MyWiki:WikiProject Washington/GNIS cleanup

Per Project:Reliability of GNIS data there are many (sub)stub articles on Washington places that have been created sourced to GNIS entries. A lot of them falsely designate things as "unincorporated communities", which is several GNIS importers' catch-all equivalent to the GNIS catch-all feature classification code "populated place". GNIS has many errors, and all of these (sub)stubs need cleanup.

To-do lists

/State
/Asotin, County Sorted May 2024, Added missing place to county article.
/Clallam County
/Grant, County
/Island county
/Lincoln county
/Lewis county
/Okanogan County
/Thurston county
/Walla Walla County
/Yakima county

Deprecated

/tempgoogle

Resources

Further information: Project:Reliability of GNIS data/Cleanup methodology and resources

Arcadia Publishing books

As usual, these are broad guides to where the history will be found.

If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:

• (An Illustrated History of Klickitat, Yakima and Kittitas Counties: With an Outline of the Early History of the State of Washington at the Internet Archive)
• (An illustrated history of southeastern Washington, including Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield and Asotin counties, Washington at the Internet Archive)

Edmond S. Meany

Meany wrote a series of articles across several issues of his Washington Historical Quarterly starting in 1917, that were collected in book form in 1923.

Unfortunately, after Artesian, Washington (AfD discussion) (where Meany had "Gans" instead of "Gano") and Ping, Washington (AfD discussion) (where Meany clearly gave an erroneous page number) it is clear that Meany has a high rate of typographic or transcription errors that have not been caught. Fortunately Meany cites his sources, albeit that some are manuscript collections of letters sent to him. Others are things like history books that are accessible to us directly. For safest results, check Meany against his own sources.

Gazetteers

These are useful for telling whether an "unincorporated community" is a post-town/post-village or only a post office. Lippincott's, in particular, has a uniform scheme for this.

• (part 1 part 2)