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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Niles, North Dakota

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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. Seraphimblade Talk to me 06:43, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Niles, North Dakota

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Niles, North Dakota (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Another ND GNIS stub which turns out to have once been the location of a rail siding with a grain elevator beside it. There's nothing there now, and no evidence of a town surrounding the spot. Mangoe (talk) 22:15, 7 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • KEEP
Place shows evidence from secondary sources.
  • Grain and Feed Journals Consolidated. Volume 11 1903 page 585.
Niles, N.D. -- The Farmers' Independent Eltr. Co has been sued by the G.N. Ry. to stop the construction of the elevator which is being built on the station grounds of the railway company without its permission.
  • North American Locomotives: A Railroad-by-Railroad Photohistory page 125
An A-B-A set of passenger F3s lead the eastward Western Star at Niles, North Dakota, on June 29, 1953. (showing picture of train and rural town behind, proving inhabited)
बिनोद थारू (talk) 02:04, 14 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In the photo, it looks like a barn, not a town. Magnolia677 (talk) 13:32, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 23:20, 14 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. WP:GEOLAND policy.
"Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable, even if their population is very low. Even abandoned places can be notable, because notability encompasses their entire history. Census tracts, Abadi, and other areas not commonly recognized as a place (such as the area in an irrigation district) are not presumed to be notable. The Geographic Names Information System and the GEOnet Names Server do not satisfy the "legal recognition" requirement and are also unreliable for "populated place" designation.[1][2]"
The legal recognition is given by the lawsuit happening in "Niles, ND", mentioned in the historical source above. So, this satifies WP:GEOLAND, leading to keep.
A railway station does not meet the criteria of "populated". Magnolia677 (talk) 13:34, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Change to Keep, per User:RecycledPixels comments below. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:50, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Per WP:GEOLAND. The 1906 Minnesota. North and South Dakota and Montana gazetteer and business directory by R. L. Polk available here lists Niles, Benson county, on page 680 of the digital copy. It says: Niles. Benson county. A discontinued p o and flag station on the G N Ry, 27 miles n w of Devils Lake, 18 n of Minnewauken the county seat, and 4 1/2 e of Leeds, the bank location. Send mail to Leeds and which see for names. Looking at the directory for Leeds, which is on page 546 of that digital copy, I see a business listing for "McCabe Bros, grain elevator (Niles)" and under Page & Co., there is "Roy Parsons agt grain elevator (Niles)". That's the only business listings for Niles, but it suggests that Niles was recognized as a named settlement, with enough of a population of enough people to support a grain elevator and an agent. The 1880 and 1888 directories by the same publisher does not list Niles in the Dakota Territory directory (but not Leeds, either). A 1910 Department of the Interior General Land Office map of the State of North Dakota by Eckert Litho Co., available here (you probably need a free FamilySearch account to access it) shows the town of Niles a few miles east of Leeds. Also on the 1903 map here, but not on the 1889 or 1892 maps. RecycledPixels (talk) 23:05, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@RecycledPixels: Which of the sources states "with enough of a population"? Did any of the sources specifically mention that this was ever a populated place? Magnolia677 (talk) 23:33, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
None of those did, other than the mention in the gazetteer that if you want to send mail to people in Niles, mail it to Leeds because the post office in Niles is closed. I did a search on Newspapers.com through the Devils Lake Inter-Ocean newspaper and found enough snippets to confirm it was a populated place, such as August 24, 1906, page 3. "Harry Thompson of Lansing, Iowa arrived Thursday. He is interested with Mr. Bakewell in the town of Niles and will remain until the harvest season is over", or March 29, 1901, page 6, "Rocky Anderson, of Niles, has been down for a few days visit with old friends", or March 23, 1900, page 8 "E.B. Page, of Niles, Benson county, was shaking hands with this Churchs Ferry friends here Wednesday. He says he has to come here at least once a month and always hauls away a wagon load of supplies. Mr Page is paying considerable attention to the raising of hogs, finding it a very paying investment.". The other Devils Lake newspaper, the Devils Lake World, has snippets like "[...] A few weeks ago Montgomery paid an election wager to Elling Tufte, of Niles when he started to wheel the latter from Leeds to Niles in a wheelbarrow. [...]" on page 5 of the January 11, 1922 edition (I didn't re-type the whole blurb because it was wordy and not very interesting), or "Elevator burned: Niles, N.D., Oct. 21-- The Independent elevator here burned to the ground yesterday morning. Considerable grain was destroyed." on page 8 of the October 27, 1911 paper. Recall from above that Devils Lake is a community located 27 miles south of Niles. Newspapers.com doesn't have any archives of papers from Minnewauken or Leeds, which are the other nearby towns. But it does have a German-language (in German gothic typeface, no less) paper from Rugby, up the Great Northern Railway from Niles in adjacent Pierce county. On page 4 of the July 1, 1909 paper, there's an article that describes a tornado that hit the area around Leeds and Niles. Mrs. Weiler, who lives near the small Niles train station, lost her assets in the storm. Two and a half miles south of Niles, the Urness family farmhouse was demolished and Mrs. Urness suffered life-threatening injuries. A couple of counties away to the northeast is the town of Langdon. The Courier Democrat on May 2, 1901 on page 6 has the local weather forcasts for the surrounding counties. In Benson counties, weather reports are given for Pleasant Lake, Niles, Leeds, and Brinsmade. (cold with frosty night and the top two inches of ground were frozen in Pleasant Lake, in case you were wondering). The Grand Forks Herald, a paper published tree counties to the East, mentions in its January 3, 1922 paper on page 7, "... An interesting trip that would give some idea of the work of the highway commission would be one over the Theodore Roosevelt Trail through Nelson and Ramsey counties to Niles in Benson county, then south through Benson county over the state highwat to Sheyenne...". At this point, I've stopped looking further. RecycledPixels (talk) 00:29, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: I see either closing this discussion as No consensus or relisting it for another week and I'm choosing the latter. As always, this discussion can be closed as soon as another closer sees a consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 23:05, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Source assessment for the three sources I could access:
Source assessment table prepared by User:PaulGamerBoy360
Source Independent? Reliable? Significant coverage? Count source toward GNG?
