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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 no consensus‎. Even while disregarding "it's useful" and its cousins, there isn't a clear consensus here. There should probably be a discussion somewhere, but this is far too complex a discussion and with too many articles involved for an AfD Star Mississippi 03:26, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

43rd parallel south etc.

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43rd parallel south (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/113th meridian east (1st discussion) became a sprawling meta-discussion. So let's start again.

At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Maps#Article for each meridian?, Delectopierre, Strebe and others have discussed deleting all of these en bloc. Mangoe also chimed in in the previous discussion. I refer you to their rationales, which I am sure that will not be shy about repeating here.

This is a wikignoming action to fix something at the input and of AFD that at least one closing administrator was going to have trouble with at the other end of AFD.

all of the articles nominated

The aforelisted articles all contain nothing but tables of crossing points, and astronomical information about sunrises and sunsets and angles of the sun and constellation visibilities, occasionally for latitudes that are not exactly those of the article.

Let this discussion focus on just the articles where the contained content is purely calculable. This should help to keep things manageable and not introduce masses of side-issues. This is a set of articles that are fairly uniform in what information they provide. (Feel free to note any that I included in error, although I tried to err on the side of ruling things out.)

The following articles are not nominated because they contain claims that the latitude forms part of some territorial border or a reference point for some mapping system, or something else that is not simple astronomical calculation:

the articles not nominated

The following are already redirects to Antarctica:

The following are already redirects to Arctic Ocean:

Also note that from the WikiProject discussion it seems that there are going to be different concerns over parallels and meridians, so there are no meridians in this discussion.

Uncle G (talk) 12:56, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

While some of these integral lines of latitude are less important than others, taken as a whole, this collection of articles provides a useful almanac of geographical information.
Per WP:NGEO, "legally recognized, populated places are presumed to be notable". All of these lines have population living on them, and all appear in countless atlases and globes. Many of the lines are used to define international or subnational borders, oceanographic regions, and treaty lines. Some of the lines that define borders are in the "not nominated" list, but not all, e.g. 43rd parallel north.
Integral lines of latitude are mentioned throughout Wikipedia, and the ability to provide context to that text by wikilinking to these articles is invaluable. Deletion would leave a lot of red links in its wake. Some examples:
  • Iraq: "Iraq lies between latitudes 29° and 38° N, and longitudes 39° and 49° E".
  • Tuna: "Thunnus are widely but sparsely distributed throughout the oceans of the world, generally in tropical and temperate waters at latitudes ranging between about 45° north and south of the equator."
  • Norsemen: "Those who plundered Britain lived in what is today Denmark, Scania, the western coast of Sweden and Norway (up to almost the 70th parallel) and along the Swedish Baltic coast up to around the 60th latitude and Lake Mälaren."
Are the articles unsourced? No. Although many do not contain normal references, each contains coordinate links (e.g. 38°37′N 65°0′E / 38.617°N 65.000°E / 38.617; 65.000 (Turkmenistan)) which point directly to Geohack, itself linking to numerous reliable mapping services. Note that some of these articles used to contain a reference to MSN Maps (now Bing), but I was persuaded that this didn't meet WP:EL criteria and qualified as spam (though I disagree somewhat with that latter point). The Geohack links remain as indexes to reliable sources, although I admit that they don't really look like references. Suggestions for addressing this would be welcome.
Are the articles WP:OR? No. All of the information is verifiable from commonly available reference material, i.e. atlases or on-line mapping sites. The information was translated from one format (cartographic) to another (textual). However, it's certainly not original thought, analysis or synthesis. Consider accessibility: a blind person may not be able to interpret a map, but they could use a screen reader to access the information via these articles.
Do the articles need some attention and tidying up? Yes, but that's not a reason to delete.
The arguments made at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/104th meridian east by User:Nyttend and others may provide further context for keeping the articles. See also here, here, and here.
Bazonka (talk) 13:53, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's pretty absurd to suggest that they are notable because there are populations at these latitudes. A latitude is not a populated place, nor is it legally recognized.
I don't believe these should be outright deleted to leave redlinks. A redirect to Circle of latitude would be more appropriate. Reywas92Talk 14:41, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Doesn't a script or bot remove links when articles are deleted? CMD (talk) 14:45, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A redirect to Circle of latitude wouldn't provide the reader with any useful information if they wanted to know where the line was on the globe. In a situation such as the Tuna example above where two latitudes are given, both of these may end up redirecting to the same place, which would be utterly useless. Readers would most likely want to know where these latitudes are, not what they are. Bazonka (talk) 17:00, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Wouldn't provide the reader with any useful information" seems like an extreme unserious overstatement, but if articles such as circle of latitude, latitude, or geographic coordinate system do an inadequate job of showing readers how to find a particular circle of latitude on the globe / do not give readers an idea of how latitude numbers correspond to geographic places, then such articles should be improved. I could imagine circle of latitude containing a full-width map (500 px wide or something) showing a labeled graticule, coastlines, labeled continents, etc. If we want to get fancy we could even use the {{calculator}} feature (cf. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-01-15/Technology report) to make something quasi-interactive, with a little slider box for latitude which would select an image with the corresponding latitude highlighted on the map. I don't think the current articles about parallels do a particularly good job of showing readers where particular parallels are on the globe, and they are very difficult to navigate because Wikipedia is designed as a list of pages connected by text links, not an interactive graphical atlas. –jacobolus (t) 17:28, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Procedural Keep: I think you should split this nomination like 10 articles at the time to let people discuss each articles listed one article at the time. This will become a trainwreak as we cannot discuss that many articles in one nomination. Also good luck to those gonna close this. Pretty sure XFD Closer will gonna bugged with this one. Renominate the articles again in different separate AFD if nessesary. Thanks Warm Regards, Miminity (Talk?) (me contribs) 14:58, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per WP:5P1: «Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers» (emphasis mine)--cyclopiaspeak! 15:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Cyclopia: if that is the case can you show gazetteers which feature lists of features based on minor parallels? I've never seen that before. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:35, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: WP:NGEO states, in part: A feature cannot be notable, under either WP:GNG or any SNG, if the only significant coverage of the feature is in maps. These articles fail that test.
Thanks @Uncle G for cleaning up the process. Delectopierre (talk) 21:40, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Two things there: you ignored the last part of that sentence, which said exceptions apply - and these are not features but lists. These lists are an exception because it's an aggregation of encyclopedic information. SportingFlyer T·C 01:52, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
you ignored the last part of that sentence, which said exceptions apply I did not. I said WP:NGEO states, in part and didn't include the second part because if you'd click the link, you'd see it leads to WP:IGNORE. Do I also need to list the rest of the five pillars?
and these are not features but lists. These lists are an exception because it's an aggregation of encyclopedic information I don't understand. Please clarify? Delectopierre (talk) 04:45, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep These articles on what is at which latitude are extremely useful and I refer to them often when trying to determine my location and climate with respect to that of international friends.
If there are policy reasons for altering the format or moving them to a different Wiki project then I accept that, but I would move that the information should be kept readily accessible somewhere.
FloweringOctopus (talk) 14:34, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@FloweringOctopus Can you describe more about this? Do your international friends all live on integer parallels? If they don’t, do you round and check that parallel? When you do that, what does the list of locations tell you about your friend? Does it give better context and higher quality information than a map would? Strebe (talk) 17:36, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It isn't necessary to live literally on the integer parallels to get a good idea of where people are with respect to their nearest ones. Between "49th and 50th North" is good enough - you can look up both and consider whether they are North of the settlements it mentions, but between the relevant tropic and the arctic circle really isn't helpful!
Mostly, it's when we're trying to explain to each other how daylight and weather variations are experienced, or what's different about the climate - exactly how much further we're North or South than each other is very interesting for that purpose.
A map is no use at all for that sort of information because you need both large and small scale at the same time. A map that's large enough to include several continents doesn't show anything but the most major settlements, and that's not enough detail to be useful if I'm trying to explain to a friend in Brazil, California, or Australia the differences between how midsummer looks on the Isle of Wight and in Inverness. Whereas lists of which settlements the parallel runs through are very easy to comprehend and use.
FloweringOctopus (talk) 20:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’m still not following. How do these articles contribute to understanding, in your example, the differences in how the Isle of Wight and Inverness experience midsummer? The difference in latitude is critical, but that is evident from the difference in latitude, not from information in these articles. The Isle of Wight is between the 50th and 51st parallels north, straddling neither. So, if, for example, your friend lived in Brazil, how would their seeing that Romsey is on the 51st parallel and Predannack Wollas on the 50th parallel help them understand anything about midsummer on the Isle of Wight? Isn’t the pure fact of the Isle of Wight’s latitude what is important? Same argument for climate: Isn’t the fact of the latitude what’s important here, rather than what particular named locations are at the same latitude? (And, while latitude is an important factor in climate, many other factors contributions such that 1° increments are meaningless.)
I can understand that someone might want to know what prominent cities are at the same latitudes as Inverness and the Isle of Wight, since they might know of those prominent cities and have some mental model of them — but those are precisely the places that would be on maps of small enough scale to encompass both Brazil and, say, Riga, which is at a similar latitude as Inverness. How does a list of locations along a particular latitude help with the exchange of information that you describe? Strebe (talk) 20:43, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete -- these articles are not very useful and additionally clog up the WP:URA project because people keep tagging them as unsourced. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:56, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Merge 84th parallel north and 85th parallel north should be merged to Arctic Ocean, 38th parallel north should be merged to Division of Korea, Parallel 36°30′ north should be merged to Missouri Compromise, and most of the rest should be consolidated into 5-degree chunks. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:17, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all but Equator, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Arctic Circle and Antarctic Circle.
    • The degree system is arbitrary. There is no natural meaning to it, and other systems exist, such as radians and gradians.
    • Whole-numbered degrees are no more meaningful than fractional. It is false to claim, as some in this debate have, that there are “only” 90 parallels or 360 meridians. Not only is that immediately false, it is also false in practice: Depending on the scale of the map and other factors, it is normal for fractional parallels (and meridians) to be shown on maps.
    • The location of a given parallel (or meridian) depends on the geodetic datum. It not only depends on the datum, it depends on it locally in the case of most historical datums. Therefore, for example, a given parallel used as a boundary for a country is in fact only the boundary for that country in some specific datum. The much cited 38th parallel dividing North and South Korea is not the boundary in the now commonly used WGS 84 datum and coordinate system — not to mention that the actual border only follows the parallel roughly. Many boundaries are not on the originally intended even-numbered parallel (or meridian) when given in a modern, earth-centric datum.
    • Again concerning, for example, the 38th parallel, the notability starts and stops with a short stretch.
    • The repeated justification that this information appears in almanacs appears to be false. I cannot find any such thing.
    • The repeated justification that this information appears on maps feels extremely strained to me. We don’t make articles for every star catalogued by modern astronomy for the simple reason that very few of the billions of catalogued stars have any notability or meaning individually to more than a few people. Meanwhile, stars are far less arbitrary than whole-numbered parallels (and meridians).
    • I disagree with the argument that WP:NUMBERS justifies these articles. One of the first guides in WP:NUMBERS is Have professional mathematicians published papers on this topic, or chapters in a book? With respect to most parallels (or meridians), the answer is “no”: No professional has published papers on most individual parallels (or meridians). WP:NUMBERS expressly excludes whole numbers with no notability other than that they are whole numbers; they must fulfill other requirements.

