Talk:List of the most common U.S. place names

message: Farmington, with 21 occurances, should also be included.
-Speedeep (talk) 17:42, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Farmington? 

message: If anyone is interested, there are quite a few more that could be added to this list... 
Chester, Union, Burlington, Newport, Troy, Ashland, Arlington, Florence, Hamilton, Georgetown, Lincoln, Lexington, Dover, Jefferson, Oxford, Richmond, Warren, Clayton, Dayton, Farmington, Kingston, Aurora, Centreville... 
Rarelibra 03:28, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps the ONLY authority would be something like a US registry or Census, yes? Rarelibra (talk) 01:09, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Additions

message: Danville, with 17 occurances, should also be included.
ZirconBlue (talk) 15:14, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Danville? 

message: Riverside etc. from an About.com article
citing a Word Ways magazine article (not named) by Dan Tilque from 2001.
Ironically the About.com article cites this Wikipedia article, perhaps erronously?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.43.232.248 (talk) 13:13, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations 

message: There are a lot of unincorporated areas in Wisconsin in this list. For those who may not know, towns in Wisconsin are unincorporated. It doesn't seem like they should really be in the list.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.76.131.49 (talk) 02:39, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unincorporated areas 

message: The list in this page looks *extremely* dubious.  A list of "populated places" in the US can be downloaded from the USGS.  Processing this with the following Perl script (please excuse my terrible Perl; I've not written any for ages)
:#!/usr/local/bin/perl
:
:while (<>) {
::  /\d*\|([^|]*).*/;
::  $count{$1}++;
:}
:while ( my ($city, $num) = each(%count) ) {
::  print "$num $city\n";
:}
and piping the result through sort -nr gives the following
Rank	Name           	Count
1   	Midway         	218
2   	Fairview       	213
3   	Oak Grove      	169
4   	Five Points    	150
5   	Riverside      	129
6   	Pleasant Hill  	124
7   	Mount Pleasant 	119
8   	Bethel         	111
9=  	Centerville    	109
9=  	New Hope       	109
11= 	Liberty        	98
11= 	Oakland        	98
13  	Union          	97
14  	Pleasant Valley	96
15  	Shady Grove    	94
16= 	Pine Grove     	92
16= 	Salem          	92
18  	Greenwood      	91
19= 	Forest Hills   	89
19= 	Pleasant Grove 	89
Now, the list includes over 190,000 places, which seems rather a lot.  Maybe it's not the right data to be using?
Dricherby (talk) 14:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious list 

message: ...yet no townships at all? In Wisconsin, a town is essentially a township, it just goes by another name. So, if the towns of Wisconsin are included, why not the townships of many other states? For Washington, if we included all townships (in addition to boroughs, cities, towns, and villages), it would bring its total to over 60. Phizzy  01:41, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why so many Wisconsin towns... 

message: Aren't there loads of places called Plymouth? on the Plymouth disambig. pg there are at least 16.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.104.69.37 (talk) 20:52, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plymouth? 

message: 20 states have a Belleville, and if you include ghost towns and towns that used to exist, it goes to 23.  The variant spelling "Bellville" adds 3 more.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.60.213.26 (talk) 01:00, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Belleville only suggests 17 locations of significance on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages?from=Belleville&to=&namespace=0&hideredirects=1 for a slightly more comprehensive list. TehAnonymous (talk) 06:43, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Belleville 

message: I found this list: Riverside in 46 states, Faiview, 43, Centreville, 45, Franklin, 42 etc. etc. 
Totallay different of what I see in the article. Even in that list I miss Hamilton, which is mentioned in 30 states on Wikipedia. 
[]
Salix2 (talk) 21:13, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  What's the truth? 

message: There are two or three ways to establish criteria for this:
# Use the US Census list, which includes the CDP category (census designated place)
# Use another list, such as USPS or USGS lists
I'd prefer using the Census list as a base, since a designated place has a place name.
The BGN - Bureau of Geographic Names is another source that should be considered.
You can download files like http://geonames.usgs.gov/docs/stategaz/NationalFile_20101001.zip
The USPS web site doesn't appear to have a downloadable list of their place names (which are tied to
Zip codes). rhyre (talk) 16:47, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup? 