GNIS Yes Yes This Location was enterred into the GNIS In 1980, The GNIS was not corrupted in 1980 Yes 148 Words, Partially Significant Coverage ✔ Yes
Hometown Locator Yes Independent of Subject Yes Well Known & Up to Date Website Containing Reliable information ~ Partially: Contains 2 Sentences of information about Niles, and lists nearby locations as well as a map ~ Partial
Source 3 Yes Independent of Subject ~ Accuracy is Not Guaranteed No 5 scentences & a map ✘ No
This table may not be a final or consensus view; it may summarize developing consensus, or reflect assessments of a single editor. Created using {{source assess table}}.
PaulGamerBoy360 (talk) 00:25, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
also found this source: https://roadsidethoughts.com/nd/niles-xx-benson-profile.htm PaulGamerBoy360 (talk) 17:35, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Per GEOLAND. ~EDDY (talk/contribs)~ 14:15, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • comments re source reliability and news mentions First, GNIS is not a reliable source on the nature of a location. If it says something is a "populated place", all that means is that there is some evidence of human activity there, but the variety of things it dignifies with a name is wide and often contains outright mistakes— click through the link for a list of some of the more amusing/egregious examples. Fourth class post offices and rail passing sidings (which all have station names in the US) almost always have names on the maps, even though they quite frequently are just a house or a store or a station building and nothing else. There's every reason to believe that Hometown Locator and its ilk are derivative of GNIS; at any rate, there's no evidence of their independence.
This brings me to the "person from" issue. I'm "from" Laurel, MD, except that I never lived in that city. I actually was born in DC (where I never lived) and lived in Silver Spring for a bit under a year; then we moved to a brand new suburb about five miles from Laurel. That's the problem: the fact that people are "from Niles" or the like only establishes Niles as a locale; it doesn't make it a town. All it really says is that people in the area, back when, went to the post office at the station to get their mail and send things off, and when RFD started in the area, it was where the wagon/truck set out from. We have doggedly said that locales have to pass a pretty high GNG-level notability test; just mentions and database entries don't cut it. Mangoe (talk) 00:30, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The GNIS is not reliable due to user generated content, which did not happed in 1980. PaulGamerBoy360 (talk) 17:26, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what you mean by "user generated content" (because, mostly, there isn't any in GNIS) but you are quite incorrect about it having been fine in 1980. In fact most problems we've found can be traced back to that initial exercise in map-reading. More recent entries from other sources besides the topos are quite a bit worse, but they made plenty of mistakes in the first pass. Mangoe (talk) 05:08, 26 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. NGEO is a rebuttable presumption of notability. Policy says articles cannot be based on primary sources, and so far every single source identified that could support an assertion of being a "populated place" is primary (or primary and autogenerated SPS garbage like the "roadside thoughts" site, which asserts When the people of Niles refer to themselves (known as a demonym), they frequently use Nilesite). There is zero reason this possibly-populated grain elevator needs to be a standalone article, so if the fact that we haven't actually established it even meets NGEO at all isn't enough then my !vote can be considered based on NOPAGE.
JoelleJay (talk) 04:56, 28 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete I completely agree with JoelleJay. There has been no clear evidence in a secondary source that states without a doubt that Niles was populated. Although RecycledPixels did some very admirable work in searching through newspaper databases, none of the articles gave a population figure for Niles or anything of the like. Per WP:PST, we cannot *interpret* primary sources to mean anything beyond what they say: "Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation". Until someone produces a secondary source that states in no uncertain terms that Niles was populated, we cannot prove that it meets WP:GEOLAND, and the article should be deleted. Toadspike (talk) 09:47, 28 September 2023 (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.
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