You are juxtaposing statements I made about two different subtopics as they were the same topic. My first statement was about what our guideline means by "place", trying to establish that the geographical sense of "place" is meant (for which I provided an introductory reference).

The second comment is what enwiki recognizes as reliable sourcing for a place to exist, which is government recognition as such. People maintaining government databases don't have the luxury of looking at how long people reside somewhere or where they go for medical services when creating geographical metadata. But the decisions they make define, operationally, what places are "official" in that jurisdiction.

Also note that we are now discussing edge cases, akin to the virus in the boundary of living and nonliving. Throwing out the Indonesian kecamatan because we can't agree about a government-recognized "inhabited place" that has always been at most one family living in a railway station seems like a paradigmatic baby-bathwater issue to me. Newimpartial (talk) 17:42, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm not seeing a government database linked above, aside from FOARP's links to the UK databases including streets and properties. As for the two statements, they are on the same topic; the guidelines are what en.wiki recognizes. What en.wiki recognizes is whatever meets the guideline. The last paragraph about Indonesian kecamatan is a very dramatic statement for someone saying someone else is trolling or misreading things. At any rate, this is effectively a guideline about edge cases. Anything that isn't an edge case is easily going to meet GNG. CMD (talk) 18:17, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

this is the government geoportal where you can see "Krientgeshaff" listed as a place name, covering multiple buildings and other parcels of land.

Re: . Anything that isn't an edge case is easily going to meet GNG - citation needed; I really don't think this is true. I've already given one example, Tri Phai, which isn't an "edge case" but also doesn't have significant secondary sourcing in prose, and least not that anyone has pointed out. And I am very skeptical that extended prose treatment exists in secondary sources for most of the Indonesian kecamatan, either; I don't see evidence of such in many of the articles we do have on them, anyway. So I don't think I've exaggerated anything.

And as far as my failure to get you to understand the difference between the concept of a place and how governments operationalize that concept in practice - I guess it's a good thing I don't teach introductory human geography any longer. :) Newimpartial (talk) 18:45, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm familiar with the cadastral source, although it is definitely not linked above. Trying to OR via that map doesn't prove much. As for Tri Phai, is that the one at vi:Trí Phải with 21 sources, and many easily findable sources through a very quick search [16][17]? As for the sarcastic end, I already understand that difference, as I'm sure most others in this conversation do as well. So different, and yet both have been cited in this discussion as the meaning of the current wording. CMD (talk) 19:03, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I hate to answer a question with a question, but which of the .vi links do you believe to be secondary sources? This isn't rhetorical; its a serious question.

You'll find the Luxembourg portal linked by Katz last week (22:07, 20 October 2025), and you'll find that I corrected their interpretation of the source (attributing Krientgeshaff to the wrong layer). If I were looking to improve the article, I'd need to find the official government list used to populate the "place name" field, but for the purpose of this discussion I think it's enough to know what layer it's in and that various cadastral units are assigned to it.

And there's nothing sarcastic about my regret when failing to communicate; that's probably the thing I take more seriously than anything else. Sigh. Newimpartial (talk) 19:17, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I haven't looked through all the wi.wiki links, but unless all news sources in Vietnam are considered non-independent then there are plenty pf sources within seconds of googling. From the two links I provided there is information about the population, geography, and specific administrative setup. The 22:07, 20 October 2025 link is below, not above, I see why my look above did not find it. On Krientgeshaff, the place name is easy, because Krientgeshaff is literally a "lieu-dit", or 'place with a name'. I posted official government list that had lieux-dits at the AfD. There are upwards of 42,000 'places with names' in Luxembourg, including its streets and places literally named 'near other place'. It's a small country and everything is mapped. CMD (talk) 03:05, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Please note that I was asking about secondary sources for Tri Phai, not independent sources. I have no doubt that the vi wiki article cites many independent sources, but I remain unsure which if any are secondary.

Our NOR policy defines them, in WP:SECONDARY, as providing analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources. So I am curious which of the sources of the vietnamese-language article might offer a significant amount of analysis or interpretation of the information available on the village?

Also note that I have linked to the Krientgeshaff article the relevant government list of populated places; it is much shorter and more restrictive than the list that you gave at AfD (no roads, for one thing). Newimpartial (talk) 16:56, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Krientgeshaff was kept at AfD because it was clear that there is WP:SIGCOV for it, even aside from the argument about place-names. Katzrockso (talk) 19:17, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

The article currently has three cited works, 1) a dictionary definition of 'Kréintgeshaff'; 2) a link to a database-generated spreadsheet that provides name and location and nothing else; and 3) Google maps. To say that satisfies WP:SIGCOV seems terribly mistaken. older ≠ wiser 20:35, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Why not just look at the link I provided which provides analysis of the administrative boundaries of the Commune? The xlsx you linked says that Kréintgeshaff is not a localite officielle. What this means I'm unsure, but this is the problem with trying to diving meaning from databases of localities and roads. CMD (talk) 03:44, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

Regarding Kréintgeshaff, the site you link to, if you drill down into the detail describes it as an orchard with several buildings (nothing remarkable at all for a rural property) -- and yet editors have somehow transformed this into a hamlet. And this is what you want to hang your hat on? Remarkable. older ≠ wiser 19:29, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

As a matter of fact, the article was brought to AfD and was kept. Editors familiar with Luxembourgish geography described it as a lieux-dit. Katzrockso (talk) 20:32, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Assuming Luxembourgish lieux-dit is similar to the French Lieu-dit, it is a place with a traditional name. I might be notable it some way, or it might just be a place name such as the name of the orchard there. Without something more, it is impossible to tell. I'd have no problem with describing it as a 'locality', but it seems speculative to transform it into a hamlet without some additional sources. older ≠ wiser 20:41, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article List of populated places in Luxembourg states

Lieux-dits are named inhabited places that are smaller than villages and often only have few inhabitants. They might be isolated hamlets or farms that are located outside of villages, but are often administered as part of the nearest locality. In this list, settlements fitting none of the criteria of towns or villages are classified as "lieu-dit".

It's unsourced, so I'm not sure if this is accurate, but it seems likely to be. Katzrockso (talk) 19:22, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

@Newimpartial, By your reasoning, mining camps, oil rigs, rail sidings and other such artifacts of human activity would be presumed notable under the current guideline. There should be no such presumption. Some of them may be notable where there is secondary coverage, but this guideline should not provide an implication that any such site is notable simply because it is mentioned an official record as a populated place. older ≠ wiser 11:32, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

But that isn't my reasoning. I am saying that places that are officially recognized as populated places and that have officially recorded inhabitants are presumed notable under current policies. I think this is demonstrated by cases that the "not fit for purpose" crowd has brought to this discussion, like the Russian "km" settlements. I thought y'all were arguing that the current guideline allows them notability. No?

To be clear, I am only saying the presumption applied there the sourcing is good. So the place my great aunt grew up (isolated train station, one family) would be presumed notable if (1) an RS shows that the government recognized the place (and contra 2 or 3 editors here, the CGND is reliable for government recognition in Canada - one thing it does is reconcile federal, provincial and first nations geographies) and (2) an RS (like the census) indicates a resident population. Now I am also proposing the novelty of a cutoff establishing a minimum human population of 10, but that is not part of the current guideline and intended (by me) to prevent pointless arguments about edge cases.

Anyway, for the vast majority of mining camps, oil rigs, rail sidings and other such artifacts of human activity, one or the other of those conditions are not met - either they are not officially recognized as populated places, or they have no RS-sourced population. What I am saying is that the current guideline results in a presumption of notability for the ones that meet both criteria. Newimpartial (talk) 16:14, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

I thought y'all were arguing that the current guideline allows them notability, regarding the Russian settlements, as a class IMO they should not be presumed notable.

I am only saying the presumption applied there the sourcing is good -- how would that differ from simply applying GNG rather than carving out huge categorical presumptions of notablility. To be clear, I think there are some levels where such a presumption is warranted. One issue is that this current guideline does little to clarify what is or is not appropriate under the guideline. older ≠ wiser 16:26, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

To answer your question, the GNG requires WP:SIGCOV. This is interpreted by many editors as requiring considerable coverage in multiple, secondary, RS prose sources (e.g., WP:100WORDS for an arbitrary length requirement). The result of applying the GNG to populated places is therefore that places written about in prose travelogue - even ones that dubiously exist - would be presumed notable while ones that veririably exist in administrative geographies, with reliably sourced populations, would not. This is the main reason I prefer categorical presumptions of notablility in this domain rather than GNG; the other reason is that I believe readers benefit from consistent treatment of topics of the same kind, while the application of GNG encourages asymmetrical and arbitrary constellations of articles that make our list and category systems, and even redirects, function poorly if at all. Newimpartial (talk) 16:53, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

All of this, along with your apparently idiosyncratic re-interpretation GEOLAND to also requires something else under WP:V seems completely counter-intuitive. GEOLAND is a profoundly vague and ambiguous standard and it shouldn't be. I'm still not aware that anyone has directly addressed my previous quesion about precisely what purpose this standard is actually fit for (other than generating persistent and seeming endless discussions about what it means). older ≠ wiser 17:11, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Further to your claim that GNG would allow in your opinion articles on unnotable places and exclude, again in your opinion, ones that verifiably exist in administrative geographies, with reliably sourced populations. Some examples here would be helpful. I find this to be a dubious claim. I'm aware of some cases where editors argued that coverage in local sources was insufficient to establish notablity. But I'd argue that is a misunderstanding of both notability and reliable sources that a more clearly defined GEOLAND would help to avoid. older ≠ wiser 17:43, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

So I'll try again. I think the purpose of GEOLAND (and in particular if its application to places rather than "settlements") is to allow like topics to be treated alike. Editors don't always do this, for various (sometimes very good) reasons, but the guidelines allow it. So for one example, I don't know the state of GNG sourcing for the Alberta hamlets. I know some currently have articles while others do not. I also know that all of them have (or had) the same form of legal recognition and census availability, so they could all have articles - and I think this consistent treatment woule benefit readers even if some of them lack prose treatment in secondary sources.

The same is equally, perhaps more dramatically, true of Indonesian kecmatan. For these we have very few articles, though I haven't looked into project histories to try to figure out why. Nor is this an area where I can read local-language sources to try to identify secondary coverage, so I can't make an informed guess about GNG notability. But here is a level of state-sanctioned geography with official statistics and in some cases hundreds of thousands of people - and very few articles. This leaves enwiki without even the structure to hang redirects for any "settlement" geography in Indonesia at a more detailed level.

My point is not that we need to immediately create articles for "missing" Alberta hamlets and Indonesian kecmatan; my point is that GEOLAND (rightly understood) would allow their creation, while subjecting them to GNG would allow kinds of objections (i.e., grounds for deletion) that work against what I understand as the purposes of an encyclopaedia. Newimpartial (talk) 15:35, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

That is a reasonable interpretation. However, the issue is that GEOLAND is so vague that is also allows a lot of stuff that really doesn't need a standalone article. older ≠ wiser 16:40, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

And thats why WP:N says "Therefore, topics which pass an SNG are presumed to merit an article, though articles which pass an SNG or the GNG may still be deleted or merged into another article, especially if adequate sourcing or significant coverage cannot be found, or if the topic is not suitable for an encyclopedia." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:37, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Sure, with the caveat that lack of sigcov is always valid grounds for deletion... Even when we have a clear SNG pass. Some seem to be arguing that the SNG can exempt an article from those deletion grounds which is I think what people are reacting so strongly to. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:34, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

There have been several AfDs mentioned where GEOLAND was essential the sole reason for keeping. Again, the vagueness of GEOLAND is the issue. older ≠ wiser 17:47, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps... But we still have the same issue of people arguing that a SNG pass equals automatic notability outside of GEOLAND. It seems to be a pretty automatic recourse for genera warriors who believe that their genera is uniquely encyclopedic and as such shouldn't have to follow the rules that ordinary articles have to follow. I've seen it with politicians, actors (of both the theatrical and pornographic variety), athletes, soldiers, military bases, railroad stops/stations, roads/highways, airports/landing strips... and I'm sure thats only scratching the surface. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:20, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

@Newimpartial That is why we should drop the phrase place, you are both arguing over the issue of what a place is. It is not what GEOLAND was intended to be. We should use the phrase City, Town or Village, and state that the settlements status must be backed up by reliable source(s). If hamlets, camps or other populated "places" are to be created, they need to be notable under GNG. We could then add in about States, counties or parishes with their own rules to distinguish them. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 13:24, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't agree with this, and I'll use hamlets in Canada as an example. In Ontario, hamlets are not really recognized by the provincial government except on road signs. But Alberta gives hamlets a special status for purposes of rural government and administration, with specific inclusion criteria and recognition under section 59 of the municipal government act. So even given your desire to restrict the kinds of populated places the guideline covers, it wouldn't make sense to me to exclude the Alberta hamlets. So I would much rather include within GEOLAND the Ontario hamlets for which population data is available - as the current guideline does - than exclude the Alberta hamlets which are readily verifiable in terms of both legal status and population. Newimpartial (talk) 16:14, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Hamlets are a big issue. In the UK they are rarely acknowledge, even by local parish councils. An example is Sible Hedingham, where the local hamlets are within the parish but are not mentioned at all by the parish council. Because of this, the UK Geography WikiProject say unless there is enough to show notability it is put on the article for the lowest local authority (aka parish). Davidstewartharvey (talk) 20:02, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

There is a consistent and strong consensus across hundreds of AfD discussions that rail points, resorts and camps, and other such man-made features are not covered by GEOLAND and must meet GNG or the appropriate standard (e.g. resorts and camps are treated like businesses; rail points are almost never notable unless they are quite famous as such). This is largely irrelevant to the subject of the RfD since inclusion in a government gazetteer is not legal recognition. Post offices without towns (common in pre-RFD USA) have almost never survived deletion discussions. Mangoe (talk) 13:33, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but the issue is that many presumably well-meaning editors will see these places labelled as a populated place in some 'official' record and without bothering to investigate further assume that as a populated place it gets an automatic pass under GEOLAND until they are individually challenged (as you have been doing). older ≠ wiser 15:41, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Is there really such a consensus, though? I thought the NFFP crowd was arguing that RS sometimes indicated a population, e.g. for rail points, and that those were therefore found notable under the current guideline? Newimpartial (talk) 16:14, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

I thought it was the other way around, that supporters of GEOLAND vagueness make a false syllogism that because some of these are or were populated, we should therefore presume that they all are until shown to be otherwise. older ≠ wiser older ≠ wiser 16:29, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Quick clarification: I support WP:V as the relevant, overarching policy. My reading of GEOLAND therefore requires that both recognition and inhabitation (population) be verifiable. Without one of these, the presumption does not apply.

Also, I meant to say before that it seems clear to me that some government gazetteers are restricted to officially recognized places and some are not. GNIS never indicated official recognition for populated places, even before human geography was purged from the database. But the CGNS - which coordinates the geographies of federal, provincial, and First Nations governments in a federal system - pretty clearly does. Similarly, the 2011 census of India is drawn up entirely on the basis of official, administrative geography and therefore indicates official recognition, but the US census does not (even before it is replaced by a Register of the Righteous tm). Newimpartial (talk) 16:43, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

This is somewhat misleading. GNIS did indeed have category for incorporated municipalities (and perhaps some other administrative divisions) as well as for census-designated places. The confusion arose because the category of 'populated place' was misunderstood by editors to be equivalent to a settlement, where it was more of a catch-all garbage category for any feature that was not one of the others and has some people present. It was (and is) more of a problem with user naivete in misinterpreting the data and then trying to translate that misinterpretation into Wikipedia articles about settlements. older ≠ wiser 16:58, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Right. I think it is misleading to say that the problem with GNIS, the Iranian census, the Polish list of place-names (etc.) is solely that they are "unreliable" and that other databases exist that don't have similar problems. Instead they are most-of-the-time reliable for the things they are supposed to be reliable for which is not the purpose that Wikipedia editors have tried to use them for. FOARP (talk) 09:01, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Extended discussion on the "legally recognised, populated place" standard (moved)

• @Chipmunkdavis I'm afraid that isn't what WP:GEOLAND - or the discipline of human geography which is the reference point for this guideline - means by a "place". A place is not a location nor an inhabited structure; it is defined by a socially constructed system of meaning. Some of those constructions - like villages in many national states - are recognized (and to varying degrees defined) by national (or federal) states. Those social units are what we are talking about whte, not individual freehold properties. Essentially no-one can be brought up, live and then die within one freehold property - and those are three key elements of one popular geographical definition of place. Newimpartial (talk) 18:48, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  A person can absolutely be brought up, live, and die in one property. And at any rate, GEOLAND in practice is used for such places, so if the intention is to use a particular academic definition then the current guideline is definitely not fit for purpose. See for example Kréintgeshaff, a single farm (perhaps under freehold), where a PROD was removed because this property is "officially listed as a populated place". CMD (talk) 19:14, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Chipmunkdavis briefly, to clarify my comment above: I meant "being born, living, and dying on a property" literally, not just having one property as a home base. Aside from infant mortality and extreme invalidism, I almost all humans who were born within their first home have left it at one time or another, at least momentarily. Even those who never work, shop, or go to school generally at some point in life go off to a ritual of some sort - possibly a religious service, a gamily gathering, a sporting event, or even a barn dance - and are at least a few minutes away from home. Newimpartial (talk) 19:39, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  Whatever particular meaning is being associated with the phrase living on a property, does it apply to Kréintgeshaff? CMD (talk) 20:21, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Chipmunkdavis to answer your question: I'm not an expert in Luxembourgish institutions, but I don't think so? The article describes it as a "hamlet", from Google Maps it looks like a hamlet. Where I live, a hamlet is basically never "legally recognized", nor are statistics generally available for hamlets, nor are articles on hamlets generally included on enwiki except where there is a clear GNG pass or where the settlement had a more elevated status in the past. So in the absence of more information, I'm leaning "no". Newimpartial (talk) 20:51, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  "Where I live, a hamlet is basically never "legally recognized"" - Has the standard suddenly become what is legally recognised in Canada? The issue is there are many countries that have exhaustive registers of all such small settlements, and even head-men appointed for them. FOARP (talk) 21:42, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  @FOARP to answer your question: of course not! I didn't suggest that; I was merely explaining why I was "leaning no" in the absence of information about Luxembourgish recognition of hamlets. I would also note that the article currently provides no evidence that the place in question is legally recognized, whereas articles on villages in other contexts often do - and should, IMO, to trigger the presumption.

