Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities/Archive 3

message: Where do the suburbs fit? - User:utcursch May 14, 2004
* This is certainly an interesting question, but I'm afraid the answer must be developed country by country. Just as you are working on Bombay, others are working on London, New York, Sidney, etc.
*In the U.S. there are still no general answer. Often we are referring to a neighborhood within a city's limits (see Covedale, Ohio). Other times the relationship is just a note in the article on a neighboring city (see Cheviot, Ohio). There are places (like St. Bernard, Ohio) where residents are offended by the reference and refuse to consider themselves a suburb, even though completely surrounded by Cincinnati.
*In some instances there is a metropolitan government entity, such as Greater Manchester in England.
In short, I don't think there is a single answer, but there may be several templates that could be shared or adjusted for projects involving a major city.    Lou I 20:18, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Suburbs

message: The most likely city pages to be viewed are probably the state's capital page.  Many of these pages have received little attention over the Rambot info.  I've gone through and created a table on Requested pictures of which pages need city photos, capitol building photos, and location maps.  If you have pictures of a state capital, or live in or near a state capital please help make this pages better.  - Redjar 14:17, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photos and other contributions needed  for U.S. State Capital Pages 

message: I don't understand the rationale for having different categories for cities, towns, etc., in the same state. Maurreen 00:32, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The different types of municipalities have distinctive characteristics (which vary from state to state). In the northeast and midwest, towns or townships are subdivisions of a county (although in parts of the northeast the county is essentially only a land designation with no governmental authority). Villages (or in some states, boroughs) are incorporated municipalities but are generally not completely autonomous while cities are generally completely autonomous. One way to look at it, although it is not entirely accurate for the northeast, is to start with the state level. The state is divided into counties, and the counties are divided into towns or townships. These divisions are generally (or at least were originally) intended to provided governance for more or less arbitrary divisions of land (in the midwest, the boundaries for counties and townships were often drawn up long before there were any permanent white settlers in the areas, mostly so as to provide some semblance of order in adminstering land sales). Villages and cities were generally established to provide for more effective government and municipal services for residents within relatively densely populated areas. Historically, counties and towns or townships were what is sometimes known as "general-law" municipalities, in that their powers and organization were narrowly prescribed and controlled by the state legislatures. While cities, and to a lesser degree villages and boroughs, had what became known as "home-rule" powers--basically, they are municipal "corporations", and are able to do pretty much whatever they like, within the limits of the law. The distinction has become blurred in recent times as some states have granted home-rule powers to townships and even to counties. But nonetheless, they are still different types of municipalities with distinct powers of governance. older≠wiser 01:59, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, that was educational. I knew they were different, but not how. But I wonder if anyone looking up a community would want categories for differenty types. People usually want to see what communities are in a given area, or they're looking for a specific one. It seems like a listing of all communities or municipalities in a state, or whatever, would be more useful. Maurreen 02:18, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I can see that. But that is perhaps better done with a list, say something like List of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan (although that still needs a lot of cleaning up). Unfortunately, in many states, towns or townships are really only governmental entities for land managment and not anything like what you might think of as a community (I mean many have population densities of less than ten people per square mile). But then some town or townships are densely populated and seem more like a city than their rural ccounterparts. But it is quite difficult to distinguish them without closer examination. And complicating matters, there is very often an unincorporated community (or even a village or city) with the same name as a town or township that serves as the urban center of the town or township. So, for example, on that list of Michigan entities--it appears to have originally come from a state web site. However, many of the places it included were not incorporated municipalities. The townships that appear on the list were introduced because I (and some others) did not understand that there were also unincorporated communities with the same names as townships in many cases (i.e., if you look at a map, many of the little dots are actually unincorporated communities). And there are also many towns or townships that are not visible on most general highway maps, because they simply do not have anything resembling a "community". In any case, producing a complete list of actual "communities" or places that one might be able to find on a map is more complicated than simply merging all the various types of municipalities. A good start would be with cities and villages (or boroughs). But towns and townships are problematic in many states. older≠wiser 03:14, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: It should depend on the state then; in Florida, cities, towns, and villages are all roughly-equal. They may have different forms of government but are not usually seen as different types of municipalities, so it should be enough to mention in the article whether it's a town or city.
I also suggest possibly including other districts with similar powers, such as the Reedy Creek Improvement District.--SPUI 09:35, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Rationale for distinct cities vs. towns

