Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Farm to Market Road 752

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. Scott Mac 00:06, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Farm to Market Road 752

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This is actually one of the better road articles, however it is a rather small road (13 miles), one of a network of about 2 dozen in between i 45 and i 20. This is almanac territory, and I've noticed a lot of road articles lately that don't even begin to meet notability criteria. This is one of them. Shadowjams (talk) 09:09, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note - This editor has apparently created a lot (over 20) of these lately. I'm not addressing those at this time, although others might want to take note. Shadowjams (talk) 09:11, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep for now: state highways are generally considered notable for the fact that the state's department of transportation or equivalent has sought fit to maintain, mark and number the roadway in question. Length of the roadway has nothing to do with the quality of the article that can be written about it with the proper amount of time and research. See M-28 Business (Ishpeming–Negaunee, Michigan), 4.873 miles (7.842 km), or Capitol Loop, 2.381 miles (3.832 km), for samples what can be done with even shorter roadways. I don't know enough about this specific roadway to know how much history could be written for it, but the article is brand new and just being started. Imzadi 1979 → 10:03, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's not true. State highways are not generally considered notable, and the fact a state department attends to my water meter isn't a reason it's notable either. Loops around major metro areas are quite different than loops south east of Dallas. Shadowjams (talk) 11:11, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:USRD/P and WP:USRD/NT for precedents and notability concepts regarding highways in the US. Past consensus here at AfD is that state highways are generally notable. You're the only one that uses your water meter, but most state highways are used by hundreds to thousands or more cars daily. The fact remains that this article was only created 2 days ago. Length of a roadway is irrelevant to the potential quality of an article that can be created. Of the two articles I referenced above, the former is a Featured Article and the latter is currently a Featured Article Candidate on subject roads 3–6 times shorter than this one. Let's let this article develop for more than 2 days (it will get 7 more days now that an AfD has been initiated) and we'll see what possible with this subject. If it's not showing signs of notability and development, the prudent course of action is not deletion, but rather merger into the appropriate list article. Imzadi 1979 → 11:36, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WP:USRD is a WikiProject and does not get to set lower notability bars for articles in its purview. Stifle (talk) 15:29, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, they have not set a lower bar. They have given stated outcomes (the precedents page) in response to what was turning into a campaign to eradicate all state highway articles from Wikipedia at the time. They have also given a logical reasoning on why certain articles are generally considered notable for the purpose of inclusion in the encyclopedia. That whole page is about the general case and not the specific one, and so it is not a blanket "policy" for inclusion, it's more of a "litmus test" whereby the page explains some general points to consider on why precedent has been here at AfD that state highway articles are generally notable. If you would like, I can quote the whole thing here every time an AfD is started, or I can just refer you to some pages that exist that provide some insight on the situation, past and present. WP:USRD/NT is not policy, it does not override any other policy, it just summarizes the situation with logical reasoning based on informed opinion. Imzadi 1979 → 21:05, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If people were paying attention, they'd see that we've (USRD) been trying for years to purge unneeded county routes and minor unnumbered roads from Wikipedia, and about 1/5 of them have been retained here at AFD. I think it's pretty clear that our notability standards are higher than the general notability criteria, not lower. – TMF 16:38, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - Road appears to be of a decent length and does have quite a bit of information. Dough 48 72 15:38, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. Though it is a state highway (which are generally considered notable), TxDOT itself has flagged this as a more minor highway by including it in a secondary highway system. Are FMs notable? I'm not so sure. Most of them that I've encountered are local access roads that most places would just be major county roads. There are a few, especially as you get in more western parts of Texas, that literally spur off a main highway and end for at a random point for no easily observable reason. (See FM 2119 and FM 2465 for particularly egregious examples.) So I think at the most deletionist end of the spectrum we could say "nuke all FMs from orbit" while one more on the reasonably inclusionist side would say "keep some FMs but not all". (Of course there are some hyperinclusionists who want articles on every county road, but that's a bit radical for me.) If we go with that second interpretation, we have to determine where the line is between the FMs that are "important enough" and those that aren't. I would say FM 752 falls below that line; at best it is an old alignment of US 69 and at worst is just a meandering alternate to it. So, I don't think it's worth having a full article on. List entry, yes, Rockland County Scenario-esque entry, maybe, full article, no. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 16:27, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Scott, the only reason I'm willing to keep this particular article at this time is that secondary highway system or not, the article was 2 days old when the AfD was initiated. Past precedent has shown that articles with similar lengths or "non-primary state highway status" can be turned into very viable articles. Two days is not long enough for me to judge the notability nor viability of this article yet. Otherwise every highway stub out there of similar highway length, article length and article development should be deleted. I feel as though this nomination is a knee-jerk reaction by someone that saw several new articles being created en masse. I have counseled its creator to spend more time on the quality of each article being created so that each one can be developed enough to ensure notability. Otherwise, it appears to be a race to finish a "to-do list" to get "all the missing articles created". Imzadi 1979 → 21:05, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  - Perhaps this is where you and I disagree. I tend to follow a model of AFD as "timeless", where the importance of an topic can be examined separately from the merits of the article itself, disregarding such things such as the age of the article or its current level of sophistication. If we do that—take just the subject of the article into our consideration and not the article itself—we see that FM 752 is part of a class of potential article subjects, that of Texas Farm-to-Market Roads. Are all FMs suitable topics for an article? Let's examine FM 2465. (You can examine this highway on Google Maps by searching for "Farm to Market Rd 2465 Childress TX".) Would this be a good topic for an article? It starts two miles south of the Red River, goes west for 2.8 miles, and from the same point goes east 0.7 miles to a stream crossing, and ends. Notice there are no towns noted anywhere in the highway's definition—the highway is described from an arbitrary point on US 83 relative to the Red River, and the highway is simply denoted as distances from that point. Its purpose is unknown; presumably it was built to connect to the Conkline Creek crossing, but assuming such would be OR. It serves no other immediately obvious purpose, as doesn't connect to any incorporated territory at all. Wikipedia could not do much better at describing this highway than Google Maps does. We could include the two history notes that TxDOT gives us, but that's still barely enough for a four-sentence article. With this example in hand, we must come to the conclusion that not all FMs should get articles. So then, with this in mind, the question for FM 752 is "does the same apply for this route as it does for FM 2465?" Obviously this is more of a gray area, because FM 752 does connect two towns. However, US 69 does the same thing better (it appears to be a divided expressway) so FM 752 appears to be a glorified back road. (From its appearance on the map, it may well be an old alignment of US 69, but the TxDOT designation file makes no such declaration). In my mind, that tells me that FM 752 isn't important enough (important, that is, not notable, since we do have sources from TxDOT and DeLorme that it exists) in the grand scheme of things to get an article. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 03:53, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - Improving the article would not be difficult. This provides a great opportunity for the new editor who wrote it to familiarize himself with the project's article standards and get experience writing and improving articles. Besides, I don't want to discourage the guy because we need more active editors in Texas. Fortguy (talk) 01:30, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Calling this one of the better road articles is a bit of an insult to the editors of WP:USRD considering this is a stub as of this writing. Anyway...we do need to look at how we handle Farm to Market and Ranch to Market Roads. By their very nature, most of them are spurs connecting extremely rural areas to larger, more populated areas. Unless they have a substantial history, they're probably not deserving of standalone articles. We should treat the vast majority as we would members of any secondary state highway system, and that's by merging them into RCS-style lists. However, this decision should be made in another venue, such as USRD or WT:TXSH. Thus, conditional keep on the basis that this subject is notable enough for some kind of coverage in Wikipedia. – TMF 16:38, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Texas-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:12, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Transportation-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:12, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd never heard of the RCS until the link was brought up. If there could be such grouping involved about FMs/RMs, I see only 2 ways to do it: the number range or by county. A quick glance at any TX map with FM/RM routes on it will show that not every county has a uniform amount of routes. Cherokee County (for example), where FM 752 is, has 37 FMs (and another on the way), which would make quite a long article and some might have a problem with an article that is longer than is accepted for most subjects (I guess, I'm still feeling my way around). But to group them by county wouldn't always work, as several FM/RM routes cover multiple counties, which would be difficult to have a single link to. As for the number range in the RCS, how many could be grouped without the article being lengthy? 5? 10? 15? Awtribute (talk) 17:53, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This road is a state highway, albeit a secondary one, and it does have a good bit of content and the potential for expansion; if anyone could get access to this book, for example, we could probably expand the route description a bit. (For some of the context, see the snippet here.) Also keep in mind that we have GAs on lesser highways than this (several county roads in rural New York come to mind), so calling this unexpandable is a bit premature given the article's only a few days old.

