Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dreamland Villa, Arizona

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. All populated, legally recognized places are kept per WP:GEOLAND. (non-admin closure) JudgeRM (talk to me) 02:55, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dreamland Villa, Arizona

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Dreamland Villa is a neighborhood/subdivison within Mesa, Arizona. It has about 350 homes and not notable. This subdivision is one of many thousands in Arizona alone and completely fails WP:GNG. MB 16:13, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:00, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Arizona-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:00, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Unscintillating (talk) 01:28, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Question - Is it incorporated? If so, WP:GEOLAND applies. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:49, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Populated places, regardless of their size, that aren't neighborhoods of a larger city are considered notable. This isn't actually within the corporate limits of Mesa, so it's notable in its own right. Also, WP:GEOLAND covers legally recognized places, not just incorporated places; for instance, census-designated places are recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau, and smaller communities like this one are recognized by the U.S. Geological Survey. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:03, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, this site, which admittedly is a commercial site, says it is merely "an active-adult, 55-Plus community in Mesa, Arizona... Dreamland Villa is ideally located in Central Mesa." If that's correct, it would seem to be an in-all-likelihood non-notable retirement community within Mesa, not the sort of thing that WP:GEOLAND would confer notability on, at all. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 03:44, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - WP:GEOLAND states "Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable, even if their population is very low." (emphasis mine). This populated place is designated "U6", which as defined by the US Census Bureau means, "A populated place that is not a census designated or incorporated place having an official federally recognized name." Now "officially federally" is another way of seeing "legally", so it clearly meets Geoland. I understand the nom's perspective, but their view, in my opinion, would only apply to places which were neighborhoods which were not officially recognized, which would then have to stand on notability alone. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 12:03, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - Wikipedia is a gazetteer-thank you-RFD (talk) 12:12, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comments – This appears to be one of a series of articles created as part of The 50,000 Challenge. While I'm happy to take part in this challenge, a lot of the obvious WP:NOTDIR and WP:NOTNEWS violations I see, a microcosm of the way the encyclopedia has been going in general, reminds me of why my interest in the project is declining. The keep votes in this AFD appear to be based on the rationale that a GNIS entry = notability, which in itself blatantly runs afoul of NOTDIR, especially when there's not much more to be said about the topic. Category:Populated places in Juneau City and Borough, Alaska contains a slew of permastubs sourced to GNIS, created in 2009 and 2010 with no substantial improvement since. GNIS's own sources for those entries are predominately from the 1950s and 1960s, when those places stood a chance of being viewed as separate communities. Nowadays, not a chance; they're basically neighborhoods of Juneau, which has been the equivalent of a consolidated city-county for over four-and-a-half decades. That may or may not be the case here, but I see it's nonetheless tied to a decades-old source. Perhaps the nominator means that this area is within Mesa's ZIP Code market area?

A second concern regards the real root of the problem. It also appears that this was created to eliminate some of the many long-standing redlinks found in numerous "List of places in (U.S. state)". Without looking over every one of them, it appears that those lists were mass-created as an unsourced data dump in August 2005 by Brian0918. The only real "improvement" made since was to split the lists off by first letter. This revealed a number of size disparities between the upper range and lower range of the alphabet, which makes me wonder if these lists were complete when they were added to the encyclopedia. Since there were no sources offered, there's nothing by which another editor can go to and confirm that or not. I expressed concern with the List of places in Alaska entries in November 2015 in this discussion. The end result was that if it didn't involve picking low-hanging fruit, why bother. Poking around revealed that these problems exist with every such list, and that these problems have remained unaddressed for over a decade now. The lists do contain useful information, but not if there are no sources and not if it leaves readers with the impression that airports, post offices and railroad sidings (or in the case of the Arizona lists, trailer parks) are somehow of equal stature to actual communities. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 00:59, 16 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. It's not a "populated place", under any sane definition of the term. It is a retirement community located within the sphere of influence (if not within the city limits) of Mesa. (I came here from WT:USA.) Some of the Leisure Worlds are notable, even though retirement communities. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 03:42, 19 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Our article says that The Arizona Republic is Arizona's largest newspaper. This March 2013 article states:

Farnsworth...began his company...in the late 1950s....Youngtown had just started up, and we thought it would be a good thing to put something like that out here because this is the prettier end of the Valley.

That led to the launch of Dreamland Villa, which in 15 years ballooned to 3,000 homes at University Drive and Recker Road.

Sunland Villa, Sunland Village and Sunland Springs Village, all in Mesa, eventually joined his inventory.

Farnsworth was actually about a year ahead of Del Webb, who gets most of the national credit for launching the postwar surge in retirement communities.

Dreamland Villa opened in 1959, but by late that year, Webb was making headlines with his Sun City development, which was to open on Jan. 1, 1960.

“When we first heard Del Webb’s plans, we thought we were ruined,” Farnsworth told The Republic in 1995. “Del Webb started doing all of this national advertising that was bringing lots of people in to look at the development.”

Farnsworth countered with a billboard on Grand Avenue, between Phoenix and Sun City, drawing customers to his own development in Mesa.

Notice that the nomination makes an unsourced claim that the community has 350 homes, whereas this reliable source states that it is over 3000. Unscintillating (talk) 14:25, 19 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

According to the official plat maps of Maricopa County, this housing development was developed in stages. There are separate plat maps: Dreamland Villa, Dreamland Villa 1, Dreamland Villa 2 through Dreamland Villa 19. There probably are over 3,000 homes. The majority of these subdivisions have been subsumed into the City of Mesa and are just unofficial Mesa neighborhoods. Units 5, 11, and 15, which total about 350 homes, chose to avoid annexation into Mesa and remain as unincorporated areas of Maricopa County (county "islands" surrounded by Mesa). This is an obscure distinction which only affects which municipality (the city or the county) supply some services. I don't think that these three sections of the Dreamland Villa development (which aren't even contiguous) are notable because they are not within Mesa. Nor do I think the entire development is notable, it is just another neighborhood of Mesa. MB 17:14, 19 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. From Google maps looking at Mesa, Arizona, there is an enclave of non-Mesa there. From Google maps looking at Dreamland Villa, it seems two non-contiguous areas are together named Dreamland Villa and are in that enclave. Also Velda Rose Estates, Arizona (currently a redlink) and Candlewick Manor, Arizona (currently a redlink) are non-Mesa areas that are populated places, probably all in unincorporated area of the county. All of these are Wikipedia-notable as named occupied places. We have to have a way to refer to these places, e.g. to identify a historic house or any other site within them. Note the sprawling City of Los Angeles is comparable in having non-included enclaves. I believe that all of the Los Angeles ones have Wikipedia articles. In the case of Dreamland Villa, the asserted fact that some of it has been incorporated into Mesa and some has not (while Google maps verifies only the latter), is all the more reason for having an article to explain this and to define all parts of Dreamland Villa. --do ncr am 03:39, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Also, we have just as much interest in the Dreamland Villa of 1974 as we do the concept today. Unscintillating (talk) 03:54, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, it appears that this article's creator is continuing to do exactly as I described in my original comments, namely creating countless permastubs on particular geographic locations in Arizona and de-redlinking the list of places. From looking at a handful of these efforts, they serve little purpose as they are dominated by an infobox and contain no appreciable substance, instead containing more concealed linkspam to the GNIS and Census Bureau websites, something the encyclopedia hardly lacks as it is. At least this particular article does contain a difference kind of reference. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 00:20, 22 November 2016 (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.