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 Draftify. There's clear consensus that this doesn't belong in main space in its present form. What's not clear from the discussion is whether it's a hopeless case. Moving it to draft space per J04n solves the immediate problem while allowing for several possible ways forward and complies with WP:ATD.

With some work to clean up the WP:OR and (critically) find good sources, maybe this could be salvaged. Given that it's been tagged for sourcing problems for 11 years, I'm not terribly optimistic about that, but we'll see. Maybe some of it should be merged into Oregon Trail. Maybe some additional information about other trails and a rename would make this main-space-worthy. If, after some reasonable amount of time, there's been no useful progress in any of these areas, feel free to bring the draft back to AfD MfD.

Nice bovine picture. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:33, 9 February 2018 (UTC) reply

PS, I also deleted The big medicine trail, which redirected to this. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:37, 9 February 2018 (UTC) reply

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

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Extensive searching found no actual use of the term "medicine trail" in association with these trails. The first source is a book on horse breeding which is completely immaterial to the topic. The Great Medicine Road, Part 1 is available on Google Books, but it does not use the term "Medicine trail" at any point. Similarly, searching the works cited + the term "medicine trail" turned up no results besides Wikipedia mirrors. Most of the content of the article is immaterial to the phrase "medicine trail" to begin with, and I was overall unable to find anything supporting the use of the term in this context. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 23:35, 23 January 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. ^{Baby miss fortune} 07:14, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Animal-related deletion discussions. ^{Baby miss fortune} 07:14, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:47, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• Keep Medicine Trails are faily well known walks and ancient trails you can go on, the citations are book based and can be found online, the article could be improved, but I so no reason to delete it what so ever. Govvy ( talk) 14:22, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• @ Govvy: I did look up the sources on Google books, and the ones I found did not contain the phrase "medicine trail" in them at all. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 17:06, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• Comment - I have the inkling this might be a notable topic, there are certainly quite a few mentions of them. However, searches did not turn up enough in-depth coverage to show notability. If someone can provide that type of sourcing, would definitely !vote keep. Right now, I'm on the fence. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 14:30, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply
• Keep I've just said this over at WP:ANI, so hopefully TenPoundHammer will do the decent thing and spend some time sorting this article out and withdrwing his AfD. Here is an admittedly lengthy breakdown of my assessment: Now, Medicine Trails is a pretty poorly-constructed, unreferenced article. But look at View History and you'll see a load of waffle about horses added by one person last year who only ever made eight edits - all to this article - and then left the Project. Strip that out the (literal) horseshit and you're left with this version. Read the lead sentence, noting the emboldening and the word prior to it. Check out the early forms of the article where none of it was emboldened. Do a Google search on "Big Medicine Trail" and related terms and suddenly we start to see we have an article (admittedly with a lot of OR in it) that's about the early origins of major trails across the US, used by animals, then native American Indians, and then the early explorers like Lewis and Clark and then hordes of white settlers migrating from east to west. We find the term Big Medicine Trail used in numerous sources referring to the early Trails like: this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and possibly even this. That makes me wonder whether the article was correctly titled, and whether a keep and rewrite, or at least a redirect to one of the major articles on N American trails ( Oregon Trail, Great Osage Trail, Santa Fe Trail etc.), or to Lewis and Clark Expedition would be more appropriate. That's where I'm stopping as I have no knowledge of the history of American trails, and their origins, but I'm sure there are many here that do. What I do know is that this is yet another article from the same proposer that is definitely worthy of being retained. Nick Moyes ( talk) 15:24, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• @ Nick Moyes: So are you going to do the heavy lifting yourself, or are you going to pass the buck like everyone else? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 17:06, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

@ TenPoundHammer: How dare you! Nick Moyes ( talk) 19:34, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• "Great Medicine Trail" is also attested [1] [2]. XOR'easter ( talk) 22:57, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This debate has been included in the Article Rescue Squadron's list of content for rescue consideration. 14.192.208.83 ( talk) 15:52, 24 January 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. XOR'easter ( talk) 01:06, 25 January 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. XOR'easter ( talk) 01:06, 25 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• Merge to Oregon Trail (selectively, possibly just redirect given state of OR here). This is just a POVFORK, full of OR, of the Oregon trail. Following Nick Moyes suggestion to look at big medicine trail - this source Pioneer Trails West, 1985 has this synonymous with Oregon trail - and much less used. Alternatively - we could turn this article into a list article using a more properly used term (e.g. Great Trail - which seems to be in the east) - for American Indian era trails - cutting out the OR here. Icewhiz ( talk) 07:24, 25 January 2018 (UTC) reply
• Delete - Looking at the actual content of the article, we already cover this at Indian route (United States)#Historical usage, which is actually sourced and well-written (this article isn't, so I wouldn't say there's much worth merging). - 165.234.252.11 ( talk) 19:57, 25 January 2018 (UTC) reply

I'm not even sure about redirecting to Oregon Trail, since the sources provided above use the phrase to refer to the Oregon Trail, to a leg of Lewis and Clark's journey, to one specific Indian route through Wyoming, and as a metonym for westward migration in general. (And with the exception of the HQ snippet and the over-land.com site, which talk about Indian routes in general and then use the phrase "medicine trail" to mean the Wyoming route specifically, that's all they do, establish the phrase as an alternate name for something else. Nothing you could build an article on.) - 165.234.252.11 ( talk) 20:21, 25 January 2018 (UTC) reply

From my reading - Big Medicine Trail is synonymous with Oregon Trail. Medicine trail seems wider. Icewhiz ( talk) 20:26, 25 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• Comment -- I know little about this, but I get the feeling that there is there basis of a worthwhile article here, though not necessarily with this name. Peterkingiron ( talk) 17:34, 26 January 2018 (UTC) reply

• delete When I weed out the numerous false hits (there's a "Two Medicine" park area which generates a ton of them) I was unable to find a good reference for this. And really, when you think about bison moving around in enormous herds, it just doesn't seem reasonable that they would produce relatively narrow pathways. What with all the irrelevant beating around the bush in the article, I have to think this is fakelore or even a hoax, and I don't think it should be merged anywhere because there's just not any evidence that it's in any way true. Mangoe ( talk) 16:58, 30 January 2018 (UTC) reply
• Rename to Wilderness Trails, with new lede. Googling the phrase "Medicine Trails" with every single trail name in the article delivers zero hits outside of Wikipedia. Fails WP:GNG as titled. These are clearly wilderness trails, and are formed mostly by bison. So, how about a rename and this lede?:

Wilderness Trails, sometimes also called bison trails, are a series of North American trails made by the act of migrating animal herds for thousands of years. The herds, primarily bison, led early people out of the harsh full regions of the Ice Age and centuries later, the trails were followed by influential explorers during the exploration of the west. Some of these trails survive as modern highways.

Also add Great Osage Trail. Not a lot of heavy lifting required here - just consensus. TimTempleton ^{(talk) (cont)} 23:01, 6 February 2018 (UTC) reply

• Draftify: As it stands this is a unreferenced page full of original research. In this discussion references have been provided, moving it to draft space would allow folks to incorporate them into the page. Others have suggested renaming or merging, either of those can happen while it is a draft. -- J04n( talk page) 13:31, 9 February 2018 (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.