Benjamin Esham wrote:

(I'm sorry if this topic has already been beaten to death on this list; WikiEN-l was entirely overwhelming to me until I recently started using Gmane, so I haven't been keeping up.)

Hello all,

I'm writing to try to gauge the community's feeling on an issue that has been nagging me for a while. I am a resident of [[Geneseo (town), New York]] and [[Geneseo (village), New York]], and cannot come up with a good reason for why these should be separate articles. I realize that the village and town are, in a legal sense, different entities; the division between the two in the census data is why Rambot created two articles.

In any context other than a strictly legal one, however, both the town and village are simply "Geneseo", and I believe that Wikipedia should reflect that fact with a single unified page. That article would of course include the census (Rambot) data from both legal entities, and a section explaining the difference between the two, but I believe that the current situation—with two articles—leads to duplication and redundancy of data, or its opposite, unsynchronized or inconsistent data.

I realize that any changes to the relevant policy would extend beyond this one pair of articles—the Livingston County infobox at the bottom of the Geneseo article indicates seven other town/village pairs, and it seems probable that there are hundreds of analogous situations in New York alone. However, I thought I would try to judge the community opinion on this particular matter: should Wikipedia describe reality de facto when that is more accurate and useful than describing it de jure?

Thanks for any feedback,

[[en:User:Bdesham]]

I wouldn't see any problem, in this case, with just merging the two. Even with good rules, there will be edge cases in which an exception is warranted.

Benjamin Esham wrote:

(I'm sorry if this topic has already been beaten to death on this list; WikiEN-l was entirely overwhelming to me until I recently started using Gmane, so I haven't been keeping up.)

Hello all,

I'm writing to try to gauge the community's feeling on an issue that has been nagging me for a while. I am a resident of [[Geneseo (town), New York]] and [[Geneseo (village), New York]], and cannot come up with a good reason for why these should be separate articles. I realize that the village and town are, in a legal sense, different entities; the division between the two in the census data is why Rambot created two articles.

In any context other than a strictly legal one, however, both the town and village are simply "Geneseo", and I believe that Wikipedia should reflect that fact with a single unified page. That article would of course include the census (Rambot) data from both legal entities, and a section explaining the difference between the two, but I believe that the current situation—with two articles—leads to duplication and redundancy of data, or its opposite, unsynchronized or inconsistent data.

I realize that any changes to the relevant policy would extend beyond this one pair of articles—the Livingston County infobox at the bottom of the Geneseo article indicates seven other town/village pairs, and it seems probable that there are hundreds of analogous situations in New York alone. However, I thought I would try to judge the community opinion on this particular matter: should Wikipedia describe reality de facto when that is more accurate and useful than describing it de jure?

I brought this up a while ago, and nothing happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Political_subdivisions_of_New_York Feel free to resurrect it.