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

[Todd Allen]

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.

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