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 delete on verifiability grounds. It is correct that settlements of village size, including former settlements, are almost always kept even if they are unremarkable. However, that presumes that verifiability requirements are met. In this case we have not found any map that labels the village with the given name. The only source is a 1944 one that says there is a village with this name and that gives coordinates to the nearest arcminute. The given coordinates point to an apparently unsettled area of palm forest, but it has been speculated in the discussion that the village is actually the buildings located south of this. However, it would be original research to assert that those buildings make up the village that the 1944-source refers to. It is also uncertain whether the 1944 source has truly spelled the name correctly, so there is uncertainty as to whether there really is a village named "Buttock Batu". Since the main source for this page has serious reliabilty issues due to the way it has been compiled, the standards for verifiability have not been met. This is an absolute requirement, and one that has not been adequately answered by the "keep" side. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:14, 28 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Buttock Batu[edit]

Buttock Batu (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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No indication of notability. I couldn't really find any further information about this place. PepperBeast (talk) 20:28, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep It's a village and so passes WP:GEOLAND. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:12, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What makes you say it's a village? –dlthewave ☎ 22:16, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment do you have some WP:RS that indicates it's a village? PepperBeast (talk) 02:28, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Malaysia-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 21:20, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 21:39, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete- for want of reliable sources describing exactly what the nature of this location is. All we have is a name and a location, and that's just a statistical entry not an encyclopedia article. I've done some searching for sources for this article, including under different possible spellings of the name, and all I can find are WP mirrors and shady online travel agencies offering hotels in a geographically nearby city. Without anything substantial this is a no-go. Reyk _YO! 05:20, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Per WP:GEOLAND. A real existing settlement, nothing gained by destroying the article. FeydHuxtable (talk) 10:09, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - Sourcing is insufficient to establish notability. I would challenge the assertion that this meets WP:GEOLAND, since that guideline "specifically excludes maps, tables, lists, databases, etc., from consideration when establishing topic notability" and the only current references are a list and a database. –dlthewave ☎ 12:42, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The guideline also states "On the other hand, sources that describe the subject instead of simply mentioning it do establish notability. " The BGN source does this. Let's not get caught in excessive piety for words - the BGN source may have 'List' in its title, but it's actually a book length reference. While you're argument is valid, we're not forced to class it as a list for WP:GEO purposes. Also Buttock Batu is covered in other English sources such as imperial documentation. Though I'm not going to link to those as per deColonization, I'm not sure that 100% of Malaysians would find it non offensive. FeydHuxtable (talk) 13:45, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment the BGN source from the 40s calls it a village and describes its locatiion ([a]n interior village on the Sungei Segama west - northwest of Lahad Datu). It doesn't describe the village at all. The up-to-date BGN database only calls it a "populated place", and I can't find anything else to positively state that it's even that. Malaysia Geoportal doesn't mention it. PepperBeast (talk) 19:06, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, though it would also be valid to read the 40's BGN source as describing the settlement as a village, though I concede it's a brief description even if we count the location data. Anyway, if you want verification of the settlement's continued existence, it's on various sites like malaysiaplaces.net, or you can even see it yourself via the 2021 photos on this Google earth link. I'd not expect it to be on Malaysia Geoportal, with a few exceptions that seems to be more mainland Malaysia, missing even several famous towns & cities from East Malaysia, which is about a thousand miles away from the mainland. (Just in case you didn't know and feel bad, I was also unaware of this until a couple of years ago. Had an issue escalated to me at work where a client needed a face to face in Labuan. I was like "Just send Sabir bro." (Sabir being our man in Kuala Lumpur, and I knew he could spare a whole day for the mission.) They were like "Errr Feyd, I hope you know Labuan is like a 4 day round trip from KL." So embarrassing, we ended up sending someone from Aus. Fortunately, the good Colonel (Andrew D) has an expert knowledge of east Asia, so we can be guided by his opinion on the matter. So I remain of the opinion we should keep the article. If you wanted another reason beyond the policy based case, there's the fact that various GIS sites have feeds from Wikipedia, which might be broken if we delete the article. These things can be very valuable to tourists or botanists etc doing research in the area. FeydHuxtable (talk) 17:18, 7 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Clearly a recognised settlement, so passes WP:GEOLAND. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:19, 7 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• delete Actually looking at GMaps, what's clearly there is nothing but a large spread of palm forest. Either that, or the coordinates are inaccurate, because a half-mile to the south, there is something that might be construed as a "settlement", but it is quite peculiar looking and to my eye doesn't look anything like a village that's been there since the 1940s. It could just as well be a coconut plantation with dorms for the workers built pretty recently.

Geonames has the same sort of reliability problems as GNIS does, and I suspect it's for the same reason: the latter was largely an exercise in map-reading and interpretation, and on top of that they pulled in stuff from even more problematic sources. Here the maps are not as good as US topos, and indeed, I couldn't find any maps of this area which I could determine to independent of Geonames/WP data, except for GMaps's aerials. Having banged my head on this stuff for years now (e.g., a long run of Somali villages) I'd just as soon preemptively delete all the "X is a spot on a map" entries like this, to be recreated if and when someone comes up with some substantive content. In any case this fails verification and notability. Mangoe (talk) 12:58, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, the coordinates are only degree/minute precision which could easily be off by 1/2 mile. Apparently it's common practice for editors to manually adjust these to the nearest thing that shows up on the satellite view, which hasn't been done here yet. I would say those buildings to the south are probably the place we're talking about, but like you said, we can't confirm that it's actually a village. –dlthewave ☎ 22:04, 17 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Question. Is it possible that this is a misspelling of Butok Batu, a real village in Indonesia (but not one that Google Maps can find)? Butok is a much more Malay-looking spelling than Buttock. Athel cb (talk) 09:39, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a bad question, but it doesn't produce a satisfactory answer-- there is a Batu Butok, but it's in a completely different location, in East Kalimintan. PepperBeast (talk) 13:05, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• When I was looking for sources I found a "Batak Batu", also in Indonesia. Definitely not the possibly nonexistent place in Malaysia. I think Mangoe's detective work makes this questionable under WP:V, and I don't think even the ludicrously lax standards of GEOLAND extend to nonexistent locations. Reyk _YO! 11:43, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]