  As far as what degree of registration triggers (or ought to trigger) the presumption of notability, I don't think we have consensus about that, and surely there is no consensus behind "it's been mentioned once somewhere so it's notable". In fact, discussions of special-purpose geographies (like sanitary districts, AIR) have shown a pretty clear consensus IMO that a place can be referred to or even defined by a government without it becoming "legally recognized" in the sense of NGEO. Newimpartial (talk) 22:05, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  What do you mean no evidence it is legally recognized? It's a registered place in Luxembourg. I assume its owner has a legal right to it. That's presumably why the "Populated, legally recognized places" standard was cited for it. CMD (talk) 03:05, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  Really struck by how many of these response are basically "the standard is fit for purpose, people are just being silly by saying that it means that Abadi/Barangays/non-village rural localities are all notable" when at AFD - and even outside AFD - this standard is typically interpreted as meaning exactly that. Because logically "populated, legally recognised places" includes every place that is populated and "legally recognised" (whatever that even means).

  I mean look at some of the proposals above. Particularly the proposals that we make a list. How on earth is a list supposed to work if every one of the things that we are likely to want to add to it are typically populated and "legally-recognised"? We'll inevitably get people saying that items (e.g., Abadi, Barangays) should be removed from the list because they are populated and have "legal recognition". FOARP (talk) 07:18, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Chipmunkdavis I mean that the article has no evidence that the hamlet in question has any particular status beyond appearing in a geographical database. Precedent on enwiki is reasonably clear that - unless we know that the database in question only includes entities with a clear legal status - being included in a database is not evidence of legal recognition. And neither property title nor residency is "legal recognition" of a place in the sense used in the guideline.

extended explanation

• I feel about GEOLAND the way an established editor might feel when encountering someone who reads our reliable source standard and interprets reliable as meaning "stable from day to day and week to week" and independent as "stored on a different server (or server farm) from other sources". Legal recognition of a community/inhabited place is clearly something other than a property listing or a name linked to geocoordinates.
• It seems obvious to me that populated place was never intended to mean a structure or location, but many "NFFP" editors seem to be arguing that here in what seems obvious straw goat fashion (I cant imagine any of them would actually make at AfD the arguments they caricature here). Based on the discussions before the guideline text settled into its current form, it seems clear that officially recognized was always intended to refer to the status of the community as a social entity occupying a space; legal title to land or shelter does not create a "place" or give it "legal recognition".
• If some editor in an obscure AfD somewhere has, in fact, cited land registry records as evidence of legal recognition of a place, then (1) that instance has never been shared anywhere that I have seen it and (2) the argument is clearly not in alignment with the existing guideline, as-is.

• It seems to me that, Like the anti- side of the species discussion, the NFFP (not fit for purpose) side of this discussion has been driven primarily IMO by two motives:

  • (1) a reaction to mass-created articles in this domain that are hard to clean up (though such article creation is always against policy and is often unsupported by this guideline; NGEO doesn't "allow" mass creation any more than NSPECIES does), and
  • (2) some editors are uncomfortable with/aesthetically disapprove of short articles on topics that meet an SNG rather than GNG.

  I don't see either of those as evidence that the guideline is NFFP.

  Newimpartial (talk) 19:21, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I really need you to understand that my opposition to WP:GEOLAND does not come from not understanding it. I think I speak for a number of the editors on here who are in fact very, very experienced in this field. Particularly @Mangoe and who is a veritable grand-master of geostubdom. Other veterans of the California project could be referenced here.

My very first serious encounter with the problems with WP:GEOLAND was !voting keep in this AFD about Oriole, Kentucky. Up until then I had thought GEOLAND was a fairly straight-forward standard: if it's a legally-recognised, populated place, then it's notable. So I !voted keep. It was Hog Farm who clued me in with the problems here. These start with GNIS being a bad source, but move on to what Oriole was: Oriole was a mine, but one where potentially people lived. Is it a "legally recognised populated place?" well, as you can see from the discussion, people just couldn't decide on that. Rather than having always been against GEOLAND and simply latching on to any argument to justify that, I originally approached GEOLAND believing that it was unproblematic and simple to apply and it took some time for me to reach my present position.

I don't want to yank out WP:AGF, but I feel that when you say that we are "arguing that here in what seems obvious straw goat fashion" and that you "cant imagine any of them would actually make at AfD the arguments they caricature here", well, what am I supposed to say? All I can say is that these are arguments we have had to have, not just once, but repeatedly, over and over and over. I don't know if C46, who was an admin and one of Wikipedia's most prolific article creators, and whose articles were defended again and again and again and again counts as "some editor in an obscure AfD somewhere". I don't think they do, anyway. I really hope you read some of the comments in the linked discussions, where multiple editors state explicitly that C46's mass creation was permitted by this guide or its predecessors and weren't mass-creations - even in the last one where he accepted a voluntary slow-down (but didn't stop...). FOARP (talk) 21:53, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

None of the discussions FOARP links to about Carlossuarez46 is less than a decade old. Why is a discussion from 2009 evidence of a problem today? James500 (talk) 22:51, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I reference these discussions because they’re relatively low-drama to discuss now. I could instead talk about Lugnuts’ Mahalle articles that he created ~2021. I could talk about the fiasco from earlier this year where someone went through a list of Belarusian Selsoviets so they could be the one who made the 7 millionth article.

But even just for the early article-sets (like the thousands of Sri Lankan “village” articles that were created based apparently on GNS, though the actual cite is a generic link to the Sri Lankan statistical bureau website which never has held that kind of information…) they remain incredibly difficult to clean up because of the GEOLAND standard. You have to go through them one by one and prove, for what are effectively unreferenced articles that took someone literal seconds to create at some point in 2008, that they don’t exist.

Here’s one I’ve literally just selected at random by going down the tree of administrative divisions in Sri Lanka: Norton, Sri Lanka. The article has only a single source supporting it: a link to the landing page of the website of the Sri Lankan statistical bureau. As far as I have ever been able to determine, no data listing Sri Lankan villages exhaustively has ever been available anywhere in that website. These links were apparently just added to the articles en masse in the assumption that at some point data would be available there. Looking at the satellite data for the location given in the article, there’s a collection of buildings some distance away called “Norton Bridge”, but we already have an article for that. The spot on the map is a point in what looks like a river (I suppose it could be a very rough track - hard to tell from the satellite photo), but there’s no village at that location. There’s some large buildings in the middle distance so possibly we’ve been looking at a farm.

But then you apply some historical knowledge: in the colonial era Sri Lanka had tea plantations, hill stations and similar, often named after owners/managers. This is therefore likely a tea plantation that was marked on a map at some point, transposed on to GNS (or could be Geonames or OpenStreetMap or…) as a “populated place”, then transposed on to Wikipedia in a matter of seconds without citing the actual source they got it from.

And at this point I’ve already spent more than 20 minutes on something that took seconds to create and isn’t really cited to anything. All trying to prove that a supremely lax standard is failed. And there are tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of these articles world wide. FOARP (talk) FOARP (talk) 06:04, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

2018 was the cleanup of the UAE 'John Carter stubs', each of which, exhaustingly, required an AfD - and some were even contested! I didn't know, incidentally, that Spinningspark had passed. He was a lot of help in that cleanup. GEOLAND wasn't. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 06:48, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

God some of the !votes in the AFD are pure, high-concentration face-palm. One essentially says that because the location is only geolocated to within a radius of 11 kilometres (that's ~7 miles!), we can't be sure that it isn't a village... FOARP (talk) 07:35, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Lugnuts was permanently blocked three years ago in 2022. John Carter was permanently blocked seven years ago in 2018, and the AfD on his article is from 2018. Norton, Sri Lanka was created fourteen years ago in 2011. They are all as irrelevant as the decade old discussions about Carlossuarez46, who retired and has not edited for four years since 2021. If there is an ongoing problem, show me someone creating lots of these articles in the last month and refusing to stop. Show me that this is actually happening right now, and not years ago. [I should also point out that Norton is on p 2724 of The Columbia Gazetteer of the World, which says Norton is a village and gives co-ordinates that differ by a minute of latitude from those in our article.] James500 (talk) 11:00, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Lugnuts and John Carter were both blocked for incivility/disruptive behaviour, not their mass-creation of Geostubs. Their creations remain on Wiki and remain a problem in 2025. Calossuarez46 retired under a cloud in the face of being desysopped, again, ultimately for incivility, and we're still cleaning up his articles. I tend to discuss their cases because they're low-drama to discuss and knowledge has already percolated through that they're creations were no bueno.

Norton also remains an article on Wikipedia in 2025 and it, and the thousands like it, still need to be dealt with (the mention of a hydroelectric project in that reference makes it a near-certainty that its a duplication of Norton Bridge, where the Norton Dam hydroelectric project is located, and should probably just be redirected there, but deletion would be just as good since it's unsourced).

Other than just the general percolating through of the knowledge that GEOLAND is highly problematic, I don't think much has changed since the above cases either.

I've already discussed the 7 millionth article fiasco (they literally created ~200 geostubs in a couple of minutes). That was this year. I'm not going to name names because I don't want the drama (and please don't tag them - just look at their user page) but a quick check shows this person who I am aware of and who has been spoken to previously about this issue created 36 Geostub articles in a 24 hour period spanning 21-22 September 2025 (which meets the 25-50 pages in 24 hours mass-create definition). Creation seems to have taken 2-3 minutes in each case and is clearly just a case of putting numbers in a template. This is the first time I've looked at this set, there's at least a few of these where it's questionable whether a stand-alone article is needed or notable, Mogrob for example looks like it has only ever just been an individual farm. FOARP (talk) 14:36, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

It does not matter why Lugnuts or John Carter or Calossuarez46 were blocked or retired. What matters is that they are not creating geostubs anymore. If there is a problem with someone trying to create the millionth article, that is a problem with competition over millionth articles, not the guideline: they could have done that with any topic. And you have yet to explain what, if anything, is wrong with Altenmann's articles. The first item on the list, Asipavichy rural council, appears to have sources in Belarussian and Russian in GBooks and GNews. It has an article on ruwiki. Its 2011 population is said to be over 1,700. What is the problem? James500 (talk) 23:54, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Did you, perchance, survey any of the other 200 articles uploaded in a single block in a matter of minutes? I work in anti-counterfeiting, and the practise of a legitimate top-layer concealing less-legitimate layers underneath from the eyes of the inattentive customs-inspector is a known one. So let’s just have a look at a few of them at random:

• Zayamnawski rural council - single-sentence stub sourced to a list of place-names. No information other than the name.

• Dzyerawnyanski rural council ditto.

• Pasetski rural council ditto.

And I honestly can’t be bothered to go on. You’re acting like it’s a coincidence that an editor, looking to boost their credentials, chooses this specific field in which to mass-create. As if the fact that this field has a notability guide that says effectively “if you can find an official list of populated places, those can be turned in to articles, go ahead and spam us” had nothing to do with it.

The fact that you are now simply glossing over/ignoring these things happening this year, and even your request for an example from the past month being met, makes me think there simply is no point continuing this discussion. I cede to you the honour of having the last word. FOARP (talk) 07:58, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

Your comments have reached the point of a WP:NPA false accusation personal attack (and putting words into my mouth). Rather than answer myself, I think I should just point to the words of Joe Roe in the previous discussion: [18]. James500 (talk) 08:16, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

Zayamnawski rural council seems to be the same thing as ru:Заямновский сельсовет. That seems to have a 2019 population of more than 2,800 and coverage in Google Books. I will try to do the other two later, as I am too ill to stay at this machine for another hour. James500 (talk) 09:28, 18 October 2025 (UTC) Dzyerawnyanski rural council seems to be the same thing as be:Дзераўнянскі сельсавет. That seems to have a 2019 population of more than 2,200. Pasetski rural council seems to be the same thing as ru:Пасекский сельсовет/be:Пасецкі сельсавет. That seems to have a 2009 population of more than 900. James500 (talk) 00:23, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

The problem is that while having to deal with a small number of stubs like this might be manageable for the community, its the volume that is unmanageable.

I have recently spent the time to go through the backlog of Myanmar articles missing geo-coordinates. There were some 300 articles to begin with and I got it down to 24 mostly over the course of 1-2 months. And these articles were not about villages and generally better quality than the stubs we are talking about here. The problem is that in the time it takes me to geo-locate 1-2 of these articles a user who is WP:NOTHERE and is only interested in upping their edit statistics could create hundreds more one line geostubs, and it becomes a Sisyphean task for the small group of interested editors that tries to tackle this vast amount of articles, leaving a huge number of frankly inadequate articles that end up polluting anything downstream of wikipedia.

And in the process I found that there exist ~1000 Myanmar geostubs that are incredibly problematic.

To highlight the difficulty of this process I'll highlight this example I found: there is an article for Battle of Theemuhta which was a small clash during the ongoing Myanmar civil war. Notability for this event is already questionable as WP:NOTNEWS in my eyes, but I found more sources so I let that pass, but I tried to locate the village this event happened in. On the page the village is called Theemuhta and Thee Mu Hta and on some sources I found it written as Htee Mu Hta, but I spend a fairly long time trying to located this clearly real village with even a rough location given in the article but I had no luck even trying any alternate spelling I could think of based on my experience of dealing with Burmese place names.

Cleanup of such articles is made more difficult by the current state of WP:GEOLAND as there are always going to be people that argue that because one source one time mentioned this place as having a population then it must meet the definition of WP:GEOLAND when frankly, that sourcing is inadequate.

While I agree in principle that a lot of populated places are notable, a lot of these stubs were negligently created in years/decades past with inadequate sourcing resulting in many village stubs created of places that were never villages or which fail to provide enough information to positively identify the village in question, and the current version of WP:GEOLAND is a major hurdle to cleaning this up. As others have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, while mass creation of articles seems to have have got under control in more recent years, WP:GEOLAND is still a hurdle preventing NPPs from adequately addressing similar newly created low quality stubs. Giuliotf (talk) 12:28, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP When I talk about straw goat arguments, and you ask what am I supposed to say?, I expect you to respond in good faith to what I actually wrote. I looked at the discussions you linked above, and I don't see any editors arguing that documented land ownership constituted "legal recognition" or that a house is an "inhabited place", so I feel that once again you are misstating or caricaturing my comment - your "evidence" has no bearing on what I was saying. In this discussion, editors have pointed to such "interpretations" of the standard we are discussing as an argument against it. However, as far as I can tell, the only editors who have asserted that a verifiable house or freehold property is therefore a legally recognized, populated place are those using such claims to conclude that the standard is NFFP. The same is true of the discissions you've linked: the only ultra-inclusionist statements I see (like OK, Brian is sleeping in my kitchen tonight; can I haz article? from the Iran discussion) are straw goat arguments made to discredit NGEO. I haven't seen editors anyone actually use the standard as caricatured, either here or elsewhere, which is why I think that argument is a straw goat.

Rather than anything that would make the straw goat real, in your links I see a series of discussions from before the "legally recognized, inhabited place" standard existed, and I can't see how those are relevant in evaluating the standard as it is. I also see one dispute from 2014 prompted by the use of an Iranian database that, as I understand it from subsequent discussions, was not fit for purpose (i.e., it did not provide a reliable record of legally recognized, inhabited places). That instance - along with all the prior mass creation issues - is in clear violation of our mass creation policy. Saying that enwiki can't afford to have NGEO or NSPECIES because of mass creation is like saying a society can't afford to have courier companies because of illicit drug distribution. In both cases, the remedy proposed is at best tangential to the problem it is supposed to address.

