Talk:Lackawanna Cut-Off

Archives (Index)

2024/June

This page is archived by ClueBot III.

Merger discussion

The Waltz & Reece Cut, Armstrong Cut, Bradbury Fill, Colby Cut, Jones Cut, Vail Fill, Ramsey Fill, Pequest Fill, Lubber Run Fill, Slateford Junction, Wharton Fill, and McMickle Cut (Lackawanna Cut-Off) articles do not seem to meet notability requirements (WP:GNG), with little significant coverage. The sections on construction can be merged into this article.--Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 18:24, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

@Epicgenius, Pi.1415926535, Mackensen, WallyFromColumbia, and PRRfan: I just wanted to ping all of you about this. Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 20:04, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. I think most of these can be merged, as they consist of simple statistics which aren't notable on their own per WP:NOTSTATS. The possible exceptions are Colby Cut and Pequest Fill, which do have more substantive info about the features themselves. – Epicgenius (talk) 20:08, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm unpersuaded that any of these need have separate articles. Mackensen (talk) 20:45, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

• Merge all per nom. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 21:06, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
• Merge. Except maybe Pequest Fill because it was a record setter when it was built. The rest have zero independent notability. oknazevad (talk) 21:30, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
• Merge all except Pequest Fill per nom and my comments above. After looking at Colby Cut again, I realized that it only includes stats and etymology. It doesn't appear to be notable otherwise. – Epicgenius (talk) 21:37, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
• Merge all except Pequest Fill, to which I've lately added a half-dozen or so citations that buttress its claim to notability. PRRfan (talk) 01:27, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

  I think there is a consensus to merge all but Pequest Fill. Can this discussion be closed? Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 18:49, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

• Having browsed the above discussion and articles, I agree that Pequest Fill can stand on its own but the others should all be merged. Thanks to those who identified Pequest Fill as notable. These appear to have been slightly over-enthusiastic creations that really should be in the article of the rail line itself. Merger will be complicated by how these articles are lacking sources, however. Wharton Fill for instance includes a citation only titled "NJ Transit Press Release" and another that's clearly OR from a map, and half of the text in these articles is uncited entirely. Some of these will need to be more of a redirect than a merge. Also, the Lackawanna Cut-Off article already includes a table with all these fills and cuts and some basic data, do we need anything more to be merged over? Trainsandotherthings (talk) 15:34, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

  That was why I initially tried to propose these for deletion (wrongly-since Pequest Fill seems to be notable.)-it seems like a bunch of OR. Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 20:13, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

  Yeah, based on the discussion above, I think you can probably safely merge or redirect all of these, except Pequest Fill (which can be brought to AFD later if the circumstances warrant). Though take my comment with a grain of salt, as I was involved in the above discussion. – Epicgenius (talk) 22:57, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

A thought: I concur that these features of the Cut-Off are not individually notable (save Pequest Fill) and that their pages ought to be merged. But into what? Because Lackawanna Cut-Off is already 42K bytes, of which about one-quarter is the "Planning & construction" section, and because folding in the information from the various feature pages would add at least 10K bytes at a rough estimate, I propose that the pages and "Planning & construction" section be merged into Construction of the Lackawanna Cut-Off. That's currently a redirect, but once was its own page (that some of us worked on). In 2017, it was deemed duplicative of the main Cut-Off page and stripped of its content. But we have far more information now, more than we should jam into the main page. Let's bring it back. PRRfan (talk) 17:49, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I think that would make sense. Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 16:48, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

@PRRfan, I'm not saying that your point is wrong, but the 42KB figure is the total wikitext size. The actual readable prose size is 19,455 characters (3,165 words). The WP:TOOBIG guideline says that for articles under 6,000 words, length alone does not justify division or trimming, so I think it is possible to merge all these articles to the Lackawanna Cut-Off article without overburdening the page.

(For what it's worth, I routinely come across pages that have 100KB or more in total wikitext but only about 4,000-5,000 words. The wikitext is no longer really a major factor in determining whether a page is too long.) – Epicgenius (talk) 23:28, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

@Epicgenius, I'm sure you're right about word count, and I was being lazy in just grabbing the byte count. I guess part of my concern is that details that made sense in individual feature pages (e.g., the namesake of Colby Cut) would not seem out of place in a Construction of the Cut-Off, but just might in a unitary Cut-Off page. I'd like to preserve those details as we shut down the individual feature pages; what's your feeling about them? PRRfan (talk) 01:12, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

@PRRfan, I see, thanks for clarifying. In that case, I think it might be helpful to have a section in the Lackawanna Cut-Off page about individual features; however, we can summarize the content if length is an issue. Alternatively, we could have an article about the construction of the Cut-Off. I was just saying that we don't need to split the page based solely on page size, but splitting the page based on contents is okay. (Also, I got the word count from WP:DYKCHECK if that helps.) – Epicgenius (talk) 01:26, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I've made a very rough draft of a Construction of the Lackawanna Cut-Off page, just to help visualize how long such a page or section might be.

Either way, there's an interesting question of how to present its information. I love how the table groups features by contractors, but I don't love how big it would have to be to accommodate things like mileposts and name origin, nor how including buildings and cuts/fills in a single table necessarily wastes space because the two kinds of features share few defining characteristics. One idea I had was to delete the table and instead have subheads by section—i.e., Section One, Section Two, etc. We'd lose the ability to quickly compare the various cuts and fills, but could present the information in less redundant fashion. PRRfan (talk) 15:32, 11 October 2024 (UTC)