Strebe (talk) 17:29, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • Strong Keep Wikipedia functions as a gazetteer - this is gazetteer information and clearly correct, and cursory searches of the internet show different articles of cities by longitude and latitude. This is encyclopedic information along the lines of WP:NUMBER. SportingFlyer T·C 16:52, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete anything which can't meet GNG; see Strebe's comment above for some nice discussion. Aside: I believe there is a severe misunderstanding among many participants in the previous and this discussion about the content and nature of these articles (ping user:Cyclopia, user:SportingFlyer). These pages do not function as an "almanack" or "gazetteer"; such publications are premised on describing information about the most notable places (e.g. large population centers, politically important places, rivers, continents, etc.), and to the extent there is geographical information about those places it comes in the form of maps or lists of places within a particular region. These articles are entirely different: they include only lists of places falling at particular exact integer-degree latitudes, with no concern for the importance of the places involved. So for example Shelter Cove, California (population 803) is included because it has latitude 40°01′50″N which is close to an exact integer. However, New York City (population 8,804,190) is excluded because it has latitude 40°42′46″N, which is not close enough to an exact integer. I defy anyone to find an almanac or gazetteer which includes Shelter Grove but excludes New York City. You won't be able to, because it is an absurd criterion for picking out a (very limited) list of geographical places. –jacobolus (t) 17:44, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I do not understand the point you are trying to make. «These pages do not function as an "almanack" or "gazetteer"». It's not the page that works as a gazetteer; it's Wikipedia as a whole. The whole example about Shelter Cove etc. makes no sense whatsoever to me. cyclopiaspeak! 17:48, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I concur - a gazetteer is a "geographic index" and these pages clearly function as a geographic index. This is a very rare case where GNG is irrelevant. SportingFlyer T·C 18:05, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    These pages do not function as a gazetteer. A gazetteer does not discriminate for or against locations based on whether they lie along a given meridian or parallel. Rather, they serve as an index of places having notability regardless of whole-number coordinates, if they limit their entries, or of all named places (typically in a more local context). There is no such thing as a gazetteer based on locations along a parallel or meridian for the simple reason that would have no utility and the list of inclusions have no significance. Strebe (talk) 18:19, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Are you arguing that Wikipedia, as a whole, discriminates for or against locations based on whether they lie along a given meridian? Do we have "lying on a meridian" or "lying on a parallel" as inclusion criteria? Again: a page is not an encyclopedia. Wikipedia does not discriminate for or against locations based on whether they lie along a given meridian. Wikipedia, correctly, however, discussed locations that cross a given meridian in the article about that meridian. That is no more "discrimination" than citing Belgian localities in an article about Belgium. cyclopiaspeak! 20:27, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The discrimination is in singling out integer parallels and meridians for special treatment when there is nothing special about them. The locations presented in the articles under discussion are giving significance they do not possess when nearby locations that happen not to fall on integer parallels or meridians do not receive that attention. That is a gross WP:NPOV violation. Integer parallels and meridians have no inherent significance over non-integer meridians and parallels and so the locations spanning them do not acquire significance by virtue of spanning them. This whole enterprise smells like numerology. Why you bring Wikipedia as a whole into it is inscrutable. I don’t advocate deleting Wikipedia or articles that follow its guidelines. Strebe (talk) 20:44, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I bring Wikipedia as a whole because you said «A gazetteer does not discriminate for or against locations based on whether they lie along a given meridian or parallel»: but the gazetteer here is the whole of WP, that hardly discriminates based on meridians or parallels. The locations do not acquire significance for being on the meridian or parallel: they are simply features of the Earth location defined by such a meridian or parallel. They're not special in an absolute sense: they're just there, and as such noted there for the very same reason we list cities and rivers belonging to a country or a continent. As for singling integer parallels and meridians, well, they are (usually as a subset) the same almost always featured on world or regional maps. See e.g.this Alaska USGS map. cyclopiaspeak! 20:54, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    In any case, if you believe a single given location is given undue weight in such an article, you can edit it out of the article; that has little to do with the existence of the article itself. cyclopiaspeak! 20:56, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That would be all locations in these articles, because they are all given WP:UNDUE weight compared to locations not on integer parallels or meridians. Strebe (talk) 21:04, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If the article is about the location on the integer meridian, it's not WP:UNDUE to list what happens to be on such a meridian. Just like listing features of Nevada in articles about Nevada is not giving any undue weight to such features compared to locations not in Nevada. Why an article on the 10th meridian should include stuff on, say, the 10°3'57" meridian? cyclopiaspeak! 13:06, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That’s not the argument, and the analogy does not work. The reason the status quo is WP:UNDUE is that only a tiny subset of parallels and meridians could ever have articles devoted to them. The vast majority of locations will be forever excluded by this type of article. The analogy fails because any major geographic region, not just Nevada, could have an article devoted to listing features in that region, and many do. It would make no sense to use the analogy to say that 54°43′19″N could have an article devoted to it if someone wanted, unlike saying that Utah could have an article listing features within it. Strebe (talk) 18:47, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    «The vast majority of locations will be forever excluded by this type of article.» That's a feature, not a bug, per WP:INDISCRIMINATE. It does not make sense to feature every conceivable meridian, it makes sense to feature meridians commonly featured on maps (that are also sources/references). cyclopiaspeak! 19:09, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I believe all locations currently listed in these articles are given undue weight, and the only reasonable way such articles could possibly meet Wikipedia guidelines for NPOV would be to include the entire band of latitudes (e.g. 45°30′ to 46°30′) with the list of places to include chosen by some neutral criterion, e.g. listing all cities with at least 500,000 people living in them and all national capitals. Otherwise what we end up with is an entirely artificial and arbitrary choice which is not neutral and is original research not supported by reliable sources. –jacobolus (t) 22:43, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    This does not make any sense. The articles are not about the 45°30'-46°30' band, they are about the single latitude. Also why "all cities with at least 500,000 people" would be a neutral criterion? This is much more "artificial and arbitrary" than simply... listing what happens to be in a location in an article about that location. cyclopiaspeak! 13:04, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    You (and a few others) are the ones arguing that these articles help Wikipedia serve as a "gazetteer", but without offering any support or justification for that claim. I argued at length that it absolutely does not, and that this claim is nonsense.
    It picks out a tiny and trivial subset of places in a way violating WP:NPOV and WP:OR and effectively worthless to readers who need an index or survey, because it includes a highly arbitrary (chosen at the whim of one editor by skimming through a map) selection of random trivial towns while ignoring many of the world's most important metropolises. Personally I don't think the situation is salvageable in a way that is both in accord with basic Wikipedia policies and also a worthwhile use of maintenance effort, which is why I recommend deletion.
    However, I was offering one possible way to turn these articles into something satisfying WP:NPOV and WP:OR and making them into a useful index: that is, to include every place satisfying some neutral criteria (e.g. every sufficiently large river, every sufficiently tall mountain peak, every sufficiently populated city, or similar). Then it would actually serve some purpose as a gazetteer index. But as you say, determining a set of meaningful neutral criteria is a difficult challenge, so it's probably not worth it, and we can just delete the articles instead to solve the problem. –jacobolus (t) 18:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an example of how these articles provide useful gazeteer information: there are countless articles thoughout Wikipedia that reference integral lines of latitude and longitude, e.g. the ranges of wildlife species, territorial expansions, hurricane warning areas, etc. etc. etc., the list goes on. Readers may not know where those parallels or meridians are, but by clicking on one of the links they can easily find out - and they may learn more information at the same time. (And yes, these articles are all for integral parallels, and other parallels appear in between, but it's the integers that are most often mentioned in other articles, and they're the ones that appear most frequently on maps.) Bazonka (talk) 22:20, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But the ranges of wildlife species, areas under hurricane threat, and usually even territorial expansions are regions with fuzzy boundaries of arbitrary geometry which rarely if ever fall precisely on some particular integer line of latitude or another. What would be most useful to readers in each of these cases would be a regional map with the approximate boundary of the indicated geographical area highlighted. If it's impractical to make a dedicated map, the next best thing would be to see a large regional map of the relevant region with a labeled graticule. As a fallback if that is still impractical, it would be somewhat useful for readers to get to a page about latitude in general including a large enough well-labeled map so that they could understand how latitude numbers correspond in general to places on the globe.
A textual list of a random collection of minor towns and small islands falling on a particular integer latitude line is almost completely useless to provide the intended context for readers curious about this or that wildlife range or whatever, and wikilinking to such a page in that context seems frankly pretty inappropriate. –jacobolus (t) 02:11, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • The locations do not acquire significance for being on the meridian or parallel: they are simply features of the Earth location defined by such a meridian or parallel. That’s right. And the problem is that those meridians and parallels have no geographic significance for grouping. There is no precedent in the literature. They have been chosen because they are integers, which has nothing to do with the geographical context. as such noted there for the very same reason we list cities and rivers belonging to a country or a continent. The river and country and continent are WP:NOTABLE. Integer parallels and meridians are not. …well, they are (usually as a subset) the same almost always featured on world or regional maps. They appear that way purely because they have to appear some way, not because they are significant in and of themselves and not because the locations that happen to lie along them make them significant. I could make a series of hundreds of Wikipedia articles, each of which lists cities that are integer multiples of 100 km distance from the article’s central city. For example, one for all cities that are n × 100 km from Washington D.C, one for all cities that are n × 100 km from London, n × 100 km from Paris, and so forth. Honestly, that strikes me as more valuable… but it’s pretty much useless. Strebe (talk) 21:20, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    «They appear that way purely because they have to appear some way, not because they are significant in and of themselves» That is not our problem. They appear. Lots of arbitrary things, that are not "significant in and of themselves" in an objective, absolute sense, are nevertheless notable and covered because they are part of the conventions we use to describe the world. Integer meridians form a universal reference grid, such as powers of 10 form a universal reference scale of orders of magnitude; there is nothing significant in and of itself in the powers of 10 compared to the powers of 8, 12 or 74.61, but that's what most people use, and that's why they are relevant. cyclopiaspeak! 13:11, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, integers are not relevant in and of themselves, and simply deciding that integer parallels and meridians are significant is WP:OR. The article on 53rd parallel north (for example) lists locations all across the world. Meanwhile I challenge you to cough up a single world map in the history of mapmaking that shows the 53°N parallel. You would have some luck with this argument talking about meridians and parallels in 5° increments, but that does not thereby make the locations along those lines significant in any sense. Strebe (talk) 18:52, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, it is notable that there is a reference grid, which is why we have articles called Graticule (cartography) and Geographic coordinate system discussing the topic (and also Latitude, Longitude, Spatial reference system, Geodetic datum, etc.). That's not relevant to the current discussion. –jacobolus (t) 18:57, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    According to your logic, the existence of City would forbid the existence of articles about individual cities. We can have Geographic coordinate system and individual relevant coordinates as well. cyclopiaspeak! 19:11, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I have no idea what you are talking about. The point is that the notability of a concept does not establish notability of every instance of that concept. To use your previous example, the notability of the conepts Powers of 10 and Order of magnitude does not, by itself, make 10,000,000,000,000 or 0.0000000000001 into a notable topic worth making a separate article about. The notability of a concept like Person doesn't mean we should have an article about each separate person in the world. Etc. That obviously doesn't mean we can't have an article about a particular notable number, say 100, or person, say Isaac Newton, if they meet Wikipedia's notability standards and if those articles are written in a neutral way, based on reliable sources. –jacobolus (t) 19:34, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That doesn't seem right... Maybe you misinterpreted jacobolus's argument? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:33, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    You have to actually go look at these pages and carefully consider their practical use by real readers before declaring that they support the function of a "gazetteer" or "almanack". My contention is that they self-evidently do not, and anyone claiming otherwise needs to try to make a persuasive case to explain how that works, because on its face it seems like nonsense. Just stating this without elaboration is non meaningfully engaging with the discussion.
