Wikipediocracy

So, looking at the fuss over the draft Donna Strickland article led Ming to a discussion about sourcing for the location of St. Barnabas' Episcopal Church, Leeland (T-H-L). One would think that the answer is "Leeland, Maryland (T-H-L), duh", but there is the minor problem that Leeland doesn't really exist anymore, if it ever really did. The actual correct answer is, "at the corner of Church Rd. and Oak Grove Rd. north of Upper Marlboro", but since it seems to have been decreed that every place is in a Town of some sort, we have seen a bit of an edit war between claiming it's in Upper Marlboro itself, which is what the post office says, or in Brock Hall, Maryland (T-H-L), whose CDP boundaries are alleged to include the church building. Ming hasn't bothered to check the latter, but then we've been around before about how (a) the CDPs are arbitrary and erratically drawn, and often don't represent real "towns" accurately, and (b) how the post office, for its own convenience, ignores local names and tends to lump groups of towns under one name. The truth from above (as it were) as revealed in Google Maps is that Leeland may never really have existed in the first place except as a place name of convenience for the church and for a railroad "station", neither of which are particularly close to each other and both of which were probably isolated boondocks spots from the beginning, and that Brock Hall, if it ever existed, has been erased by a collection of out-suburbs of Upper Marlboro/DC (your choice). Of course there is an argument over sourcing, utterly ignoring that neither the census nor the post office has proven a reliable source for these names. OK, so can we say the church is in Leeland? Of course not, since it is presumably the source for the "claim". Can we just say "north of Upper Marlboro"? What source says that, other than reading the map?

In Britain too the postal address is often misleading. The town of Hay-on-Wye (T-H-L) is famous for its bookshops. There is a huge volume of post in and out of the town, buying and selling its books, so its address is no small issue. As the article does not bother to mention, the postal address is Hay-on-Wye, Hereford, implying that it is in England. As it is in fact just about in Wales, its inhabitants insist that its address is Hay-on-Wye,Wales, via Hereford, England.

Poetlister wrote:In Britain too the postal address is often misleading. The town of Hay-on-Wye (T-H-L) is famous for its bookshops.

My Compleat Remastered Hits of the syphilitic Bard come from there.

And here's another, which Ming was originally going to file under "crap articles": Chance, Virginia (T-H-L), whose entire text is: "Chance is an unincorporated community in Essex County, in the U.S. state of Virginia. Glencairn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979."

OK, well, unsurprisingly Glencairn (Chance, Virginia) (T-H-L) says that it's "near" Chance, which, as far as one believes the topo map in the nomination, appears to be true; but that's as much a mention of "Chance" in the nomination as there is. That same map, however, shows exactly one structure at the location both it and the WP article give: the buildings of what is now the Hundley Seed Company. There are a few scattered houses north of that, and a very rural-looking Baptist chapel north of those, and that is it. The USPS, unsurprisingly, claims all of this as Champlain, Virginia (T-H-L), which consists of a post office, an Exxon station, an antiques store which used to be an Episcopal church, and the usual vague scattering of houses which may or may not have ever had anything to do with the "town", or rather, "unincorporated community", which seems to have been the term-of-art for what GNIS calls a "populated place" if it's in the US and can't be attributed to the post office or the census. The article claims three NRHP properties, one of which is the aforementioned ex-church; the other two are a pair of houses, one just south of town ("near") and another quite a ways to the east, which doesn't seem to exist any longer, as best Ming can determine. Looking at the places listed in the article on Essex County, Virginia (T-H-L), which is where all of this is located, only the county seat is a town with multiple streets, though there is another close to it (sort of a suburb, as it were), which manages something of a strip mall. Every other place has a post office, a gas station, or a church (generally Baptist), and maybe one other business, but never more than two of the above. A couple of them are houses at the end of streets. But they're all in GNIS (one assumes), and they do seem to appear on road signs, so they are "communities".

The way wiki notability works though, all NRHP properties are notable and so are populated places, so that "unincorporated community" could feature four articles, even though no-one may live there anymore and the houses may no longer exist.

It's always going to be hard to argue against the NRHP since it is, after all, a list of notable buildings. But when you read the forms, they tend to say things like "at the intersection of US 666 and Yellow Brick Road" rather than refer to placenames. There has been some headway in getting rid of phantom towns in the third world, but in the USA (and probably in Europe) it's essentially hopeless.

Ming wrote:It's always going to be hard to argue against the NRHP since it is, after all, a list of notable buildings. But when you read the forms, they tend to say things like "at the intersection of US 666 and Yellow Brick Road" rather than refer to placenames. There has been some headway in getting rid of phantom towns in the third world, but in the USA (and probably in Europe) it's essentially hopeless.

Agreed.

GNIS/GRIS define "populated place" so broadly that Ted Kaczynski's cabin would have qualified, had someone slapped it on a map and given it a name.

Poetlister wrote:In Britain too the postal address is often misleading. The town of Hay-on-Wye (T-H-L) is famous for its bookshops. There is a huge volume of post in and out of the town, buying and selling its books, so its address is no small issue. As the article does not bother to mention, the postal address is Hay-on-Wye, Hereford, implying that it is in England. As it is in fact just about in Wales, its inhabitants insist that its address is Hay-on-Wye,Wales, via Hereford, England.

I go there once a year with the wife on a book-shopping holiday.

Its not very Welsh. I doubt the native inhabitants insist that much really, its a hard search to find one with a Welsh accent.

The secret to UK mailing addresses of course is that you only actually need the house number/name and postcode for 80% of them. And street name for the remainder where a post-code bridges multiple streets.

Town/City/County are all completely un-necessary.

Anroth wrote:Its not very Welsh. I doubt the native inhabitants insist that much really, its a hard search to find one with a Welsh accent.

The secret to UK mailing addresses of course is that you only actually need the house number/name and postcode for 80% of them. And street name for the remainder where a post-code bridges multiple streets.

Town/City/County are all completely un-necessary.

Quite probably the fuss was made by a local minority.

If there's a small block of flats it may not have a postcode all to itself, so you'll also need the number of the flat.