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 keep. Consensus to keep. (non-admin closure) Zing^{( Talk!)} 04:03, 16 October 2020 (UTC) reply

Knob Lick, Estill County, Kentucky (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log)

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Topos show a "Knob Lick School" and a "Knob Lick Cemetery", Rennick and an old geologist report suggest it is what appears to be a very small stream. The claim of an unincorporated community is completely spurious. Hog Farm _Bacon 02:01, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Hog Farm _Bacon 02:01, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Kentucky-related deletion discussions. Hog Farm _Bacon 02:01, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply

• Keep: I'm not sure if it qualifies per WP:NGEO/ WP:GEOLAND or not, but I think it may, so I'm going to offer some information here. In the 1850s geographic report nom mentioned, the author did NOT indicate it was a small stream. On pages 139-141 they recount surveying to locate sufficient salts or ores in the knob for extraction. (In Kentucky, a " knob" is a type of hill.) They found some salts in some of the springs and sampled uphill of them. The language used indicates that "Knob Lick" referred to a more extensive area, possible the entire knob — "At Knob Lick the summits are... while the creeks, at the base... If there are any veins of lead ore in the Knob lick country... a line of disturbance runs through the Knob lick country..." So to me, it seems like this "area" was called Knob Lick for almost two hundred years, and though may have been extremely rural in the 1850s, was definitely settled by the mid-1900s. This article [1] has a mention of an unincorporated community thusly: "was born ... 1943... his parents moved to the Knob Lick section of Estill County, Kentucky. He attended the Knob Lick School for eight years ... served the following churches as pastor: Knob Lick Baptist Church, 1962-1963". In Kentucky a " lick" is a common name for an area where wildlife gathered to consume naturally occurring minerals or salts, either pulled from the underground limestone by springs or occurring in the soil where animals would paw at the ground then lick it. These were natural hunting grounds and were given distinct names to aid in communicating a location. This university article describes it similarly. [2] A Kentucky lick is not the same as the Anglo-European term Lick (stream), but fits in with the Mineral lick article. How this stub-article stacks up with WP:NGEO, WP:GEOLAND... I'm not sure (no experience on this), but I'm going to vote Keep — on the basis that it is a longstanding named natural geographic area. Normal Op ( talk) 06:07, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply
• merge into List of unincorporated areas of Estill County, together with all other one-liners of this ilk. Staszek Lem ( talk) 18:22, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Or the section in Estill County, Kentucky. I think I'll work on that section which is already there. Normal Op ( talk) 18:28, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply
  • @ Normal Op and Staszek Len: - Check to make sure these are real. A lot of these have been completely spurious, such as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fish Pond, Kentucky. I think we can all agree that the ones that are cemeteries or ponds or mines probably don't belong in a list of communities, if there was no permanent human population. A lot of these were created by a single user who was very careless with what they called a "populated place". Hog Farm _Bacon 14:45, 2 October 2020 (UTC) reply
    • @ Hog Farm: I do NOT agree that these places you mass-AfD'd are just cemeteries or were "spuriously added to Wikipedia". I don't know where you are from, but in Kentucky an "area" can have a name, and be settled/populated (albeit sparsely), and it is still considered a community and has a name. The majority of the land mass in Kentucky is "unincorporated area" meaning it is governed a county government and not a city or municipal government. That is all that "unincorporated" means. Cemeteries and mines get their names from the communities they are in, not the other way around. For example, your nomination of Sweet Lick, Kentucky and this one, calling each "a very small stream", were ridiculously cursory WP:BEFORE investigations, including not really reading the reference source you provided. Normal Op ( talk) 15:21, 2 October 2020 (UTC) reply
      • @ Normal Op: - I've lived in three states, two of which border Kentucky, and I've spent most of my life on a farm. I know what an unincorporated community is. I know that EVERYTHING in the Midwest has a name. The church my grandparents attended was out in the woods, it appeared to topographic maps, and there was apparently never any other buildings around it. The one room school my grandpa attended appeared on maps for decades, long after it ceased to exist. These are on the maps, and are briefly mentioned in old documents, but are not notable. I will admit that the two Knob Lick and Sweet Lick articles were a little iffy on the AFD. Yes, that was bad on my part. Here's the source calling Sweet Lick a stream. Here's the source calling Knob Lick a stream. There's a bunch of Knob Licks, but the USGS county code for the county applicable there is 21165, which indicates that Knob Lick is a tributary of Drowning Creek (Kentucky). For the record, I also rewrote the Drowning Creek article, as it claimed to be a town, but the topographic maps, Rennick, and the Kentucky River Basin Assessment Report all made it clear that Drowning Creek was a creek. However, aside from the two nominations mentioned above, I think it's almost certain that all of those other ones fail WP:GEOLAND. You know why there's so many of these little articles? Because one user mass-created most of them. For instance, according to the logs, Sawyer, Kentucky and Parkers Lake, Kentucky were created two minutes apart. I haven't looked to see if either of these is real or not, but I think that the time frame shows that little-to-no care was placed in the creation of these. Read WP:GEOLAND as well, most "communities" in the sense of informal neighborhoods or unofficial areas are not going to be notable. If you think that everything that ever existed that has a name needs an article, that'll take a RFC that WT:NGEO which has very little chance of passing. Hog Farm _Bacon 16:30, 2 October 2020 (UTC) reply

• Keep Several older newspaper sources document events and incidents in Knob Lick, establishing that it was the name of a real community where people lived, and not just a mislabeled stream [3] [4] [5] [6]. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction• Creation} 21:17, 10 October 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.