message: A page devoted to computer-assisted categorization of articles has been created at Wikipedia:Auto-categorization.  The first target is counties and municipalities in the United States. -- Beland 10:19, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Related auto-categorization page 

message: Hi. I'm hoping this is the right place to discuss this.... I was looking up U.S. Air Force Bases where my father once served, and I was surprised to find that one of them is refered to in its article as a town. As I began to investigate, it seems that all cities, towns, and military bases were based on the same template. In some cases, the bases are properly referred to as a base throughout the article, in other cases, it is called a base in one place, but a town in other places, and in a few articles, the only indication that the place in question is a military base at all is the inclusion of an acronym like AFB. I was going to start making corrections to these articles, until I realized what a big job it is. Presumably, it also is a problem for army, navy, and other types of bases as well. Plus, I was worried about whether or not there is a standard template or format for military bases. This Cities page was the closest to a policy page I could find for this issue.
Malmstrom_AFB%2C_Montana is an example of an article that gives no indication whatsoever of actually being a base other than the acronym AFB. Columbus Air Force Base and Loring_AFB%2C_Maine are examples of inconsistent language, (sometimes base, sometimes town). Another consistency issue:
:Scott Air Force Base (Scott AFB) is a base of the United States Air Force located...
In some cases, where an AFB article starts with this type of sentence, the word base is linked to base and in other cases it is not. This is another reason why I wanted to discuss this here before making lots of changes to pages myself. Presumably, all of the bases should have a standard opening sentence.
AdmN 07:02, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: If you look at :Category:U.S. Air Force bases, it's clear that the "Foo Air Force Base" form is preferred. In some cases people have taken the census data and pasted into the base article, in other cases the two are cross-linked. In general, I think the human-written articles should suffice - Rambot did not know that places with "AFB" in their name (which the Census just did that way for their own convenience) were actually not towns at all, and so mechanically chose a poor name. Stan 04:01, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, heck. ;-) I didn't even know there was a category. It is incredibly hard to find stuff around here, (especially when the search function sporatically stops working all the time). Thank you. func(talk) 04:14, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: sigh... and now I feel really dumb, because the category link is at the bottom of every AFB page.... func(talk) 04:16, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Air Force Bases 

message: See WP:CFD for a discussion on conventions for city-related category names (like "Cities of Uzbekistan" vs "Cities in Uzbekistan"). -- Beland 08:58, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  City category name conventions 

message: Seems to me like :Category:Unincorporated communities in Massachusetts and :Category:Villages in Massachusetts should be merged. Village is not an offical term for municipalities in MA. I'm OK with using the term to refer to unincorporated places in states that don't use it for municipalities (so long as it is explained)--but that would probable exclude the "neighborhoods" in :Category:Unincorporated communities in Massachusetts if I'm understanding how it is used correctly. And of course, there is overlap from both with :Category:Census-designated places in Massachusetts. I know there is concern in MA about applicability of the term "unincorporated", as the entire state is part of one incorporated municipality or another. Not being from MA, I'm not sure what to suggest, but it seems a little confusing as it stands now. older≠wiser 22:05, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
:The proposal on the project page suggests a convention of "Category:Municipal sections in StateName". -- Beland 22:15, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Massachusetts Categories 

message: The problem with any large metropolitan city is that the name of the city also becomes a synonym for the metropolitan area. Los Angeles may be worse than most large cities because the various different regions that are labeled "Los Angeles" can overlap, but not wholly contain the other "LA" region (for example, most of the San Fernando Valley is part of the City of Los Angeles, but is outside of the Los Angeles Basin. I personally think that several of the section in the article for Los Angeles, California are a mess because they often conflate the city with the megalopolis. There are several other LA articles (see Los Angeles (disambiguation)), but none of them seem, at least to me, to be best place to put Los Angeles region information. I was wondering if some of the people in this WikiProject might have some suggestions on how to deal with this different LA articles, and the inclusion of non-LA City info in the City of Los Angeles article. gK ¿? 17:41, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Los Angeles, California]]

