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GNIS "unincorporated community" articles can be found in per-state or per-county "unincorporated communities of" categories; in lists of "unincorporated communities" within the articles on the states, counties, and townships; and in navigation templates that have "unincorporated communities" sections below the sections for cities, CDPs, townships, and towns. (It is worth noting that some CDPs also state "unincorporated community" as well as "census-designated place", when the reality is that the CDP comes from anything from a genuine old town to a railway station.)

In general, all of these categories, navigation templates, and in-article lists are wrong, and were made alongside the GNIS database mass imports. Most articles in them need to be in some other lists and categories, which can be anything from actual bona-fide creeks (which were, and in some states still are, often settlements) through lists of railway stations in a railroad article, to lists of bona-fide (possibly former) towns and villages.

A general methodology to follow is:

  1. Find the state and county histories (#Old state and county histories).
    Sometimes these will already be cited in the county and state articles, although the citations can vary in quality from proper {{cite book}} to vague bare URL hyperlinks to Google Books (which — alas! — does not let all editors in all countries have the same access to books). It is worth checking the HathiTrust and the Internet Archive, as well as a state university's library catalogue, to see whether all of the local histories have been found. Many 19th century histories are available with full text via the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.

    It helps all around, of course, if when you find new county/state histories to add citations for them to the county/state articles. Then the next editor to come along can benefit. It also helps to fix the bare URL hyperlinks. {{Internet Archive}} and {{HathiTrust Catalog}}, as well as the OCLC numbers from the HathiTrust Catalog's find-in-library search, are helpful, too.

  2. Check the gazetteers (#gazetteers), Arcadia Publishing books (#Arcadia Publishing), and place name books (#Books of place names).
    These will tell you what the thing truly is, and indicate what and where to look for further information.
  3. Search the county histories, and the state histories if appropriate.
    County histories often have breakdowns of early towns, villages, and hamlets in the county and in its various individual townships; sometimes even ones that vanished so early in the history of the United States that a 19th century history records their disappearance, which is quite useful indeed.
  4. Check shipping guides and USPS directories.
    These are particularly useful for things that are really post-offices and railroad stops. They will often identify the railway (a possible merger target, as railway articles can have annotated list of stops with as much or even more information than exists in a bad GNIS "unincorporated community" substub).
  5. Make at least basic corrections to the article(s).
    The "unincorporated community" cop-out is almost never correct as a category, description in {{Infobox Settlement}}, or place list heading in Township and county articles. Ironically, county histories often have outright lists of towns and villages themselves.

Books to check against

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This is a generalized discussion. Some WikiProjects (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington/GNIS cleanup and Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota/GNIS cleanup) go into greater detail on some additional resources that are local to their states.

Arcadia Publishing

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There are usually Arcadia Publishing books for a particular locality. Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they do point the way and are generally the results of local historians already having done for us the poring over old maps, records, and photographs. Arcadia (and other local history) books helped sort out Robert, California (AfD discussion) and Escalle, Larkspur, California; helped identify what Salminas Resort, California (AfD discussion) actually was; and conversely made the cases stronger against the likes of Ettawa Springs, California (AfD discussion). All of these were two-sentence GNIS-only stubs at the time of deletion nomination, all claiming "unincorporated community".

Gazetteers

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Further information: § List of national-scope gazetteers

Gazetteers are useful for telling whether an "unincorporated community" that is just a dot nowadays is a historical post-town/post-village or only a post office; that then might be found in local county/state histories. Take care about dates, of course.

Many states will have local gazetteers. (Indiana, for just one example, has local 19th century gazetteers by M. V. B Cowen and by John Scott.) Many states also have individual Polk gazetteers.

Books of place names

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In many states people took it upon themselves to identify the origins of the names of places within the state. These vary in quality but have often helped to clarify matters by giving a more specific characterization of the places in question.

We have found these used as GNIS sources, often quite badly (with, for example, the placename book outright saying that something was just a post-office; but cited in the article in support of some supposed settlement having a post-office).

Henry Gannett's placename books from the early 20th century will turn up, as USGS Bulletin publications and as books in Google Books. Be aware that some of Gannett's errors are the sources of errors in the GNIS in the first place.

In general, always check placename books against a second source. Some of them will helpfully cite their sources, e.g. Federal Writers Project articles from the 1930s, that can then be found and checked.

Old state and county histories

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As with the place names books, quality is variable, and those from around 1900 tend to be a bit gushing in their praises of the forefathers and heavy on the anecdotes. That said, their age (typically with a few decades of the foundation of the places, at least outside the east coast) and attention to detail can help resolve matters.

County histories often contain biographies, and sometimes the vanished place named after some erstwhile luminary is discussed more fully in the biography of that luminary.

List of national-scope gazetteers

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Unless otherwise stated, if you copy the wikitext of the following citations, then they can be inline cross-referenced as they stand with {{sfn|surname1|surname2|year|p=page|loc=entryname}}.

Lippincott's

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Lippincott published gazetteers throughout the 19th century. These are particularly useful for GNIS-derived articles that turn out to be post-offices, railway stations, or old settlements that no longer exist.

Lippincott's has a uniform scheme for identifying what something is, that applies across all states and territories. (The idea that everything is a "city", with various classes and grades of cities, did not exist in some states until the 20th century.) Something is a hamlet, village, town, township, or city; to which the prefix "post-" is prepended if there is a post-office there as well. Post offices that are just post offices, in a rural area, are simply post-office.

You will see some other gazetteers following the same convention with abbreviations like "p.v.", "p.o.", "p.h.", "twp." and so forth.

de Colange

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Auguste Leo de Colange LL.D. was a French lawyer who became a botanist after marrying into money, and only got into the encyclopaedia and gazetteer game after xe lost all of xyr money speculating in the stock market in xyr 40s.

It is an example of the huge problem with auto-generated geographic articles, even those for CDPs generated by Rambot (talk · contribs), that Zellwood, Florida (named for publisher T. Ellwood Zell here) for the first 22 years of its life to Special:Permalink/1248742518 was almost entirely robot-written, had no Arcadia Publishing books, and like so many GNIS mass-import articles was entirely recentist: giving almost no information on the place from prior to the 2000 census apart from it having a post-office at one point.

Darby and Dwight

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Like several others, these have a guide to the common "p-o.", "p-v.", "p-t." abbreviations after the introduction, to which they add "p-r." for post-road. The introduction's story of how the authors had to cross-check bad 1830s U.S. federal government information against local gazetteers might have a familiar ring to it.

Others

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