I fully recognize, FOARP, that you are familiar with GEOLAND. However, when I hear you talk about it or ask questions about it, what you are talking about doesn't have much to do with actual debates over "legally recognized populated places" since the current guideline has existed (by contrast with the links I provided, which come from 2020 discussions). Instead, what I hear from you and others are assertions that "nobody knows what legal recognition is" (or "nobody knows what a place is"), and I simply see no evidence for that in the current guideline environment. I'm certainly open to other interpretations, but essentially everything I see from the NFFP editors seems to belong to the factors I listed - concern about mass creation, and dislike of WP:N articles that would fail GNG if it were applied to them. Some editors certainly believe that the WP:GNG and WP:SIGCOV should apply to all articles, against current guidelines, but this change has not met with consensus any time I've seen it proposed. Newimpartial (talk) 19:45, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Did you see the 17km example? That involved a single house with a population of 2, and people arguing that a population of 2 in a single house meets GEOLAND. Ditto the 2779 km case. Cadastral surveys have also been used in keep arguments for Russian Selos. FOARP (talk) 08:10, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP I had not recently looked at those AfDs. I don't see editors in either AfD arguing that "because it's a house with a population of 2, it meets GEOLAND". What I see is an argument that 17km is verifiably listed as a populated place by the Russian government, and that it has had a (small) recorded population (with a WP:VAGUEWAVE to higher population in the past). I don't see an argument there that inhabited houses are inherently notable, which is the caricature CMD in particular has produced in this discussion.

So, in the absence of additional evidence (and having read the Google translate of the ru.wiki article), my sense is that yes, this case qualifies under GEOLAND but no, an article on this topic may not serve the enwiki readership. But edge cases make bad law, and I don't think this particular type of instance (places that are officially recognized with very low populations and almost no additional information available) are very common. I certainly wouldn't deem the GEOLAND standard NFFP because it doesn't handle this edge case very well.

What is more, I wouldn't have !voted in that AfD (my impulse would have been to merge) because I wouldn't want to contribute to a precedent that would inevitably have encouraged deletion of places with larger historical populations, where deletions would create redlinks for birth and death locations and would interfere with consistency of treatment at a recognized geographical level. There are purposes for our geographical articles that may not be met by this one, but which could be inperilled by its deletion.

By the way, my current perception - though this might be affected by propaganda - is that there are enough problems with selos that the "cost" to enwiki of articles on very small selos is greater than the inconvenience of merging and redirecting some of them. However, I recognize that I may well be wrong about this, though.l, since the perception is based more on the "loudness" of editors talking about it rather than the number of cases I've looked at myself. Newimpartial (talk) 12:03, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

I have not produced a caricature, I have noted a quite plain reading of the policy. CMD (talk) 12:16, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

A plain reading of the policy that is only advanced by people seeking to discredit said policy is what I mean by a "straw goat", whether it is technically a caricature or not. Newimpartial (talk) 20:40, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

It's such a straw goat that I provided an actual example of an article covering a single property. CMD (talk) 00:06, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

From the sourcing, it is not clear to me that you have provided an example of an article covering a single property. But even if you did, you haven't provided an example where anyone argued that each inhabited property is "legally recognized" and therefore meets NGEO. The latter is the straw goat I described and is not a caricature: it is your Every inhabited house with a government-recognized property title is a legally recognized, inhabited place or another editor's OK, Brian is sleeping in my kitchen tonight; can I haz article? from the Iran discussion. You seem unable to distinguish your straw goat from sincere arguments of the form, "a government database appears to designate this place officially, even though I'm not sure how many buildings it has" - and that inability to distinguish two obviously different arguments is quite concerning to me. Newimpartial (talk) 00:48, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

What part of the source calling it a farm is unclear? I again, have not made a straw goat (assuming this is some variation of straw man). Being unable to see a quite clear meaning of the words as written seems far more concerning. CMD (talk) 03:33, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis I'm trying to answer your question, CMD, but what source calling what a farm? The straw goat argument isn't about what is or isn't a farm, anyway: it's an claim you put into the mouths of Wikipedia editors as a notability argument. You interpret NGEO as saying that a place is notable because governments recognize the title of its land (as quoted above). However, no enwiki editor puts forward that logic as a reason a place is notable; it is only used as a "gotcha" argument against the guideline (at least according to every link or diff provided here). You apparently think you have revealed the clear meaning of the words as written, but you have shown no editors at all who actually put forth your interpretation as a reason a place is notable. If nobody but you reads it that way, it can't be the "plain meaning of the words".

And what is more, you seem unable to see the difference between what you are saying and the actual views of other editors. It seems that because they have come to the conclusion that certain places are notable and you disagree, you can ignore the reasons they gave actually given for their disagreement and substitute the idea that freehold properties (or perhaps inhabited structures) are inherently notable. I'm not sure what your intent is, but if is very difficult to carry on a discussion with someone if you are unable to distinguish between what other editors have actually written, and your personal translation (which I elsewhere called a "caricature") of their thinking. You should also be able to distinguish between what a source says about a place, and what a wikipedia editor says about the notability of a place. The "straw goat" I'm talking about is your version of the latter; your statements about the former are not "straw goats" and I have never labeled them as such. Newimpartial (talk) 10:18, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Just Room Enough Island. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:32, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

That seems like a great example of a locality that is notable under the WP:GNG but not WP:GEOLAND. Katzrockso (talk) 20:27, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Nah, WP:GEONATURAL. I don't see anyone arguing it's legally recognised as a settlement. SportingFlyer T·C 07:04, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

What I am claiming is that "Populated, legally recognized places" can be read as a populated place that is legally recognized. All the extrapolations are not things I have claimed, although it is notable that nobody has over the years actually provided a clear and well-defined meaning (hence this RfC). Speaking of "what other editors have actually written", "they have come to the conclusion that certain places are notable and you disagree" is entirely fabricated, I have not pointed to a particular place and said whether it is notable or not, I have explicitly pointed to a place that another editor has applied the wording under discussion which did not meet the sociological reading you provided (large enough for a person to go dancing, shopping, etc. without leaving). CMD (talk) 12:03, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis what you actually claimed, originally, was that Every inhabited house with a government-recognized property title is a legally recognized, inhabited place. Since then, you have also claimed that you have provided an actual example above of how this specific line (and not NGEO as a whole, which is not the topic of this RfC) is read in practice - but you have not. You have not cited any editors arguing that all inhabited houses are notable because of property title. In fact. you haven't cited any editors arguing that even one property is notable because of property title. You have simply found an example where you think the "hamlet" the sources refer to is a single property, then you make up this wholly imagined reasoning for why the editor thought it was notable, based on your own humorously implausible reading of the guideline.

By contrast, the AGF reading of the situation in Luxembourg is that the editor in question believed they were using a source that clearly identified inhabited places (in this case, hamlets) recognized by the government. One of them turned out to be fairly small (it isn't clear to me from the sources exactly how small). There is no need for the extra baggage you used to explain the editor's reasoning. Now, the source the editor used may not have been doing what that editor thought it did - or perhaps the source did what the editor thought, but you disagree with the editor about the minimum threshold for "legally recognized" or "inhabited" or "place". But to maintain - as you have done, quite strenuously, in this discussion - that if some editor, somewhere has created an article on an inhabited place with a single property or a single structure, that means that the editor in question is presuming that all inhabited structures are notable - well, that just doesn't show a good faith reading of how other editors explain themselves.

To give another real world example: one of my great aunts spent several years of her childhood being homeschooled with her siblings in one of those train stations with a residence attached, scores of miles from the next inhabited place. Some of the maps and documents of that time gave the name of the station as an inhabited place, and if there was a census while they were there I'm sure the place had a listed population of 5. Now I'm not saying that said location is notable for wikipedia (though it was certainly notable for her, growing up). What I'm saying is, that an editor could logically believe that place to be notable, without therefore believing that when the family moved to an outlying district of a town of 5,000, that their house in that community was therefore notable as an inhabited place, by analogy with the house they had lived in before. Nobody to my knowlege has ever made that argument, and I can't imagine anyone will make that argument in good faith.

And so, you simply can't use this argument that nobody has ever sincerely made - that all inhabited structures are presumed to merit a wikipedia article - as a reductio ad absurdam of the very different argument that some editors have actually made (namely, that governments sometimes recognize very small inhabited places). Newimpartial (talk) 01:50, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

I did in fact provided an example of how the specific line was read in practice. That is what you quoted, and that is what was done. "hamlets" is a word you have decided to use here without a source or other identified basis, the source on the page specifically says farm. As for "doesn't show a good faith reading of how other editors explain themselves", I have not positied any of these extrapolations you claim. All well to claim a plain reading is reductio ad absurdam, but nobody has over the years figured out how to apply a different meaning. CMD (talk) 02:44, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis I simply don't understand how you can believe you've provided an example of this, when you haven't linked a single diff where an editor makes this imaginary argument (which you refer to, counterfactually, as a "plain reading").

In fact, editors apply a different meaning than that one, literally all the time - like in the link you gave about the PROD removal in Luxembourg, where the deceased editor says that it seems to be officially listed as a populated place. They aren't applying the meaning you've put forward again and again (a claim to NGEO is based on land title). They are clearly indicating that the place is on an official list of populated places - nobody thinks a list of street addresses is that. (My last assertion is demonstrated by the fact that, when problemantic geo articles are created, the editors doing so are generally working from a flawed list of populated places - I haven't seen even one instance when the consulted an address register.)

As to why I refer to Kroentgeshof as a hamlet, it's a term used in our article's short description and in some of the sources I found in a quick "before" (such as Mapcarta). In addition to "farm" and "small settlement", I can see "small village" used among the sources. (As to my own opinion: I don't know what this location is, and I haven't pretended to know; I also can't see how the sourcing for "farm" is actually better than that for "hamlet".) Newimpartial (talk) 20:53, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

From what I understand from the government website [19], that locality is considered a "cadastral parcel" in Luxembourg geography. Katzrockso (talk) 22:07, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

The only non-google maps source in Kréintgeshaff is a site with individual street addresses. CMD (talk) 00:27, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure which source you mean, but the one Katzrockso just provided shows "Kréintgeshaff" not as a street address or a "cadastral parcel" but rather as a "place name". If I look at the interactive map in detail, there seem to be up to a dozen buildings or structures that belong to Kréintgeshaff, on both sides of the road. with varying residential and nonresidential functions. There is a farm (and an orchard) in Kréintgeshaff, but I would not conclude from the government site that it is a farm. In fact, I now suspect that the deceased editor was correct in their belief that it is an officially recognized place (at a level of geography higher than a building or a property) according to the Luzembourg government.

I still have no opinion on whether or not it is notable, but I can see why the deceased editor believed that it might be. Newimpartial (talk) 01:57, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Newimpartial, this conversation perfectly illustrates the reasoning behind my !vote as well as the quote from WP:SIGCOV, "'Significant coverage' addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content."

It's really unacceptable to have an article with such scant sourcing that we have to peruse satellite photos and speculate on the intentions of a former editor in order to figure out what sort of place it actually is. –dlthewave ☎ 02:41, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

@Dlthewave So I actually agree with you in the (nearly tautological) insight that, to have an article, we need sources (meeting WP:V) that allow us to define the topic of the article without original research. But I can't get from there to a universal requirement for SIGCOV, in this domain. WP:SIGCOV is part of the GNG, and just as it hasn't been deemed suitable as a general rule for species notability, I think it works against encyclopaedic purposes for GEOLAND notability, as well.

In particular, SIGCOV demands WP:SECONDARY coverage - defined at the wikilink as offering analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources. For many inhabited places, this secondary coverage is either nonexistent or okay available off the internet or in languages most enwiki editors do not understand. If all our articles on populated places were were required to meet GNG/SIGCOV, we would have far fewer articles. Of course this is the preference of some editors, but as with species, such affordances as hypertext links, lists and categories work much better with articles, which also IMO suit the needs (and habits) of our readers.

So while I support strict WP:V and NOR requirements, I don't think SIGCOV/GNG is the right approach to achieve them in articles on many populated places. Newimpartial (talk) 20:30, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

SIGCOV is not just in GNG, its part of the overarching notability concept... Outside of GNG you have: "Wikipedia articles cover notable topics—those that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time, and are not outside the scope of Wikipedia. We consider evidence from reliable and independent sources to gauge this attention. The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic may have its own article." "The common theme in the notability guidelines is that there must be verifiable, objective evidence that the subject has received significant attention from independent sources to support a claim of notability." "No subject is automatically or inherently notable merely because it exists: the evidence must show the topic has gained significant independent coverage or recognition, and that this was not a mere short-term interest, nor a result of promotional activity or indiscriminate publicity, nor is the topic unsuitable for any other reason. Sources of evidence include recognized peer-reviewed publications, credible and authoritative books, reputable media sources, and other reliable sources generally." and finally "We require "significant coverage" in reliable sources so that we can actually write a whole article, rather than half a paragraph or a definition of that topic." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:57, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

All of this are clearly referring to the WP:GNG as a shortcut for notability, as explaining the complexities of the overall notability concept in every policy or guideline that touches on notability is excessive and unnecessary. There is clear consensus among Wikipedia editors that SNGs are an alternative route to notability and there exist SNGs that do not require WP:SIGCOV, as elaborated above, and established with the consensus of the community. This is all explained quite simply at the WP:N page, a page that is surprisingly absent in your analysis of notability! Katzrockso (talk) 04:26, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

Absent? Those are all direct quotes from WP:N. Didn't you notice that when you looked at their context to see what they "are clearly referring to"? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:22, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

I suspect the difference in perspectives on this arises in large part because "significant coverage" on WP:N can be one of two different things. There is a specific test for notability, which is articulated Iin bullets and wikilinked as WP:SIGCOV. And there is a more general concept, of "significant coverage in reliable sources", which is foundational to notability.

Challenges arise when people confuse those two things - from my perspective, when editors use the UPPERCASE for the general concept instead of the test, or when they apply the test outside of GNG, that causes confusion (and cognitive dissonance). It is similar to when editors refer to WP:SIRS (or WP:NAUD) outside of the application of NCORP - this is probably a neurodivergent tic on my part, but it just irritates me and seems confused.

So the comments I have been making elsewhere on this page about secondary coverage are, properly speaking, specific to the SIGCOV test. Of course, we always want to provide the deepest content we can, grounded in secondary sources. But the minimum threshold of content for having an article demonstrably differs from domain to domain, according to our policies, and isn't always required to meet the SIGCOV test. I get that some editors use UPPERCASE differently from the text they point to, and perhaps if we all recognize that we can talk past each other a bit less. Newimpartial (talk) 17:42, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

This page says in lowercase "A geographical area, location, place or other object is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are, in the case of artificial features, independent of the bodies which have a vested interest in them." which to me is pretty clear... But we seem to still have people arguing that notability can be presumed without such significant coverage (for example with verifiable legal recognition and population alone). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:53, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

My reading of NGEO in general - and in this case I think my reading is the most common - is that the first bullet of the nutshell (which you are quoting) is intended to cover geographical places in general (including natural features, engineered constructs and places without official recognition). Meanwhile, the second bullet of the nutshell covers officially recognized, populated places. I do not believe that most editors see the second bullet as subsidiary to the first, since this does not follow the structure of the rest of the guideline. Newimpartial (talk) 20:07, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

In the second bullet "beyond simple statistics" is clearly talking about significant coverage in the lowercase sense. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:20, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

Regarding "I'm not sure which source you mean", I referred to "the only non-google maps source in Kréintgeshaff". There are two sources in that article, one of which is google maps. I am not sure where the potential ambiguity is meant to be. At any rate, "at a level of geography higher than a building or a property" is moving in the direction of a slightly clearer guideline, we can identify a lower limit at places with two buildings and/or properties. CMD (talk) 05:26, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

"I don't think this particular type of instance (places that are officially recognized with very low populations and almost no additional information available) are very common" - certainly they happen regularly enough. There was a discussion a while back where I listed all the Russian selo articles with tiny populations and names that declared them to be kilometre-points on a railway (a small sub-set of the whole) and got to 12, and that was far from an exhaustive search. According to the USDA, of Russia's 150,000 rural localities, 20,000 are presently uninhabited, and there are people working mass-creating selo articles even now. A search for articles mentioning both of the search-terms "is a rural locality" and "the population was 1 as of 2002" gives 275 hits.

Poland is also an area where this is an issue - we have ~50,000 Polish "village" articles, but according to UN statistics there are only ~42,000 villages in Poland. The discrepancy is explained by Kotbot mass-creating "village" articles that were about tiny rural localities that in reality were farms, railway installations, fishing installations, etc. FOARP (talk) 12:32, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

"I wouldn't have !voted in that AfD (my impulse would have been to merge) because I wouldn't want to contribute to a precedent that would inevitably have encouraged deletion of places with larger historical populations, where deletions would create redlinks for birth and death locations and would interfere with consistency of treatment at a recognized geographical level." Wikipedia is not precedent based and that sort of strategic behavior creates issues for the rest of us who aren't in on your master plan to prepare the battlefield (this is one reason we have WP:BATTLEGROUND after all). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:58, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

Not participating in an AfD because I am concerned about the downstream impacts of the decision that might result is pretty much the opposite of WP:BATTLEGROUND behaviour. Some editors in this discussion are willing to have articles on encyclopaedic topics deleted because "allowing" them is seen to encourage the creation of articles of questionable encyclopaedic interest where it takes too much time and attention to assess the validity of their sources. Framing potentially WP:MOTTEANDBAILEY questions and offering carefully curated examples to serve that agenda reads to me as closer to WP:BATTLEGROUND than the moderate stance I am taking on this topic. Newimpartial (talk) 20:40, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

It is not moderate to misinterpret our articles effectively lying to readers as "articles of questionable encyclopaedic interest". CMD (talk) 03:34, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

I had not noticed you taking a moderate stance on this topic, but perhaps the real extremes of opinion are absent from this discussion so its more or less a fight among moderates so to speak. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:54, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Why are you claiming straw goats and obscurity when I provided an actual example above of how this specific line (and not NGEO as a whole, which is not the topic of this RfC) is read in practice? CMD (talk) 23:35, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

User:Spinningspark is dead. If you want to redirect or merge or delete Kréintgeshaff, he is not going to stop you now. James500 (talk) 23:44, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis to answer your question - if you're talking about the hamlet in Luxembourg, I don't see an AfD discussion about it, much less an argument being put forward based on one of the "straw goat" arguments I've mentioned (like "it appeared one time in a database" or "it's a freehold property registered with the government"). I don't see how the existence of an article - which, as far as I know, hasn't been discussed in relation to NGEO until I offered a provisional comment above - can be an example of how "legally recognized" or "populated place" is understood on enwiki.

