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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of interesting or unusual place names/2003 discussion

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  • List of interesting or unusual place names
    • There is absolutely no way in the world that this can ever be NPOV. -- Oliver P. 08:40 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    • Why is this a question of NPOV? The names in this list are not fictional, and the introductory paragraph explains quite well (a) the intention of the page and (b) that in many/most cases the names just sound funny to foreign language speakers. If someone added things like "Fucking is very popular with tourists", well, that would of course have to be removed. But the bare list? --KF 08:54 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    • Do we really need to apply NPOV to an issue as trivial as whether or not a place name is interesting? I doubt this can ever offend anyone. Evercat 13:54 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    • NPOV is a Wikipedia-wide policy. We can't just start arbitrarily deciding not to apply it to some articles. Whose POV do we go with when deciding whether or not to apply the NPOV policy? This is just silly. -- Oliver P. 13:58 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
      • NPOV is overrated mental masturbation - this is a nice article Pizza Puzzle
        • Well, of course it's nice. But Wikipedia is not here to be nice. ;) You love NPOV, really, you know you do... -- Oliver P. 14:49 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
          • Heh, OK, but I still refuse to believe that it's POV to say that Fucking, Austria is an interesting name. I mean, who doesn't find it so? :-) Evercat 15:10 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
            • Well, I do, admittedly. :) But it's still a subjective judgement, and I think we should be trying to be as objective as possible. Much as I like this list, I don't think it is appropriate for an encyclopaedia. -- Oliver P. 21:55 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
              • If you really want it to be NPOV you could re-cast it as list of place names that sound like "vulgar" (dictionary tag) English words, list of place names with an unusual number of letters, etc., and move remainder to "inherrently funny words" article. But why bother? Leave it in, Killjoys. Andy G 22:15 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
                • "Killjoys"? This is supposed to be a serious encyclopaedia, not somewhere to have a laugh. "Why bother?" Because an encyclopaedia is supposed to provide a summary of human knowledge. What does one learn from this page? Nothing, except about the minds of the Wikipedians. How can we check a "fact" on this page? What reference source can we use to check if something is interesting or not? We can't check anything on this page, because it contains nothing but the subjective impressions of the people editing it. -- Oliver P. 02:27 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    • Objected. :-) -- Timwi 23:39 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
      • On what grounds? I know the page says "Votes" in the title, but I think we should provide arguments. -- Oliver P. 02:27 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
        • What does one learn from this page? you ask. One learns about interesting and unusual place names. Evercat 02:33 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
          • Do you learn what is interesting from other people? Of course not. There is no objective truth behind the concept, so you can't learn about it from other people. It's purely a matter of taste. This is just a list of what some Wikipedians find interesting. I mean, what are we going to get next? A list of songs that are good? A list of political doctrines that are sound? A list of people that are attractive? -- Oliver P. 04:59 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
        • I can't see the problem with this page. FearÉIREANN 04:14 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
          • I started this page do de-orphan Fucking, Austria, and that is how I generally see most of the lists on Wiki that might be accused of being non-encyclopaedic - as place holders for links to articles that might not otherwise get wirtten. Some of the interesting and unusual places, I find less than interesting. If you want to delete this page for NPOV reasons, then a page containing placenames that are vulgar in English would susbstitute the majority of entries, but then we would orphan pages such as Bang Bang Jump Up and Macgillicuddy's Reeks Mintguy

I think the best way to de-orphan placenames is to list them in the article on whatever region the place belongs to. I think this should be done whatever the decision on this page, so I might do it later. I'll put it on my things to do list, so it might get done by around 2043 or so. :) -- Oliver P. 01:27 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I started adding footnotes to some of the entries, possibly this makes the list more objectif in your eyes. -- User:Docu

That's cool, but if you're going to explain a large proportion of the entries, it would probably be easier to put the explanations on the same lines as the entries themselves. But it doesn't help with my NPOV concerns, which are related to the title - specifically, the words "interesting or unusual". That's purely a subjective matter. However much you do to explain why you have chosen to include something, it's still your personal choice, and there is no means of checking whether or not it is a valid choice. Maybe that's true with all lists, to a certain extent, but it's particularly true of this one. And I didn't realise that the linking-to-headers thing had been implemented here yet. That's hideous. Please don't do it again. :P -- Oliver P. 09:01 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If you like to suggest a better title, I'm sure I'm likely to follow your suggestion. As for the inclusion criteria, I tend to think that looking up the words in a dictionary is a fairly objective process, even if it may the wrong dictionary. -- User:Docu

Well, KF came up with List of place names that are likely to be considered by some as unusual (see above), but I'm not sure that was a serious suggestion. Then I suggested that we could have List of place names that some published source states is interesting or unusual, but I wasn't really being serious myself. It would mean removing all the placenames until such published sources could be found, anyway. And I don't understand your comment about looking up words in a dictionary. How many dictionaries tell you which of their words are "interesting"? Even if one of them did, it would still only be the point of view of the editors of that particular dictionary. So I still support deletion of the page. Why is no-one else supporting me? >:( -- Oliver P. 15:59 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Since I'm here, I just thought I'd say three things:

  1. I am another person who thinks this page is not neutral and shouldn't be here. Having articles for entertainment value is more Everything2's style.
  2. However, I don't care enough to argue about it. Have fun.
  3. I have a friend from Shag Harbour. He was reminded on a daily basis how funny that was. I believe that Shag Harbour is more interesting, however, for that fact that it seems to have developed a unique dialect of English. -- Stephen Gilbert 16:01 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't see how this could be a NPOV issue. On a reasonable reading, lists of this kind implicitly assert only that many people are likely to find the entries interesting -- not that one point of view is superior to another, or that anyone who finds the names uninteresting is "wrong". I have to think that what's really bothering the objectors is a feeling that the topic is frivolous or unencyclopedic, not that it's biased. I see no good reason to delete it. -- Cjmnyc 02:14 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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