Talk:Winchester, Richland County, Ohio

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Merge into Richland County, Ohio[edit]

The main article for this page says that Winchester was "an attempt" to build a town, and that the whole community "never amounted to more than a few homes". It does not appear to be a community of any historical significance, and propose merging it into Richland County, Ohio as a historical footnote. Tim Pierce (talk) 15:58, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why? Ghost towns are as deserving of articles as any other communities; if it got a name and settlers, and if there are no residents anymore, it sounds like a ghost town to me. Nyttend (talk) 00:19, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Because it apparently wasn't ever even really a community in the first place but a failed outpost. Tim Pierce (talk) 02:15, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The GNIS reference that I just added considers it to have been a community. Nyttend (talk) 04:10, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That GNIS reference does not even use the word "community." It is a statistical record that lists Winchester as a "populated place," which appears to be a demographic term meaning nothing more than "people lived there." Unlike other ghost towns documented in Wikipedia, this one apparently did not even exist for more than a few years, and the references I have seen cannot even confirm that it lasted that long.

Please note that I am not proposing that the article be deleted. I agree one hundred percent that the information listed here is verifiable through reliable sources. I am suggesting that, unlike most other Wikipedia articles on ghost towns, this one was not significant enough even in its heyday to warrant a separate article. One of the very sources on which this article hangs its claim to notability says that the settlement "never amounted to anything." What better argument for merging this article into a more notable one? Tim Pierce (talk) 04:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, Stuartyeates (t c) convinced me that having a one-to-one correspondence between authoritative databases like GNIS and Wikipedia carries enough benefit to keep individual articles like this for populated places, so I withdraw my merge suggestion. Tim Pierce (talk) 05:17, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]