And if you're not talking about the hamlet in Luxembourg, I have no idea what you're talking about. Newimpartial (talk) 23:56, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

The argument put forward was very simply that is "listed as a populated place", not any of these extrapolations. It was a statement based directly on the wording under discussion, and is a direct use on enwiki. There's no call for talking about the death of the user in question so callously either, they were presumably following the guideline as written in good faith. CMD (talk) 00:18, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis: who has put forward the argument that the hamlet in Luxembourg is "listed as a populated place"? Do you have a diff? All I've seen is your link to the article. Newimpartial (talk) 19:49, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

[20], as James has referred to already. CMD (talk) 03:01, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

And anyway we already linked to multiple discussions where it has been incredibly difficult to establish that we should not have articles for them above. Just look at the massive discussion about Russian Selo, particularly the 17km and 2779 km AFDs, and then consider that there’s many more such articles (eg the near-identical 2797 km) but the process of cleaning them up in the face of WP:GEOLAND is so incredibly laborious, particularly compared to the rate at which they are created, that you would have to be a masochist to undertake it. And these are just the lowest of low-hanging fruit because they have names that explicitly declare them to be just points on a railway: many more have more normal-sounding could-be-village names. FOARP (talk) 07:03, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

I would remind you that during the previous discussion on this talk page, Joe Roe and Ymblanter said that your claims about Russian selos were less than completely accurate, and that in particular you were failing to take depopulation into account. James500 (talk) 11:51, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

This simply indicates the problematic nature of GEOLAND.

We not only have to show that place is not populated, we have to show that it was never populated. It's not enough just to point to the article and all other sources containing low/no population - and no other data - because the point is then raised that they might, possibly have had a population at some point in the past! And this is all that is needed to massively hinder any effort to do anything about an article that declares the existence of a village that does not in fact exist and which no evidence says ever existed.

So the 17 km discussion - an absolutely preposterous discussion about a single building in the middle of nowhere on a muddy road with a population of zero in 2002, zero in 2010, and two in 2020 - gets treated as if we were trying to delete the lost city of Troy! FOARP (talk) 12:43, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Your example of a problem is an AfD that ended in merge? That discussion was 4 keeps and 12 delete/merge !votes. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 13:02, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, my point is that in an article-set of tens or even hundreds of thousands, that clean-up of even what is blatantly not a notable location taking three weeks and ~5,000 words of discussion, only to result in a merge that was ultimately really a redirect, exactly because of the GEOLAND standard, is problematic and an indicator that things have to change. FOARP (talk) 14:40, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

The guideline WP:NTEMP requires that depopulation be taken into account in cases where it is verifiable. GEOLAND does not require you to prove that the village was never populated, it requires the other side to provide a verifiable source that says it was populated in the past (NRVE). James500 (talk) 23:28, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

In practice GEOLAND does require proving the 'village' was never populated, as seen in the comment below. CMD (talk) 03:05, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

The current reality of these attempts to mass delete stubs is that it is really quite easy to find evidence about the supposedly unpopulated American towns. Indiana is one example where there were numerous communities that share the name of a post office that was later established there and the community at some point became depopulated. Because the only mention some editors can find online for the community is some short mentions of the post office and maps show it is currently not populated, they insist that the town was never populated, that it was some confusion of the GNIS conflating a post office with a populated place, when that it is in fact not the case. I am sure that these issues are profoundly worse when it comes to localities for which there is little online English language information. Katzrockso (talk) 19:15, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

• Ken Dodd was born, brought up, lived and died in the same house for 90 years. It's in Knotty Ash. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:06, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  Sure, but he performed outside of his house and off of his property. So in the sense of human geography, the house was not the "place" in which his whole life was "lived".

  (It might also be worth noting that while NGEO doesn't apply to the house, it probably does apply to Knotty Ash. Based on the current state of the article, Knotty Ash may not pass the GNG, although it is probably notable as a "legally recognized, populated place".)Newimpartial (talk) 18:33, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Newimpartial which is why at the last RFC I raised that the wording should change from place to settlement. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 19:24, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think the issue with this type of proposal is that there are plenty of larger (but still small) level administrative divisions that don't quite count as a 'settlement' in and of themselves, but are composed of settlements. Changing to the word 'settlement' would leave their notability in question, but we may still want to have articles on low-level administrative divisions (indeed, it would be strange if we were to have an article on a village, but not the administrative division that village is a part of). Katzrockso (talk) 01:34, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  In WP:NORG we've declared that non-notable parent organisations don't inherit the notability of their child organisations. Indeed, WP:NOTINHERIT is a known principle on WP, but not the opposite. Even if we were to ignore that, a notable village can be within multiple over-lapping administrative areas (e.g., educational, police, court, sanitary, etc.), and these can't all be automatically notable just because they cover a notable village, can they? FOARP (talk) 07:31, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  Many years ago i did ask on the village pump should we have an sng for administrative organisations. GEOLAND should only cover the settlement, and a separate SNG existing for organisation. We have on Wikipedia wards in UK council areas that are just a political division, but users say they should stay because they are legally recognised places! Westborough (ward) is a perfect example. It now exists just listing election results which already exist elsewhere! Davidstewartharvey (talk) 17:18, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  The question is about the notion of "place" and whether that carries significant semantic meaning here vis a vis "settlement". To give a broader example, think about U.S. counties. These are "places" in the sense that WP:GEOLAND currently uses, but they are not "settlements", they are composed of different settlements. Katzrockso (talk) 21:53, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

  FOARP above put forward ”Cities, towns, and villages are typically presumed notable, other populated entities may be presumed notable on a case-by-case basis (see list)” as an alternative up above. Would that be more acceptable? Davidstewartharvey (talk) 17:52, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

  Using what definition of "village"? We should be looking for criteria for determining that a settlement or populated place can be presumed notable that works globally. If we can agree on a definition of "village" that works globally, great. But just saying that if a settlement is called a village it is presumed notable will yield very uneven results. Donald Albury 20:57, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

  No, that does not help at all. A United States county does qualify as notable under this definition except under the "case-by-case basis" which is doing way too much work here. Katzrockso (talk) 21:07, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

  The problem with this version is that what village means changes from country to country, and words can have multiple different translations (e.g. abadi can reasonably be translated into village, and that has caused issues in the past.)

  I think the guideline should make this fact very clear, something like:

  "Definitions and words used to describe populated places of different sizes changed considerably between countries and even between different juristictions in the same country. As such it is impossible to have a general guideline for what types of human settlements could be presumed to be notable. A list of representative examples from different countries and jurisdictions is provided below."

  We would then provide a table of example which would need to be gathered by consulting different communities it will likely be impossible to do for every country, but we can at least provide enough examples from different systems that would give editors a good feeling for what is needed.

  On top of that we need to make a clear statement on what is not a notable settlement, and I think that the current guideline is a good start mentioning thing like abadis and barangays, but to this I think we need to add something about census tables, I think something like

  "Census methodologies differ greatly between countries, and distinctions and groupings made for statistical purposes in a census do not necessarily map onto real settlements. While census data is usually reliable for population numbers we can't assume that a place name used in a census describes a notable settlement unless we find other sources to verify this."

  Feel free to iterate on my wording, but that could be a good starting point Giuliotf (talk) 21:22, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

  Abadi does not translate into village! It means "Settlement, inhabited space". People had used this meaning to link to a village, but in Persian a village is vilij. I would add to FOARP's idea that if this wording is used it should be backed up with "with reliable source(s) that confirm the settlement's status". Davidstewartharvey (talk) 05:20, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  Obviously I don't speak Persian, but my understanding was that it could be translated as "village", but that wasn't the sense that the Iranian census bureau was using it in. Ditto selo in Russian. FOARP (talk) 08:51, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

• reply to Bkonrad's comment, above:
• Re: very bad, poorly referenced, permanent sub-stubs - there are a lot of concerns embedded in that phase, but I'd like to split it in two since I think there are different issues to disentangle in each. After doing that, in this "extended discussion" section, I will also float some trial balloons about how the baby could be kept safe while draining bathwater.
  • very bad ... permanent sub-stubs seems mostly to communicate a concern about whether an article has enough, or good enough, content. WhatamIdoing could quite possibly let us know what the median length of an article is, in words or in sentences, and then ideally the discussion could focus more on the "delta" between the supposed "sub-stubs" and the typical enwiki article. From the discussion so far, I think it's clear that editors have very different views of the pro and con aspects of very short articles, both in general and for populated places in particular. My sense is that, contra some editors' comments here, many readers use geographical articles (found by wikilink or by search, or even a well-written shortdesc) to find basic contextual information about the location and scale of a place. And that many of the short articles that some editors find WP:UGLY serve those purposes better than any alternatives I've seen proposed.
  • poorly referenced also means different things to different editors. As I have said before, problems that aren't really about notability have often been shoehorned into demands on the notability framework. WP:V is a policy that governs all article content, but several editors in this discussion have expressed concerns (in this NGEO discussion) about unverifiable material or material for which the sources are poor. It seems to me that, just as WP:NSPECIES presumes notability if certain information is clearly verifiable, something similar could work for NGEO.
• My sense is that for any article whose claim to significance is that it is (or was) a legally recognized, populated place, sources should exist that show recognition and population.Therefore, it would be reasonable to expect sources for those claims to be included in article space, particularly if the claim is challenged. While I believe that a lot of sloppy thinking went into the 2017 NSPORTS RfC, I do respect the clear expectation for athlete notability that is now applied at AfD: that a reliable source be included in the article that clearly backs up the claim to notability. So I would be supportive of changes for GEOLAND to establish a clearer threshold for verifiability - that sources be included in the article to establish that a place is (or has been) populated and officially recognized. (Of course, what kind of "recognition" is relevant depends on the jurisdiction and time.)
• To explore the situation further: as I understand the potential of an online encyclopaedia and the ways they are used by readers, it would be helpful to clarify the boundaries of the WP:NOTINHERIT principle in this area, perhaps following the logic of the existing guidelines that support WP:NARTIST and WP:NCREATIVE. I'd also want to reflect the reality that the category system is useful to many readers (and editors), and that system works well with hierarchy. So it would make sense to me to specify that, for the main, general-purpose hierarchy of governance in a jurisdiction, a higher level is presumed notable whenever at least one of its constituent units is notable. (Note that, like WP:NCREATIVE, this would be a one-way presumption; it does not extend to "downwards" to the lower-level units.)
• One key advantage of this one-way presumption is very practical: there would be a clear target to merge/redirect poorly-documented places so long as their location within a higher-level unit is known. It would also help ensure that, in jurisdictions with large discrepancies (in size, data availability, and prose coverage) at a certain level of geography, there could be at least one set of articles at a consistent sub-national level (or a sub-federal level, in jurisdictions with large federal units). Also, as I have suggested previously on this Talk page, for most jurisdictions it is easy to distinguish between one main geographical hierarchy, which organizes most local and regional governance or administration, and other geographies with special functions. I can see a "new" NGEO that applies to populated places within the main "official" hierarchy, while NORG could apply to entities like school boards, sanitary districts and transit commissions, which often inhabit unique geographies.
• Finally, just to keep my trial balloons all in one place, I would suggest that a minimum population threshold, like "places that some point had at least 10 residents", might be useful in preventing deleterious discussions of edge cases. ("At some point" because of WP:NOTTEMPORARY, a principle that sometimes seems forgotten in NGEO discussions.) I think limiting the presumption of notability for inhabited places to ones that have verifiably had a human population of 10 or more and that have been recognized officially within their jurisdiction, while also providing that in a country's primary geographical hierarchy higher levels can inherit notability from their components (so long as the relationships are verifiable), would end the vast majority of disputes about geographical notability while facilitating the removal of unsuitable articles. Newimpartial (talk) 21:20, 21 October 2025 (UTC) tried to fix ping Newimpartial (talk) 13:52, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  I'm in pretty much complete agreement with everything you set here as a baseline to discuss a more specific NGEO standard and think your senses are right on point about the underlying arguments in this situation. EmeraldRange (talk/contribs) 14:33, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  To be fair in some parts of the world (and in all of the world if you go back far enough) 10 people is going to include most buildings occupied by a single family unit. Looking just at the contemporary you'd have most houses in Senegal meeting that specific minimum population threshold. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:15, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Horse Eye's Back sure, but such families will not themselves be legally recognized as "places" in any jurisdiction of which I am aware. Families. buildings, and places are three objects to observe, and I am talking about places. Also, I think "human population of 10" is a data element about a place that reliably sourced data can generally support, while "multiple families" would be much harder to establish for many places - so I don't recommend the latter as a standard. Newimpartial (talk) 17:39, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  @User:Newimpartial, I wonder if it would be helpful to give an example of a proposed standard for a specific country/state/region along with suitable sources for verification. Maybe we could discuss it in a new subsection.

  One challenge I forsee is that many official lists of places don't clearly distinguish between settlements and dispersed rural populations. For example one census tract might be a distinct village that we would all consider likely to be notable, while the next tract might be called "Bob's Corner" and cover the local farmers who don't live in a village but get their mail at Bob's general store which also serves as the post office. This would be good to keep in mind when choosing sources. –dlthewave ☎ 18:57, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  How is an individual property not legally recognized as a place? If it has a tax number, address, or similar its a place. Discrete buildings certainly count as places, please see [21][22] etc. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:56, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Horse Eye's Back To answer your question, having a tax number, address, rural route number, fire number etc. does not turn a location into a "place". That's not what anyone means by a "place" in this context, nor have I seen anyone argue (here or at AfD) that because a location has a street number it is therefore a "place" in the sense of the "inhabited place" standard.

  The sense of "place" we are discussing is actually included in the Merriam-Webster page you linked, within 3a. A good example of this specific sense comes from everyday language, where "places" have "place names". Ordinary street addresses are not place names (though spatial designations sometimes are, as in Three Mile House - but only spatial designations that are verifiably also the names of places can name "inhabited places").

  So the official Luxembourgish database linked earlier has a field called "Place name" (in English); parcels of land and buildings aggregate up into named "places". Similarly, Canada has an official repository of named places that includes both named natural features and "populated places", with clear distinctions among them. While natural and human geography both include "places", only the latter - "populated places" - are relevant to the standard under discussion.

  My point isn't that Luxembourg and Canada are unusual in giving official recognition to "places". My point is that, when they do, the layer of geography they are referencing as an inhabited place is essentially the same. This isn't an individual property or structure, but rather the named geographical space that properties, structures and people inhabit. I think this is pretty much universal among countries, and I am unaware of any recent or contemporary national geography that uses "place" in the sloppily defined sense to which you refer, to include properties or buildings in general. Newimpartial (talk) 22:39, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  Lots/addresses are locations, they fit within 3A but I guess thats why you say "within 3A" because the full 3A doesn't work... So what we find is that the definition you claim is the common and obvious one can't actually be found in the dictionary per say. In general in an encyclopedia we cover three general topics... People, places, and things. That is the context in which places is being used, or at least I think it is (at the very least we can see that people are probably right to be confused by "places" if its some weird term of art vs something you can find in a dictionary). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:27, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Horse Eye's Back NGEO is a geography notability standard; the fact that a lounge lizard can ask in English, "wanna come back to my place, babe?" doesn't change the context of "place" as a geographical term any more than "star" in WP:NASTRO might also refer to a popular entertainer (or a meteor). I suppose "place" is a "term of art" (as is "star" in popular culture) - if you need a basic orientation to perspectictives on and uses of this concept in geography, I recommend this one. A general-purpose dictionary isn't useful in this context, any more than it would be for defining the "strings" of String theory.

  But for encyclopaedic purposes, it seems obvious to me that the word "place" in "people, places and things" carries a primarily geographic sense. The WP:5P invoke this sense when they refer to the function of a gazetteer. If people talk about "people, places and things" in the context of an encyclopaedia, they aren't using "place" in the sense of "first place" or "put them in their place" or "a place for my clothes" or "a place to stay". As a rule, the "places" that matter to an encyclopaedia are geographical places (and, by contrast, the structures found in populated places, like the landforms and animals found in natural places, are actually "things" in this context).