message: Why doesn't this article have any population figures for the cities?? Georgia guy (talk) 16:47, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Because no one has put them in. —Tamfang (talk) 22:30, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Population figures 

message: There's no established guideline/rule/anything resembling for inclusion, so I propose the following arbitrary solutions:
# Top 20 most common US place names (ties likely)
# US place names with 20 or more locations
As of this edit, the page lists 19 names exceeding 20 locations, with 13 for 18-19, with likely many more if it were accurate and inclusive. As for criteria for consideration, I suggest using the disambiguation page & relevant section (ex. [Washington#United States]]) as a rule of thumb, unless/until a better solution is found. TehAnonymous (talk) 06:43, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criteria for inclusion 

message: I stumbled upon a similar result as Dricherby (see Dubious List above) when I looked at the USGS List Of Populated Places at https://geonames.usgs.gov/docs/stategaz/POP_PLACES_20170401.zip today.   Today's version includes 201066 places.
:The USGS list shows up several major failings of this article.
  
:First, though, before examining the USGS list, a quick look at the article reveals major problems with the current list.
:The top name is given as Washington, with a claimed count of 88.  That is inaccurate for two reasons:
::*The claim of 88 places is wrong.  There are only 43 places listed.
::*Of the 43, only 25 places have a name that consists solely of the single word "Washington".   As wrong as the count already is, it also includes names such as Mount Washington, Port Washington, Washington Park, Washingtonville and others which are not uniquely "Washington". How can they be included merely because they share one part of their name with another place?   If they should be counted together, why do we not count place names together if they have any elements in common? How many places include the word "North"? (There are more than 2100). How many include "ville"?  (There are more than 24,800).  Where do we stop?
:Back to the source of the count quoted by Dricherby. It doesn't give identical results to the list I checked, but it's headed in the same direction.  To examine the list I simply imported the pipe-delimited data into Excel and did a simple analysis of the Place Names. Despite taking less than five minutes, the resulting counts are completely accurate.  The list has Midway (217), Fairview (212), Oak Grove (171), Five Points (150) and Riverside (130) as the most common place names.
:In the case of Washington, the list I used has 34 with that word as their entire name.  Counting the place names which have "Washington" as the first 10 letters of their name, there are 158 places.
I believe there's more than enough evidence to suggest that the list in this article is not only poorly constructed, it's also wildly inaccurate, and I am sure that extensive research would only confirm that.  Without even considering that there must be a consensus regarding the source of the data, I'm wondering if it would be too large task to revise and easier to simply remove it from public gaze and rewrite it completely. Twistlethrop (talk) 05:18, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wildly inaccurate and misleading article. 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I've completely redone/renamed the former Post Offices section; it now has the official USPS list of the most common city & post office names, and is up to date for 2017. Twistlethrop (talk) 09:54, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Postal Service data 

message: The "Greenville" listing includes an entry for the place in Tennessee.  The correct spelling of the placename is Greeneville.
I believe placenames that are not spelled exactly are still acceptable for inclusion, so have left the entry with correct but different spelling in the list. It's worth noting that Greeneville is the only place in the U.S. with that spelling, although its parent county name is not unique.
Twistlethrop (talk) 16:18, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greeneville vs. Greenville  (Tennessee) 

message: There are at least a dozen Antiochs just in Texas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioch,_Texas).  Suspect there are many more in the US. 2600:6C56:4000:3062:6038:31E6:DDD8:BB91 (talk) 14:22, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Antioch 

message: Don't want to step on any toes here since I'm relatively new but I thought it was kind of odd to include The Simpsons in this list of otherwise nonfictional town names, especially if there's no other cases of these?
I of course didn't want to go editing anything headfirst, but I just wanted to question it before anything. I could be wrong—apologies if I am and I just waste time, haha. SurgeFire (talk) 19:54, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simpsons name?