message: Many of the Rambot-edited articles do not link to explanatory text as indicated in the proposal. We need to create the "footnote" article and fill it in with the appropriate text, so we know exactly what links to make. -- Beland 02:26, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Links to footnotes

message: All of the muni articles with (CDP) in the title ended up in a county category plus Category:Census-designated_places_in_StateName except:
* Littleton_(CDP),_New_Hampshire -> :Category:Grafton_County,_New_Hampshire :Category:Towns_in_New_Hampshire
* Oakport_(CDP),_Minnesota -> [[:Category:Clay_County,_Minnesota :Category:Unincorporated_communities_in_Minnesota :Category:Census-designated_places
* Ripley_(CDP),_New_York -> :Category:Chautauqua_County,_New_York :Category:Unincorporated_communities_in_New_York
I don't know why the Rambot missed them.  They should probably be put in conforming categories until the Great Disambiguation of CDPs can occur. -- Beland 09:58, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: CDPs in title

message: Hi people, I was going threw some of the cities that i have lived in or visited and i came across Detroit, and personally found it need of some improvement. First off it was a bit to large, going over the Wikipedia size allotment, had a time line for a history, some categories that were out of place, and a extremely long list of persons associated with city. So i went about to clean it up and make some improvements, before i put these improvements onto the page it's self i hope to get some feed back from this group since it runs the convention on cities. I know some of the edits are out of convention, but i will gladly explain all of them in the proper forum. I do request that all comments though be posed on the temp page discussion forum so that it is open to all, but do feel free to contact me in my own personal talk page if you do so. Note though i have received a negative feedback from the persons  have made some edits on the Detroit page, even to the extent that a user that has yet to be identified has created what I believe is a sock puppet ,Boothy-Is-Goofy|Talk , to prevent my edits. I look forward to your comments. The new Detroit page is located at Detroit, Michigan/Temp, also comment outside this  group is wlecomed as well so feel free to direct others to the page as well. --User:Boothy443 | comhrÚ 19:03, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment Requested 

message: Is it acceptable to have a general footer for a city, like countries have. Such footer would feature history, neighborhoods, and other articles related to Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm only asking because no cities currently seem to have such footers (although Chicago, Illinois has a neighborhoods footer), and I want to know whether this is intentional.  Cool Hand Luke 01:39, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Question about footers

message: I've been adding "Media" sections to various places such as Needham, Massachusetts to cross-reference information about media markets, local newspapers, broadcast stations, etc.  I'd like to suggest this as a general convention.  (I could grind over the FCC's CDBS database to generate a list of all broadcast licenses by community of license, but I don't think this would be particularly worthwhile and I'm not generally in favor of dumping a lot of this stuff into Wikipedia except where the market or the stations are truly of encyclopedic significance.)  18.26.0.18 06:37, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Media 

message: From Wikipedia:Template messages/Talk namespace
To be placed at the top of talk pages covered by the associated WikiProject - Suggestions for new projects: 7 Advertise! 
Here is a draft Template:WikiProjectCities with info taken from WikiProject_Cities#Scope, but can be shortened if you think it is too long.
It is currently: Template:WikiProjectCities
To use it, place  at the top of an article's Talk page.  Petersam 05:46, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Just changed it from CitiesTalk to WikiProjectCities to better reflect what the template is Petersam 01:32, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: WikiProject notices

message: מה קרה? מלחמה???ŪÁášŤť
(edited by User:66.167.115.167 on 11:06, 13 Mar 2005)
:Can anyone fix the above? Petersam 05:54, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Hebrew link?

message: I have edited the Akron and Cleveland articles a number of times because information in them about things like businesses or natives really referred to ones from the suburbs.  I'm being strict on this, saying that there is a good place to list the item in the actual location or in an article with broader scope like Greater Cleveland.  Is this a problem with other cities?  How have others dealt with this? --User:Beirne
:Yes, I think such problems occur, and I guess there often is a certain tension between local usage and that of foreigners. It seems to me that local perceptions often are the ones surviving when there are difference in opinions with regards to defining in accordance with legal/administrative boundaries versus a broader understanding of what to understand under the name of a larger city. Helsinki is the example closest to my heart, but there are for sure plenty of others. I know of also Copenhagen and South-Western Scania of personal experience. /Tuomas 08:42, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  City vs. metropolitan area