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 no consensus. Spartaz ^Humbug! 15:26, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Appolena (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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I can find no sources whatsoever that suggest that this town exists, and the limited article text strongly suggests that it does not pass Wikipedia notability requirements. This user has created a vast number of permastubs by working through a list of likely apocryphal ancient place names. LegesRomanorum (talk) 22:29, 20 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete this article and all other articles of the same form, with prejudice against recreation. This is the most clear-cut case of non-notability I've seen in my time at Wikipedia. First of all, it's literally just a name on a map. I can't access the second reference (dead link), but I was able to find the directory and gazetteer to map 62 of the Barrington Atlas. It's literally just a name that may or may not have at one point been the name of a town that, if it existed, we know exactly nothing about. There is no way on earth that this passes either the GNG or GEOLAND, and these useless permastubs provide absolutely no useful function, only serving to clutter the encyclopedia. These articles never should have been created in the first place. CJK09 (talk) 04:37, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Thank you very much for the advice! This user has created vast numbers of similar stub articles by grinding through the Atlas and turning each place name into an article - if you ever find yourself with too much free time, I'd appreciate some help working through them. LegesRomanorum (talk) 05:29, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  You're welcome. I've been dealing with something similar for GNIS mass-generated stubs in California. Numerous counties have hundreds of them, most of the rest have several dozen, and we can't just mass-PROD because some of them are actually notable, and they're all mixed in together. We're about 4 counties in so far... 54 to go... CJK09 (talk) 06:11, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  There's no comparison between GNIS and the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. The former is a primary source that includes individual present-day farms and houses, but the latter is a secondary source for ancient populated places that pass WP:GEOLAND. I'm getting a bit tired of the assumption that seems to be rife on Wikipedia that just because a database exists that includes unnotable US place names everything else in the rest of the world must be unreliable. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:26, 29 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, at least for now. A populated village from antiquity doesn't need a lot of sources just to show that it existed, or approximately where. The Barrington Atlas is enough for that. As for notability, that can probably be presumed from the fact that it was populated. Since it appears in epigraphy, the name might be encountered not just by atlas users, but scholars studying people or events from the region; and having an article, even a stub, that tells them where the place was—even approximately—and how much we do or don't know about it—is useful. See the ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome. P Aculeius (talk) 14:10, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Turkey-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 11:31, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 11:31, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 11:31, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep -- It is useful to have a stub or (at least) redirect, the result of merging. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:08, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete A couple other AfDs I've voted in I've voted !keep because there were references in other works such as scholarly articles. This is based off a single directory listing in an atlas. I cannot find any other references to it online. Other articles were easy to find sources for. I have no doubt the atlas gets this near WP:V, but we can't have a standalone on it right now. That being said, this needs to be listified somewhere. I don't know where that place is, so I'm a delete - if anyone suggests a good spot for it, I fully support that. SportingFlyer T·C 08:07, 25 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Appearing in an atlas is not sufficient to establish notability per WP:NGEO, and populated places aren't presumed notable simply because they exist. This goes double for a place whose existence is merely inferred. –dlthewave ☎ 00:53, 29 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World is a reliable academic source, although presented as maps rather than prose, and I can't for the life of me see how deleting this could possibly make for a better encyclopedia than keeping it. Notability guidelines are subservient to basic common-sense principals such as that. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:19, 29 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• We have exactly one source - a directory listing/a dot on a map - and literally no other sources, which I am concerned about because the other ones which we've kept have had sources. We can include things in the encyclopaedia without having to dedicate a perma-stub to them. This is better off listified somewhere. SportingFlyer T·C 01:18, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not aware of any policy that requires that articles be deleted unless they have multiple source citations. The Barrington Atlas itself cites Tabula Imperii Byzantini for epigraphic sources, with the additional note "T. Drew-Bear". Tabula Imperii Byzantini is a reliable scholarly source and has a web site which seems at first glance to provide open access to at least some of its holdings; and T. Drew-Bear is the author of some indices of its maps, for which map 62 contains Appolena, with the aforementioned citations—one to himself/herself, but I can't figure out what that citation means, since eleven publications from 1976 to 1999 are listed, all with dates, in the bibliography, but the citation doesn't say which, if any of these, is meant—and the index for volume 7 of TIB is shorter and doesn't include Appolena. So we have a scholarly citation, but I'm unable to locate the source information being cited over the internet. Does that mean the article on the town fails for lack of citations? No, of course not. Sources don't have to be available over the internet. They simply have to exist and be capable of verification—whether or not anyone involved with Wikipedia actually views them.

