Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pulong Buhangin, Sta. Maria

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. fishhead64 00:36, 22 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pulong Buhangin, Sta. Maria

To the best of my knowledge, this Philippine-related AfD has no known precedent of its kind, so I hope this opens a lot of good inputs from Filipino editors. As with the TfD for Template:Santa Maria, Bulacan, I think there should be a fine line between what place-names deserve their own WP article. Creating an article about Philippine barangays (that would be something similar to a municipal district for non-Filipinos) is taking it too far, as not all barangays are notable, and some are too small to deserve their own place on WP. We might as well write articles about every purok (place) or kanto (street corner) in the Philippines, in the same flawed logic that just because a street such as EDSA or Mendiola has its article, then some unknown private alley should also get its article just because the article's writer lives there. Addenda I might as well include the redirect to this article under the name Pulong Buhangin. --- Tito Pao 01:18, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually there were some previous barangay-related AFDs, and most of them were to keep. However, I still believe a barangay is by default unnotable. Either one is notable or all are unnotable. So delete for me. --Howard the Duck 02:04, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- I should have changed my mind into merge or redirect but this has no real information to be merged into Sta. Maria, Bulacan so I'd still say delete. --Howard the Duck 05:37, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  - Howard the Duck, please only bold your vote once. --Oakshade 05:51, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    - Shouldn't really matter since I put my new comment under my old comment. --Howard the Duck 08:23, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Keep - A real place. A barangay is a Phillipine version of a small government district, usually that of a town or village and sometimes a district of a larger city (like a borough). Towns are inherently notable. --Oakshade 04:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- They're not exactly towns... towns are the municipalities... barangays are neighborhoods or French communes. --Howard the Duck 15:10, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - unless a barangay is notable should it have its own article. And even then, information about barangays - and there are about 42,000 of them - would probably be best kept in the municipality or city's article. --Chris S. 04:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC). I change my vote to Neutral. --Chris S. 04:20, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Of course there are around 42,000 of them - They are actual towns, villages and districts where people live in in a very populous Asian nation, that's why Wikipedia considers municipalities inherently notable. Even more imporatant than city neighborhoods (ie:Larchmont, Los Angeles, California) because, unlike city neibhborhoods, barangays are actual governments that administer the services in them. --Oakshade 04:21, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Question: about how many people live here? We are relatively strict about city neighborhoods; many are home to 50 or 100,000 people, and not all of them are included. It seems "neighborhood" is the nearest comparison.DGG 04:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

But if it's an actualy govenment district with governing body made up of a legislative council and committees, then it's much more than a simple neighborhood that doesn't have such entities. --Oakshade 04:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It has a population of 23,069. This is much larger than the usual population of a barangay, by the way (usually under 5000). TheCoffee 06:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I appreciate Oakshade's attempt to save the article. However, I believe having a lot of barangay articles would be too unwieldy. Given the way provinces split as fast as an amoeba and cities pop up like mushrooms in the Philippines, it would be hard to manage changes to the affected barangays. I live here but I already lost count how many new ones sprung up during the last decade. I suggest we cut this in the bud before it overwhelms wikipedia. As Chris S. suggested, let's add a barangay if it is notable enough.--Lenticel 06:35, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep. Barangays are the smallest unit of government (subdivisions of towns) in the Philippines, so small that most of them don't have any verifiable information aside from census data and government officials. I note Oakshade's view, but I still think barangays should be dealt on a case-to-case basis. In this case, there does seem to be enough Google hits and references for it to be notable. TheCoffee 06:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Additional comment. Per DGG, I would agree that a barangay can also be compared to a neighborhood, except that for historical and administrative reasons, barangays are incorporated as a limited version of a local government unit (LGU) like a city, province and region (AFAIK, there is a so-called law titled Barangay Code in the Philippines). However, it isn't exactly sa powerful as, say, a city government in that most of the functions of a barangay involve minor administrative functions (such as the issuance of a residence tax certificate and arbitration of very minor neighborhood disputes); in addition, barangays are essentially dependent on their municipal or city government, fiscally and administratively. Also, it's very, very rare for a single barangay to be as notable as the town/city, if not more so. So, yes, on these points, not all neighborhoods can be notable enough for a WP article, even if it's a large barangay. Which is my contention as a resident of the province of Bulacan. Pulong Buhangin is one of many barangays that I know of, but I'm not sure it's notable enough to be on WP.

I took a look at the borough article, and I'll have to disagree with the comparison because a barangay is too small and too weak, administratively and legally, to be considered as a borough or town or city. In Manila, yes, there are some districts which can be considered as the historical barangays that made up Manila (e.g. Sta. Ana, Tondo, Sampaloc...these used to be considered as the principal Manila barangays), but as far as the government and the law is concerned, these barangays do not exist anymore because they have been subdivided into their proper barangays ("Barangay 74, Zone 1, Purok 3" anyone?). And there are potentially hundreds of these in Metro Manila, which on their own might not be notable enough.

In Pulong Buhangin's case, this is the same barangay as it was historically and administratively. Having said that, I'd want to contest the article's notability on its own merit, not just on the basis of its population. Most of the Google hits for "Pulong Buhangin" return sites for directories and classified ads, but very little (if any) material that could be used for a WP article. --- Tito Pao 12:00, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My first inclination here was to !vote keep per WP:LOCAL, as the general consensus is that inhabited towns/cities etc are inherently notable, and the fact that a barangay has an elected government would lead me to believe that is good enough for inclusion. However I must admit that it's hard to find a comparison to make in terms of municipal/local government here in the United States, as to whether a barangay is more than just a "neighborhood", I cannot definitively say. So, going on the assumption that the closest analogy is "neighborhood" I would say weak delete based on lack of sources supporting notability. Arkyan  (talk) 15:40, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The closest US anaogy is not "neighborhood" as neighborhoods don't have independent governments with elected officials like towns and cities do. --Oakshade 16:22, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I repeat, barangays are not "towns", the towns, translated into Tagalog, bayan, are the municipalities. The closest comparison would be the communes of France. --Howard the Duck 10:41, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, many neighborhoods do have such organization. There are community boards, and also overlapping utility districts, historical districts, business improvement districts, police districts, fire districts, sanitary districts, water districts, library districts, and on and on, usually elected, sometime appointed. (Where I live the community zoning board is where the action is.) In a wiki of local interest to a region then probably every one of them would be included. But this is a general encyclopedia. DGG 06:02, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That depends on what's defined as a "neighborhood." In the traditional American sense, most of those things you mentioned, ie library districts, water districts, police districts, fire districts, etc. are in fact governed by county, city and town (sometimes called "township") governments, not neighborhoods. At least in California, the term "neighborhood" refers to sections of such places that are not independent government districts. For example, Noe Valley, San Francisco, California is a distictive neighborhood, but it has none of those "districts" you mention. All of those services are provided and governed by the city and county of San Francisco. A barangay does have those entities. --Oakshade 06:21, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep as it seems to be an official subdivision. — JyriL ^talk 22:51, 17 April 2007 (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.