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 redirect to Geography of Illinois. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 11:50, 27 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of regions of Illinois[edit]

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This list purports to be a list of "regions" of Illinois; it is not. It is a collection of someone's quite random ideas about the geography of the state. Though it is listed in a template box at the bottom as one of a series of state lists of political divisions, only two other states have "entries", and at least in the case of Illinois (I don't know the other two states well enough to comment on theirs), the divisions are generally not political in nature. That they overlap and are non-comprehensive is further evidence of their arbitrariness. In short, this is just someone's original research, and not very compelling OR at that. HuskyHuskie (talk) 03:32, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Although I'm personally aware of local usage of some of these region names, this list as a whole is total OR. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 16:08, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per WP:CLN. This is a list of the articles in Category: Regions of Illinois, with a bit of explanation for those persons who don't want to do the "and what's under this rock?" way of finding information. I agree that the lack of citations needs to be fixed by using the same citations from those articles to this one. Mandsford 18:00, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone ahead and added sources from the other articles, that had sources (I've left River Bend (Illinois) out unless someone can identify that. There's still more to be done, however. We don't have sourced definitions for what's described in the articles about the division between Northern, Central and Southern Illinois. Mandsford 18:46, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Lack of citations is not the problem. It's a lack of coherence, and the impossibility of it ever being achieved with this content. It's akin to creating an article like this:

List of farm things

It's gibberish, and serves no purpose that I can see. HuskyHuskie (talk) 18:53, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

And I assure you, I can find citations indicating that all of these items on the list can be found on a farm. Doesn't make them the foundation for a coherent article.

While it is certainly possible that a coherent structure could exist for defining the regions of Illinois, your citations do not provide this. I'm not sure I've made myself clear, but my point is, it is not the parts that constitute original research, it's the act of synthesizing them into a single article. HuskyHuskie (talk) 19:00, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - There are plenty of "List of regions of x" articles with x being a particular country, continent, or other area. These lists do not purport to synthesize the regions into a consistent system; they purport to catalogue the various ways in which these areas have been divided, whether colloquially, linguistically, physiographically, historically, or otherwise. This list could do with considerable expansion, but it should not be deleted. Neelix (talk) 19:27, 20 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Illinois-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:32, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:32, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge into Illinois. The concept of the state's regions can be discussed there. Dough 48 72 04:28, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge - I think Dough4872 has the right idea: the Illinois article should include regional discussions; this article is superfluous and a potential content-fork. Carrite (talk) 05:45, 22 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge is an easy thing to suggest, but more difficult to carry out in practice. There's no reason that you can't rewrite tge article about Illinois if you want to do so, but it's not absolutely necessary. Still, I'm not averse to the concept of merging this to Geography of Illinois, which would be a relatively simple task. Mandsford 02:30, 24 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm good with the merging. HuskyHuskie (talk) 02:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Done and done. It's been merged and this redirects to Geography of Illinois. Mandsford 02:07, 25 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - This AfD challenge has been rendered moot and can be safely closed. Carrite (talk) 05:00, 27 February 2011 (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.