Talk:Census-designated place

message: Aren't there enough three-letter acronyms already? Good grief, the Census Bureau coins the term "census-designated place" for their statistical purposes and you all find nirvana because you have a new TLA to inflict on the rest of us. Saying (for example) "Pine Valley is a census-designated place" is no more proper than saying "Pine Valley is a zip code" or starting an article with "San Diego is an incorporated place". The Census Bureau web site says a census-designated place is the statistical counterpart of incorporated place, not a new definition for towns and villages. It also says that the boundaries of a CDP have no legal status. Furthermore, the USGS has been designating the locations of populated places since forever. The locations listed by the Census Bureau are the centers of the CDPs and rearely, if ever, are anywhere near where the USGS, and the people who live there, locate the communities.
Calling a community a CDP except for statistical purposes can also be very misleading. For example, I live near a neighborhood called Bostonia. The USGS, the Post Office and the people who live there place Bostonia within the city of El Cajon. However, the Bostonia CDP is entirely outside El Cajon. The Wikipedia article on Bostonia only covered the Bostonia CDP which most people around here don't think of as part of Bostonia. The Census Bureau places Bostonia nearly a mile from where the USGS, and most Bostonians place Bostonia. Another case is nearby Lakeside. Within Lakeside is a neighborhood called Winter Gardens. Nobody in Winter Gardens says they live in Winter Gardens; they all say they live in Lakeside (as does the Post Office). The Census Bureau has divided Lakeside into two CDPs. One is called Winter Gardens and the other is called Lakeside. The Wikipedia article on Lakeside did not include the part of Lakeside that contains Winter Gardens. So, starting the article with "Lakeside is a Census Designated Place" us just plain untrue. 
I reluctantly agree with not using the terms "town" and "village" because the definitions are subjective. However, reducing the names of the communities we live in to a bureaucratic acronym is offensive. I don't know about other states but California uses the term "unincorporated community" for unincorporated towns and villages. That's still a bit bureaucratic but it's a hell of a lot better than census-designated place. I have edited a few articles to call such places unincorporated communities and point out that they fall within the Census Bureau's CDPs. I would appreciate it you TLA zealots would stop reverting my edits. Get real will you? Rsduhamel 02:38, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, I get your point, but calling us zealots is a little over the top. If it needs explaining, explain it on the article instead of attempting to merge an article with the name that has been around since 1980. For further details on why I oppose the merger, please see the link below. --Moreau36 22:11, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  TLA zealots 

message: See Talk:Place (United States Census Bureau) Rsduhamel 20:13, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge proposal to Place (United States Census Bureau) 

message: Related discussion about merging certain New England CDP articles to the town article. See  Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vermont#Merging town center CDP articles into town articles and Talk:St. Johnsbury, Vermont#CDP change for details. --Polaron | Talk 21:31, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  merging some CDPs in New England into towns 

message: I removed the words "or area" after the word "place" in the opening sentence. The term "place has an official meaning to several organizations in and out of the U.S. The term "area" does not carry the same meaning. I'm sure it was added in an attempt to clarify the term but I think it confuses it just as much. I put "a concentration of population" in parenthesis to clarify the meaning. Rsduhamel (talk) 07:04, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Place 

message: This phase An example is the former village of Covedale, Ohio, compared with Covedale (CDP), Ohio.
:: Since these both point to the same (merged?) wikipedia article, this probably isn't the best example anymore.
The better comparison is between Covedale, Cincinnati, Ohio, compared with Covedale (CDP), Ohio.
rhyre (talk) 12:51, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fixed the covedale example to another example 

message: As this article indicates (based on cited sources), the census folks have changed some of their rules and definitions for 2010. This obviously means that there will be some new CDPs this year, and some old CDPs will be redefined.
Polaron has started creating lists of new CDPs and has been adding information to various article leads regarding new CDP designations and changes in old designations. Some of his changes are sourced to GNIS entries for CDPs that were added to GNIS in 2010, but he has been unable to point to any other source for his information. I'm very uncomfortable with these unsourced additions. Does anyone know of a source for this information? --Orlady (talk) 16:59, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  New CDP designations for 2010? 

message: :Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *Support or *Oppose, then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.
* Oppose. Undoubtedly the term, as spoken, consists of three words concatenated: "census~designated~place". Once that has been settled as the content of the title from reliable sources according to principles at WP:TITLE, we turn to style. On Wikipedia that is the province of WP:MOS, where WP:HYPHEN follows just about all best-practice publishers and style guides. Our guideline calls for "census-designated place". That is standard use of the hyphen in English, both US and elsewhere. See this search on Google scholar: "census designated place", which shows that several scholarly sources follow the same style as Wikipedia. We do not necessarily go with the majority in style matters; but we find ourselves agreeing with those that are most style-aware and consistent. NoeticaTea? 04:33, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: Hi. :)  I'm a brand new editor. And I'm working on the article for my town, which is a CDP. 
I didn't know what that was, so I clicked the link to this article, and then clicked the link in source 1 in the notes section. 
1 ^ a b c "Census Designated Place". Cartogaphic Boundary Files. United States Census Bureau. Retrieved 2010-09-30.  
That link directs to here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/pl_metadata.html#cdp 
But that page apparently no longer exists on the Census Bureau's site. 
Since many areas in the U.S. are CDPs, and that is the first source in this article, we should probably fix it. 
I searched census.gov but couldn't find anything similar and, being new, I don't want to link to the wrong source and break the article. 
Any suggestions of what to link to now/instead would enable me to be bold(er). Thanks! :)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Msannakoval (talk • contribs) 14:01, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your comment. The Census Bureau's website has been restructured several times. The source content cited in this article is still valid to cite as a reference, although the URL may have changed. The page that is linked here likely is still available at www.archive.org, and it's probably been moved to a different location on the census website (I'm sure I've seen it recently, but I haven't taken the time to look for it at the moment). --Orlady (talk) 02:36, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Dead Link in Source 1

message: I went to U.S. Census Bureau, Geography Division, "Cartographic Boundary Shapefiles - Places (Incorporated Places and Census Designated Places)". Cartographic Operations Branch, December 11, 2014.
which is given as a reference in the article, and you can download a zip file for every state, but I have no idea what to do with the files in the zip file. Thank you. deisenbe (talk) 00:33, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  Shapefiles are used to generate graphical outlines, borders, and maps.  I think what you're looking for is what the Census Bureau calls "Gazetteer Files".  They're in the "reference" section of their web site.  Specifically, the "Places" gazetteer files are tab-delimited text files.  Open one of them into a spreadsheet and sort by the "funcstat" column, to separate out cities from CDPs.  Petershank (talk) 18:17, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do you see a list of census-designated places? 

message: I have removed this from :Category:Census-designated places in the United States as that is a container category and so should not contain individual articles. There is also a link to this article via the category as it is listed as the main article. Dunarc (talk) 23:48, 24 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories