Talk:Iyoki Station

Tram stop and train station policy

I copied this discussion from Talk:Asahi-ekimae-dōri Station because it is inaccessible due to a bot-bug which does not handle unicode characters. The basis of the discussion is the same.

We have 200,000 unreferenced articles. Several hundred of these are articles on tram stops and train stations. There is no doubt that they exist. They are in linked lists of the previous and next stations. They are named places (of a sort) and therefore are assumed to have inherent notability. Many have photographs. Some perhaps have references in another language. The ones addressed here have no secondary references. They fail WP:GNG. I know editors like these articles. Well composed PRODS are reverted without comment or improvement. I am asking for a discussion of a policy here. I reject the first option, letting these articles molder for another ten years. One of the next two is what we need to decide on -- if another easy option is not proposed:

1. No action
2. Remove the unreferenced tag if the article seems to be legit. This would appear to be in contravention to WP:GNG
3. Delete the articles in one fell swoop, or at least allowing a speedy for each one. Rhadow (talk) 20:45, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment What exactly do you have against them? I don't believe they all fail WP:GNG. Looking at deleting them has a number of problems, that need to be looked at individually. They tend to drive traffic to WP, which is important. They are encyclopedic, in countries where industrialisation occured relatively early, or at the beginning, where I live, and a lot of these stations tend to have buildings or built environment which are listed. So they have standalone notability. I think they should be kept. scope_creep (talk) 22:06, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment: No !vote at this time, but the wording of this RfC appears out of order. Requests for comment should be neutral and opinions should be left out of the RFC question (see Wikipedia:Writing requests for comment#Neutrality). Your interpretation that one option is unacceptable and another is in contravention to policy is merely opinion, not fact. --NoGhost (talk) 22:12, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment I take it scope_creep suggests that all of the tram stop and train station articles be kept until each can be looked at individually. I am still unclear whether this demands a reliable source or whether a tram stop has inherent notability and should stay irrespective of WP:GNG. If the Unsourced tag is removed, what happens when the bot comes through and replaces it? I am sorry, I was unaware of the goal to drive traffic to WP. Rhadow (talk) 13:37, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

  Hi Rhadow, that is what i'm thinking. Rhadow I don't think anybody can reach this RFC now. The legobot has turned the character 'ō' into a ?, i.e. Talk:Asahi-ekimae-d?ri Station, making the RFC all but invisible. scope_creep (talk) 07:13, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

  Sorry, it is findable. scope_creep (talk) 07:17, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

  The root problem is that Legobot (talk · contribs) - which builds the listing pages like Wikipedia:Requests for comment/History and geography - can't handle Unicode characters. This is why it replaced the "ō" with a question mark. As soon as I saw the redlinked listing entry, I fixed it by creating a redirect - which made the link blue, made the RfC findable by all the usual methods, and worked just fine until JMHamo (talk · contribs) slapped a {{db-talk}} on it. I've tried asking for the redirect to be undeleted, but no response yet. The ideal solution would be to get Legobot fixed, but Legoktm (talk · contribs) doesn't respond to bugfix requests any more. Therefore, we need to work around a buggy bot by understanding what it does, whether that be correct or not. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:48, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

  @Rhadow: You didn't need to move the RfC. All that was necessary was to get that redirect undeleted, and make sure that it stayed undeleted. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:28, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

  @Redrose64: -- I was asked to take the discussion to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. Rhadow (talk) 11:09, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment how about:

  4. Convert to a redirect pointing to a list of or "itinerary" article being a table giving details of each station in route order.

  — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 20:41, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

• 1 or 2 - With the way this set of articles has been constructed and linked together, it doesn't make sense to delete some and not all of them. This is the case for me even if some stations are clearly demonstrated to meet WP:GNG and some not. I just think it is unnecessarily bureaucratic to try and do an independent WP:GNG assessment of each article. I appreciate Scope creep's point about being a source of traffic. And I haven't seen a compelling non-policy (i.e. practical) reason to delete. I also don't see anything likely to be challenged in the current content of the articles so having them remain unreferenced is not a problem for me and so the {{Unreferenced}} tags can either go or stay. The material in the articles is verifiable from published transit system maps (both primary and secondary sources exist). I beleive the articles are potentially useful to readers in their current stubby state as evidenced by non-zero pageview counters. I am not concerned that they have not been improved in x years because I don't see what additional verifiable information could be readily added. It may be possible to convince me that entire lines including their stations could be covered in a single article but that would get tricky when stations sit on multiple lines which is a common situation so I'd need to see a proposal about how to address that. Also, if the current organization is not broken, don't fix it. ~Kvng (talk) 23:03, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

• 1 (Keep all articles on stations) Train stations are important markers. Unlike bus stops which are considerably easier to construct, train stations are the result of a lot more planning. While some stations may seem disused today, many have existed for years and they were once important landmarks in their community. In India for example, train stations are often used as references for directions in rural areas. I personally feel that train stations are important to human geography and should be kept. As for the specific case of stubs, I don't see a problem with that. I have noticed that many articles about Japanese stations contain the location, line and an image. I think that is a good start. Perhaps in the future someone can add more facts. Wikipedia is built incrementally and I wouldn't want to delete these.--DreamLinker (talk) 02:07, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment -- DreamLinker -- The argument is WP:ILIKEIT. A proponent says, "Perhaps in the future someone can add more facts." In ten years, no one has added any facts. Google it. Facts on Iyoki Station are scarce. WP:GNG exists for a reason. Rhadow (talk) 12:29, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

  I do get your point. However, we have a short description about the station here. It contains details of the route and location. Today I even added an image. There are many other facts which can be added - the type of platform, the date of opening, whether any important landmarks were nearby and the date of closing (if it ever closes in the future). My argument is not WP:ILIKEIT but rather according to WP:5P1. Wikipedia functions as both a general encyclopaedia as well as a Gazetteer, containing article about train stations. I don't see a problem keeping stubby articles.--DreamLinker (talk) 14:42, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

  "In ten years, no one has added any facts." This does not imply that in another 10 years no one will add any facts. This is a Japanese train station and it is entirely possible that information is located in offline Japanese sources. I wouldn't want to delete something simply because it has not been improved in 10 years, as Kvng mentioned above.--DreamLinker (talk) 14:47, 18 October 2017 (UTC)