This article was nominated for deletion on 17/02/2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus. This article was nominated for deletion on 10/2/2006. The result of the discussion was already been deleted. This article was nominated for deletion on 10/2/2006. The result of the discussion was delete.

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Archive 1: 2003-2004 Archive 2: Feb 2006 Archive 3: 2005-2006

I have protected this article from editing. Please discuss the issue here. Thanks/wangi 23:19, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dieter Simon has destroyed this page. Jooler 23:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It is highly inappropriate to delete the list of place names from this article. People researching the subject will expect to find just such a list present, and its removal significantly degrades the comprehensiveness of Wikipedia - which, as we all know, is designed to be a repository of all human knowledge - not just the bits that some people think are important. Geographical place names are easily verifiable. Unreferenced inclusions on the list can and should be properly referenced. Those who consider the lack of references a problem should take it upon themselves to make a positive contribution to Wikipedia by adding them - rather than simply dismissively blanking the valuable contributions of hundreds of other editors. --Gene_poole 23:59, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well said. Jooler 00:00, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Listen, there are pages and pages of debate on this subject and it all boils down to one thing: there are no reliable sources indicating that any of these places are considered unusual (with about 2 or 3 exceptions). You may think that they are unusual or interesing, but what you think, if it cannot be backed up with indpenedent reliable sources, is utterly irrelevent. Wikipedia does not allow original research. We've been down this road so many times that I have no interest in rehashing old debates for the sake of a few misguided users. If you can find the name of a place that has reliable sources indicating that it is genuinely unusual, then feel free to add them with he source. Throwing a list of hundreds of random names onto the page and then telling other people to go find references isn't going to wash. Read the old debates. I'll try to find the ones that weren't archived and provide links. -R. fiend 00:29, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For further reading check out this page, near the bottom, as well as the old AFDs and DRVs linked at the top of this page. -R. fiend 00:41, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for highlighting "[Swastika, Ontario]]: for one, a book by Alan Rayburn (a prior executive secretary of the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names) called Naming Canada: stories about Canadian place names, 2nd ed. (ISBN 0-8020-8293-9)." - Culled along with so many others. Jooler 01:00, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Listen yourself. A 3-second Amazon search on "unusual place names" reveals a wealth of independent, reliable, published sources. Your argument is spurious, your tone uncivil, and your mischaracterisation of other editors as "misguided" for failing to share your POV is provocative, disrespectful and wrong. I suggest that you reassess your position, and adjust your attitude accordingly. --Gene_poole 01:19, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In reply to Jooler saying I "destroyed this page", I am repeating the section I composed on 17 June to give the reason why I thought then and still think it most inadvisable to bring back into the main name space the full list:

Quote: Well, if you went through the confusion, convulsions and convolutions of the article's last weeks in the main name space you must also have seen that there were great numbers of people iunvolved. It certainly wasn't just one person. The article had its name changed umpteen times, was moved hither and thither, was vandalised, no-one could make up their minds as to what should happen to it during the time when it was opened up for discussion , prompts and templates were entered and removed, POV was created, some wanted street names others didn't, field names were put in then removed, etc. What ever makes you think this would ever be any different if it were brought back into the main name space? It is the type of list that lays itself wide open to the most atrocious POV and differences of opinions, as again you must have seen. You see, there were too many contrary opinions about this article, and people weren't reasonable. As for Adam's arming yourself with a Merriam-Webster is all very fine, but it's the one's which weren't in the M.-W. that caused the bother. Your taking them out of the list immediately afterwards wouldn't pacify tempers, in fact, they used to put them straight back in again. You can argue till the cows come home, as lots of reasonable people did, bring in perfectly sensible guidelines, and then someone will argue and you will find yourself on the defensive trying to reason with them. Anyway, good luck if ever you try to reintroduce it. Dieter Simon 01:13, 17 June 2006 (UTC) Unquote