  So if we need a note saying that the inhabited places we're talking about are "places" defined in government-approved human geography, that's fine. But from everything I've read on this Talk page and at AfD, those actually are what this guideline was talking about, all along. If adding a note to the guideline can pre-empt insincere arguments like Brian is sleeping in my kitchen tonight; can I haz article?, that would certainly be a gain. Newimpartial (talk) 01:52, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  this one seems to agree with me... But I will digress as I think I've said just about everything I can muster on the subject. Snide remarks aside I appreciate you fleshing out your position so fully, thank you and have a good night! Horse Eye's Back (talk) 02:58, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  "The WP:5P invoke this sense when they refer to the function of a gazetteer." - Wikipedia does not, and has never had, a gazetteer function. Wikipedia is not "a geographical dictionary or directory used in conjunction with a map or atlas". These are two classes of things that Wikipedia was declared to be WP:NOT years before a random editor boldly added that wording to WP:5P without any discussion. FOARP (talk) 12:07, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  @FOARP And yet, whenever the "gazetteer" phrase has been discussed since it was added, there has been consensus to retain it. Almost as though the community believes that (aspects of) a gazetteer function belong to the core purpose of English Wikipedia. Newimpartial (talk) 13:35, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  The last time this was simply on the grounds that removal was seen as out-of-process. I'm not aware of any other actual discussions around this.

  We might also point out that the same wording, according to the same logic, means we have some kind of "almanac function", that is somehow "core" to Wikipedia.

  I know there's some people who just want to act as if WP:NOT does not exist, but the WP:5P essay does not abolish it. FOARP (talk) 13:42, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

  Of course Wikipedia functions like a gazetteer. SportingFlyer T·C 07:06, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  10 residents is enough for a single farmstead with just one family. Traumnovelle (talk) 19:44, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Newimpartial, Just to clarify with regards to very bad, poorly referenced, permanent sub-stubs. I have no problem with clearly referenced stub articles. These can be very helpful at times (although in many cases, I think these might be just as well placed in a list article). However, IMO, there is an issue with stubs that contain only some ephemeral statistical data and provide no references that would allow readers to verify what sort of a place/locality is being described.

  I'm not keen on including any arbitrary population as a threshold/proxy for notability. First, population is ephemeral and much depends on who is doing the counting and reporting, and on what methods and standards are used. Second, by itself, it does not add any clarity to what constitutes a place that would count.

  The ideas about unidirectional upwards inherited notability are worth exploring, although somewhat tangential to the immediate issue concerning the fitness of GEOLAND (and none of those who have disagreed have responded to my earlier questions yet to explain exactly what purpose this vague and endlessly contentious standard is actually fit for). older ≠ wiser 12:21, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Bkonrad I'm a bit surprised that you don't feel the purpose of the standard has been explained yet, so I'll address that directly. The goal of this element in NGEO is to describe a category of topics that ought to have an article in English Wikipedia. Or, in wikispeak, a set of topics that are "presumed to merit an article". I have mentioned previously why officially-recognized, populated places are of encyclopaedic interest , but I'll try to be more systematic about it:

  • readers have the reasonable expectation that the places they were born, and live, are included on Wikipedia at an appropriate level of granularity; official national geography is the obvious structure to use to meet this expectation;
  • readers have the reasonable expectation that biographical entries in an online encyclopaedia will include wikilinks to the places their subjects were born and die, and where important phases of their life and work took place; again, official national geography is the obvious structure to use to meet these expectations;
  • since early in wikipedia's history, many editors have contributed towards the inclusion of all populated places systematically on English wikipedia, just as a (largely distinct) set of editors have contributed towards the inclusion of all recognized, existing species on enwik - the phrase "legally recognized, populated place" defines a boundary for that project of inclusion.

  Now my suspicion is that, as with the NSPECIES issue, this debate at NGEO largely pits editors who prefer systematic treatment of domains (treating like topics alike) against editors who prefer universal standards that apply to all articles. There is also an overlapping but logically distinct axis that pits editors for whom depth is an encyclopaedia's defining attribute (what a nostalgic person might call a macropedia approach) and editors for whom breadth is paramount (a micropedia approach?). What I don't think helps the discussion is the tendency of some editors to deride reliably sourced content on these topics as "junk", though I suppose the assumption that any editor who considers a topic non-notable is therefore trying to remove content on it from wikipedia could also undermine productive discussion.

  As far as the viability of the standard, I am suggesting that the existing standard should be understood as requiring: (1) that a place be demonstrably recognized as a populated place by the government/legal system with jurisdiction over it, and (2) that there be corroborating evidence that the place has - or has had, in the past - a population. Those restrictions, if consistently understood, ensure that the only places enjoying the presumption of notability represent "real" human geography. Really, I haven't seen any suggestion that they don't do that; instead I've mostly seen editors challenging the premise (that wikipedia should have articles on all recognized, inhabited places), or quibbling about edge cases (mostly ones that aren't well-researched by those presenting them). Newimpartial (talk) 17:57, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  I understand the purpose of the overall guideline just fine, thanks. What no one seems capable of explaining (yourself included) is how the irredeemably vague formulation Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable is fit for the general purpose of this guideline. That phrasing is something like a rorschach test -- anyone can read whatever they like into it. older ≠ wiser 18:14, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Bkonrad I really don't think that's true. For Canada, a "legally recognized" populated place would be one listed in the relevant official repository, the Canadian Geographcial Names Database, as a populated place. For such a place to be inhabited, the reliable source would generally be a census that indicates the place in question and assigns to it a population. No ink blots required. I understand that other jurisdictions are organized differently from Canada, but most have a published, official geography and a published census, which (when reliable) tend to give all of the information the guideline requires. Newimpartial (talk) 20:20, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think the Canadian Geographical Names Database has many of the same issues as GNIS. It is maintained by the Geographical Names Board of Canada which serves much the same function as the United States Board on Geographic Names (the maintainer of GNIS). The purpose of both databases is also very similar. older ≠ wiser 20:28, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Bkonrad just a quick question for clarification: what issues do you think ths CGND that relate to the problems with GNIS? I'm not aware of any issues with the CGND, certainly nothing comparable to the causes and results of the removal of various elements from GNIS in 2021. (The GCND has a reputation for being robust, among other geographers I know.) Newimpartial (talk) 20:41, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, describing any issues with the CGND would be welcome. SportingFlyer T·C 22:23, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  For Canada, a "legally recognized" populated place would be one listed in the relevant official repository, the Canadian Geographcial Names Database, as a populated place - According to CGNS, "Populated Place" includes many types of "Unincorporated Areas" that may or may not have populations such as Railway Points, Localities and Resorts. Denison, Bluevale Siding and Bells Junction are a few examples of railway points that are "officially recognized populated places". We'd be better off using settlement-specific categories like City, Town, Village and Hamlet. –dlthewave ☎ 16:34, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

  Are any of those populated? Katzrockso (talk) 18:00, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

  Denison, Bluevale Siding and Bells Junction are not listed in the Canadian census and appear to simply be railway features, for example Bells Junction is a railway junction on the edge of Bells Corners with no separate population center around it. I think there's a disconnect where we assume that "officially recognized populated places" are settlements like towns, villages and hamlets or meet the dictionary definitions of "populated" and "place" while government databases use "populated place" to cover many types of places that are not necessarily where people live. For the Cadadian Geographic Names Database, you can see the list of things covered by "populated place" at About the Canadian Geographical Names Database and their definitions here. –dlthewave ☎ 20:43, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think that the Wikipedia standard is using populated place to mean "a geographic place that is populated", not "a place that is listed in a government database as a 'populated place'". I think "populated place" is being used in a crude manner in the government database because the vast majority of the individual places covered by the different "feature types" are indeed populated. I think being listed in that database is sufficient to show something is an official recognized place, but not necessarily that it is a populated place. Katzrockso (talk) 21:51, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Dlthewave first of all, only some of the types of "populated place" in the CGND are likely to be inhabited settlements; I regard the list as a nomenclature of places but not as an indication of inhabitants.

  On this last point, my reading aligns with that of Katz: a second source, preferably a census, should be used to show inhabitation at some point in time (and I'm still proposing a threshold of 10 humans - to pre-empt pointless arguments, not because there is any difference in kind at that magic number). Newimpartial (talk) 22:21, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

• As NSPECIES has been mentioned, I would like to point out that NSPECIES works because there exist generally accepted authorities that maintain databases that explicitly say whether or not a species is valid. If you search such a database for a binomial name, there are three possible outcomes: 1. the name is not found, 2. the name is for an accepted, validly named species, or 3. the name is not accepted because it has been found to not be valid, has been found to be a junior synonym of another name for a species, etc. There is no such system for "legally recognized populated place". Our problem seems to be that there is no consensus on complete definitions of what either "legally recognized" or "populated place" mean. We might be able to develop a list of kinds of official recognition that we would accept as creating a presumption of notability for populated places, but it probably would have to stay open-ended and might get very long. But, I don't see how we can continue to use "officially recognized" without a consensus on what that means. Donald Albury 19:24, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Donald Albury a brief clarification: in some jurisdictions, this is extremely straightforward. In Canada, for example, the list of official names for populated places is maintained within the Canadian Geographical Names Database, and restricting a search to "populated places" is very simple and reliable. Newimpartial (talk) 20:12, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  Assuming that the community finds CGND acceptable for Canada, what is the equivalent for each of the 200-some other countries? Note the issues in a discussion a little while ago, here. Donald Albury 22:39, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  @Donald Albury to answer your question for the example you give: I observe that India (unlike Canada, the United States, or Iran) uses administrative geography directly as census geography. So the official lists of populated places at the village level in India are available at this open data site, effective at the time of India's most recent census.

  Frankly, I'm not sure why the discussion in question got hung up on sourcing, although data.gov.in only works well for me after I VPN to an IP address in India. :). But the legal recognition of the village by the Indian government seems clear, as is its place within the hierarchies of administrative geography in India - as is the authority of the RS that document this. The part of the discussion that I do understand is that editors who think GNG/SIGCOV (or something eerily similar) should apply to all articles can be seen arguing against the well-established community practices that the NGEO guideline reflects.

  Also, I would point out that the notability of individual villages by NGEO doesn't preclude aggregating up to a higher level, as has been done in the Philippines, in Ontario and elsewhere. A GNG or SNG pass never guarantees a separate article, and it is always up to human editors to decide on the best way to handle encyclopaedic content. (I do distrust editors who would say, "include the village in the article on the district" without providing a section-level redirect and the administrative and demographic information from the child article in the parent one - a lapse of WP:PRESERVE that results all too often from discussions about deletion.) Newimpartial (talk) 00:04, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

  Our general rule, which doesn't appear up for debate really, is that populated settlements (hamlets, villages, towns, cities) are notable if they are verifiable, even if they have a very small population. The problem is adopting that definition would likely include a number of places which we have worked to delete, especially with the US Census claiming places are settlements when in reality they were railway junctions or sidings or watering holes or unincorporated subdivisions. I agree one is probably needed, but it would have to be at the country level, which as I've noted previously we've done elsewhere. SportingFlyer T·C 22:22, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  I think I agree with this point, what causes the problems isn't so much the spirit of the rule, but rather that

  1) "legally recognized places" is an imprecise wording with different interpretations and that doesn't account for the vast complexity due to differences in how things are done in different jurisdictions.

  2) There is disagreement over the level of sourcing required to prove that a location is a "Populated, legally recognized places" Giuliotf (talk) 23:06, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  Our general rule (at the top of the page) is "presumed, but not guaranteed, to be notable." there is no "are notable if they are verifiable" anywhere in here (nor could there be without a rewrite of WP:VNOT). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:04, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

  Newimpartial, I agree with your interpretation of the guideline. SportingFlyer T·C 22:26, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

  For Newimpartial's question above: I've put the stats in Wikipedia:Statistics#Quality. The median article has 300–350 words, 13 sentences, four refs (NB not "reliable sources" or "independent sources" or "sources that prove SIGCOV IRS" or anything else: just four entries in the references list, some or all of which could be lousy). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Pings and notifications

@Kingsacrificer, Mangoe, Dlthewave, SportingFlyer, Traumnovelle, Newimpartial, Horse Eye's Back, Davidstewartharvey, Ingratis, Ckfasdf, Alexandermcnabb, Chipmunkdavis, and Rupples: (this is all the participants of the most recent discussion on this talk page, and of the most recent VPP discussion about this) FOARP (talk) 13:29, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Talk pages notified: WP:VPP, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography, Wikipedia talk:Notability, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Iran, Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources, Wikipedia:Tambayan Philippines, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject California, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Poland, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Russia

Where are we now?

So, at this point in the above RFC I think it is worth noting a few things:

• I make it 20 agree !votes versus 17 disagree !votes. That's either weak consensus in favour of the standard not being fit for purpose, or (more likely) no consensus on whether it is fit for purpose or not. For any other major notability standard on EN WP I would expect a WP:SNOW consensus in favour of the standard being fit-for-purpose, but this one does not get that.
• We and our readership deserve better than a standard that hundreds of thousands of articles are based on, but for which there isn't even a recent consensus in favour.
• The 37 !votes cast in this RFC also represent a higher level of community participation than was involved in the original discussions which brought this standard in to force. In the first discussion that was five !votes only, and in a second discussion only 29 support/oppose !votes were cast by my count. No-one can say this wasn't a high-participation discussion.
• I think this provides a decent basis for workshopping further changes to this standard and presenting them eventually in a multi-option RFC similar to WP:NSPORTS2022. Changes were suggested which even a number of those in the disagree camp were in favour of (e.g., national guidelines, "cities, towns, and villages") which would stand a reasonable chance of passing.
• I don't think there's any need for a formal close because I think everyone agrees what the most likely outcome would be (no consensus) though I'm not going to stand in the way of anyone else doing so.

FOARP (talk) 12:22, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

I agree with your points above. However, how we agree on a policy is another thing. As we know Legally recognised just cannot be proven without a complicated table of the legal recognition for each country, which as the discussion states is impossible because of the complex nature within just one country.

Therefore we need to make a decision. Are Cities and Towns notable? Yes they are and most would probably meet GNG anyway. Villages - this is a big issue that seems to be a sticking point. My personal opinion is if a village can be proven to exist by reliable refs then it should exist on Wikipedia. Hamlets - well i think unless they meet GNG they should have pages redirected to the lowest government area page and the data merged there. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 13:57, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

The problem is how you define those? In The UK a town has a market, a village has a church, and a hamlet has neither of those. What about suburbs or subdivisions, housing estates etc., they are not towns, villages, nor hamlets but are considered to be covered by NGEO if they have 'legal recognition'. Traumnovelle (talk) 20:26, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

I can name towns that dont have markets in the UK. The best way is to use multiple sources that show what the status is. Local government areas should be also notable, but wards should need to meet GNG, which is the generally acceptable standard. Housing developments should meet GNG, which is what we do now. Most suburbs were former towns or villages and can easily be covered. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:58, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

>Housing developments should meet GNG, which is what we do now

I have seen housing developments be kept as suburbs based on 'legal recognition' (a census tract). Traumnovelle (talk) 18:49, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Which is why this should be changed! Davidstewartharvey (talk) 10:39, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Which housing development are you referring to? SportingFlyer T·C 18:00, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Northpark, New Zealand

Its a housing deveolpment from the 1990s, is not gazetted (basically any settlement from the 80s and earlier is gazetted), and possesses no form of governance. Traumnovelle (talk) 19:00, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

As you know, I disagree with your take there. SportingFlyer T·C 23:33, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking about definitions and I think we could maybe get some inspiration from Italian Località:

centro abitato – a group of houses with roads, squares or other small gaps between them, and public services or establishments where residents congregate for religious, educational or business purposes or for obtaining provisions

With a few tweaks this could perhaps be a reasonable universal definition for the type of settlement that could be considered notable while excluding things like remote post offices or farmhouses, though getting good sources for what might be a place of business might be tricky Giuliotf (talk) 20:55, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

How would this definition apply to a (permanent) military base with on-base housing? To a monastery? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:31, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I think there are a few things that are important to note here that I personally took from the discussion above:

• Countries do things differently, while it might not be possible to create a table for every country, it might be useful to create some general guidelines for the most common types of cases:
• Countries that have nested divisions going all the way down are quite straight-forward (e.g. Italy is divided into Regions --> Provinces --> Comunes --> Frazioni and Localita, where Comunes generally represent one or a small cluster of settlements). In cases like this we can simply say that that n-level divisions and above are presumed notable, while those n+1-level divisions and below are presumed not notable unless they are shown to pass WP:GNG. These divisions cover the entire territory and subdivisions can be re-directed to the next lowest level division with an article, this way links in articles that list e.g. places where people were born would still work. Obviously different countries do things differently, and the level we would consider notable would vary from country to country, but I'm sure we can come up with a guideline about what level would be presumed to be notable (e.g. the level of subdivision which has its own elected body/mayor, population level or something like that, this would need to be workshopped along with Wikiprojects for different countries to come up with a robust general guideline)
• Countries, like the UK and US where things aren't typically divided based on sensible human geography (e.g. parliamentary constituencies/local council wards in the UK being drawn to ensure a more or less equal number of people living in each one, meaning that recognition is likely to be inconsistent). Dealing with such systems is a mess, and I don't have a good suggestion for who to write a guideline to address all this, other than two say I think have two different general guidelines for these two types of systems seems to be a good middle ground between having just one guideline and having one guideline for every jurisdiction.
• We need to make a guideline about what the minimum sourcing needed to prove that a place exists and that it meets whatever other requirement we set on notability. This needs to be quite detailed because what is good for one country might not be good for others, for example The Burkina Faso census that was used to bulk create articles on villages in Burkina Faso lists population by village, which could be a reasonable barrier to show that these places merit inclusion, whereas the Sao Tome and Principe Census, that has been cited in some articles, lists Localities which don't necessarily appear to match villages seen on a maps e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bom Viver
• Obviously this should only be a workshopping phase and any proposed new guideline would need to go for a vote to the wider community, probably in multiple parts given how long a complex a good guideline is likely to be.

