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Misc.

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In the main body of the article it says the population is 17 and in the sidebar 170. Which is it? --41.222.129.145 (talk) 14:29, 11 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why Do They Call it "Chicken?"

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Good Question. In the late 1800's, early miners traveled far in search of gold. Food was sometimes scarce, but a particular area near the South Fork of the 40-Mile River was abundant in Ptarmigan, now the state bird which bears a resemblance to a chicken (Ah the foreshadowing is thicker than steel.) The miners kept themselves alive with the help of the Ptarmigan (if you consider being eaten as helping.)

In 1902, Chicken was to become incorporated, the second town in Alaska to do so. The name "Ptarmigan" was suggested. Many people liked the name, but felt the quotation marks were too presumptuous. The name was shortened to Ptarmigan.

The only problem was that nobody could agree on the correct spelling. They didn't want their town name to be the source of ridicule and laughter, so they decided on "Chicken." (The irony is thicker than the foreshadowing.)

I hear that this is an apocryphal story, but that the term "chicken" was used as a synonym for ptarmigan, since they were plentiful and a staple meat. Deirdre 19:33, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If it's apocryphal, why is it stated as fact in the article? StaticElectric (talk) 01:23, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if this was excised from the article or if it's an unsigned talk page post. Either way, it's plainly intended to be whimsical enough to where it shouldn't be taken that seriously. Just in case it is, however: the statement "In 1902, Chicken was to become incorporated, the second town in Alaska to do so" needs to be checked. It may be factually accurate to state that it would be the second town to incorporate in that part of Alaska, following Eagle in 1901. Juneau, Ketchikan and Skagway all incorporated in 1900, with Eagle as well as Valdez in 1901. There may be others I'm missing. Therefore, by 1902, it would be impossible to call it the second incorporated town in all of Alaska. If Chicken did incorporate, something which can be verified through reliable sources, that would be of interest to the subject of the article, I would think (see discussion below on raging edit-warring dispute, as incorporation would also pertain to the community's history and demographic makeup). RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 00:41, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Notable residents

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Chicken has one important former inhabitant: The teacher Anne Hobbs Purdy, co-author of the book Tisha

She was certainly the most notable person from Chicken, but to refer to her as the only one is stretching it. I take it that no one has ever heard of Robert S. McCombe? He was a gold miner in that country for probably a half-century or better, and also served in several early Alaska state legislatures and wrote multiple books about his life (one of which is in my library, but I haven't read it yet).RadioKAOS (talk) 21:45, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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A couple years ago, the external links to businesses (3) in Chicken were removed, including the link to the business "Downtown Chicken", which has been added again under the heading "Homepage". It is not the home page for Chicken, but a webpage for the business that holds the name "Downtown Chicken" per the State of Alaska website. Same is true of the photo on this page, it is of the business and not downtown Chicken, as Chicken has no downtown. There are two other businesses in Chicken, a Post Office and a number of scattered residents, who mostly leave for the winter months. There are only 4-5 people who stay through the winter. If one business is promoted on this site, then all 3 businesses should be.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Chickengold (talk • contribs) 9:04, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Here are some realities of how Wikipedia works: 1) Any bottom-feeding non-profit or government agency can promote themselves to their hearts' content and no one blinks an eye. For-profit enterprises are held to a different standard. 2) Too many articles to count or mention are filled with crappy, subpar sources due to the mentality that "no URL = no verifiability". URLs which are not offered in this context tend to be deleted out of hand, often without much thought as to whether they are actually useful or could provide clues to reliable sources which could improve the article. Oh yeah, then there's this recent idea that notability is black and white and there's no such thing as notability within the context of an article. Eliminating mention of Anne Purdy and Tisha only pushes this article further in the direction of promoting the fiction that it's only notability is as an enumeration district of the U.S. Census Bureau. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 01:52, 27 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Statistics

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When dealing with demographics among 6 households, is it really best practice to use percentages?

So instead of: "There were 6 households out of which 50.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 66.7% were married couples living together, 16.7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 16.7% were non-families. 16.7% of all households were made up of individuals and 16.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.83 and the average family size was 3.00."

This seems more appropriate:

"Amongst a total of 6 households, 3 had children under the age of 18 living with them, 4 were married couples living together, 1 had a female householder with no husband present, and 1 were non-families. 1 of all households were made up of individuals and 1 had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.83 and the average family size was 3.00."

