Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Columbia Mill

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 no consensus. I am choosing no consensus as good points were made all around. Here are a few ideas:

1. I think there could be an opportunity for this article to be expanded with offline sources.

2. If not, propose a merge to an appropriate article and a redirect to follow. That can be purposed on the talk page.

Thanks everyone. Missvain (talk) 00:29, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Columbia Mill

Columbia Mill (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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Non-notable subject. The draft of this article (Draft:Columbia Mill) was rejected last month on the grounds of its non-notability. Some of the information on this page could be added to pages such as Cedarburg, Wisconsin and Cedar Creek (Wisconsin) if it isn't there already. CoatGuy (talk) 14:44, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Wisconsin-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 15:00, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• It's in the history books, and that's its history. In fact, there's more in the history books than in the article at hand, because what the 20th century history books skim in a subordinate clause, the 19th century history books cover in detail, and no history books were used in the making of this article.

  We don't pick and choose articles based upon your subjective notion of what's important. That way madness lies. Notability is not subjective, and Project:fame and importance is a famously rejected notion. This is also entry #422 in H. Russell Zimmermann's 1989 The Heritage Guidebook: Landmarks and Historical Sites in Southeastern Wisconsin, from which there might be a small bit to add.

  Uncle G (talk) 15:36, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • It's not my subjective notion of what's important; with the exception of Columbia Mill, the existing articles on buildings in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, are all sites on the National Register of Historic Places. The Washington Avenue Historic District (Cedarburg, Wisconsin) alone includes 80 historic structures. Should each of them have its own page? I've read some of the non-peer reviewed history books that you're talking about. For example, Butterfield's The Town of Cedarburg was written within the town's first three decades of existence and chronicles the building of nearly every blacksmith shop, mill, general store, tavern, and stagecoach inn in the community. And I have read Ryan Gierach's Cedarburg: A History Set in Stone; I've even cited it as a source in contributions I've made to articles about Cedarburg. His book contains a paragraph about the construction of Columbia Mill's dam in 1845-1850. The subsequent paragraph is about all the shoe stores that opened in Cedarburg in the mid-1840s. Should Fred Schliefer's shoe store (and the lovely anecdote about his hiring of a Bavarian sales clerk who would work in his employ for the next 19 years!) also get an article because Ryan Gierach thought it was notable enough to write a few sentences about?

    Wikipedia is not a directory of every old building that once existed and is not an indiscriminate collection of information. But we turn the encyclopedia into just that when we don't take a thorough look at the sorts of secondary sources we use in determining what is notable. Just because a name appears several times in Google Books does not make the subject notable. An article based solely on entries in these sorts of local history books, which are essentially directories peppered with a few entertaining anecdotes about the "old timers," runs the risk of becoming a directory entry itself. It is not an exaggeration to say that you could produce several hundred articles for all the historical buildings and now-demolished 19th century structures in the small town of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, but that way madness lies.

    The Columbia Mill site lies within the Columbia Historic District (although it is not a contributing property to the district); maybe this information could be included as part of a larger article on that NRHP site. CoatGuy (talk) 16:23, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep – satisfies WP:GNG, since the article's References indicate "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". I acknowledge CoatGuy's comments regarding the Further reading resources, but the references seem to me to demonstrate that this subject satisfies GNG. — Hebrides (talk) 20:19, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment by nom: I would also note that none of this article's references satisfy WP:GNG. Ref 1--which accounts for most of the information in the article--is a scan of a typewritten, hand-edited document. While it is housed in a university archive, it is not a peer-reviewed or formally published work and should not be treated as a reliable source--certainly not a reliable source on which more than half of an article is based. Ref 2 is a webpage about a totally different building with one passing reference to Columbia Mill. Ref 3 is a state government report that proves nothing other than that the mill's dam exists and was inspected as early as 1915. Refs 4 and 6 do not reference Columbia Mill at all and instead deal with pollution that doesn't seem to have anything to directly do with the mill. Ref 5 also references the pollution and at least mentions the Columbia Mill pond, but looking more closely at the source, it seems that the pollution actually had nothing to do with the mill itself other than the fact that it occurred in the vicinity after the the building had already been demolished. And the source makes clear that pollution was caused was a totally different company, a mile upstream. The paragraph about pollution, which accounts for half of the page, doesn't even have anything to do with the subject, and would be better suited to a page such as Cedar Creek (Wisconsin). I urge you to take another look at the sources to determine if they truly are significant and reliable coverage, Hebrides. CoatGuy (talk) 22:25, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Reference 1 seems to show good coverage.
• Delete, I'm not seeing much significant coverage in reliable sources. The first source is the only one that has some coverage, but it's only a single source. Much of the sources in the article are either passing mentions, or not about the subject of the article. JackFromWisconsin (talk | contribs) 17:09, 22 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Only the first source is possibly okay per WP:GNG. I can't find anything else in a web search. The Further Reading may be the key to determining whether WP:GNG is (weakly) met. I also wouldn't be adverse to re-draftifying, since most of these will be offline. SportingFlyer T·C 19:23, 22 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: three further sources now appear in the References section, so when interpreting the comments above that refer to citations by their numbers, an appropriate mapping should be applied (2→3, 3→5, 4→7, 5→8, 6→9). Hope that helps — Hebrides (talk) 15:37, 23 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, I guess. Boy, this is tough one and a borderline case. Still, in borderline cases we want to learn toward preserving material, I think.

So OK, reasons for preserving the material... Well, most important, it's a OK article. Most of the last paragraph has nothing to do with this mill and should go (it's good material, but it doesn't belong in this article). And that's the most important material I guess. Still, even then, it's an OK size article, it's not just a stub. And every single sentence is ref'd! That's a far better level of reffing than most of our articles. And it was the first mill on Cedar Creek, after all. And it's on a clearly "encyclopedic" subject, it's not like a Pokemon card.

The key principle Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia opens with "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia... and incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. But there's no "Encyclopedia of American Grist Mills" or "Encyclopedia of Wisconsin Mills", that is true, but then, we are making one aren't we. How is that a bad thing to do. And we're not running out space, and the article exists, so why not include this entry.

On the other hand, good grief but is this thing obscure. They tore it down to build a bank branch, and no human person seems to have taken a picture of it before that, at least that google knows of. There's really no articles about it and I can't find anything. The one notable lengthy article in the Chicago Tribune doesn't mention the mill all, and would go if the last paragraph goes.

Everything else is either bare primary documents or really obscure. WP:GNG doesn't say that that matters, but it's a notability guideline so of course really obscure sources don't help much there: does not meet WP:GNG in my view. But... WP:GNG is something to always seriously consider, but it's a guideline, a suggestion, and here somebody has made an acceptable article, well-ref'd article, so keep.

I mean, what should really be done IMO is make an article Mills on Cedar Creek in Cedarburg Wisconsin, merge this article into it (minus most of the last paragraph), make an entry on the Wire and Nail Factory (which I think is doable), and two-sentence entries on the Concordia Mill, Concordia Mill, and Hilgen and Wittenberg Woolen Mill with pointers to those articles with the "main article" template. That'd be great, if the article creator want to do that. Herostratus (talk) 01:49, 8 May 2021 (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.