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. ✗ plicit 04:22, 4 August 2022 (UTC) reply

Aliabad-e Qotb ol Din (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log | edits since nomination)

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Mass-created geostubs by Carlossuarez46 ( talk · contribs) based on the 2006 Iranian census. Said census grouped people based on the nearest named structure, and is not an indicator of legal recognition per WP:NGEO. Tolombeh (تلمبه), also romanized as talambeh, means pump in Persian, so it is highly unlikely that any place names containing tolombeh are actually villages. There are 116 articles with such a name, including 1 which is already at AfD, and 2 disambiguation pages which will be deleted per G14 if this AfD closes as delete and Hojjarat-ye Panj is deleted by PROD. Some entries do not have coordinates or are below the minimum size defined for a village in Iran.

– LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 03:12, 28 July 2022 (UTC) reply

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Geography and Iran. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 03:12, 28 July 2022 (UTC) reply
• Comment WP:AWB will be needed to AfD-tag all of these pages; there is also a request filed at WP:AWBREQ about the same. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 03:19, 28 July 2022 (UTC) reply
• Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log ( step 3). I have transcluded it to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2022 July 28. — ^{cyberbot I} _{Talk to my owner:Online} 03:54, 28 July 2022 (UTC) reply

• Delete per WP:V and WP:GEOLAND. The verifiability policy requires us to have at least one independent reliable source about a subject before we can have an article on it, and the burden of proof is on those who want to retain the content. These stubs are all sourced to the Iranian census (which as the nominator explains is not reliable) and the GEOnet Names Server (which is also not reliable for the existence of places). Furthermore WP:GEOLAND only grants near-automatic notability to legally recognised populated places, and notes that regions defined for censuses do not qualify by this metric, so the subjects would have to pass the WP:GNG anyway. Hut 8.5 11:56, 28 July 2022 (UTC) reply

  @ Hut 8.5: In terms of GEOLAND#1 as far as I'm aware it generally covers things like administrative units such as formal regions (such as East of England, states (such as Suffolk), districts (such as Maldon District), municipalities (such as Stanwix Rural) and other places with at least some function (such as Brunstock, formerly a township) or Waveney (UK Parliament constituency)). For other places with census data as long as the place is a settlement or other on the ground feature like Howe Green, Chelmsford I think GEOLAND#1 would be satisfied. A long-standing exception is census tracts since they are generally random areas with no administrative function and nothing on the ground. Abadi and the like may be an exception if they aren't settlements but that's debatable. Crouch, Swale ( talk) 09:29, 29 July 2022 (UTC) reply

  I just meant that these aren't presumed to be notable just for being areas included in the census. GEOLAND #1 doesn't apply to anything that isn't a populated place, and it sounds like this census just grouped people by the nearest landmark in some cases, in which case these may not be populated places. And GEOLAND can't overrule WP:V - unless we have a reliable source which says something is a populated place then we can't call it one. Hut 8.5 11:59, 29 July 2022 (UTC) reply

Hut 8.5 - 100% agree. You should see some of the discussions we have with some of these other articles. One currently-live AFD is deadlocked because one editor thinks that "there's a road that has that name that leads to a point near to the co-ordinates in Geonames for this abadi" is sufficient proof to keep the article. Never mind that Geonames is an unreliable Wiki-like source. Never mind that there's no actual evidence of legal recognition. Never mind that it's not really possible to tell what something is just from looking at it in a satellite image. FOARP ( talk) 18:36, 29 July 2022 (UTC) reply

• Delete All - Yes, even the ones that are just redirects from a Title including the word "Tolombeh" as these don't even appear in the Iranian census under their supposed non-Tolombeh names as far as I can determine (Ctrl+F for the Farsi name in the spreadsheet turns up no hits with the ones I spot-checked). I think these were the ones Carlos made after he began to realise what these Abadi actually were but he thought hat he could fix it just by taking out the word "pump".

These abadi are mere locations used for counting the Iranian census. They do not have to be villages, but can be just wells, petrol stations, bridges, shops, etc. etc. around which people were counted. In fact 23% of Abadi have no people at all, and may never have been populated. In this case the term "pump" strongly suggests that every one of these is just a pump that has been used as a reference point. Since these are not legally-recognised communities, but only reference-points used in a census and therefore the equivalent of census-tracts, this fails WP:GEOLAND#1, and as there is no significant coverage they also fail WP:GNG. Use of GEONet Names Server does not fix this, because GNS is also an unreliable source per the RSN discussion. It is not clear where the location data associated with some of these articles comes from, and it often points to empty fields. Even when it does point to something that is maybe a village, how are we to say without engaging in OR that is is a village? And if it is a village, how do you know it is known by the name used in the article?

Yadda yadda yadda - I've written these same arguments over and over for years now with Carlossuarez46's mass-produced Iranian stub articles and I'm really tired of it, just as I'm sure that others are tired of reading these AFDs over and over are. I thought when we first started on Carlossuarez46's articles after the ARBCOM case against them that people would see quicker than this just how harmful this mass-creation can be, but people still resist doing anything that's really going to make an impact on it. We need to be given better tools for cleaning up these stubs, and yes that means mass-deleting all the ones that we made in a mass-creation session based on bad sources and haven't been improved since. FOARP ( talk) 18:19, 29 July 2022 (UTC) reply

@ FOARP: Agreed, we should delete all remaining articles that are Iran village stubs created by Carlossuarez46 and contain no nontrivial content, probably in an RfC-like venue. There a few other categories of pages where he created similar problems, which can generally be handled manually. Should we also create a standalone documentation page of this incident, like Wikipedia:Fabricated articles and hoaxes of Russia in 2022? – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 06:36, 30 July 2022 (UTC) reply

• Delete all per V and Geoland. Avilich ( talk) 13:29, 31 July 2022 (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.