Giuliotf (talk) 18:32, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

One helpful step might be to put a floor under it: If the "populated, legally recognized place" is a place with its own local government, similar to what would be expected from an Incorporated town, then that definitely counts. Places without this (e.g., Neighborhoods of San Francisco, ghost towns, clusters of buildings in a rural area) may or may not count, but places with this always should. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

The issue is just that the different level of authority some countries. Where I live towns do not have their own governance, but historically rural districts of only a dozen people had their own independent government. Traumnovelle (talk) 02:20, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Where you live, what's the lowest level that does have an independent local government for a place with, say, 5,000 people who live inside a few square kilometers? What entity decides, e.g., whether the town park will get a bench for older people vs a playground for children? Who decides whether to put up an extra sign about speeding on a small side street? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Ok so you want to abandon the presumed notable standard entirely? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:01, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, yes, I think this is getting closer to the original intent of legally recognized. It perhaps might not be universally applicable though, but as you suggest, it may provide a base level for settlements that are likely to be notable.

Also, any update to this guideline needs to more clearly distinguish between settlements (or whatever term of art we might choose) and administrative divisions. The former are recognizable and stable population centers while the latter are often arbitrarily defined and named areas (and in many cases, are subject to redefinition following political or administrative whims). To be clear, such administrative divisions often are notable, but under differing criteria than settlements. older ≠ wiser 12:40, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

I agree that we should have a separate rule surrounding settlements and administrative divisions, as I have mentioned this at the previous RFC and at the village pump. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 17:01, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

To be clear, while many cities may also function as administrative divisions, they are primarily and more conventionally recognizable as population centers. older ≠ wiser 13:36, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Is that easy to distinguish at a general guideline level? Our US city articles for example are often administrative divisions rather than distinct population centers. CMD (talk) 13:04, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

While many US cities (such as NYC, for example) cover very large areas and grew by incorporating numerous other population centers, they are nonetheless clearly recognizable as population centers with a distinctive organic history unlike a say a rural township where someone drew some completely arbitrary lines on a map and gave it a name. Are there cities you can name that would not be recognizable as a distinct population center? older ≠ wiser 13:17, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Sure: ghost towns. There are parts of the US plains states that have fewer residents now than they had back in the frontier days (back when only non-Native people were counted). Some small towns have basically dried up and blown away.

@Chipmunkdavis, I think the problem we've always been dealing with is that it really isn't easy to write a description that includes all the variations and makes sense to people who don't know anything about local governance. Imagine trying to write something that covers both the US model of an incorporated city/town/whatever (when I was a young, I once saw a sign on a highway for a "city" with a population of six – but administratively, it really was "a city") and towns in Europe where a different model is used, and towns in the ancient world, where we might struggle to say what "government" even looked like, or to differentiate between a single large farm vs a village. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:29, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Ghost towns (and other sorts of historical settlements) should have separate criteria from currently existing settlements. older ≠ wiser 12:31, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't necessarily disagree that they "should", but the second sentence of NPLACE says they don't currently: "Even abandoned places can be notable, because notability encompasses their entire history." WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:46, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, there's no question many of them could be notable. And likely for many of them there is nothing more to say about them than that they were reported to have existed at one time according to source(s). Getting agreement about notability for current populated places is elusive; I think trying to address abandoned places with the same criteria would unnecessarily complicate things. older ≠ wiser 02:56, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

@Bkonrad I strongly disagree that there should be a difference in notability policy between current and historical settlements, or between current and historical administrative divisions for that matter. Per WP:NOTTEMPORARY, the notability of a topic is not limited based on its current status or the recency of the sources. In some cases, more RS exist for more recent topics so they are more likely to be verifiable in relation to any criteria of notability. However, I don't see that as justification that it should be made "artificially" more difficult to demonstrate the notability of inhabited places that no longer exist, for whatever reason.

For example, I live within convenient day trip distances of the Lost Villages under the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It seems absurd to me that those places would have become of any less encyclipaedic interest because they were evacuated and flooded to create the Seaway.

Also of course, regardless of notability criteria, it is always possible for editors to decide that readers are better served by treating otherwise notable topics at a more aggregate level. That continues to be true for former municipalities and ghost towns.

That said - and I recognize I am not a typical user, but - one of the recurring annoyances I find when consulting Wikipedia occurs when a formerly independent municipality (e.g., a former streetcar suburb) has been merge-redirected into a current-city article without the article containing information about the merged suburb itself. If I am lucky, the current-city article might include the name and amalgamation date of the suburb, without providing the kind of information a standalone article would include (population, governmental structure, office holders, settlement history, etc.). In these cases, a bias that encourages content based on "present-day" human geography against historical geography for articles ends up excluding content that had clear encyclopaedic value (at least to me). It would be a shame for any changes to the guidelines in this area to tilt the field any further in this direction. Newimpartial (talk) 19:28, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

Recent or not we do still need enough sigcov to write an article worth having as a stand alone. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:43, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure that comment helps move the discussion forward as much as it simply reiterates a position. In the RfC and since, it seems clear that editors do not agree on what counts as an article worth having as a stand alone in this area. By contrast, I think there is general agreement that articles need to have reliable sources for the content they contain - disagreement largely concerns a possible minimum threshold of content to be required to retain articles on geography as inhabited by humans. But whether or not to include an explicit bias for present-day vs. historical geography does not say anything I can discern about the required content threshold (or sourcing for same) - it seems more likely to express background assumptions about the comparative "importance" of topics. Newimpartial (talk) 20:04, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

It sounds like the question to ask @Horse Eye's Back is: What does "an article worth having" look like? (NB: I'm asking what the Wikipedia article itself looks like, which is not a question about what the sources look like. For example: Does "an article worth having" contain some minimum number of sentences or facts?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Thats a hard question and why IMO we treat each deletion discussion as separate and exquisite. We want to give editors maximum freedom to make any P+G arguments they desire, up to and including WP:IAR because editors will be faced with effectively infinitely variable contexts. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:17, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

AFD isn't supposed to be about whether the article is worth having (except perhaps in WP:TNTcases). AFD is supposed to ignore the fact that it's an WP:UGLY little article and consider the notability of the topic alone.

But some editors clearly do have a personal idea of what an article worth having is (e.g., that it's not too short, or not too ugly). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Almost but not quite... AfD is about whether an article worth having can be made, not whether the current article is worth having (thats more of a merge/redirect issue, but to be fair that is a common outcome of AfD). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:13, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

What do you think an article worth having looks like? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

The community consenus on this expressed in WP:N, explained in the nutshell "Wikipedia articles cover notable topics—those that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time, and are not outside the scope of Wikipedia. We consider evidence from reliable and independent sources to gauge this attention." and I don't disagree with that in any notable way. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:24, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

You are answering the wrong question.

WP:N is about whether a topic is worth us having an article on it.

I'm asking what you think an article worth having looks like.

For example: New York City is a topic worth having an article on. This is true regardless of whether the article is good, bad, or in between.

But a page that says only "I love New York City, the Big Apple!" is not IMO an article worth having – even though NYC is a notable topic.

Do you understand the distinction between topic and article now? What does an article worth having look like to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:38, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

In general notability terms the topic and article are one and the same. As I said before there is grey area here, we can for example decide that a topic is likely notable but that for now it should not be a stand alone article but a subsection or otherwise in another article with the idea that it later be expanded into one. That is all within our remit. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:57, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

That's just the problem: The topic's worthwhile-ness is determined by notability, but whether the written words on the page ("the article") are worthwhile is not determined by whether the topic is notable. The article's worthwhile-ness is not the same as the topic's worthwhile-ness.

You wrote above that we do still need enough sigcov to write an article worth having. That implies that "writing" is something that affects whether the article (not the topic) is worth having.

Again, consider this example:

• New York City is a topic worth having an article about.
• A page that says only "I love New York City, the Big Apple!" is not an article worth having. (In fact, it is so non-worth-having that it would be subject to several speedy deletion criteria.)

Imagine that the topic is New York City.

Now tell me what an article about New York City would be worth having. Presumably you agree with me that an article with having is not one that says "I love New York City, the Big Apple!", even though that's about an incontestably notable topic. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Notability is never independent of extant sigcov. Beyond that each article's context is unique, which is what I've said a half dozen times now but you just aren't listening... The question you're asking has no single answer, it will be different in every single context which is why we treat each context individually. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:45, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

You didn't write "we do still need enough sigcov to have a notable article". You wrote "we do still need enough sigcov to write an article worth having".

It is not logically possible to know what's "enough sigcov to write an article worth having" if you don't know what "an article worth having" is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

And you are telling me what I mean by that rather than listening to me. I suggest you re-read what I've written (perhaps you will notice that what I wrote was "an article worth having as a stand alone" and you've been taking it out of context), I will not be writting any more for you here. Please consider yourself satisfied. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:33, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

I've given you multiple opportunties to explain what you mean, but you've given me only a tautology: We need enough sigcov to write an article worth having, and an article worth having is one for which we have enough sigcov/notability.

If you mean something else, I invite you again to say what you mean. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

You're consistantly misquoting me, that you insist on cutting as a stand alone from every single context is completely misleading and uncivil. Never do that again, not to me or any other editor. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:40, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't think it makes any difference. The logic is still circular:

• we do still need enough sigcov to write an article worth having as a stand alone.
• How do we know if we can write an article worth having as a stand alone? We have enough sigcov.
• What's enough sigcov? The amount that allows us to write an article worth having as a stand alone.
• How do we know if we are able to write an article worth having as a stand alone? We have enough sigcov. And repeat.

If you have a different answer for one of those steps, then please tell me what it is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:13, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Q: "What's enough sigcov?" A: "It depends on the individual context" Fin. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

How would explain to a new editor what "enough sigcov" is, without making that new editor think that your answer is functionally equivalent to "whatever I feel like at the time" or "nobody knows, so we just make up different answers based on whether WP:ILIKEIT or not"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:25, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

IF this is your stance, I'll go a different direction and say there is no need whatsoever for a GEOLAND SNG. All articles for populated placed must meet GNG. Period. That simplifies things tremendously. older ≠ wiser 22:22, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

Probably not as much as one might hope.

One of the ongoing problems is that editors regularly interpret the GNG's requirements in such a way that they just happen to favor the outcome that the AFD participant intuitively believes is the correct outcome. We each look at the same sources, but come to differing conclusions. Someone will say, e.g., that the US Census is significant coverage in a secondary, independent, reliable source, and that therefore the article must obviously be kept. The next one will say that it's trivial coverage ("just 4-7 numbers"), primary, and non-independent, and that therefore the article must obviously be deleted. The argument doesn't go away; it just shifts to a different form.

For most editors, I think we could reliably predict what their view will be, because what matters the most, most of the time, isn't whether the sources are technically A or B; it's whether the editor believes this is a desirable thing for Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:24, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

A big issue I see is that some folks at AFD utilize the vagueness of WP:GEOLAND to keep any article about a place that may have ever had as many as ten people living there at some point. It is the vagueness of the current guideline that is causing the confusion. With such a vague guideline, it is only to be expected that there will be disagreements about what it means at AfDs (as well as significant variability in the outcomes of the AfD discussions). older ≠ wiser 12:54, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Is there something inherently wrong about having an article about a place that only had 10 people living there, and that wouldn't apply to a place that had, say, 100 people living there?

I don't think the guideline is vague. I think the guideline is clear and that some editors really dislike the results (results in "an article not worth having" – whatever that individual means by "an article worth having"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Is there something inherently wrong about having an article about a place that only had 10 people living there, and that wouldn't apply to a place that had, say, 100 people living there? No, of course not and that's not what I said or even implied. If there is something worth saying about such a place beyond that it existed in such and such a location, then an article may be warranted. But it is ridiculous to think that ANY place that once had ten or more people living there should have a default presumption of notability. older ≠ wiser 20:23, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

It sounds like your idea of "an article worth having" is a populated place about which it is possible to say at least these three things:

• that it existed/it's a populated place,
• that its location is known (might include approximate location), and
• there is "something [else] worth saying" about it.

So 800 words on geography and demographics alone doesn't work for you, but something like "Smallville (population: 42) is a town near Lake Woebegone that is best known as the birthplace of Alice Expert" might work for you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:31, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

When the 800 words on geography and demographics alone are nothing more than boilerplate generated by a bot to give some tabular data the illusion of being substantial, yes that alone is insufficient. As for the hypothetical Smallville, I'd say it depends. If Alice Expert is anyone even close to widespread notability, such an article might be warranted on the likelihood that there might be something more published about the place. But in most cases, I'd likely suggest such an orphan article to be merged into the next level up (and it is not clear-cut). older ≠ wiser 20:46, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't think I agree. Imagine, e.g., that we have five articles for nearby populated places, each containing 800 words on geography and demographics alone [that] are nothing more than boilerplate. I don't agree that one merged article with five sections, now containing 4,000 words on geography and demographics alone [that] are nothing more than boilerplate constitutes an improvement in any way.

Your hope in merging appears to be that if you merge up high enough, then someone will be able to write something that you find interesting or significant, thus transforming the topic from one you (and I) find WP:BORING to one you (and I) find WP:INTERESTING.

Traditionally, notability has treated boring topics the same as interesting ones. The question is "Can we write 300 words?" and not "Can we write 300 words about something 'significant' or 'substantial'?"

(An Wikipedia:Orphan is an article that nothing links into. I think you meant to say Wikipedia:Stub.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:15, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, in the case of the five articles for nearby populated places, If there were agreement to merge and the only actual content to merge was nothing but gussied up tabular data, it would make more sense to present it in tabular form rather than pretending the boilerplate prose actually helps anyone understand it better.

Your hope in merging appears to be that if you merge up high enough, then someone will be able to write something that you find interesting or significant, thus transforming the topic from one you (and I) find WP:BORING to one you (and I) find WP:INTERESTING. I've never said or implied anything like this. Where do you come off making SH*T like that up? Without any indication that there is anything meaningful to write about a place beyond basic data, I would have no such expectation that there is anything to say about it, which is why it might be better to merge such a perma-stub up to the next level. older ≠ wiser 21:23, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

You said above that you want articles only if there is something worth saying about such a place beyond that it existed in such and such a location.

The fact that "it existed in such and such a location" is not worth having an article for it. The fact that people lived there, and the population's demographics can be described is apparently not worth having an article for it.

You complain that demographic data only gives the illusion of being substantial (even when there's a quite lot of it, and "Large in size, quantity, or value; ample; significant" is Wikitionary definition #6 of substantial). You want something beyond those demographic facts. You also talk about the need to have "something worth saying". Of course, what is "worth saying" is subjective and will vary from person to person. Therefore I conclude that you want some facts in the article that you believe are "substantial" and not about demographics; I also conclude that what's "worth saying" in your opinion is something that you will find interesting, and that you don't find demographic facts interesting.

If you believe I've misunderstood you, then maybe you could give me an example of a totally boring little town, in which nothing of importance has ever happened, and for which you believe GEOLAND would correctly support having an article. What is it, beyond the demographic facts, that you think would make the Wikipedia article have "something worth saying"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:07, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Your repeated misrepresentation and distortion of my comments is tiresome. I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve. Once upon a time I thought you were one of the most responsible editors around; now not so much. If the goal is to understand what others are saying in order to reach some mutually agreeable point, this is failing. On the other hand, if the goal is to antagonize those with an opinion differing from yours and inflame an already tortuous discussion, well congratulations.

You've cherry-picked selections of my words without context. I'm not going to bother to rebut point-by-point as that would accept the misleading framing you are trying to set up.

This is all really rather surreal, in that in many cases, I am fine with tiny articles about places so long as they are properly sourced and do not misrepresent the nature of a place (e.g., we should not be mislabeling something as an "unincorporated community" or "hamlet" or "village" when it is just some sort of a named place (like an orchard) that happens to have some people living nearby).

Actually, I do want to respond to one specific misrepresentation you make about my words. It is not that the demographic data itself is not worthwhile, it is more an issue when an article consists of nothing else and lacks context or meaningful connection to anything else.

So do you think an article about a place consisting SOLEY of barely intelligible boilerplate prose about statistical data extracted from a tabular dataset is a worthwhile article? Really? Sheesh. Can you give an example of such a populated place (and in the light of other aspects of this discussion, I would not include administrative divisions)?