Nothing has changed, the period involved is January to February, 2006, and it may be perused in the history. Read this first, it's not "fun", it's pathetic how people carried on. Then see if you still want it back. Dieter Simon 01:48, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Jooler & Gene Poole, I sympathise with your viewpoint, but this is one of those debates where positions have ended up becoming so entrenched that you're not going to get very far by simply adding a list of names back into the article. I was a strong advocate of keeping the list in the previous debates, but the arguments for keeping it out carried the day, and so any admin is just going to side with that point of view. If you want to include a list in Wikipedia, then you're going to have to try a different approach. You either have to accept that you have to find a reliable source for the unusualness of each name you want to include, or you have to find a way of not doing that which gets community buy-in. SP-KP 18:32, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Any such list is going to be challenged as "point of view". I suppose some think that a city name of "Springfield" is funny-sounding, but it's certainly not unusual. However, anyone who argues that cities with names like Truth or Consequences, NM, or Intercourse, PA, are not unusual is a few fries short of a happy meal. Wahkeenah 19:28, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This list survived a deletion poll. But deletion has been circumvented by removing the actual list. How does that work? Jooler 21:36, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• That's the "dog in the manger" approach to editing. Someone doesn't like it, so they keep deleting until the other editors get tired of trying... or turn the editor in for vandalism. Wahkeenah 21:50, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that a minority of editors have made their weight felt on this page and acted to destroy it by stealth by removing place names from this page. Please vote here to state whether you support or oppose the view that it is not a violation of NPOV or any other Wikipedia policy to have place names listed on this page; and that provided certain degree management of the names can be maintained, it is valid to have a list of noted "unusual" names on this page. See a previous version of this article here to see what this page used to be like. Jooler 21:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - as per above. Jooler 21:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Support in general. This could lead to lengthy discussion on what constitutes "unusual", and the example list is probably too long, but the current article is not only too short, it sits there with a section header with no contents. Wahkeenah 22:02, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I'll repeat the argument I made in previous discussions, which to date, I've not seen a convincing rebuttal of. Those who are arguing that inclusion of a list is in inherent breach of NPOV are misinterpreting NPOV. NPOV is basically about ensuring that the information we present is presented in a balanced way, as would be expected of a high-quality encyclopaedia. NPOV has nothing to say about decisions on how information is structured. That is governed by various other policies and editorial consensus. Whether a specific piece of information is regarded as relevant to an article or not is an information-structuring decision to be made by the editorial community - this is an activity that goes on all the time across hundreds of thousands of pages, and is an accepted part of the wiki process. How are editors going to make decisions about what to include in an article unless they exercise some kind of personal judgment? If we decreed that those judgments inherently represent breaches of POV, the whole process of creating Wikipedia would grind to a halt. A decision to present information in a POV way is a totally different matter from a decisions to include an item of information based on a belief in its relevance, and the latter is all that the majority of pro-list editors are arguing for, as far as I can tell. SP-KP 22:17, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• I would urge everyone to first read through this articles talk archives and the previous AFD discussions - they are now clearly linked from the top of this talk page. Remember too that we work using consensus, not voting. Thanks/wangi 22:19, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• I support including only place names which have a cited reliable source indicating that they are considered unusual in a widespread and meaningful way. This does NOT mean restoring the earlier version which had just about everything thrown in there. It also does not mean you can cite someone's blog listing names the author considers unusual. This is an encyclopedia (allegedly) not a smorgsabord of factoids, though I fear that is what it is becoming. If people would cite sources (that the names are unusual, not just that they exist) we wouldn't need to have this discussion. -R. fiend 22:39, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hi R. fiend. Can you explain why you want to apply that standard to this article and (presumably) not to others. What you are saying, as I understand it, is that, in this situation, the wiki process, which is the normal mechanism by which it is decided whether a piece of information makes it into an article, should be secondary and that instead, we should abandon our judgments as editors and rely only on sources elsewhere to inform our editorial decisions. To illustrate my problem with that approach, let's pick the article Cher, within which can be found the piece of information "Cher first rose to prominence in 1965 as one half of the pop/rock duo Sonny & Cher". Sure, that piece of information needs to be sourced, and presented in a NPOV way. However, the decision to include that information in the Cher article has been made by the judgment of editors, based on their personal view as to whether it is relevant to the article - you are presumably not arguing that we have to find an independent source which states that this piece of information is relevant to the subject of Cher for it to be included? Yet that's what you're arguing about whether we mention, say, Bang Bang Jump Up or Idiotville in this article, isn't it? SP-KP 22:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • The difference is that the comment on Cher is a fact, and one that can be verified by any number of sources. In fact, to pick just one source as a citation would be sort of silly. In this case, we have a whole slew of names which rely entirely on the opinions of users. If we take "unusal" to mean "unique" then we at least have an objective criterion, but a list that is difficult to verify and nearly endless. If Bang Bang Jump Up is such an interesting and unusual name (and it seems it is to me, but individual opinions here count for little) then we shouldn't have much trouble finding some sort of reference to it being such. The problem is most of these things are pretty damn subjective, and the encyclopedic value of the article is dubious, at best. The old list was a travesty; it contained whatever poped into the infantile mind of any given editor. We don't need lists of places with "Dix" or "Pu" in the title, we need verification. And yes, anything in the Cher article which cannot be verified needs to go, but that doesn't mean we need to little the article with "Cher is a female (citation needed) entertainer (citation needed)..." But by all means, people should feel free to put Truth or Consequences, NM in the article; I'm sure you can find a source for that. There's an interesting story behind why it got that name (though this doesn;t mean any place name with a story behind it is unusual, most placesget their names for a reason). -R. fiend 23:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • R. Fiend, I don't dispute that the piece of information in the Cher article is a fact, but the relationship between a piece of information and the subject of an article (and its relevance or importance in the context of that subject) are what govern whether it makes it into the article (otherwise we'd just articles that are collections of unrelated facts). Ultimately its the opinions of editors which decided whether that fact should be included in the Cher article, not the NPOV policy. Do you see the point I'm making? I agree with you completely that the old list had an awful lot of chaff and relatively little wheat, but that's not the issue under discussion here, which is whether we can trust the collective judgment of the editor community to separate the two. I think we can, although I admit our past efforts aren't a good argument for that viewpoint. SP-KP 23:32, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]