[WikiEN-l] Separate articles for U.S. villages and towns

[Benjamin Esham]

(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]]
-- 
Benjamin D. Esham
bdesham at gmail.com  |  AIM: bdesham128  |  Jabber: same as e-mail
"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur."
                    (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)