Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force

Plan

Per this discussion, there are many stubby Wikipedia articles on California locales that have been created sourced to a GNIS entries. GNIS has errors and may contain locales that are not notable, per WP:NGEO.

The plan for the cleanup is the following. For each county in California:

Create a work page as a subpage of this one, using this template
Fill in the work page by sorting articles by notability
When finished sorting, create a list article (e.g., List of unincorporated communities in Modoc County, California), with formatting described here
Modify the county navboxes (e.g., {{Modoc County, California}}) to refer to the new list article and remove non-notable entries.
PROD or merge the non-notable articles.

Members

CJK09 (talk) 23:32, 17 April 2020 (UTC) - Gold Country, Sierra Nevada, Bay Area[reply]
Titan Andromeda 03:03, 18 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
— hike395 (talk) 01:24, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
– dlthewave ☎ 03:12, 20 April 2020 (UTC) I have access to urham’s Place-Names of California’s Gold Country.[reply]
Reywas92^Talk 05:36, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Mangoe (talk) 11:02, 22 April 2020 (UTC) I am working on the Nn Place articles first but will switch to by-county once those are done.[reply]
Glendoremus (talk) 03:45, 31 May 2020 (UTC) Contra Costa[reply]
Hog Farm _Bacon 18:57, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Progress by county

TODO: make county progress map

County Page	Editor(s)	Status
Alameda	Glendoremus	page created
Alpine	Mangoe	Sorted
Amador	Mangoe	started
Butte	Mangoe	Sorted
Calaveras	Mangoe	started
Contra Costa	Glendoremus	Sorted
El Dorado	CJK09	Sorted
Lassen	Mangoe	started
Marin	Glendoremus	Sorted
Mono	Hike395	Finished!
Modoc	CactusJack	started
Orange	TitanAndromeda	Sorted
San Diego	TitanAndromeda	Sorted
Santa Barbara	Reywas92	Sorted
Sierra	CJK09	Sorted

Resources

Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force/Template - Template for starting a county page
USPS Report on the evolution of mail delivery: it explains what a fourth-class post office was. At the height of pre-RFD service there were 76,000 of these, and yes, often enough they were just a spot in someone's house.

Books to check against

Any Arcadia Publishing book for the locality such as (to take Lake County, California as an example):
- Lake County Historical Society (2009). Lake County, 1871–1960. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 9780738560175.
- Hoberg, Donna (2007). Resorts of Lake County. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 9780738547985.
Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they do point the way. Arcadia (and other local history) books helped sort out Robert, California (AfD discussion) and Escalle, Larkspur, California; helped identify what Salminas Resort, California (AfD discussion) actually was; and conversely made the cases stronger against the likes of Ettawa Springs, California (AfD discussion). All of these were two-sentence GNIS-only stubs at the time of deletion nomination, all claiming "unincorporated community".