    Let's look at a concrete example: here's a gazetteer from 1854, which I randomly picked as the first one that popped up in a web search. This gazetteer mainly consists of an alphabetical list of all places within the region of coverage (the USA in 1854) which are considered sufficiently notable to mention. If you look up a random small town by name, you will be given a textual description of where to find that place, relative to presumed-known places such as states or major cities. By comparison, if you look up a major place such as a state or major city, you will see page after page of detailed information about the place. (The gazetteer also includes as appendices at the back a list of colleges, a list of railroads, a list of military outposts, a table of agricultural output by state, etc.)
    Wikipedia as a whole already serves this function but that has nothing whatsoever to do with these integer-latitude articles: if you look up a random small town by name, you will usually obtain a stub article containing basic information such as its geographical coordinates, location relative to more significant places, and population, while if you look for a significant place you will obtain much more detailed information. When Wikipedia is described as "combin[ing] many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers" this is what is meant; the geographical entries found in a gazetteer are a subset of the entries which you are likely to find in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia contains the same kind of information found in the gazetteer.
    But these latitude articles are something completely different, and claiming that they are "gazetteer information" seems clearly factually incorrect. These articles pick out a trivially narrow and extremely arbitrary subset of places, most of which are not particularly significant, and elevate them in a way not found in any other sources. This is a serious problem and a sharp violation of WP:OR and WP:NPOV. The articles themselves seem to me to clearly violate WP:N.
    In theory we could use articles at these titles as a kind of geographical index, if their combination contained a list of all sufficiently significant places on Earth, with e.g. the article about 45° listing every significant place within the band of 45°30′ to 46°30′. That would be more supportable as a kind of list/index article. But then the content would balloon to potentially millions of items in the list, and we'd need a long and serious discussion about which places are notable enough to include, what reasonable criteria might be, who gets to decide, etc. I don't think such articles would be of value significant enough to be worth the very steep maintenance burden that would be required, and as a navigational index this method frankly still sucks compared to looking at a map. If we want something that isn't an indiscriminate collection of information, then the list should be quite limited and probably organized by region.... lo and behold, we already have such lists, such as List of United States cities by population (among numerous others). If we want to include geographical coordinates, per se, in such lists, we should just add an extra column to their tables, instead of making a separate geographic-coordinate-organized index. –jacobolus (t) –jacobolus (t) 18:20, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Very well articulated. Strebe (talk) 18:22, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The WP:NPOV argument seems insurmountable. Strebe (talk) 18:31, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think the WP:OR and WP:NPOV arguments are ridiculous. First, it's not original research to say a city is along a specific line of latitude or longitude. I have absolutely no idea which part of WP:NPOV even applies here - are we stating opinions as facts? Stating facts as opinions? No, we're just presenting data in a specific way. Also, cherry picking one gazetteer at random isn't necessarily helpful - there have been books written listing the latitude and longitudes of specific locations, such as Longitudes and Latitudes in the United States (Dernay, 1945) or Air-line Distances Between Cities in the United States (Whitten, 1961). WP:INDISCRIMINATE fails as well because there will never be more than 180 latitude articles and no more than 360 longitude articles, so it's clearly discriminate. As for WP:N, previous AfDs have made the argument that these articles are more similar to WP:NUMBER. SportingFlyer T·C 19:20, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't understand the point of these examples.
    • Air-line Distances Between Cities in the United States is an extensive table listing the point-to-point distance between every pair of major cities. The cities are chosen by significance/population, not by latitude. The only concrete information presented is the distances themselves. I would not consider a table like this document to be worth including in Wikipedia, so it seems like a poor example of something we should care about. But it also is totally irrelevant to the current topic.
    • Longitudes and latitudes in the United States is an alphabetical table of major cities, organized by state, showing the geographical coordinates of each city as well as the time difference between local time and the relevant standard time zone. As I said above, I think it would be fine to list the geographical coordinates of a list of cities, and I proposed adding a new column to List of United States cities by population as a way to accomplish this, if someone wants to pursue it. Again, this seems substantially irrelevant to the current discussion about these latitude articles.
    As for Wikipedia:Notability (numbers): the current test proposed there is that only "interesting mathematical properties" and only numbers with several such properties or "obvious cultural significance" should be given articles. Articles about numbers are routinely deleted for being non-notable, and demonstrating notability requires providing sources which specifically call out the number. It seems to me like a largely unrelated question, but by criteria like those usually applied to numbers these articles should be deleted. –jacobolus (t) 19:30, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The point is that the latitude and longitude of cities and places are notable enough that they were frequently covered in books and specialty publications. These articles are just lists that summarise that information slightly differently. SportingFlyer T·C 19:34, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed, the latitude and longitude of cities and places is covered in Wikipedia already, and nobody is proposing removing such information. These latitude articles do not "just summarize that information"; instead they invent an original categorization scheme not attested in reliable sources, pick out an arbitrary tiny collection of mostly trivial places while ignoring the majority of significant places, and provide basically no value to readers as a summary or index. –jacobolus (t) 19:40, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That's not true. The cities are not chosen because they were notable; they were chosen because they exist along an arbitrary line. If it were just a different way to organize, the material to be organized would be the same . The WP:NPOV argument is powerful: places are being given significance far out of proportion when nearby places that happen not to fall on an integer meridian or parallel are ignored by this scheme. Strebe (talk) 19:42, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    With the same argument, one can deduce that a List of cities in Belgium violates WP:NPOV: after all, cities in that list are included only because they're being enclosed by an arbitrary boundary. How is that different from localities lying on a meridian? A meridian is a (very thin, very long) location on Earth. Listing features of this location is the obvious thing to do when describing such a location. cyclopiaspeak! 20:35, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    1. Belgium is a WP:NOTABLE construct. Can we agree on that? The disagreement is about whether an integer meridian or parallel is a WP:NOTABLE construct. No Wikipedia policy I know of suggests that it is, and the very WP:NUMBERS guideline repeatedly evoked here pointedly disagrees these arbitrary lines could be notable: No expert has published papers on individual integer parallels or meridians (to give just one of several reasons from the guideline).
    2. Towns outside Belgium are not being discriminated against because Wikipedia articles do, or could (without contest), exist that do the same for whatever country those towns are in. Meanwhile, there will never be a “complete” set of parallels and meridians because there is no such thing. Therefore enormous numbers of locations are permanently discriminated against. This is WP:NPOV. Strebe (talk) 20:55, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Also, the question we fundamentally ask at AfD is "is/are this article/s encyclopedic?" At their very core, I believe that answer is a firm yes. SportingFlyer T·C 22:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    At their very core, I believe the answer is an obvious “no”. That is the debate; I don’t think simply asserting a conclusion helps. Strebe (talk) 22:27, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The lines aren't arbitrary, though - they've been commonly accepted for use in navigation for centuries. SportingFlyer T·C 22:07, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No they haven’t. Navigation does not treat integer meridians and parallels specially. Strebe (talk) 22:09, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Perhaps not, but that wasn't my specific point - integer parallels and meridians are often discussed as geographic concepts, such as [1] [2] [3] [4] SportingFlyer T·C 22:20, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Those are not “geographic concepts”. Like an odometer turning over at a round number, yes, people will mark a meridian or parallel at a particular point (not all along it). That does not make it a concept any more than an odometer rolling over is a concept in any meaningful way — and if it is, there has to be some kind of research on it, not just an anecdotal observation that some people like round numbers. Having a long history of scholarly geography, I assure you, there is no literature that talks about integer meridians and parallels as “a concept”. Pedantically, it’s a concept, but it’s a frivolous one. The 45th parallel is possibly one you could scrape together enough WP:RELIABLE information on to turn into an article (such as, it’s not actually the halfway point despite common belief and despite that highway departments insist on marking it as such), but there is no WP:RELIABLE support for arbitrary integer meridians and parallels having any significance. Some of those markers from your list are geodetic markers (that are, in fact, not at the locations they state themselves to be in modern coordinates) and sure, a surveyor is going to choose an integer lat/lon as a geodetic origin because, why not? Less carving than 14°17′33.2994″ and less text to propagate information about this anchor. But I guarantee you that the surveyor will deny there is any significance to it beyond that. Strebe (talk) 22:47, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Of course they're geographic concepts. Buy a geography book for eight year olds. SportingFlyer T·C 01:50, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If there is such a geography book for 8-year-olds which organizes its content this way, please link it explicitly. Otherwise it seems likely that you are inventing fake children's books that don't and won't ever exist, as a bizarre rhetorical flourish. –jacobolus (t) 01:53, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Those books absolutely exist. They are called atlases. The only difference is that atlases represent the information cartographically, whereas here we're representing it textually. Same information, but in a differently accessible format. Bazonka (talk) 08:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is no such atlas which includes only places on integer latitudes and excludes all other places. It doesn't exist. You are making it up. (Or if it exists, please provide a link.)
It would be fine to make a list of some type of places, chosen by neutral criteria (e.g. population size, political relevance), along with their geographical coordinates in a sortable table.
But these articles are nothing like that. –jacobolus (t) 18:19, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, atlases don't only include places on integer latitudes, in the same way that dictionaries don't only include verbs or words beginning with K. Of course they contain much more information. But they do contain this information, which has been helpfully extracted into these articles as an almanac reference. Bazonka (talk) 21:57, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is not an almanac-like reference. No almanac does this or ever has. The dictionary analogy doesn’t work. In this context, if parallels are analogous to verbs, then an analogous list of verbs would take a list of all verbs (or the most common n-thousand verbs), order them some way, such as alphabetically, and then keep every 10th verb so as to present a user with a bag of verbs with no association with each other except that they all happen to have a position k in the original list where k modulo 10 is 0. The rest of the verbs? Not important, but that position, that is important because it’s a multiple of 10. That’s what this enterprise is: Here’s a bunch of places that happen to fall on every integer parallel and meridian. The rest of the places? Don’t care. Strebe (talk) 22:29, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That people mark integer parallels and meridians with monuments, plaques and so on is enough to argue that such lines are notable. It means that people notice such abstract lines, talk and mark them per se and that they are relevant. It's not just our quirk. Thanks to SportingFlyer for pointing that. cyclopiaspeak! 13:15, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You argue notability, but WP:NOTABLE does not agree that your observation is notable. What you are doing is WP:SYNTH, noting that such plaques exist in various locations (not all along the meridian or parallel) and inferring from that that integer latitudes and longitudes have a degree of specialness that justifies affording an article to every single integer meridian and parallel, and further inferring that the existence of such plaques justifies plucking out (WP:OR) locations along it to list. There is no precedent in the literature; there is no precedent in the field of geography; there is no utility. The stretch here is huge. Strebe (talk) 19:02, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That already exists: Boundary marker, but its content is very different to the almanac information provided here. Bazonka (talk) 08:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all but Equator, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Arctic Circle and Antarctic Circle, for essentially the same reasons Strebe gives. Parts of some lines of latitude have meaning in defining borders, and some of those are integer values, but generally are not (e.g. US state boundaries). I do not see how these segments grant notability to the entire circle. And I don't see the gazetteer argument at all. In the first place, no gazetteer I've ever seen lists places this way, and in the second, the "WP is a gazetteer" statement is a misquote of probably the most controversial claim about WP's geographic purpose, as we have consistently rejected the notion that we should exhaustively document place names. I'll say it again: these articles consistently read to me as lists of unrelated factoids about places that happen to lie on or close to integral parallels. In other words, they are collections of trivia of the sort which once plagued social media. Mangoe (talk) 03:09, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Alright then. So how do all of your positions apply to one of the nominated articles? Try 64th parallel south or 3rd parallel north or some others in the list.