This stub was nominated for deletion for three reasons that I can identify: 1, that the place is not notable; 2, that it's likely apocryphal; 3, that the editor who created it made many others that are similarly non-notable and likely did not exist. None of these reasons hold up under close scrutiny, however. Notability is established because this is a town or village from antiquity, the location and nature of which are of interest to historians and archaeologists today; its inclusion in the Barrington Atlas as well as within the TIB project framework are more than adequate to establish that. We know that the place either definitely existed at or near the place identified in these sources, or is accepted as probably having been there by modern scholarship; we do not have to prove that this supposition is correct in order for the article to exist: many perfectly acceptable articles exist about people, places, and things that are merely thought to exist or have existed, or claimed to exist or have existed by some scholars, historians, philosophers, theologians, myths, legends, folktales, etc. The mere possibility that a name might refer to someone or something or some place other than the one currently identified doesn't justify deleting an article. We don't delete the articles about Bigfoot, Atlantis, or West Virginia merely because they're potentially apocryphal. And the first two being the case, it really doesn't matter how many other articles the same editor created.

I further note that pretty much all of the others that were similarly nominated for deletion have already been closed as "keep" or deProdded. Yes, it might be a good idea to combine some of these stubs into a single article. But that requires at least one editor to choose which among these many town and village stubs should be included, and perhaps how many articles there ought to be for settlements in different regions. The fact that nobody has stepped up and done so yet—or may do so in the immediate future—is not grounds for deletion. There is no time limit for articles to be improved, and there is no consensus on the best way to treat these many towns and villages yet. Even if some of them are combined, the current titles will still exist as redirects to the combined articles, which we would expect to contain the same source citations and basic descriptions that the stubs have now. So the contents of articles such as this one would not be deleted from the encyclopedia by "listifying" them—it would merely be moved to a different location. Taking all of this into consideration, I can see no circumstances under which this article meets the criteria for deletion. P Aculeius (talk) 14:03, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A search [1] here gave no results. I advocated for keeping other articles, but considering: 1) this article contains only one citation, which itself is only a directory listing, which you have noted that the citation by the author references a citation by the same author, which cannot be found; 2) no other information is available on the internet, and no other sources have been presented that might contain information about this place; 3) other articles which were kept, at least the ones I participated in, were easily verifiable elsewhere; 4) just because other articles have been kept does not mean this one should also be kept/deleted; and 5) if you cannot write anything that's not a perma-stub, an alternative, such as a redirect to a list, should be considered. In this case, there is no actual evidence this is a notable place apart from a dot on a map, and while WP:GEOLAND does give a presumption, I don't think the presumption is met here, since there's really nothing we can say about this place apart from "this was a place name on a map that may or may not be logged in the TIL." That being said, as I've noted above, I have no problem of including this in a list somewhere. SportingFlyer T·C 18:20, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I believe your analysis of the underlying policies is faulty. One citation to a reliable source, such as the Barrington Atlas or TIB is sufficient to demonstrate verifiability. I'm not sure what your point about a "directory listing" is. As far as I know, there's no such exception to the criteria for determining whether a place is verifiable. You may be thinking of the notability criterion, "Wikipedia is not a directory." That's not really applicable here; an ancient town or village that can be named and located within a particular area and is so listed in scholarly sources is notable, even if nothing else can be said about it. But here we don't even know what else can be said; only that I wasn't able to learn more about the information in TIB by looking through its website. Nothing about our verifiability criteria says that we have to have seen the archaeological evidence, or have access to it over the internet, before we're entitled to accept that it exists based on a citation in other sources. I mentioned that the other articles were all kept, because their simultaneous creation by the same editor and based on the same sources was urged as a reason to delete this one. But since the creation of the articles as a group seems to be fine, that's not a valid reason for deleting this one. There's no policy that says that articles should be deleted if they seem unlikely to progress beyond stubs in the foreseeable future. It may well be that this article could be combined with others, but the possibility that it could be is not grounds for deletion. I believe that your description of the town as "a place name on a map that may or may not be logged in the TIL" is misleading. It is not "a place name on a map". It is a known settlement from antiquity that is documented by both TIL and the Barrington Atlas. The fact that we don't know all of the information about it doesn't mean that we can suppose that there might not be any basis for its inclusion. It's highly improbable that TIL would publish an index by one of its major contributors citing it, if it were not documented by the project; and even less likely that it would then be accepted as fact by the Barrington Atlas if it did not consider the material in TIL reliable. As Wikipedians, we are not entitled to assume that the conclusions of scholarly sources are erroneous unless they can produce their proofs to us. P Aculeius (talk) 22:36, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Cities have one of the lowest barriers to notability, but I don't buy the fact that just because this was a point on a map and nothing else can be said about it makes it notable enough for its own article when the other places which were nominated were kept and easily verifiable elsewhere. The "directory listing" discussing the place was literally just an index with the place name. I am not saying the atlas is necessarily wrong, but I would expect there to be sources on Google Scholar like there were for the other articles, I would expect there would be listings in books, maybe in one of the readily online searchable Ramsey books on the topic - nothing. Is it really a "known settlement from antiquity?" The fact a place name appeared on a map does not by itself mean that we can have a standalone article for it. It's fine to listify some content, this is one of those instances. SportingFlyer T·C 00:15, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per nom. Will never be more than a stub, doesn't merit an Wikipedia article. --Cornellier (talk) 14:51, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  And what is wrong with a stub on a topic that passes WP:GEOLAND? How is having nothing better? Phil Bridger (talk) 17:14, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Precisely. That's what a stub is for. I'm not aware of "WP:DELETEALLSTUBS". The main argument for deleting the article is that "it's just a dot on a map", but clearly that's not true. We just don't have access to the information used by TIB and the Barrington Atlas—that doesn't mean that the information doesn't exist, or that we'll never know any more than the location of the town. But I think we're entitled to assume that they didn't include it "because it's a dot on a map". The place is clearly notable as an inhabited town from antiquity of interest to modern historians; and its inclusion in these sources makes it verifiable, whether or not we can see the details. So until Wikipedia policy requires the deletion of stubs because they're short—and not because the subjects are non-notable or unverifiable—articles like this should not be deleted. P Aculeius (talk) 00:47, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is we don't actually know if it passes WP:GEOLAND. We literally only have a dot on a map and its corresponding directory listing. There's nothing wrong with the source, but there are no other sources out there which have been presented that let us say anything other than "According to a single source, this was a city located in Phrygia, whose existence was inferred." It's perfectly reasonable to believe that's not enough of a demonstration of notability. SportingFlyer T·C 05:40, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Hardly seems notable. While there isn't a "WP:DELETEALLSTUBS", there is a WP:NOTDIRECTORY and keeping this would make it exactly that. Same goes for the other articles about Roman inhabited towns that lack proper sourcing. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:51, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Presumably Barrington got its information from somewhere and there must be more to find. The policies WP:ATD, WP:NOTPAPER and WP:PRESERVE indicate that we should keep this for further development rather than deleting it. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:24, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Likely it was a translation of Apollonia and the person who created the article did it without known. If you look at the list of Roman towns in Apollonia it, Appolena, and Apellonia are used interchangeably as names for cities throughout. Which is all the more reason to delete this article IMO. As it's likely a duplicate of a differently named Roman city that it is just an odd spelling of. --Adamant1 (talk) 10:09, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• The fact that it's a common name is not a reason to delete. If it's an alternate spelling of a place that we cover on another page then we should merge them, not delete anything. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:22, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Normally I'd agree. Except two things here make me think that's a no go. 1. We don't usually merge referenced information and in this case I'd say it applies 2. There's no encyclopedic content about it to merge anyway 3. There's zero way to know where we should merge it to and it's probably impossible to figure out since the information in the article is so sparse and general. It could really apply to a bunch of articles cited in Apollonia. So, should we just pick a random merge target and keep our fingers crossed it's the correct one or something? --Adamant1 (talk) 10:27, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The atlas gives a location for this place (38.959452N, 31.147865E) and also gives an alternate placename (Tezkalesi). This information seems quite adequate for further investigation. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:02, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are two reliable sources that call if Appolena, not Apollonia. This isn't some rogue editor with careless spelling, so we can take that argument right off the table. "It's unencyclopedic" is not a valid deletion argument—many encyclopedias have short articles that say little more than "X was a Roman town in Y". Why should Wikipedia be any more demanding? "Not a directory" is about "indiscriminate information". "X was a Roman town in Y" is not "indiscriminate" in the way that "the Phlink warehouse stocked the following valve configurations" or "these are the businesses at the corner of 4th Street and Vine" are indiscriminate. "We don't merge referenced information" isn't a policy. Most merged articles contain sources from each of the articles being merged. "I don't know where it should be merged" is not an argument for deletion—it's an argument for keeping it as a stub. However, it's also wrong—there's no reason why this article couldn't be merged with other stubs on Roman-era settlements in Phrygia. Is that the best solution? I don't know, but it's not important to answer that question, when the question at hand is whether to delete or keep the contents of the article; the potential for merger simply proves that there are valid alternatives to deletion. P Aculeius (talk) 14:29, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is why I think including this topic in a list is the best solution, without prejudice of recreation if we find other sources on it. It's verifiable enough to include somewhere in the encyclopaedia, but it's not notable enough for a standalone article at this point, since we really only have one source, a map. (I'm also concerned that it's a map because mapmakers prevent copying by occasionally including fictional features.) SportingFlyer T·C 16:46, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No map produced as an academic document, as this one is, contains such deliberate falsehoods. This source is just as reliable as anything written in prose published by the Princeton University Press. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:09, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Note that this discussion is now over 25K and we won't be deleting any of it ever. This is a counter-productive way of reducing clutter. See WP:LAME, WP:LIGHTBULB, &c. Andrew🐉(talk) 18:13, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussions aren't edit wars. Anyway, the point in AfDs are to reduce mainspace/article clutter. Discussions can and should be as long as they need to be to resolve things and everything said so far was to that end. Maybe if the discussion was off topic id agree with you, but sometimes AfDs require debate. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:37, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep My reading of the references[2] differs a bit from that of P Aculeius. 'Tezkalesi' does appear in the index for TIB: 7 Based on page 402 and his own unpublished information Drew-Bear gives 'Appolena' for the name. We should be concerned with the place, not the name. It's appropriate content for some article, we just don't know enough right now to say where that content should be so i think WP:PRESERVE applies. fiveby(zero) 02:36, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• If your argument is that Appolena and Tezkalesi are the same place, which looking at the references may be a fair one - I would support a move and redirect to Tezkalesi, which currently does not have an article and would pass WP:GEOLAND considering there's actual available text on the place. SportingFlyer T·C 03:18, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm reasonably certain Drew-Bear has associated 'Appolena' with Byzantium 'Tezkalesi'. This blurb referring to the demos of the Appolenoi suggests other authors thought Çoğu. Another possible reference is Drew-Bear, Thomas; Naour, Christian (1990). "Divinités De Phrygie". ANWAR II. 18 (3): 1929–1931. fiveby(zero) 06:10, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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