Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Banstali

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Daniel (talk) 22:27, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Banstali

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Non-notable location Hyperwave11 (talk) 10:58, 13 March 2021 (UTC) It does not meet notability guidelines, as no relevant sources can be found citing its notability, instead just results for plane tickets and weather.[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Bangladesh-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 11:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 11:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Fails WP:V. It would nice to know this supposed settlement's name in the Bengali language....anyone?----Pontificalibus 11:19, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete? I agree with Pontificialbus, couldn't find any sources about the subject but maybe something its the native name could help. - 𓋹 𝓩𝓲𝓪𝓭 𝓡𝓪𝓼𝓱𝓪𝓭 𓋹 [user | talk] 16:24, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Fails WP:V. I get a pretty bad sinking feeling reading this because I get the impression this may have been a common issue with this editor's mass-created articles, and they're the most prolific article-creator on Wiki. I've added a health-warning to that particular rankings list as I think some editors were just mass-creating stubs in order to rank higher on it. FOARP (talk) 13:48, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Also: note the use of an absolutely massive infobox template with lots of fields (only a few of which are filled in) to make this 15-words-of-prose article more than 5kb in size. I mean, I WP:AGF but this looks like trying to make a micro-stub look bigger than it really is. FOARP (talk) 19:14, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I cant find any citation or verification source to know it is a real place.Shahram 18:41, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I think we've got another case of someone producing cookie-cutter location micro-stubs in order to bulk out their article-creation stats here. I just searched "is a village in Chandpur district in the Chittagong division" and got 66 hits, all of them sourced only to GeoNames (an unreliable source), all of them by Encyclopaedus, all created in the same stub-creation session in July 2008. All except three of them 25-29 words in length according to the search stats. Every one of these 63 articles is a WP:V fail at present since they simply say "X is a village in Chandpur district in the Chittagong division" with no information that will allow you to actually identify where/what they are. Of the remaining three, one has a disambiguation notice at the top and is otherwise the same as the 63 I just described. Of the two that aren't the same, neither has an additional reference but they do provide some additional information that might help you know where they are (famous local people in one, local mosques in the other). TL;DR probably we should delete all the "village" stubs in the above search except Mustafapur and Aingiri.
Comment Editors who've been around awhile may remember article creator Encyclopædius as Dr. Blofeld. They created many, many settlement articles in good faith using an automated script. As I recall, they got through the As, Bs, and were well into the Cs before the community stopped them. Later in their career they expressed distaste for generic stubs of the form "xxx is a village". I believe, although I can't find the post, that they also admitted a measure of regret at having created so many, and tried to delete some, but were overruled on the grounds that Wikipedia is a gazetteer.

If you use https://geonames.nga.mil/namesgaz/ to search Bangladesh for names beginning with Banstali, you'll get three results, one of which is located at 23.201394, 90.719608, as described in the article. So I have to disagree with participants who say it's unverifiable. Whether a better source, multiple sources, or sources with a greater depth of coverage, should be required is a different question. --Worldbruce (talk) 20:16, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Worldbruce - Many thanks for this insightful contribution. This certainly illuminates better what was going on. I would make the following comments:

What can be created by a script may (with more work, and where there has been no further content added) be deleted with a script.
G7 provides a good rationale for doing this if the original author wants them gone and no-one has contributed any content since creation.
In this specific case, the issue is that GeoNames is not a reliable source as it is crowd-sourced. Verifiability requires not just any source, but a reliable one. As there is no reliable source with which we can confirm the data on this page it is a straight WP:V fail.
Even if the source were reliable, this would still be a WP:GEOLAND fail as there is no evidence here of either legal recognition or notability through WP:GNG.
The article describes this location as a "village", which is basically original research since the GeoNames database describes it only as a "Populated place", which on the face of it is a much broader term than "village" and would include single buildings, camps etc. FOARP (talk) 10:02, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@FOARP:

Just an FYI, Mustafapur was created by N ajger, not Encyclopædius.
You're confusing the user-generated GeoNames with GEOnet Names Server, which is based on the Geographic Names Database, containing official standard names approved by the United States Board on Geographic Names and maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It's a generally reliable source. Reliable enough that it's one of the recommended sources for use in Template:Coord. Reliable doesn't mean always accurate, of course.
For most village articles in Bangladesh, the 2011 census' community report for the relevant district is a second reliable source, and using it to confirm they're legally recognized is fairly trivial (after accounting for the fact that there isn't one standard way of transliterating Bengali, so a number of variants must be considered). For Chandpur: Alumura p. 50, Amanullapur (as Amanullahpur) p. 48, Asrafpur (as Ashrafpur) p. 64, Baidyanathpur p.79, Baluthupa (now divided into East and West Baluthupa union parishads) p. 52, etc.[1] Banstali is an exception. Perhaps it no longer exists or has taken a new name.
For nearly all these "xxx is a village" articles, reliable sources exist that demonstrate existence and legal recognition, so because Wikipedia is a gazetteer, I doubt you will succeed in deleting them. You might, however, be able to build support for redirecting them into "List of villages in yyy district" articles. Gazetteers are mostly a list of one-sentence descriptions, they don't have a separate page or article about every entry. I see that you've reached out to Encyclopædius on their talk page. From their "The best thing ... redirect the small village stubs" comment, it appears that they might support this approach. What do you think of it?
If "List of villages in yyy district" articles were created to be targets of redirection, what information should they list about each village? Administrative geographic context (which upazila and union parishad they're in), geographic coordinates, and population? For Bangladesh, there would be 64 lists, one for each district, and for Chandpur there would be (or it could grow to) in the neighborhood of 1500 list entries. An alternative would be to redirect villages to the smallest enclosing administrative unit, the union parishad. That would lead to embedded lists of more manageable length, but would require 4,554 target articles, only about 500 of which currently exist (and, like the village articles, they're so crappy I really wish they didn't exist).

--Worldbruce (talk) 17:31, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Worldbruce: - GeoNet is also highly unreliable as to whether a location is populated, since it is created by the same people that created GNIS, using the same methodology. Work on mass-created California articles has uncovered many "populated places" sourced to GNIS that are in fact bridges, sidings, factories, oil wells, springs, mines etc. etc. Wiki is a Gazetteer, but it is not a Gazette of every location in the world regardless of legal recognition, population, or notability. Things have changed significantly in the is regard since 2008, particularly with the introduction and development of the WP:GEOLAND standard.

All the same I am very OK with a redirection strategy as it is at least favoured by WP:PRESERVE so long as the data redirected is sourced to a reliable source (i.e., not just GEONames/Net). FOARP (talk) 18:23, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.