    If this is about relating places on the planet, why do articles such as 36th parallel south exclude all oceanographic features? (The Foundation Seamounts are too big for Wikipedia writers to miss.) For those asserting almanac/gazetteer status, how are the nominated articles almanacs/gazetteers? For those asserting non-notability, how are they non-notable? For those asserting that this is a convention outwith Wikipedia, where are they in other reference works? For those asserting legal recognition, how is (say) 78th parallel south (and indeed any of the others, since this set specifically excludes any articles that claim border or baseline status in any way) a legally recognized place? For those asserting populated places, how is (say) 85th parallel north a populated place?

    I remind those digressing and waffling on about the 45th parallel and suchlike to read the lists in the nomination.

    Uncle G (talk) 04:21, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    • 1. There's no reason they exclude oceanographic features, apart from the fact we've probably never thought about adding them in before.
    • 2. The nominated articles are essentially lists of geographic features. One of Wikipedia's functions is to serve as a gazetteer, or an index of geographic information, and these lists serve exactly that purpose. See websites like [5] [6], and older books which list latitude and longitude of cities as reference guides. Now these are more commonly seen in data sets.
    • 3. Your populated place arguments are red herrings. These are not settlements to be analysed under NGEO. The question is whether or not these lists serve an encyclopedic function. I think they are excellent references, because they are navigational lists which helps readers understand which places are equidistant from the equator (every 60.0 nautical miles, you reach another parallel), and which places are on the same meridian. SportingFlyer T·C 04:53, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I will concede that 85th parallel north and 84th parallel north could be redirected to Arctic Ocean because that's all they cross, and there's not much else to say about them. But these are exceptions. Bazonka (talk) 10:16, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That it's all they cross is a significant fact per se. I do not see that as a reason to redirect. The Null Island is actually an empty patch of the Atlantic ocean, but this is not a reason to redirect the article. cyclopiaspeak! 13:16, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The Null Island is a concept which meets the "general notability guideline" at WP:N, because it is discussed by a wide variety of independent reliable sources. The material included in that article is not arbitrarily chosen but is supported by sources, so meets WP:V and WP:OR. It presumably also meets WP:NPOV. All of these core policies are violated by the present selection of articles under discussion. –jacobolus (t) 18:26, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
All of the information in these articles is WP:V - just check an atlas. It is not WP:OR - see my explanation in my Strong Keep argument way up there at the top of this discussion. I fail to see how any of the articles fail WP:NPOV. Bazonka (talk) 21:17, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Since this has been explained repeatedly, could you describe what it is about the WP:NPOV claim that you disagree with, rather than just say you don’t see how it applies? As for WP:OR, the decision to include a place or not is original research. Those decisions were not made by consulting some authoritative source, let alone documenting the source. Strebe (talk) 22:33, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You're simply completely mis-applying WP:NPOV and WP:OR here. These are reference lists. They're not arbitrary, apart from the fact London was historically picked as the main east-west meridian. NPOV simply requires us to examine all of the viewpoints on a particular issue, but these are reference lists - there are no viewpoints at all. It's also not original research, as saying a place is on a parallel or meridian is absolutely not novel research. SportingFlyer T·C 09:14, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I totally agree with SportingFlyer's analysis, except to say that in the case of a disputed territory, the lists give both sides of the story, so entirely consistent with WP:NPOV. For example, 43rd parallel north neutrally explains the situations for both Kosovo and Abkhazia. Bazonka (talk) 12:14, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And of course, I think you are completely willfully not applying WP:NPOV and WP:OR. The premise of these articles is an arbitrary choice: singling out integer parallels and meridians for special treatment. That has no more geographical, practical, or mathematical meaning than if you were to single out multiples of π°. Promoting integer degrees and the locations along them is a point of view. The WP:OR part of it runs all the way through the entire enterprise: 1. The choice to catalog stuff along integer degree graticule lines, which has no precedence in the literature or in the market; 2. The stuff documented along these arbitrary lines is a haphazard assortment someone has pulled off of maps, being neither complete nor demonstrating any obvious balance, let alone documented balance (because no such thing exists). Strebe (talk) 16:41, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Your example websites are both lists of major cities (chosen by some non-geographical criteria, analogous to our List of largest cities) along with their latitude rounded to the nearest degree. For example, New York City is included in these lists because it is a major city, not excluded because it doesn't happen to lie on an integer latitude line. These examples are totally unrelated to the list articles under current discussion, and their completely different selection criteria provides support for the claim that the latitude article lists are WP:OR and violate WP:NPOV.
It would be completely fine to add latitude and longitude information (at whatever precision) to Wikipedia's existing plethora of lists of places (typically sortable tables) chosen by supportably neutral criteria. It could plausibly even be supportable to make a list of all important places (chosen by neutral criteria) whose latitude rounds to a particular integer degree, though there is a possibility such a list would be very large, politically contentious, etc. –jacobolus (t) 18:34, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
…They are navigational lists which helps readers understand which places are equidistant from the equator (every 60.0 nautical miles, you reach another parallel), and which places are on the same meridian.
They only serve that function for an arbitrary list of places, excluding the vast majority of places that will never get such treatment. The distance (which is not constant) is arbitrary; integer value of the meridian or parallel does not make it less arbitrary. The places selected for inclusion are arbitrary: the integer value of the meridian or parallel does not make it less arbitrary. Doing this gives WP:UNDUE weight to the arbitrary list of favored locations. There is no utility to knowing what places straddle arbitrary meridians or parallels. There is utility in knowing what locations are some chosen distance from the equator and utility in knowing what locations lie along the same chosen meridian, but that is not this enterprise. This is about as useful as lists of words that all have the same second letter. Strebe (talk) 18:17, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Of course there is. I just read an article today which mentioned the impact of latitude on wine. Latitude parallels are constant. The desertification around the 30 degree parallels is common in geography classes. Just because you don't find them useful doesn't mean they're not encyclopedic. SportingFlyer T·C 21:01, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That is around 30°, the meaning of which, in this context, is more than the 1° granularity of this series of articles. It does not mean precisely 30°, so your argument, like each of these arguments to keep, is specious. Furthermore, the fact that you don’t understand that parallels are not constant in distance is a good demonstration of the fallacies of this integer degree enterprise. The spacing between parallels varies by latitude due to earth’s oblateness. Strebe (talk) 22:15, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You are picking nits over a 1km difference over 90° of latitude. SportingFlyer T·C 09:15, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’m not sure what you are claiming is 1km over 90° of latitude, but any interpretation I can come up with renders your claim false. In the mid latitudes, for example, the oft cited “halfway between the poles” latitude of 45° is off by 16 km.
And, you are switching your arguments as you go along. If I were picking nits, then these articles would include locations that aren’t on the oh-so-special integer graticule lines, but only off by, oh some amount. (Who knows how much, because, well, it would be arbitrary, like everything else about this enterprise.) Strebe (talk) 16:57, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that relevant information hasn't yet been added into an article is not a reason to delete. Bazonka (talk) 07:34, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The exact grid is not relevant to these article titles, nor is the accuracy with which they were or could have been surveyed at the relevant time. We don't want articles for parallels or meridians to needlessly be disambiguated by the various systems which purport to define them in different ways. Even the Greenwich meridian only gets one article, I believe.
The charters, as I understand them, were between England and Spain, defining the boundary between their claims in the New World. I was surprised to find so little coverage on wiki, perhaps it's becasue too many editors spend too much time out of the article namespace.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough 08:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC).[reply]
So we should have an 12:30 pm CST article because that's the time JFK was assassinated? Or perhaps a 20:17 UTC article for the time Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon? Delectopierre (talk) 03:51, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I had difficulty following the points made there, but for at least one of them, it seems to be that a given meridian or parallel is notable and worthy of an article if something notable happened anywhere along the meridian and parallels or if some border is along the meridian or parallel. I have two things to say about that: 1) We don’t do this for non-integer meridians and parallels, so it’s obvious that the notability is about nothing but the integer value, which is not notable; and 2) Just because something happened at some coordinate does not thereby make the the entire meridian and parallel that forms the coordinate notable. It doesn’t even make the snippet of the meridian or parallel notable; what is notable is the event or boundary. Strebe (talk) 01:48, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I hope that's a straw man. The parallel is notable if it is discussed by reliable sources. Generally this is in the context of boundaries, though sometimes in other contexts. 22 degrees north, for example is very important in the boundaries between Sudan and Egypt. It is not the boundary, but it's how part of it is defined. It's not sufficient that something happened on the line, or that another line crosses it for it to be relevant for the article.
If a non-integer parallel is notable (and some are) it is also worthy of an article. For example Parallel 36°30′ north.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough 08:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC).[reply]
I'm not seeing how Parallel 36°30′ north is notable. It seem to be mostly a WP:CFORK of the Royal Colonial Boundary of 1665. None of its three sources are about the parallel or discuss it, the first is about the Sun Belt, the second is about US state borders and the relevant page even notes one border diverges noticeably from the parallel, while the third is about Colorado Territory. CMD (talk) 09:05, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
By this logic, ⅔ would be a notable number because it’s discussed by reliable sources as the fraction of US state governments that must unite to propose a constitutional amendment. Or, 31°20′ would be notable because it is the treaty definition of a stretch of the US border with Mexico. Or, the individual coordinates of boundary whose definitions include explicit coordinates would have their own pages. Shockingly, we have no such pages. Why? Because it’s not the number that’s notable; it’s the thing that’s notable, and a thing that is notable does not thereby imbue things associated with it with notability. Strebe (talk) 16:55, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's interesting to me that no-one has addressed the central point - no WP:BEFORE has been done on these articles. Trying to cope with dozens at once makes it hard to for editors to evaluate each article. This is bad. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 08:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC).[reply]