The population size seems sufficiently small that demographic comparisons to other communities would not be meaningful, and that language that states that one house had a single senior is more appropriate than saying that out of six occupied houses, that 16.7% had a single senior.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.219.251.104 (talk) 11:46, 24 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone who's been around Wikipedia long enough knows that back in the day, thousands of stubs on US places were created by a bot which regurgitated raw census data. This article was started by that bot. Some people thought it was great to create thousands of article en masse at a time when wikipedia only had a few thousand articles. Other people thought that the text was dull, repetitive and barely encyclopaedic, and that the mass creation did more harm than good. One result of the bot's actions was articles like this, where a village of 17 people got four paragraphs of absurd text which is clearly of no value. "For every 100 females there were 88.9 males" - there are 17 people in the village! This is a ludicrous statement.
Tragically enough this shoddy text has barely been touched since it was put there in 2002. It remains absurd and it's also now outdated. The only demographic fact worth including in an article about a village of 17 people is that 17 people live there. However, this is Wikipedia where the opportunity to be high handed and snotty to anonymous editors is rarely passed up, so when I removed this laughing stock of a section, someone made an idiotically false accusation of vandalism, accused me of "IP hopping in order to remove content", and misused their administrator privileges to protect the article. That editor was clearly motivated by anti-IP prejudice. A glance at their contributions reveals that they do little more than revert anonymous edits and template anonymous users.
A house by house description of the population of a village is an embarrassment to anything that wants to call itself an encyclopaedia. The two editors who not only tried to force it back in but did so with personal attacks accompanying their folly should be ashamed of themselves. I will remove it again. 201.220.242.75 (talk) 05:26, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps the IP user should take just a moment to think about how it looks to administrators (or anyone else for that matter) when anonymous users simply remove information from articles without obtaining consensus on the article talk pages. Anonymous users and new users vandalize Wikipedia all day long, and when they simply delete or change information like this, it looks just like much of the other vandalism that we see every day, and immediately revert every day as well. As for the two versions of the text above, you are right that the second version sounds more conversational and may make more sense when discussing percentages with such a small sample. A third possibility would be to word the section something along these lines: Out of a total of six households, three (or 50%) had children under the age of 18 living with them, four (66.7%) were married couples living together.... There might, of course, be some obscure rule about this that I am unaware of, but if it makes the encyclopedia better, there is a rule that covers it called WP:IAR. And in general, IP user or registered user, if you make a change and someone reverts the change, it's time to discuss on the talk page, not continue the process with additional reverts. Etamni | ✉ | ✓  06:49, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Neither I nor anyone else needs to obtain consensus before removing absurd and out of date information from an article. If there are people who can't be bothered to look at the content of my edits before reverting them and making obviously false accusations of vandalism, that's their problem, not mine. As for your suggested text, the notion that we should ever say "Out of a total of six households, three (or 50%)" is hard to take seriously. This is a village of 17 people. Its median income and the percentage of its six houses which contain children under 18 are statistically meaningless and encyclopaedically worthless. The necessary demographic information is that the population of the town is 17 people. 201.220.243.122 (talk) 03:54, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hey, you old disruptor, why don't you rewrite/condense the information a bit? I'll grant you that percentages in this case are silly, but there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if that 2000 baby is already a pimply teenager clogging up your internet connection. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 03:56, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, start with an insult, that's the way to get things done, isn't it? 201.220.242.59 (talk) 12:56, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The knots people tie themselves in to ensure that an article remains a laughing stock are really impressive. I particularly like the series of edit summaries left with the last six utterly stupid reverts:
  •  
  •  
  • (3.1.13)
  • the reason is "unexplained deletion"
  • Le warrior
  •  
Not sure which one of those is my favourite really. The reverts without any summary lose points for lack of originality. 3.1.13 probably takes it for being so utterly meaningless. You really take the idea of consensus and discussion seriously, don't you? Making repeated personal attacks, repeatedly reverting for no reason and entirely ignoring the talk page demonstrates that very well. 201.220.243.176 (talk) 23:37, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The IP user has been identified as the subject of this investigation. Further edit warring over this article will not be tolerated. Etamni | ✉ | ✓  18:03, 9 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I had a look and I'm happy with the current state of the article as I look at it now. If I had to keep anything, it would be "17 people, 6 households, and 4 families" or whatever a more up to date source has but I can't honestly see how the remainder has any meaningful encyclopaedic value whatsoever. As has been stated above, a number of these geography stubs were created by Rambot back in 2002 and many have been left to rot ever since, this is far from the first case I have seen this sort of thing. However, if other sources can be supplied that explain the importance of the demographic backgrounds, I think they can stay, cited to those. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 09:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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