Talk:Ash Hill, North Carolina

Place of Local Interest

The issue of places of local interest can be somewhat of a problem, and there is no definitive rules for saying which locales deserve to have their own articles... yet. I actually hope to draft a guideline just for unincorporated communities. The question is, what do you call a community? Is a gas station all you need? How about a really small name on a map? Those places on maps are usually misnamed and are hardly ever used. How about neighborhoods of a city? Do housing developments count? If so, how small or big do they have to be? These are all questions that I am personally trying to find some answer to for the sake of everyone who's creating these small place articles. The closest guideline we have is WP:LOCAL and Wikipedia is not a Travel Guide.

If I didn't bring this up now, I'm sure someone else would later. I, myself, have been creating lots of unincorporated community articles in Davidson County, North Carolina and elsewhere. Some were deleted for lack of importance, some remained. I fear the same for articles like these. It is hard to find any sources other than the ones you have now for a community of such size as this. It doesn't even appear on the USGS Geographic Names Information System, which means it must be really insignificant, no offense. (It does appear in smallest text on Google Maps I see) This means that finding sources or any info for that matter other than original research for a community like this is hardly possible. As a result, this article, along with other really small communities might either have to be deleted or merged into the county article or the township article. When I draft an unincorporated communities guideline, I'd appreciate your input on this issue to help solve this nationwide problem. --Triadian 04:46, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate your concerns about our research project to better profile Surry County and its communities on wikipedia. Ash Hill is in fact in the USGS Geographic Names Information System. Go to [1] and download North Carolina's zip file. Ash Hill and all but two of the other unincorporated communities for Surry County that we have added over the last few weeks are in this database as "ppl" or populated places. The other two, Blevins Store, North Carolina and Jenkinstown, North Carolina are well known place names in the area and are found on locally printed maps. We could have chosen to attempt to document every neigborhood in Mount Airy or every tree in the county, but we have edited our list of places worth mentioning to better define the colorful landscape of Surry County by what we perceived to be a reliable database, the USGS names. I strongly feel that this information has an audience. Merging this information into the county page is probably well beyond the scope of what was intended for counties. Only Surry (just recently by us) and Wake even have comprehensive township pages. Its arguable that the townships don't really belong here either I suppose, as in North Carolina they have no real authorized use other than for voting precincts (unlike say Pennsylvania where every township has municipal authority). I don't really see a problem here, at least as far as Surry County goes. Users who look for Surry County or one of its towns or unincorporated communities are presented with an easy to navigate means to further read/investigate other place names and their origins in the area. I would be happy to try to reform any of these entries to match a future unincorporated communities guideline. However, if the powers that be here at wikipedia do not approve, we only ask that we be allowed to merge any questioned community into one of the township pages we have created until enough information has been added to again merit a spin-off entry. --Naytchrboy 14:31, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

You make a good point and I hope these pages survive, just so long as there are sources to back up the claims. --Triadian 22:37, 2 June 2007 (UTC)