This page isn’t an AFD. It seems to be a discussion of the rationales for and against deletion, and it’s about the concept of having an article for a meridian or parallel, so I don’t see how WP:BEFORE has anything to do with it — in fact, this kind of conversation is exactly what is needed to get this all hashed out in advance of a proper AFD. Yes, there was an aborted AFD from someone who didn’t know how to go about it, but that’s not this. Strebe (talk) 16:29, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, Those above have made the accurate point that these are entirely arbitrary lines on a map, selected from an infinite number of lines. The argument for notability seems to be that these are important context for cities and borders. This is possible, but that purpose is served by having the information on the city articles, where parallels provide the context to the city, whereas on this article it is the cities providing context to the parallel, which is an argument for inherited notability. It is possible for arbitrary lines to obtain notability, such as with the Prime meridian (Greenwich), but that is clearly not the case for all of the myriad possible lines, indicated partially by how most have been tagged as unsourced for years. It has been suggested above that these articles could be sourced to maps, but if so a reader is likely better served with a detailed map. City article coordinates already provide readers this service, linking to geohack.toolforge.org. CMD (talk) 02:43, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See my comment about sources right at the very top of this discussion. Although they're tagged as unsourced, they're not really unsourced. Bazonka (talk) 07:34, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See my last two sentences, which were a response to that point. At any rate, the translation of map to text involves substantial interpretation (eg. in selection of items listed). CMD (talk) 08:42, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • comment Since there are a lot of lat/long borders between US states, I decided to look into these further. Most east/west straight borders in western states follow integer parallels, and some in the east do as well, but the Mason Dixon Line isn't even vaguely to a round number, and there are several border segments which nominally follow the Royal Colonial Boundary of 1665, which we have a second article on at Parallel 36°30′ north (which it does not in fact follow very accurately); the second article is a Frankenstein of a WP:CFORK of the first and of the usual list of places passed through on other parts of the globe even though the line is only relevant in the US. North-south borders of western states are more often established against the meridian passing through the old Naval Observatory in DC and therefore are non-integral values WRT Greenwich. We also have , which would be more OK if, in the US, it didn't consist almost entirely of lines from List of principal and guide meridians and base lines of the United States with the usual "make an article out of a table entry" padding.
The thing here is that you could make a single article named Political boundaries following parallels and meridians which would contain all of this info in a much less verbose form. You don't need a separate article for each latitude or longitude. Mangoe (talk) 03:29, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's worth noting for this example that US state borders aren't actually defined by the old meridians, but by markers (with associated geographic coordinates) and the lines between them. Many borders were drawn roughly along meridians, but for understandable surveying reasons, marker positions drift to various extents from the line they were intended to follow. CMD (talk) 03:54, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
They may have been inaccurately surveyed, but they were mostly intended to follow the parallels and meridians, so these are hardly irrelevant. Bazonka (talk) 12:06, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What you are saying confirms that it is the integerness of the thing that matters to this enterprise, not its geogical location. And yet, integers are not special.. Strebe (talk) 17:00, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
These are more important than just political boundaries though - I've used them in the past to see which cities were on the same longitude/latitude globally. SportingFlyer T·C 03:37, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Previous discussion: Note that there was a discussion about this in January 2024 at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 189#Latitude and longitude articles that may be of interest. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 04:52, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Ping participants from that discussion not already here: RoySmith, Doktorbuk, AirshipJungleman29, SamuelRiv, Certes, Kazamzam, Purplebackpack89, Ahecht, LindsayH, The Wordsmith, Barnards.tar.gz, David Fuchs, Horse Eye's Back, JoelleJay, Joe Roe, SmokeyJoe, BilledMammal, Randy Kryn, Rlendog, P-Makoto, James500, Kusma. –jacobolus (t) 05:40, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for the ping, jacobolus; i shall ponder and probably return ~ LindsayHello 07:05, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep 26th parallel south, state border in Australia. See also commons:Category:26th parallel south markers. No strong opinion on others nominated at the moment. —Kusma (talk) 13:07, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    In particular, I think the articles not nominated should also be kept later (generally the division seems to have been done along a reasonable line). When I grew up, I passed a marker for the 50th parallel north almost every day. There are lots of markers and monuments and other things in commons:Category:Parallel markers by latitude that demonstrate the importance of the parallels to people living there; they are well documented in books about local history and geography. So those parallels are those that some people demonstrably care about. For those nominated (other than 26S) there seems to be an absence of evidence that people care, which is not the same as an evidence of absence, but I can't find fault with deleting these articles as fairly random pieces of information without the clear impact on human culture that is demonstrated for the others. —Kusma (talk) 19:33, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Strebe above articulates all the points about these pretty well. The notable parallels and such have sources written about them, these plainly do not, and clearly fail WP:NGEO. That Wikipedia features some elements of gazetteers does not mean it functions as a gazette, full stop. There's nothing to say about these arbitrary lines, and nothing of value will be lost. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 13:17, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge 84th parallel north and 85th parallel north should be merged to Arctic Ocean, 38th parallel north should be merged to Division of Korea, Parallel 36°30′ north should be merged to Missouri Compromise, and most of the rest should be consolidated into 5-degree chunks. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    )     14:17, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I no longer have the means to contribute to Wikipedia as I once did. However I'm happy to answer here after being pinged. I see no valid reason to delete these articles. A mass deletion of articles always comes across as a negative to me, as someone who believes that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that encourages creativity and inclusion. As a global encyclopedia, it makes perfect sense to incorporate separate articles on latitude/longitude lines, and the elements along those lines. Deleting this information attacks the very principle of an almanac. doktorb wordsdeeds 18:17, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    "Deleting this information attacks the very principle of an almanac" – This seems like an extreme and hyperbolic variant of a claim that even mild versions of are not only stated without any evidence or reasoning, but frankly are completely unsupportable by evidence or reasoning. Can you give an example of a single almanac anywhere in existence which is organized with a similar principle to these articles? I have never seen one. To use similar language in the opposite direction, I could just as well (and frankly more reasonably) say "the choice of what to include/exclude in these articles attacks the very principle of an almanack or encyclopedia". But such a statement has only emotional/rhetorical value, no explanatory/persuasive value. –jacobolus (t) 23:23, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed, this is a tough AfD because it's really about whether you believe the purpose of an encyclopaedia is to include valid reference information like this. SportingFlyer T·C 05:45, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, it's a tough AfD because half of the participants are completely unwilling to engage with the substantive discussion and keep making grandiose but vacuous claims consisting entirely of rhetorical flourishes without any evidence or explanation. There is nothing "valid" about this so-called "reference information".
    We have career professional geographers such as user:Strebe here telling us that the categories are abject nonsense which have no basis in scholarship, no support from reliable sources, and explaining why in great detail. On the flip side we have a handful of Wikipedians who were invested in creating/promoting these pages, effectively their own personal original research project, created without any policy or consensus-supported rationale, refusing to answer any of his points except by hand waving. It's a perfect example of why Wikipedia's basic policies (such as WP:N, WP:NPOV, WP:V, and WP:OR) exist. –jacobolus (t) 06:58, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    As soon as you say there's nothing "valid" about the information, your argument fails, though. From a pure notability standpoint, we are arguing over whether these articles would be valid in an encyclopaedia. SportingFlyer T·C 12:47, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    You are playing weird semantic games while completely ignoring the extensive substantive argument. When you say "valid reference information" I interpret that to mean "accords with Wikipedia policy about what is encyclopedic", but really it's undefined waffle, so maybe that's not what you mean. Either way, assertions without evidence or reasoning backing them have no value here, beyond taking up space and wasting attention, and might as well be deleted. Remember: Wikipedia discussions about consensus are not votes. Unanswered arguments (specifically: these articles hopelessly violate WP:N, WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:OR) can be assumed, by whoever comes along to close this discussion, to have been conceded as unanswerable. If you disagree, please stop with this runaround and go make substantive responses. –jacobolus (t) 17:12, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    There is no "extensive substantive argument" to delete them apart from the fact you personally don't think they're fit for WP. Trying to aggrandize your own position doesn't make it actually more substantial. cyclopiaspeak! 15:15, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, it's not about what I personally think. It's about (a) what meets the standards of WP:N (specifically WP:GNG) which these articles have not demonstrated at all; (b) what meets the standards of WP:V and WP:RS – these articles are almost completely unsourced; (c) what meets the standards of WP:NPOV – these articles pluck out a trivial subset of places based on one Wikipedian's personal whims while ignoring the vast, vast majority of places (even the majority of places with precise integer latitudes), and that Wikipedian carefully polices them to remove list entries not meeting their arbitrary personal criteria.
    The primary reason the few of you who emphatically support these articles have articulated for keeping them is, to quote your comment, because "«Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers» (emphasis mine)", but you have not elaborated to explain how this is relevant. This has been answered repeatedly: No actual "gazetteer" or "almanac" in existence has been demonstrated to include this specific organization scheme. To be very explicit: these articles are based on a novel category of places invented by Wikipedians, not based on any scheme used by professional geographers or other scholars, not found in existing reference works, and not supported by Wikipedia policy, especially because because the category scheme is inherently unsupportably non-neutral. It is original research – at best, it could be argued to be synthesis, except in general no sources are provided for any of the information included, and no sources have been provided here supporting the categorization in general. I linked you to an example gazetteer and explained how it was organized; other gazetteers are broadly comparable. It bears absolutely no resemblance to the content of these articles. Basically, in this discussion, you have completely redefined the word "gazetteer" in a way unrecognizable from any precedent. I have asked over and over again for some example reliable source using this kind of category, and not a single example has been provided – presumably because none exists. Even the non-reliable random website sources given by SportingFlyer turn out to use a much more supportable and reasonable organization unrelated to the articles under discussion, with inclusion criteria determined without reference to latitude and then using (rounded) latitude as a sorting/comparison method.
    In response to these answers, you and others have made little substantive argument, and have found no evidence in published sources, but instead have retreated to vacuous semantic waffling and finger pointing, again presumably because you can't think of anything else substantive to say but are emotionally invested in your position so fill the gaps with bombast. –jacobolus (t) 16:04, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Strebe and others, and with the obvious exceptions per Mangoe. I'm failing to see anything notable about listing every place that happens to be a whole integer number of degrees from the Greenwich meridian (in the case of meridians). Why are they notable and not every 3rd of a degree from Greenwich, or every whole integer from the Paris meridian.
For times when the meridian and/or parallel has notably been used for a border/subject of a border conflict, that can easily be discussed in the article about said border (e.g. we can talk bout how the Canada–United States border was notably set at 49th parallel, without having an article who's only other real content is telling us all the oblasts the line happens to pass through or the exact time the sun rises on the line during solstices). And the vast majority of these don't even have such borders to be included anyhow.
There's also a fact, again, that a great many notable borders/border disputes along parallel/meridians are not along whole integer parallel/meridians (e.g. 54°40' or fight! being notable does not mean that we should have a seperate article on Parallel 54°40′ north or articles on every 10′ Parallel) Cakelot1 ☞️ talk 21:10, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Summarizing my understanding of the premise I will summarize what I have learned from the arguments defending the premise for these articles.