I'm not sure what you are asking for in your last paragraph. It sounds mutually exclusive. If there is such a totally boring little town, in which nothing of importance has ever happened and we in fact have no published accounts about this place, why do you think such a place should have an article? older ≠ wiser 13:06, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Why do you say we in fact have no published accounts about this place when we in fact have extensive published accounts about the demographics of this place? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:53, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Your said nothing of importance has ever happened; tabular demographic data that has been transmogrified into paragraphs of prose in no way shape or form constitutes "extensive" coverage of the place. older ≠ wiser 12:07, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

First, even in a place where nothing of importance happens, then we may still have sources. Small town newspapers will catalog the usual details of the budget, mayoral election, the construction of a building, etc., even though it is insignificant to anyone outside the town and even most of the people within it.

Second, I think that the US Census does constitute "extensive" coverage of a place. That's a lot of numbers and words each time, and it's been repeated every ten years for more than two centuries. One census report is a lot more coverage than a magazine article saying "best known as Alice Expert's birthplace". WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:38, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

As I indicated, if there are sources with accounts of the place, then I have no issue with an having article (there might still be room to discuss whether an upmerge is warranted, but that would by case-by-case. I do not agree in the slightest that census data constitutes extensive coverage. It is a lot of numbers, yes, but without context they are pretty much meaningless factoids. Of course, if a secondary source (or even the census itself) publishes an analysis that examines and summarizes data for a place (beyond merely re-iterating the data), that would be significant. older ≠ wiser 12:22, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

What is the difference between "a lot of coverage" and "extensive coverage"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:15, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

I dunno. Why do you ask? It is not a distinction I recall having made previously. older ≠ wiser 14:16, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

I think they're the same, but you seem to say that that the US Census includes a lot of coverage but isn't extensive coverage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:18, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

I wish you would stop making stuff up and attributing it to me. There is a lot of data (factoids) produced by the census, but in isolation is not very meaningful. Again, seeing a how the same information is available for census tracts and other areas, if there are two places that have no other published accounts about them other than census data, can you explain why one type should have an article and not the other? older ≠ wiser 17:25, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't think I'm making stuff up. I think I'm trying to make sense of you saying on the one hand that the US Census contains an extensive amount of information about each town and yet doesn't constitute extensive coverage of each town.

Yes, I think there is a reason for why one type has an article and the other doesn't, and you'll find it in the lead of WP:N: Editors don't choose to have it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:43, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't see this. You seem to be claiming that census data, taken in isolation without any other supporting information, is sufficient to establish notability. But if that very same census data exists for any number of divisions, why is one type notable and not the others? older ≠ wiser 17:58, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

As I said, you should be able to "see this" in the lead of Wikipedia:Notability. Look for the sentence that begins "Editors may use their discretion..." The reason that one type qualifies for a separate, stand-alone article ("notable") and the others don't is because editors have "use[d] their discretion" to decide what we want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:03, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

This is remarkably unhelpful in a discussion about standards for notability. On the one hand, you seem to suggest that all that is needed for a place to be notable is a citation to census data. And yet you fall back on editor discretion when asked to clarify precisely how such a standard could be applied. Once again, how is census data alone sufficient to establish notability for a place? older ≠ wiser 14:00, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

Because populated places are notable because people live there, not because of sourcing requirements. Therefore, the measure for notability is verification, similar to NPROF, as opposed to being covered by secondary sources. Being listed in a census is usually prima facie evidence that a place is populated. SportingFlyer T·C 18:38, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

So does that mean that any place that is listed in a census is therefore notable? If it is not based solely on the existence of census data for a place, then what is the distinguishing criteria? older ≠ wiser 19:13, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

To your first question, merely being listed in a census does not make a place notable. The USA is a perfect example of this, as the US census sometimes designates its own places. However in a country where the census is a one-to-one match for populated places, being listed in the census should be enough to verify the article as a populated place.

This is why we currently have "legally populated" - it's intentionally a permissive guideline, but not so permissive that anything that could ever be a populated place qualifies. SportingFlyer T·C 23:03, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

@SportingFlyer, I think you mean "Populated, legally recognized". Illegal settlements can sometimes be notable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:18, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I meant "legally recognized." I was tired. SportingFlyer T·C 08:12, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

What census is there for a large modern country that has a one-to-one match for populated places (and what does that even mean)? And what is the distinction that enables editors to distinguish between what is or is not permitted under this guideline? older ≠ wiser 13:17, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

I would wager almost all of Europe just as a starting point. I've just looked at Slovenia's and doing some spot checking, it is essentially a list of every settlement in the country. SportingFlyer T·C 18:19, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

What exactly are you looking at (and even then it's not even clear what you mean). I would be astonished if the census of any sizeable nation did not make results available at various levels of granularity. older ≠ wiser 18:51, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

The table Population by sex and by age, municipalities and settlements, Slovenia, annually at [23] seems to be a list of every settlement in Slovenia. SportingFlyer T·C 19:15, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

The UK do it by parish or wards in larger areas. But they are not legally recognised places. The UK government does not recognise the census as legally recognised. In fact, try and find what is legally recognised settlements in the UK, other than Cities, or towns that have legislation in place for their establishment (or market), you will not find any legally recognised phrase anywhere else. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 19:45, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's a problem, though. I'm looking at some very small places in the UK right now, say Hillesden, and it's a civil parish, which should have some legal authority to exercise jurisdiction over an area. If a place is unparished, unparished places are still comprehensively covered.

Plus, the Slovenian example is not intended to prove we can use the census as proof of population for all countries at all times. SportingFlyer T·C 22:42, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

What census is there for a large modern country that has a one-to-one match for populated places? sounds a bit like asking "What census is there for a large modern country that deliberately omits all of its rural residents?"

A properly performed census will contain information about people who don't live in cities/towns/villages. But most of them do make it possible to answer questions like "How many people live in Margate per se?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:55, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I wasn't entirely sure what was meant by one-to-one match for populated places. It appears to be a claim that the census delineates each and every populated place in a county. Perhaps I guess shouldn't be too surprised that this may be true for some countries. I'm not sure why you think that is comparable to asking "What census is there for a large modern country that deliberately omits all of its rural residents?" That is certainly not the case with US Census, although such residents may be summarized within relatively large divisions rather than in specific named localities. older ≠ wiser 22:15, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Here is the only functional definition of 'notability': If editors agree to have a separate, stand-alone article about this subject, then it's notable. If they don't, it's not.

For the most part, we want sources that make us believe that we will be able to write a few hundred words and comply with the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view and Wikipedia:Verifiability policies. However, in some cases, even that minimal standard is set aside. For example, NPROF doesn't care about NPOV (there is no other subject for which we'd accept a press release from a BLP's employer as the sole source), and NSPECIES technically doesn't care if it's possible to write more than a single fact (namely, which genus the species is in).

But no matter which standard is used, notable == editors agree to having an article.

So I am telling you, that even if the standard drives you nuts, the fact is that all subjects are notable if and only if editors agree to have an article about them, and that for this subject, editors have agreed to have articles about cities/towns/villages in the US Census (therefore these subjects are notable) and not to have articles about census tracts (therefore these subjects are non-notable).

I realize that this standard is uncomfortable for people who want everything to proceed in a highly systematizing and logical fashion, but this is the reality: Editors chose all of the notability standards, and the overall standard they chose is in the very first sentence of WP:N: editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article (emphasis added). That you think the standard they chose for NGEO is "unhelpful" is unfortunate for you, but mostly irrelevant. Editors decided that census data alone is sufficient to make a city/town/village notable, and that exactly the same kind of census data is insufficient for a census tract that isn't a city/town/village. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:15, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

This is precisely why there are repeated, extended, discussions for this supposed (non-)guideline (in that it provides no meaningful assistance for determining what is or is not notable). And if it is a matter of discretion, then surely we would do better to have nothing at all. Instead of knee-jerk appeals to WP:NGEO as a reason to keep an article about a place the discussions should focus on the qualities/attributes for each place that make it notable. older ≠ wiser 20:24, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't think that's true. I think there are repeated discussions about this guideline because some editors disagree with this guideline, rather than because they don't understand what the guideline says.

We could provide a very significant level of clarity, but this wouldn't change the fact that some editors won't like it. For example, we could write into this guideline something like this:

• The US Census is a completely sufficient source to justify the creation of an article about any place identified in it as a city, town, village, or similar human settlement, even if it is the only source known to exist in the entire world about that populated place and even if it is now a ghost town. There are no exceptions to this rule: Every single past or present city, town, village, or similar human settlement in the US is absolutely notable and must have a separate, standalone article about it, even if the only possible contents are boilerplate text describing the census data.
• Census tracts for rural areas smaller than a county (defined here as the first-level administrative subdivision of the state that contains it and explicitly including Louisiana's parishes) that are reported in the US Census and that have never been identified in the census as being a city, town, village, or similar human settlement, or part of a city, town, village, or similar human settlement, are non-notable. Articles must never be created about them, no matter what other sources may be found for them. These must be merged up to the county or parish that contains them, or, if the area extends across a county border, to a regional article such as East Tennessee or Northern California.

It would be clear, but I suspect that you still wouldn't like it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:09, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

No, I think you misunderstand where I'm coming from (again). In its present state, this supposed guideline says nothing that is objectively useful in discussions about the notability of a place. Essentially what is left is a vague generalization of WP:5P1 that might as well say that Wikipedia does function as a gazetteer and that any populated place (as well natural features) should be catalogued. What some interpret it to mean is that any place where as few as ten people may have lived for a time as recorded in a census is notable (without paying much attention to whatever descriptive attributes might be present in the census data). older ≠ wiser 21:31, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

What's your problem with "as few as ten people"? The guideline says zero people is acceptable, so why do you think "as few as ten" is worse than the explicitly authorized zero people? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

I have no problem at all with having articles on places with few or even zero people provided there are sources that provide context. The issue I have is with articles that have no sourcing, no context, and no indications of any significance other than some numbers extracted from a census dataset. older ≠ wiser 13:22, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Maybe we have different ideas about what "context" means. "Smallville is in Ruritania" is context (the context of place). "Smallville had a population of 12 in 1900 and a population of 42 in 1950 and a population of 220 in 2000" is context (the context of time).

The US Census is "sourcing". Saying where a town is located is "context". Populated places are not required to have "significance". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:29, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

@Bkonrad as someone who proposed "10 people" as a rule of thumb in a prior discussion, I should point out that my proposed clarification of the guideline would be (1) a place has been verifiably recognized by the government of jurisdiction as a "populated place" (usually verified in an official gazetteer, except for jurisdictions like the US where appropriate sources do not exist), and (2) the place has also been verified as having a minimum of 10 inhabitants at some point in time - this would usually be a census, but other WP:RS independent of the subject could also work. Those two, taken together, would trigger the presumption of notability. Newimpartial (talk) 22:20, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

What I (and I think some others) struggle to understand is how (or perhaps whether it is even possible) to determine what legally recognized means in a global context. I feel very strongly that encoding a numerical threshold into the guideline is a mistake. Also, I don't see why you say things like except for jurisdictions like the US where appropriate sources do not exist. Why do you say that? There is more high quality information available about places in the US than many other nations -- the issue with GNIS is that people make erroneous assumptions about what the categories represent and misuse that. The same sort of misuse has happened with other nations as well. older ≠ wiser 13:32, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

@Bkonrad: Could you elaborate on how GNIS is misused and how it could be used properly? This might be good information to add to a future guideline. –dlthewave ☎ 17:39, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

It's discussed in some details at Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data. Not all the places described as "populated places" would match what we might expect for such a place. I don't have much to add beyond that. older ≠ wiser 17:47, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Break

And besides, the same set of "extensive" numbers and words are available for census tracts and other sorts of unnotable divisions. What is it that make some of them notable and not the others? older ≠ wiser 12:36, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

we should not be mislabeling something as an "unincorporated community" or "hamlet" or "village" when it is just some sort of a named place (like an orchard) that happens to have some people living nearby)

How do you tell when something is "just some sort of named place" vs a true "hamlet" or village or unincorporated community? Katzrockso (talk) 05:53, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

First place to check is the official definitions applicable for the area; second would be how it is described in reliable sources. older ≠ wiser 12:09, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

@Bkonrad the problem with deciding that "all settlements and municipalities have to meet GNG" would be the following (perhaps unintended) results:

• some dubiously-existing places (or places designated by something that is neither their official nor most common name) would be deemed to merit an article
• some actually-existing places (officially recognized by the relevant government, with administrative or representative functions) would not be deemed to merit an article
• for some countries, no sub-national geographies might consistently "merit" articles

I believe most editors, since early in the history of enwiki, have seen such outcomes as undesirable from the standpoint of an encyclopaedia. Newimpartial (talk) 14:56, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

First, rather than defaulting to GNG, I would much prefer to have a guideline that is not so hopelessly vague and imprecise as what we have now. How does having a vague guideline with diverse interpretations and variable outcomes at AfD avoid these (which are essentially nothing more than largely baseless slippery slope arguments)? The first point is nonsense and would certainly be no more of a problem than already exists with many articles about places based on OR and misunderstandings of the "official" sources. The second point is also without merit as any such place would have sufficient sources to easily pass GNG. older ≠ wiser 15:14, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

>some dubiously-existing places (or places designated by something that is neither their official nor most common name) would be deemed to merit an article

Are you saying hoaxes/not real 'places' would have articles? Because thats what we already have with the current system and I fail to see how GNG would make that more likely. Traumnovelle (talk) 19:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Traumnovelle To answer your question, I am saying that travelogues are not as good - as sources about what places exist, and what they are called - as official government lists, etc. And yes, I am saying that imposing GNG - which privileges published, independent prose sources, like travelogues - is more likely to lead to the inclusion of places that only exist as inhabited places in the mind of the travel writer, or perhaps in the minds of the marketing people who are their (uncredited) sources. So yes, I am saying that it would be easier to create such articles under GNG than NGEO. Newimpartial (talk) 19:47, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Inclusion of housing developments and such already happens with NGEO being cited as a reason to keep them because they may appear in a government document as a one-word mention. As for publications that are clearly promotional, I wouldn't consider them reliable sources, although I have seen people consider tripadvisor a reliable source... Traumnovelle (talk) 19:51, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Traumnovelle I am really more concerned about hotel complexes and touristic "districts" than I am about housing developments, since authors are more likely to use the former in travelogue prose, and these published sources are likely to be independent (if credulous). I simply do not trust travel writers to know what the places they discuss are "really" called, but the GNG would favor such prose treatments over official government sources in determining what "places" merit articles. (I am also concerned about the scenarios of places that "really do" exist, but where e.g. one demonstrably populated village has received extended prose treatment by an RS tourist or two, and the rest have not. I don't think the encyclopaedia benefits from keeping the one at AfD and deleting the rest, which is the obvious outcome according to GNG.) Newimpartial (talk) 20:17, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Newimpartial Questions: Do you think hotel complexes and touristic "districts" are currently acceptable under the GEOLAND standard? If you do, then why are you opposed to clarifying the guideline? If not, then these should already be covered by GNG. I'm not aware that there is any significant issue with editors creating articles on such areas under the aegis of GEOLAND. older ≠ wiser 20:54, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Bkonrad To answer your first question: no, I don't, because the kinds of places I'm talking about are not official "populated places" and therefore not notable under GEOLAND. NGEO currently slants the playing field in favor of official recognition and documented population, so these sorts of issues tend not to occur.

And to be clear, I do not oppose the clarification of GEOLAND - indeed, I have already proposed both source requirements and a population threshold. Rather, I oppose changes to NGEO that would subject populated places to GNG/SIGCOV.

But on your last point: sure, editors can already try to create new articles based on a couple of travelogues, without pretending to NGEO notability. However: (1) they generally lack the incentive to do so, since articles on "real" places typically already exist where they can place the relevant content, and (2) when such an article is created, so long as GEOLAND exists, the most likely outcome of any discussion of it is a merger into the "real", official populated place to which it belongs. That is the way most SNGs work, even when they are not expressly restrictive of GNG notability: articles that fit the SNG are created and kept, while ones that don't face a higher "burden of proof" at AfD.

In the absence of NGEO, however, the logic behind both (1) and (2) would no longer apply. So I believe that these are the kinds of places that would be found notable at AfD if the GNG were the sole basis of notability for inhabited human geography. And this and related forms of article incoherence would be a gradually snowballing problem, as they often are in areas without an SNG or an active wikiproject that establishes clear norms for inclusion and treatment of topics in a domain. Newimpartial (talk) 21:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Do you have some evidence that these would be kept under GNG or is this just a wild fantasy? older ≠ wiser 21:27, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Bkonrad GNG is generally understood to be met when multiple, published sources offer independent coverage of a topic. I have watched enough AfDs to know that many editors treat the number of RS words published on a topic in such sources to be the best indicator of WP:SIGCOV, and therefore a topic meriting an article under GNG. So no, I wouldn't call it a wild fantasy. Newimpartial (talk) 22:39, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Close but not exactly, there is actually more or less a number of words metric built in when considering whether something counts as SIGCOV... "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." but you appear to be under the impression that trivial mentions alone can meet sigcov. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:49, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back Just as a quick clarification: I suspect that I disagree with you about what a "trivial mention" is. So in another domain, "X won the Nobel prize in Economics" in an independent source is never a trivial mention for me, because it is encyclopedic content. I feel the same way about "Z is a recognized species of caterpillar" when found in an authoritative nomenclature database.

