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

[Bill Konrad]

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 don't think a one-size-fits-all approach is advisable. For Geneseo, it 
may make sense to have a single article about Geneseo, New York, but in 
other cases it might not. There are some NY towns where the village or 
city with the same name happens to be only one of several municipalities 
within the town. There have been some other articles where separate 
Census entities have been merged together in the same article, or in 
some other cases, the demographic details are left in the separate 
articles while cultural and other aspects are treated in a third 
combined article (i.e., there would be [[Geneseo (village), New York]] 
and [[Geneseo (town), New York]] with the Rambot-generated statistics 
for each and then [[Geneseo, New York]] would treat the cultural area as 
a combined entity with links to the other two for the statistics). IMO, 
any of the approaches are OK, but it depends in large part on a 
familiarity with the area to make a determination.

Bkonrad