  • It is the integral degree value of the latitude or longitude of a feature that qualifies the feature for inclusion in one of these articles’ content.
  • It does not matter that degrees are arbitrary because degrees are what we use.
  • The integral value does not need to mean anything geographically:
    • It does not matter what geodetic datum a feature’s coordinate belongs to. It could be integer on one datum but not another.
    • It does not matter if the feature was not surveyed correctly: If the intent as documented in some way was integer, then it qualifies.
    • However, if the location is one plucked off of a map to insert into the article, then it must be along the integer latitude of the reference map which, I infer from many of the entries, is Google Maps and therefore WGS 84.
  • I see from the material in these entries that an officially stated integral degree for some feature does qualify it for inclusion, but if it is actually x km away from the modern measurement of its latitude or longitude, that does not thereby qualify other locations that are x km away.
  • The notability of something that happened on or exists on an integral degree meridian or parallel imbues notability to the line.
  • Notability for a portion of a meridian or parallel imbues the entire line with notability.
  • However, notability does not matter; meridians or parallels that do not otherwise have notability are still notable by virtue of having an integral degree value.
  • The editorial decisions about what locations to include or exclude are not governed by WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, or WP:NPOV because “these are lists”.
  • The fact that the “encyclopædic content” of these lists excludes most locations because they do not fall on integral degree graticule lines does not disqualify the material from being encyclopædic.
  • WP:NUMBERS justifies articles based on numbers.
  • The fact that WP:NUMBERS expressly states that numbers are only notable if they have had scholarly articles written about them does not apply in this case.
  • These lists are just another way to organize data from a map, and it is not relevant that they exclude most of the similar data from the map.
  • These lists are an almanac-style reference, and it is not relevant that no almanac has ever done this.
  • The successive members of the set of integral degree parallels are a similar distance apart, but it does not matter that they are not the same distance: it is the integral nature of the degree difference that matters.
  • The latitude articles are useful for determining which places are “the same distance” from the pole, but it is not important if the location you care about is not at an integral degree-valued latitude.
  • The longitude articles are useful for determining which places have the same local time, but it is not important if the location you care about is not at an integral degree-valued longitude.

Strebe (talk) 18:15, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • It's much simpler than that, really: integer parallels are frequently surveyed, marked, and discussed, and it's simply basic geographic reference information to summarise which places fall along those lines, as is allowed per WP:NLIST's Lists that fulfill recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes often are kept regardless of any demonstrated notability. Any inconsistency with datums is an editing issue, not a notability issue. SportingFlyer T·C 12:53, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • …Integer parallels are frequently surveyed, marked, and discussed This is WP:OR. No reference supports this position. I agree that in some limited parts of the world, intersections of integer parallels and meridians were somewhat favored during hasty, large-scale surveys of vast, newly claimed lands in establishing arbitrarily demarcked territories. That does not thereby establish anything notable about the meridian or parallel. There is no scholarly information about why these decisions were made, but there were no technical reasons for such decisions and I think we can infer that they were opportunistically chosen purely for notational convenience, disregarding the terrain and the indigenous people usually inhabiting it. Besides being WP:OR as a basis for articles, extending whatever notability there might be (which I disagree exists) to the entire world violates WP:SYNTH, and then further extending this same “notability” to the very many parallels and meridians that never received such attention (anywhere along their lengths) violates WP:UNDUE. To then sprinkle the descriptions of these allegedly special lines with locations along them as if the (nonexistent) notability of the meridian or parallel thereby imbues locations that happen to lie along it with more notability than the locations between the meridians and parallels violates WP:BIAS.

