Category talk:Towns

Deletion debate

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Category:Towns

A longstanding but problematic fork of Category:Cities. The problem with it is that what distinguishes a town from a city or a village (if anything) varies by jurisdiction. Given the current size of Category:Cities (which has by language subcategories while Towns does not) and our current categorization structure, I think a better means of splitting Category:Cities would be via categories such as Category:Cities of the United States that would enable one category listing to substitute for two. Then if those by jurisdiction subcategories need further splitting, splitting by the type of community would be an option.

If there is strong sentiment that using Category:Cities for all municipalities without regard to size would be confusing, I have no objections to renaming it to a more generic name, tho that would be additional effort. — Carolina wren discussió 23:50, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm for deleting Category:Towns in favor of covering all non-village entities by Category:Cities. There is no distinction between the words “town” and “city” in Armenian and I wouldn't know where to put Armenian towns/cities. --Vahagn Petrosyan 00:13, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

A category like "City" or "Town" (or township or village or borough or county or unincorporated area) would not really work very consistently across the states of the US if we rely on legal definition, which would vary by state. Except for the District of Columbia, all are matters of state law with little or no role for the federal government in making these concepts uniform. The US Census Bureau defines its own areas for purposes of defining market areas that are centered on one or more cities. Postal Codes certainly don't follow municipal boundaries very much and occasionally don't follow state boundaries.

The categories that seem most stable are the internationally recognized jurisdictions (mostly nations) and the first level of sub-jurisdiction within a nation (or equivalent). Grouping all geographich entries and distinguishing inhabited places from natural features (land, water, subsurface, ocean floor) seems the first order of business for Gazetteer categories.

Keep this and all geographic categories with any members until some decisions about the basic structure of such categories is determined. DCDuring TALK 02:31, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

What about a 'pedia-style hypernym Category:Settlements? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 04:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

That sounds OK, but sounds a little like barely civilized frontier places. The initial categories for a major WikiGazetteer push should make sense to newbies, who may find the opportunity to add their favorite places quite compelling. They also need to not require revision at the most fundamental level if at all possible. It seems like more than a response to an RfDO. At the very least it needs to be BP. DCDuring TALK 03:09, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Kept for no consensus. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:46, 11 March 2011 (UTC)