Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Raft River, Idaho (2nd nomination)

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 delete‎. ✗plicit 06:28, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Raft River, Idaho

Raft River, Idaho (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Possibly I should have speedied this as recreation of deleted material, but there is some new material here in this version so here we go again. The issue remains that this doesn't look like a community: it looks like an isolated store as far back as I can see, including when the map labelled it "Yale". GNIS fails to explain why the name changed on the map, but it's not implausible to suspect that the former Yale Store turned into the Raftriver Store (sic). Whether or not this is the place where the post office was is anyone's guess. The redirect created the last time was moved to

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Geography and Idaho. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 06:24, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Redirect to Raft River. There is verifiable history that can be covered there, including a connection to Edgar Rice Burroughs -- see [1], [2], [3], [4] -- but I don't think it's enough to justify a standalone article. Jfire (talk) 06:54, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Actually, the name mashing makes it more likely that this was a post office. The USPS had a rule for a while that post office names could only be a single word, and "Raft River" being "Raftriver" is one of thousands of examples of this. For what it's worth, Spence 2016, p. 58 also tells us that Lewis Sweetser, George Burroughs, and Harry Burroughs all went to Yale University together, and back in Idaho they ran a "Bar Y" cattle ranch and the "Yale" post office, both named for it.

  This is another fictional present tense "unincorporated community" invented by Wikipedia editors spinning out GNIS records, of course. The Bureau of Land Management's 1981 management plan for the then new Oregon National Historic Trail mentions that the Raft River crossing area where the California and Oregon Trails used to meet was private farmland.

  Uncle G (talk) 12:11, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per information provided by Uncle G; the new information is sourced to maps. This article is factually incorrect as there is no such community (see satellite view of coordinates), and if there once were, we need sources that specifically call it Raft River and a community (as opposed to a post office). Normally I think redirects are a confusing waste of time, but in this case, since there is actually a Raft River, I could live with a redirect to that article as a second option. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 14:41, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment This appears to be another "post village" with a general store and a post office acting as a focal point for the surrounding countryside. You can find references to the "Raft River community," e.g. on page 103 here [5], but I think the community in question is the surrounding farming / ranching community in the Raft River Valley, not an urbanized community existing at the location of the post office. I'm inclined to give it a sentence or two in the history section in the Upper Raft River Valley or City of Rocks National Reserve articles and delete this article. Jbt89 (talk) 19:41, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would avoid Upper Raft River Valley. The same editor who created the article at hand created that one as well, based upon the fact that the GNIS database has a "valley" database record for the valley that the Raft River is in. (The record has feature class "valley".) Basically, one editor has given us three separate articles on the Raft River confabulated from GNIS database records. Uncle G (talk) 08:01, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep If you search for Yale, Idaho, there's quite a bit, including a reference that someone lived there for eight years in the 1880s and that there was a school there (History of Idaho, A Narrative Account... by Hiram Taylor French, p. 976, 1914), and a source from Wyoming in 1992 which says "but today there is no Yale, Idaho" (cannot access any more) and another couple records of people being born there. So maybe move this to Yale, Idaho instead? SportingFlyer T·C 13:20, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Doing so would be putting the usual post office plus school equals town fallacy into action. That fallacy is simply untrue for the 19th century rural United States (and Territories). Lewis Sweetser and the Burroughs brothers named their ranch, post office, and second dredging boat after Yale University. Ironically, the notable thing in the history books, that Clark C. Spence devotes a lot of words to, is the Sweetser Burroughs Mining Company. Uncle G (talk) 08:01, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • But isn't the entire point of GEOLAND to provide information if someone finds that XYZ was born in Yale, Idaho and then decides to look up Yale, Idaho? Plus there's lots of mentions if you look far enough, including a notice they were planning on constructing a sewerage system there, and a note from a recent election. SportingFlyer T·C 10:50, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • This is where the every map dot is sacred dogma comes up against the hard reality that that's simply not true, either. This is two fallacies, now. It is simply untrue that a post office plus a school equates to a town in rural 19th century North America. And it's simply not true that every gazetteer entry is a meaningful subject.

        Here, the subjects one can find are (a) the ranching and mining, and the rural post office, done by Edgar's brothers with Lewis Sweetser and found in umpteen biographies of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as the book by history professor Clark C. Spence, mining historian; (b) the Oregon Trail's final junction for the California Trail as found in umpteen sources on those, and as noted in the 1970s as almost completely obliterated by farming when the U.S. Congress decided to make it historic and put the BLM in charge of it, and decades earlier than but in the same place as the ranching at the crossing up from the mouth of the Raft River; and (c) the places in Cassia County: Almo, Elba, and Malta.

        We have Raft River, Oregon Trail, Route of the Oregon Trail, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Malta, Idaho, and Lewis H. Sweetser articles covering all this, although we might be able to wring the mining company out as an addition as there's actually a lot to say about it, and although Cassia County, Idaho#Communities has more unwarranted inflation of things into "communities".

        But what we are dealing with instead is two articles by An Errant Knight (talk · contribs), both based upon nothing but GNIS database records, literal gazetteer entries: the Upper Raft River Valley (a valley that is fundamentally interconnected with the river) and a confabulation of a couple of post offices into an "unincorporated community" of Raft River, Idaho.

        Uncle G (talk) 15:19, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

        • Yes, but we also have multiple sources describing people and events from Yale, Idaho, which is generally enough to keep an article. I don't doubt for a second there should not be an article at Raft River, Idaho. I agree with the GNIS issue. I don't even mind if there is a redirect from Yale, Idaho to Sweetser as there's the most discussion of Yale there - not at the other places you mentioned. I just think there's the possibility for a valid article topic there, if someone were to do the research. SportingFlyer T·C 16:04, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          • Uncle G, the creator's talk page and contributions suggest they take their hobby very seriously, but the collaborative nature of the project less so. Drmies (talk) 22:24, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          • Actually, we do not. You have not cited a single one. And before you start citing the observation well and gauging station reports, note that they are about the Raft River. The power line that you might want to cite was for the Raft River Electric Coöperative, which is, as can be seen by the name, a utility company for the entire Raft River Valley based in Malta, Idaho and whose full official name is the Raft River Rural Electric Coöperative. There's that word rural again, telling us that this is a rural area without population centres, where Yale is no more than a post office that people might give as a mail route.

            Confabulating yet another "unincorporated community" from a post office named Yale is just as egregious an error as confabulating this article from a post office named Yale. This is a rural area full of ranches, which everyone agrees on from the Rural Electric Coöperative which describes how it serves a rural area and was founded by famers, through the Burea of Land Management when it surveyed what remained of the Oregon Trail in the 1970s and found it obliterated by farming, through to the autobiography where the person talks about his future wife having lived on a ranch with "nothing there". The detailed South Idaho Press piece pointed to below has this place's history as the site of cattle ranching with "no other inhabitants".

            All these are as well as the Burroughs biographies and the professor of mining history telling us that Yale was a post office, who ran it, who named it, and why. We really don't need further "unincorporated community" fakery in Wikipedia at this point.

            Uncle G (talk) 05:25, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

            I thought I cited at least two in my original keep. SportingFlyer T·C 20:31, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete I nominate this find the GOAT--> https://www.newspapers.com/article/south-idaho-press-raft-river-valley-in-1/140175446/, Uncle G you can view that as well. It is cool. It describes the entire raft river valley in detail as it was in 1929. It says that Yale was a post office, and goes on to list the towns in the valley, neither Yale nor Raft river are listed. It confirms two things Raft river and Yale were just post offices, and that post office names had nothing to do with location. They are more often named by influential people, and not for the communities. We probably should delete Yale too since it's just a post office with a vanity name.James.folsom (talk) 19:21, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• This is the new GOAT This place actually appreciated it's history enough to write about it. If your still on the fence about deleting this, look here at this greater than 1 page article on the history of Raft river valley. https://www.newspapers.com/article/south-idaho-press-raft-river-page-1/140180273/ https://www.newspapers.com/article/south-idaho-press-raft-river-page-2/140179858/ These have additionally insight about how post offices related to the community.
  • Well, it's a nice small-town paper sort of an article, but it's about Malta, not this spot! Mangoe (talk) 04:56, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Or, indeed Raft River#History or the Oregon Trail further to what Jbt89 mentioned. These are good finds, but we still haven't made any more than what all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs biographies and Clark C. Spence the mining historian tell us, which is that Yale was a post office; and what the histories of the place in earlier times tell us, which is that two settler trails diverged just after the river crossing, which Raft River already mentions. it would be nice to see some of that history from those articles in Wikipedia. But we really do not need three separate "Raft River" articles, two of which are GNIS database records confabulations created by a single editor, to cover the Raft River, the Oregon Trail, and Sweetser Burroughs. Uncle G (talk) 08:01, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • The second is also really interesting because of what it says about post offices. James.folsom (talk) 22:57, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • It's certainly a real example of post offices just being people's houses; but I found it interesting because it described this very place as the Pierce Ranch with "no other inhabitants" in the area, with Jim Pierce selling to the Sweetsers, which connects the Pierce Ranch to Lewis H. Sweetser as Jim Pierce is mentioned in the Burroughs biographies, piling on yet more evidence from sources that this is ranchland/farmland. We're not short of stuff that Wikipedia doesn't have here, from far more detail on Sweetser through the Sweetser Burroughs Mining Company to a lot more detail of this junction on the Oregon Trail which our Route of the Oregon Trail article barely mentions; but the desire to write fake "communities" instead of the real history just because post offices get dots on maps, even to be seen in this very discussion, means that we get crap like this article at hand instead. Uncle G (talk) 05:25, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, that's my point ;o), these articles are a fairly comprehensive view of the history and situation of the raft river valley and they don't mention a town called raft river anywhere in it. And, and least one of them lists all the towns and neither Yale or raft river are on that list. James.folsom (talk) 22:51, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, per the extensive analyses done above that demonstrate this place was nothing more than a rural post office for a bit and then for the rest of its history existed as unpopulated ranchland. Nothing compels us to make a standalone article for even every real city, let alone debunked GNIS artifacts.

JoelleJay (talk) 20:10, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. This article is about a rural post office which briefly served the Raft River Valley, and this content belongs in that article. It is not notable on its own. I have added a sentence to that article about the Raft River Bridge post office, so we won't lose much information by deleting this one. Jbt89 (talk) 05:30, 7 February 2024 (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.