      So, the chain of logic seems to be: “In some parts of the world, in our personal, anecdotal experience, locations or boundaries that have an integral degree-valued parallel or meridian have been established more frequently than non-integer. This is notable. Thereby, the entire meridian or parallel becomes notable. Because we have deemed some notable, we therefore deem all notable, despite that most never got such attention. Now that we have deemed all integral degree-valued meridians and parallels as notable, that implies that locations along those meridians and parallels are notable and should be listed, and we believe this enterprise aids in navigation, even though nobody travels along meridians and parallels, let alone solely integral degree-valued ones.” Strebe (talk) 18:50, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    • @SportingFlyer: your comment implies the need for merging the individual articles in lists, such as a list of meridians and a list of parallels. fgnievinski (talk) 22:44, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      • Strebe Again, these are not original research, because this isn't novel. This isn't synthesis, because we aren't creating any conclusion unsupported by the reference material. This isn't undue, because we're not giving minority viewpoints more sway than majority viewpoints, and this isn't biased, because again it's just stating what is on these parallels. NOT doesn't neatly apply here!! fgnievinski Not necessarily - that could be an additional list. SportingFlyer T·C 23:05, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
        • As Jacobolus has repeated many times, you are not responding with anything substantive. You are arguing by assertion, which is a trivial fallacy. I stated what was novel: The rationale that Integer parallels are frequently surveyed, marked, and discussed. I stated that you cannot use that claim to justify these articles because that claim is not supported by any kind of research. Therefore it is WP:OR. Your response is nothing but a pretense that you have made some kind of refutation. You haven’t. All you have said is “nuh uh!”. That is not an argument. It is not fooling me. It is not fooling anyone. Strebe (talk) 00:01, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to Wikidata (e.g., 43rd parallel north (Q2705080)). It already provides a map and list of intersecting countries. It could include endless trivia, like intersecting cities. The redirects would serve as the much appreciated navigational aids. Wikidata doesn't have the notability requirements of Wikipedia. It also does a better job of reverse geocoding. fgnievinski (talk) 01:30, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete non-notable subjects; cannot see how any of the "informational, navigation, or development purposes" SportingFlyer refers to cannot equally apply to every parallel in-between the integer-numbered; thus they all fall under WP:INDISCRIMINATE. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:10, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Per the guy that said "Useful, interesting, verifiable and encyclopedic." And procedural keep because there are just too many damn articles of too varying a quality to be discussed in a single AfD pbp 19:28, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Except that these articles in fact are all the same, quality-wise, and were selected to be such, throwing out any that had any differences; as explained right at the start. Uncle G (talk) 09:26, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Largely per Strebe's excellent explanation that integer parallels are quite arbitrary. They're based on the same logic as creating a series of "1 foot", "2 feet" ... "100 feet" articles: You can search and find those lengths mentioned in various sources, but none that tie them all together. If something was 87 feet long, we wouldn't send readers to an article about other things of that exact length, we'd link Foot (unit). Likewise, Circle of latitude is an excellent target for readers who want to understand what it means to be located on a certain parallel. –dlthewave ☎ 22:46, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The difference is that "1 foot", "2 feet" etc. are not actual locations; parallels and meridians are actual real, unique locations on Earth, no different from, say, Pakistan or North magnetic pole. cyclopiaspeak! 15:18, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That's not accurate, parallels and meridians are arbitrary artifacts of global cartographic systems. That isn't at all similar to either Pakistan or the magnetic poles. CMD (talk) 15:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The 47°14′43″N parallel is just as much “a location” (actually an infinite path of locations) and every bit as significant as 47°N, but we do not have, and presumably never will have, an article for it. The same for an infinite number of other meridians and parallels. It’s back to the question of whether these are notable because they are on integral degree values. They are not. Strebe (talk) 17:22, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete/redirect, except for a few (and likely very few) which have independent notability sufficient to deserve articles of their own. Strebe's input/viewpoint/explanation is useful. The rest could easily be redirected to the good suggestions which BD2412 made ~ LindsayHello 09:36, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • The analogy to numbers argument fails in a way that was obvious when I compiled these two lists, but which no-one has spotted in the discussion above that I can see. Project:Notability (numbers) grants a specific blanket notability exception for the numbers from -1 to +101. But clearly this is not true for circles of latitude, as already editors have formed the implicit consensus over many years that the 81st to 89th S parallels and the 86th to 89th N parallels are not covered by a blanket assertion that all integer parallels are notable. There quite evidently has been no, and there is no, blanket notability here in the first place.

    So the question remains, what actually is the standard that people are advancing for the articles nominated? It is not all articles. It is not being part of a border, as all of those that mentioned being parts of borders are in the not-nominated list. It is not being surveyed, as no-one surveys (say) the 51st parallel north as a thing in its own right, and anyone who thinks otherwise because it passes through Europe has no clue at all how the geography of Europe, political or human, works. It is not Bazonka's Project:Notability (geographic features) legally-recognized populated places argument, which SportingFlyer has already asserted to be a "red herring" on the grounds that that does not apply to these articles.

    And how is this then in keeping with edits like Special:Diff/1190761913 and Special:Diff/1190760135, where in practice article maintainers are excluding things because an arbitrary geographic centre for a town is not on-latitude; and edits like Special:Diff/1185340577, where in practice factoids about off-latitude things (way more off-latitude than Kaktovik was) are contrariwise not similarly policed? There isn't even an evident standard for what is being considered in scope for a latitude.

    Is there actually any standard, that one can articulate, here for the nominated articles at all?

    Uncle G (talk) 09:26, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    The standard appears to be WP:NOTABILITY with those that could plausibly satisfy it having been excluded. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:32, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Didn’t know about Wikipedia:Notability_(numbers); thanks. As far as the standards go, I think my summary edit covers most of what seems to have been used, with the exceptions you noted in the very high latitudes.
    This next comment is meant for the wider audience; I’m not implying you have argued otherwise: In any case, as has been pointed out many times, the number itself being “notable” would not thereby imbue everything labeled with that number as notable. We don’t have an article for the 69th prime number, for example, and this situation is much worse than that one because that is an ordinal position, whereas these latitude and longitude lines are a consequence of artificially treating meridians and parallels as discrete. Strebe (talk) 17:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very strong keep - I find these articles useful for pinpointing geographical features (mostly oceans), and also flagging up where a coordinate given by a source is incorrect - e.g. when a coordinate that should be in an ocean locates to an inland location. Mjroots (talk) 09:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm sorry, but I don't follow this last at all. The way I find out whether coordinates are wrong are by using the various online mappers to apply them to maps or aerial photography. I don't have any use for these articles for that because most of the points I have to look up do not have integral latitude or longitude values. Mangoe (talk) 16:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Mjroots: "I find these articles useful" is not in policy or guideline unless I'm missing something. Do you believe that there is any policy or guideline based argument to keep other than IAR? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:30, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The entire problem with this specific discussion on these specific topics, as a very fundamental nature of the reference value they provide, is that it's breaking down between people who find this useful and people who cannot believe anyone could find this useful. SportingFlyer T·C 11:57, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That is not due to lack of effort on the part of the skeptics. People chime in to say they find these articles useful, without giving examples. Occasionally someone gives examples, in which case they were further questioned by skeptics who found the explanation incoherent or when the examples seemed not to be examples. Those conversations appear to have been abandoned by those supporting keeping the articles. Strebe (talk) 16:21, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I disagree, it seems to be divided between people who think that usefulness has something to do with notability and people who understand that there is no such standard in Wikipedia policy and guideline. Whether or not a page is of use to a given editor has no bearing on notability as our policies and guidelines are currently written. If you want usefulness to be something that we consider at AfD you will need to get it written into policy. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:28, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Can you give a concrete example (ideally one that came up in the past), describing the precise problem you face and process you use? Wouldn't it be easier to paste the coordinates into any interactive mapping tool?
    To pick an arbitrary example if I go to Google maps and I type «38°37'N 90°13'W» into the search box I am taken to a map pinpointing an arbitrary spot in Lafayette Park in St. Louis, Missouri. I can then navigate around the map, click other places to see their corresponding coordinates, etc. (Or if you don't like Google maps, pick any other interactive mapping tool; here's geohack.toolforge.org at the same location.) If Instead I try to use the Wikipedia articles 39th parallel north and 90th meridian west the only relevant information I learn is that these integer coordinate lines pass through the state of Missouri, with nothing else particularly relevant to the place I'm searching for. Learning that the 39° N latitude line passes through Cape May Airport and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge or that the 110° W longitude line passes within a couple miles of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri (population 5000) or through the uninhabited Helen Island in Nonavut, Canada and Genovesa Island in the Galapagos might pique my curiosity, but only in the same way it might be piqued by finding random entries in a telephone directory or picking a random book off a shelf organized by color of the covers; it does not tell me anything meaningful about my original coordinates.
    Wikipedia's own Special:Nearby feature gives significantly more useful information about my place: Special:Nearby#/coord/38.617,-90.217 lists a whole bunch of articles mentioning nearby coordinates, sorted by distance. Or for a map-based version, take a look at wikimap.toolforge.org for the same location, which lists Wikipedia articles and Commons images. –jacobolus (t) 18:05, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Except in the noted cases of the Tropics &cet, and lines with political or historical signicance -which should redirect to “Korean War” and so forth, these are, to quote James J. Hill, “like the male teat - neither useful nor ornamental.”
  • Delete/merge/redirect as appropriate, none of these articles meet our notability guideline and it seems the only policy or guideline based argument to keep is WP:IAR... There simply are no other valid arguments made and I feel dumber for reading through some of the keep arguments. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:27, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or redirect nearly all of these per Mangoe. Only a handful (like the Equator) meet notability. The others have become arbitrary lists of places. If BD2412, Ahecht, or others want to make proper articles for spans of lattitude, then I am fine with redirecting rather than deleting. Rjjiii (talk) 03:51, 18 March 2025 (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.
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