Incidentally, if the tide of this discussion does turn toward deletion, WikiProject U.S. Roads needs to find a policy for merging these before deleting any outright. There's a lot of farm-to-market roads with articles that are about the same as this one notability-wise, and if they're not notable enough for their own articles, they should all be merged somewhere per the current policy on county roads and the like. Since there isn't a decided format for merging them yet, this will probably take some discussion outside this Afd. (And develop some more defined notability rules perhaps, but we can cross that bridge if we come to it.) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 23:00, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I nominated one of those rural NY county route GAs for AFD about a year ago; unfortunately it was kept due to a lack of a consensus. That route, unlike FM 752, isn't even signed - it's nothing more than an internal inventory number. I know all about WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, but I see this as another reason to keep FM 752 in some form. – TMF 03:08, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Though I agree with you that FM 752 should be kept, I also agree with you about WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and I'm not sure that some of those county route GAs are notable either; take this one (in the aforementioned Rockland County, no less), which somehow got to GA with four sources, three of them maps. It's not too bad lengthwise, but one non-map reference and the entire route description coming from Google Maps doesn't strike me as quality sourcing. There's several others like it of varying length and class, mostly in New York and New Jersey (Florida too, but those are mostly stubs and have been getting deleted/merged lately); I don't want to cause more WP:USRD infighting given the project's history, but the project might want to consider whether some of these articles should exist, especially if FM roads start being considered non-notable. (A little off-topic, I know, but still important given the context.) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:27, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I'm all for junking 99% of the standalone county route articles, but there are some highway editors in both WP:USRD and WP:HWY who are hellbent on keeping them. A USRD editor who feels the same way as me once compared the effort to phase them out to tilting at windmills, and he's spot on. – TMF 03:37, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, given the project's history with these kind of issues, or pretty much anything divisive (naming conventions, NYSR, the first county road debate), getting into another huge debate probably isn't the best idea; I don't want to drive people off over something like this. (That, and I try to avoid road drama as it is; my response to USRD debates is usually to work on another topic until the whole thing blows over. Why must WP:USRD be such a lightning rod for wikidrama?) Though I do find it strange that the less notable county routes seem to be concentrated in two states; I know we have more dedicated editors in those two, but it still seems like a double standard when almost everything else has been merged, deleted, or properly referenced. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:52, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, the FM roads are state highways, and state highways are inherently notable. Length really shouldn't be a factor; we don't try to delete Dean Barkley simply because he was a U.S. senator for a very short period of time. Nyttend (talk) 23:37, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note - Apparently I misjudged the response here, although I find this somewhat shocking as we've never included every state highway as though it were independently notable. Just do a quick street view of it south of Rusk, Texas. It's a 2 lane blacktop road with no shoulder for a stretch. This is not a major thoroughfare: it's a basic state highway. I fear that the rationale for keeping is either unaware of WP:DIRECTORY or incompatible with it. Let's go back to first principles. What are the WP:RS that indicate notability? What I see for a source is the Texas DOT's almanac listing of every road they manage, and then two references to maps. That's not an indication of notability unless we've expanded the notion of inherent notability to epic proportions. Shadowjams (talk) 07:13, 12 August 2010 (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.