Talk:Bass River

To delete or not to delete?

That is the question. More accurately, the question is: just what is this place? In New England it's often difficult to sort out "towns" from "villages" from "unincorporated places" from "wide spots in the road that nobody lives in." Does Bass River have any separate identity at all, or is it just part of Yarmouth (Massachusetts)? Can you sleep there? Do its inhabitants (if there are any) recognize it as a town rather than a part of Yarmouth? If the answer to any of these is "yes," it shouldn't be deleted, IMO. Merged into the Yarmouth article (which, of course, has yet to be populated, but that one definitely passes the "can you sleep there" test and should be viable) and redirected, maybe. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 14:41, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

You can sleep there. It has cottages, businesses and a bridge over the river. It's not recognized as a town. I agree that it's difficult to sort these things out. I just don't see that there's enough going on there to fill an article with. I say put our hopes into Yarmouth being a great article. If someone wants to go off and do a whole article on this village the size of a couple football fields some day, well OK. In the meantime it's a distraction to anyone exploring the region because it has no content and probably never will have any of any import.

In that case, I think it probably does pass the destination test, and should not be deleted. Just the fact that an article is "there" doesn't mean there has to be any priority in filling it, and having it there doesn't cause any harm -- there are pages for places in North Dakota a lot smaller than this one and we tolerate those just fine. Recommend you go ahead and work some on the Yarmouth article, possibly building in some manner of "hook" that references Bass River if appropriate; a redirect rather than deletion then becomes a sensible way of closing this chapter. (P.S. Remember to use the four tildes.) -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 15:00, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

If the issue is that this is a town outside of Yarmouth then it probably should get its own article. If it's within Yarmouth, why not just create a redirect to Yarmouth? That can be done by replacing the article content with "#REDIRECT [[Yarmouth (Massachusetts)]]". -- (WT-en) Ryan 15:12, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

It's within Yarmouth. I can live with a redirect. Not sure why I care if it's deleted except I'd like some kind of consistency with regard to village/place and town content.

As an FYI to everyone, looking at WikiPedia:Yarmouth, Massachusetts, it seems like the "town" of Yarmouth is more analogous to a North Dakota county than to a North Dakota city. These "villages" within Yarmouth (including Bass River, South Yarmouth, West Yarmouth, Yarmouth Port) seem more analogous to a North Dakota city. And yeah, Mass. also has counties too -- check out WikiPedia:Barnstable County, Massachusetts which covers most of the cape, but is subdivided into 15 "towns" and not one square inch of the county is outside of those towns. Ugh. And I though England was weird with its nomenclature. -- (WT-en) Colin 15:22, 2 June 2006 (EDT)