Now, an editor could reply to this with, "yes, but these are areas where the claim to notability isn't based on GNG". Formally I agree with that, and I understand WP:SIGCOV as a test that only applies within the GNG framework.

However, I also believe that our "notability ecosystem" would work better if editors were to treat reliably-sourced, credible claims to encyclopaedic significance as SIGCOV within GNG as well - because they are paradigmatic encyclopedic content - and not subject them to a "minimum length requirement", whether explicitly asserted or merely implied. Newimpartial (talk) 17:51, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Then perhaps you are just confused? You can have a trivial mention of non-trivial encyclopedic info which is what is happening there. But if there is no non-trivial mention somewhere then it isn't encyclopedic info. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:59, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

I think I know where Newimpartial is coming from, and I have seen been used at several AFDs in the past. One piece of significant cov is the rule. However is there are 1000 minor pieces of coverage showing a wide notability of said article, editors have argued that how does 1 piece outlay 1000? Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:10, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Three pieces of sigcov is generally the rule, not one. I also don't think thats what Newimpartial is arguing, that would make what they said make less sense not more sense. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:21, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back to answer your question: no, I don't think I'm confused; I think I disagree with you. I hold with the interpretation of notability - which is as old as the concept - that says that reliably-sourced "real-world significance", i. e. encyclopaedic info, counts more towards meriting an article than an extended RS treatment of actual trivia about a subject. This view is partly reflected in the way passing mentions are defined in the guideline, is reflected in many AfD !votes (and the retention of articles), and is incorporated wholesale in most SNGs in some form or another.

Of course, there is a competing view that emphasizes the length of prose treatment instead, when defining SIGCOV. In my view one of the main practival benefits of GEOLAND is to define a class of topics on which such bickering can be avoided. Newimpartial (talk) 18:34, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

So you don't think there can be a trivial mention of a non-trivial thing or you do? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:25, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back To try to answer your question: if the best source available mentions a "non-trivial thing" about a topic in passing, I understand that to grant notability to that topic in a way that an equally short mentions of a trivial thing (something unrelated to the topic's credible claim to significance) would not. For a biographical subject, for example, a mention in the NYT of their Nobel prize in Economics would grant notability to a greater extent than if the NYT offered a mention of equal length about the same person playing the role of Santa Claus at a Christmas party.

Of course, a longer discission of the Nobel is worth *more* notability, but the role this brief mention would more often play is that more specialized reports (potentially less independent of the subject) give more detail, while the NYT grants a bare mention. My interpretation of this scenario is that some notability is granted by the NYT report and some by the longer but more "niche" report, the combination generally ensuring that the subject merits a separate article - particularly among a class of articles, like Nobel prize winners, who are almost always treated in standalone articles. Newimpartial (talk) 21:47, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

If there is nothing beyond a trivial mention how do you establish that the information is encyclopedic content? If the only coverage that winning a nobel prize got was a single line in the NYT then winning a Nobel wouldn't be encyclopedic content. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:45, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back Here again I disagree. The English wikipedia community - in line with the community of English-speakers from which it is drawn - recognizes certain claims to significance as valid even when little might be written about those topics, especially in secondary sources. Nobel prize winners are an example of this, as are senior academics, eukaryotic species, and "official" populated places. To answer your question directly: we know such topics are notable because the topic verifiably fits in a category that the community has already decided is notable, whether or not the specific example has been written about in a way that satisfies GNG-defined-by-word-count. In these domains, editors can establish that a topic is notable because it meets the criteria for inclusion, criteria that enwiki recognizes as a clear claim to encyclopaedic relevance.

Now, if it were the case that no RS were available about these topics beyond their mere existence, then it might be reasonable to aggregate up, e.g., into "List of Nobel prize winners in Economics" or "List of obscure mollusks". However, additional information is generally available, either in database form (which some editors turn up their noses at for notability even though they may be quality, independent RS), or in suboptimal prose sources (like ABOUTSELF publications, biographies published by employers or colleagues, etc.). So, generally speaking, recognizing notability based on verifiably meeting domain-specific criteria allows us to have articles with enough prose to satisfy a range of editors' aesthetics, even though in many cases (e.g., academics) the sources used for that prose would often not satisfy GNG SIGCOV, strictly construed. Newimpartial (talk) 23:18, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

"The English wikipedia community - in line with the community of English-speakers from which it is drawn - recognizes certain claims to significance as valid even when little might be written about those topics, especially in secondary sources." no it doesn't... All of those examples draw their significance from being the subject of WP:RS and in all of those cases a lack of sigcov would be valid deletion criteria. There is no claim to notability separate from sigcov, when we presume those topics are notable its because we presume that sigcov exists even if we can not immediately identify it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:46, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back you say in all of those cases a lack of sigcov would be valid deletion criteria, but the 2024 consensus on WP:NSPECIES, and the strong, repeatedly expressed consensus behind WP:NPROF, say the opposite. And as I have pointed put before, WP:SIGCOV is a test that is specific to the GNG, and is not a universal touchstone for notability.

You can say as often as you want that a mollusc isn't notable unless prose is written about it, or that an academic isn't notable unless secondary sources offer biographical information about them - but the enwiki community simply doesn't agree with either of those claims. Aside from a few curmudgeons, there is simply no actual support for the universalist view that a certain level of independent, secondary RS text is required to support all articles. And you seem to imply here that presumptive notability is an assumption that SIGCOV must exist somehere - but that isn't generally true in the WP:N framework no matter how often you insist on it. That type of rebuttable presumption applies since 2017 to athletes, and almost nowhere else on enwiki. Newimpartial (talk) 00:05, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

"topics which pass an SNG are presumed to merit an article, though articles which pass an SNG or the GNG may still be deleted or merged into another article, especially if adequate sourcing or significant coverage cannot be found, or if the topic is not suitable for an encyclopedia." you are wrong to claim that SIGCOV is only within GNG. You understand that for something to be recognized as a species it has to be the subject of prose right? A mollusk that isn't the subject of prose would not meet the standard because it wouldn't be a recognized species, so you're wrong all the way around. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:22, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back As we have discussed elsewhere on this page, the SIGCOV test is specific to GNG. The notion of "significant coverage" is not specific to GNG or to that test, and WP:SNG is fairly clear on that point when it says that SNGs may specify types of coverage considered significant for the purposes of determining notability (emphasis added) and that others, for example, the SNG for academics and professors and the SNG for geographic features operate according to principles that differ from the GNG. It is most certainly not saying that articles subject to SNGs are subject to deletion unless they meet SIGCOV, particularly since topics that meet SIGCOV can still be deleted for lack of notability, according to the passage you already quoted.

As far as the poor molluscs go, I mean, nomenclature databases contain words and therefore in some sense prose (they ain't generally poetry), but as a minority pointed out during the adoption of the NSPECIES SNG, the prose in any or all nomenclature databases would typically not satisfy GNG, and the more detailed descriptions to which the databases link are typically not secondary and therefore don't contribute to SIGCOV. The supermajority accepted that this was the case but did not take it as a valid objection to the guideline. So I don't think I'm off in my interpretation of this example. Newimpartial (talk) 01:44, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Under the model in which SIGCOV = amount of potentially useable information, primary sources can contain SIGCOV. They just don't count towards GNG despite having SIGCOV. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:20, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

It sounds like we have a few open questions about the GNG that could potentially be addressed at Wikipedia talk:Notability. These include:

1. What does the word "significant" in SIGCOV mean? Does it refer to a source claiming the subject is significant (e.g., "Alice Expert is the world's foremost expert on the size of the Sun"), or about the volume (e.g., "Here are 42 facts you didn't know about Alice Expert")?
2. Are databases appropriate sources under the GNG (ever, usually, sometimes)?
3. Under the GNG, do sources that do not contain prose (or contain very little) contribute towards notability?
4. If a topic definitely does not meet the GNG (e.g., no SIGCOV sources), but it does meet SNGs, is it still okay to have a separate article?

The ones for this SNG somewhat overlap:

1. Does a place need to meet the GNG, to qualify for a separate article under NGEO?
2. Is it worth having a separate article on a place if the only information demographic and geographic information taken from the US Census (or a similarly detailed and reputable source), and we believe that is likely to continue being true for the foreseeable future?

Does that sound like the right set of questions to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:41, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing personally, I'm wedded to SIGCOV being the test, so I'd look for a different way to ask what "significant" means in different sections of WP:N rather than your first Q1. And I'd ask your Q4 in relation to specific examples, like NSPECIES and NPROF, rather than in the abstract. And for your second Q1, I think it's important to distinguish between the "populated places" domain (which has basically set aside GNG) and the named features and built structures (which have mostly deferred to GNG). I'm also not sure how many questions on WP:N editors could productively answer at once.

But your taxonomy of issues looks solid to me. Newimpartial (talk) 05:16, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

I think that one question at a time is usually the right answer.

The word significant appears 20 times in WP:N. It's possible that some of the seven that are not about "significant coverage" could be helpfully re-worded. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:27, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I suspect some of the "significant coverage" ones might also be reworded, to help distinguish the GNG test from the overall principle (that coverage matters to notability). Newimpartial (talk) 05:30, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

I also think that SIGCOV is a key factor (second IMO only to independence), but I see two different opinions here about what that means:

• SIGCOV means coverage that is significant in volume ("a significant amount of coverage")
• SIGCOV means coverage that indicates significance ("coverage of the fact that the subject is significant")

These are not interchangeable. I suspect that SIGCOV is meant to be the first, and that we don't actually have anything written down about the second. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:12, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

I have interpreted SIGCOV in the first sense and SNGs provide a way for a topic to be notable despite not having SIGCOV in SIRS that is "significant in volume" Katzrockso (talk) 03:35, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

NPROF doesn't even require "SIRS" (secondary independent reliable sources). NPROF is perfectly fine with only having sources that are primary and non-independent. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

Yes, precisely what I meant to convey. I think other editors in this discussion have conveyed the belief that the notability guidelines state that something may pass a SNG, but still not be fit for an article due to lacking SIGCOV, based on this quote topics which pass an SNG are presumed to merit an article, though articles which pass an SNG or the GNG may still be deleted or merged into another article, especially if adequate sourcing or significant coverage cannot be found, or if the topic is not suitable for an encyclopedia. Katzrockso (talk) 05:52, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

WP:SNG was created in May 2020 and that line was added in February 2021. I don't see anyone at the RFC commenting on the 'significant coverage' wording, and I don't think it should be interpreted as evidence that SIGCOV is actually required – it might be a factor, but it also might not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:20, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

It looks like that line comes from this February 2021 RfC. I'll have to figure out who wrote that and see if we can glean their intention in proposing that relevant section. Katzrockso (talk) 06:40, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

It appears that RfC was written by Barkeep49 in this edit [24], based on this discussion. Katzrockso (talk) 06:50, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

@Davidstewartharvey, Traumnovelle, Giuliotf, WhatamIdoing, Chipmunkdavis, Bkonrad, and Horse Eye's Back: - I've set up a page here for people to put forward proposals. We've had a lot of debate about this and I think it would be a lot more helpful just to put the proposals down on (electronic) paper so that people can see what they look like. FOARP (talk) 18:44, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

It's unclear how you want that page to be handled. For example, in Proposal 1, you write about "non-trivial coverage by their name", but what does that mean? Someone will probably say that if the place goes by multiple names, then only the one in the article title can be used to prove SIGCOV IRS TLABBQ. You wrote that "sources must be provided", which contradicts WP:NEXIST and the multiple RFCs that have tried and failed to get a requirement for at least one source to be cited in each article (usually for overreach. Maybe in 2026, someone will try an RFC on "In principle, every article should cite at least one source" and then do the novel thing of not sabotaging the proposal by adding some other, more controversial pet rule). Do you want us to discuss those problems, fix those problems, or just vote against Proposal 1 because of those problems? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:35, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I want people to write down what their proposed change is in a proposal. The vote-section is just a place-holder. If you have a criticism of another person’s proposal write it in the discussion section under their proposal.

PS- to state the obvious, Proposal 1 is not my proposal. FOARP (talk) 06:28, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

The change that I think would be helpful is a separate page called WP:Populated, legally recognized place, so that people who can't glork the meaning from context and the community's practice can go read a long explanation of what these words mean, why we expect editors to use discretion instead of applying simplistic, bot-like rules, and that if you're personally not sure whether a given place is a populated, legally recognized place, you should not send it to AFD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:53, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't understand why we are trying to change the standard itself; why not just hold some RfC to PAGEDECIDE whatever settlements are poisoning Wikipedia with their stubiness into a larger level of geographic organization. Katzrockso (talk) 07:51, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

"BAD RFC: this is clearly against the GEOLAND standard.". FOARP (talk) 12:05, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Anyone saying that would be wrong on the merits. Katzrockso (talk) 14:07, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Let me introduce you to every effort to do anything about this subject-area on WP, ever, including the above discussion. FOARP (talk) 10:07, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

The above discussion seems to be composed of editors who astutely recognize that the problems are not with "legally recognized populated place", but with how editors are interpreting that standard. That calls for clarification (perhaps explanatory essays like @WhatamIdoing said), not abandonment. I don't see any editors in this discussion who have made an argument that is "wrong on the merits" Katzrockso (talk) 20:24, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

Alternatively, we could think about a policy proposal that says there is no minimum length for articles, and that "it's a stub, and I hate short articles" is never grounds for deletion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

But it is often grounds for not covering a topic as a stand-alone page, in general we hold that its better to have one start than two stubs. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:38, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't think that's true. Some of us (including me) hold that it's better to have one article with 400 words than two articles with 200 words, but I've heard from other editors that the opposite is true, especially for mobile readers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:27, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

There are always exceptions, and the complaints I've heard from mobile readers start well above 200 words in size but that is a legitimate concern for many especially on legacy devices. Always going to come down to context which is why we use individual consenus for this sort of thing. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:20, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Sure, I agree with that. But the motivation for this entire quest to change the standard seems to arise from a dislike of stubs that don't have tons of information, like the barangay articles commonly mentioned. That would be much more easily solved by going through and RfC to PAGEDECIDE the barangay-like articles for other countries to a higher level of geographic organization.

I think your policy proposal would be a good idea though, since people seem to misunderstand the WP:Deletion policy. Katzrockso (talk) 23:08, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Looking at pages such as Alabang and Tatalon, which are about 100 words long plus huge infoboxes, I'm not sure that the community would recommend merging them (mostly because of the huge infoboxes). I would expect the one-sentence Tugatog (not counting the infobox's contents), on the other hand, to result in some eye rolling and noises of disgust. Is this a WP:NOEFFORT complaint? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

No, I don't suggest that those perfectly reasonable stub-size articles should be merged as I agree that wouldn't improve the encyclopedia and I'm not invoking any lack of improvement to these articles, I'm sure most geostubs could be greatly expanded with proper sourcing/research and that is no reason to delete them. For example, I recently created Sweet Sulphur Springs, whose previous name White Sulphur Springs, Indiana is currently at AfD because of some conflation by the GNIS. Katzrockso (talk) 00:19, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

You aren't, but I wonder whether other editors (e.g., AFD noms) might be. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:03, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

I think that content is more important than article length. White Sulphur Springs tells us practically nothing about the place other than the fact that it had a post office; even the source that mentions mineral springs in the area doesn't talk about any sort of community. We could add a few paragraphs about nearby natural features, what school district is in, climate, etc but we'd still be at AFD trying to figure out what this place actually 'is' because the article doesn't tell us. On the other hand, the lede of Sweet Sulphur Springs would be an acceptable stub even though it's just a few sentences. It tells us that it was a health resort, years operated, key people and dates as well as it's fate. This sort of information should be the bare minimum for an article. Regardless of where we want to draw the line for notability, we shouldn't have articles sources only to databases and post office records that don't give a clear description of what it actually was. –dlthewave ☎ 15:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

That's because White Sulphur Springs is based on the conflation of several different things: the hotel/springs area, which was named "White Sulphur Springs" and a nearby community Fidelity. They are not the same thing, the GNIS conflated the two. I am not defending the state of that article at all, let me be clear. But there are real places involved here, which is what happened with 99% of the GNIS entries in my experience. Katzrockso (talk) 04:24, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Re various comments about how the current standard is misinterpreted: if that's happening often, then it's a bad standard. Either that, or people who can't interpret it properly have to be banned from these discussions, which isn't ever going to happen. Mangoe (talk) 03:23, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Mangoe I certainly agree that everyone who has said "Brian is sleeping in my kitchen tonight; can I haz article" - or any cognate thereof - should be banned from these discussions. Newimpartial (talk) 20:09, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

The thing is, I don't think it is mis-interpreted often at AfD. SportingFlyer T·C 18:09, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

I agree; I think there are scarcely any examples of the wrong decision being made at AfD with regards to geographic locations. Katzrockso (talk) 23:32, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

GEOLAND Workshop

Did post this above but just so people can see it a bit more easily: Wikipedia talk:Notability (geographic features)/workshop. FOARP (talk) 12:03, 17 November 2025 (UTC)