Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. counties

Older discussion has been moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties/archive 1

I really like the picture of the state with the county highlighted. Some of the counties in California are like that. They need to be a bit smaller. But of course there is no reason that we can't have both sets of pictures, but I find that it is most useful to know where in a state it is. As for integrating them in the articles, I can easily use the rambot to add them to existing articles if you don't already have a bot. I just finished a second pass of the counties where I updated the list of cities in the counties but it only updated a subset of counties which were not up to date. It is really up to you what you want to do. If you have your own bot, you can insert the pictures. It should be really simple to do. My main concern is that the pictures are not inserted haphazardly anywhere in the article. For what its worth, I downloaded and am planning on processing all the FIPS data on counties and cities, so I may be doing a pass sometime soon updating the county information, but I don't have that scheduled in. I am a bit busy from time to time :) -- Ram-Man

I also like the idea of having locator maps but I'm with Ram-Man in stating these images should be small (ala the California counties) and placed in the correct places. Since some people are doing great work on adding adjacent county and highway lists to the geography sections of county articles, I vote to have the locator maps placed in the vast white areas to the right of these lists. Before anybody does anything though, please check out m:Wikipediatlas. IMO those maps are the best in terms of look and utility. --mav

Mav, I added a comment to that page at the Metapedia and provided a link that has some great pre-rendered maps. They've got not only county maps for every state, but also worls maps and country maps. The first map for "Africa" on that site is excellent for example. It is large, but the lines are anti-aliased and the individual countries in africa are outlined. Since the maps is plain, it can be easily colored with a "Flood Fill" command and unneeded border can be removed safely. All the maps are that site are available for public non-commercial use and distribution. See utexas.edu. --Robert Lee

Unfortunately, I fear the non-commerical use clause doesn't have compatibility with the FDL. --Ellmist Monday, November 11th, 2002

I've been working around the edges, adding or editing a few place articles. As a result I've got one recommendation and some comments:

The recommendation is that any new Township article should have a title based on Aaa Township, Bbb County, State. Sure, its sometimes creates unnecessary verbage, but going back later to disambiguate or move articles is such a pain.
I tried a table of data, but decied against it. It cluttes up the article. I'd only change my mind if we build a general template to be used for all geographic and political subdivisions of a country. For now, thats way too many articles to go back to, and the research gets really tough for villages and townships.
In the discussion about maps, I'd vote for the state outline version. Several universities (besides UT) have the same outlines, which to me implies a tiger or similar public domain source, I just haven't found it yet.

Lou I 17:26 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Discussion moved from Wikipedia:Village pump by Wapcaplet 14:10 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

A Map for US cities and Counties

Dunno if anyone has suggested this before; when browsing random articles, I often come across some of the many U.S. cities and counties imported by Rambot. It would be quite cool, I think, to have a small state map that indicates whereabout these cities and counties are (a dot for cities, a highlighted outline for counties, sort of like we already have for U.S. state articles). Is there a public-domain or GPL source for maps like this? If not, I don't imagine it'd be too hard for a dedicated soul to create them (just time-consuming). -- Wapcaplet 23:32 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I did find a collection of public-domain U.S. maps, including nice large county maps like this one of Ohio. They would take quite a bit of editing to reduce to an appropriate format for what I'm thinking of, but could be quite nice! If anybody knows of another public source for similar maps, let me know. I'd be interested in working on these. -- Wapcaplet 23:37 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There is always the U.S. Geological Survey which has data and a web application to generate maps of just about anywhere. They are more like street maps though. Never underestimate the numbers of dedicated souls out there, myself included. These things have a way of eventually getting done. -- Ram-Man 00:33 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I did look at that web site and they want us to add a citation saying that we got the maps from their web site. It is public domain, so doesn't that mean that the citation is not strictly required? I don't know enough about copyright issues, so maybe I am missing something. -- Ram-Man 00:39 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Since there are so many US cities and towns, I think the best idea would be if we could have an in-software method of converting longitude-latitude co-ordinates to a dot on a map. Possible implementations are popping into my mind as I type -- I don't think it would be that hard. -- Tim Starling 01:08 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ideas please to m:Wikipediatlas with the others. --Brion 01:17 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Based on these maps (well, the one for New York), I quickly (ish - 20 minutes) did for the state of New York a set (62) of PNGs of the state with each county highlighted individually in red (as with the images of British counties such as at Warwickshire); should I bother uploading these? I know it's only one state, but I could do the others over the next few days if people want. They are available here (I haven't shrunk them yet, though). Alternatively, I could not bother :-) -- James F. 01:22 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I did California and Nevada some time ago, by all means do more if you like. It will likely be quite some while, if ever, before we have an automatic system for doing this. --Brion 01:42 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If we collaborated, we could pretty quickly get through all of the states (as long as we can agree on consistent choices of color and size). Ideally, we'd have software to automatically render this stuff (and even more ideally, it'd be SVG), but maybe we should cobble something together in the meantime, at the very least for the U.S. counties. I am thinking that the state should have a black outline, with 50% or so grey lines for the county outlines. The counties should all be white, except the highlighted one which should be perhaps a nice blue color (Good contrast with both the white and the grey/black). Somewhere around 200-300 pixels wide would probably be good, with a clickable link to a larger version (especially for large states). Just my thoughts, at least. As for accreditation issues - I would have no problem crediting the US Census or UTexas or whoever as the original source, but we'll be doing lots of manipulation to these images so it's probably not necessary.

As for source material for the maps, I've found three good possibilities:

US Census Bureau, clickable county maps, good quality, but colored. Might be hard to trim out unnecessary stuff.
UTexas, particularly the US Census 1990 outline maps. Nice clean black and white version, but has extra garbage that would need to be removed.
Texas A&M, do-it-yourself county highlighted maps. Makes our work much easier, but I do not know if these images are public or GPL, and it may be hard to remove the county names.

I'd personally prefer the black and white 1990 Census outline maps. Anyone who's interested in helping me work on these, leave a note on my talk page. Or, if James F. wants to do them all, I would have no problem with that either. Let me know if you want me to lend a hand, James. I can make my images conform to whatever you're comfortable with. -- Wapcaplet 02:54 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

P.S. - I've put a sample image (based on one of James') of what I have in mind on my talk page. Comments welcome! -- Wapcaplet 03:11 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm happy to get on with it on my own if people think that this will be worthwhile. I did the examples with full red as that's what used elsewhere for similar positional micro-maps (counties of Britain amongst them). It's clear and visible. We could decide to use something else, if you want, but... Standards are standards, after all. I'd suggest making this part of the suitableWikiProject; move discussion there? -- James F. 03:22 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It looks like there are several different practices in use. I don't know if there are any "standards", necessarily.

White with red highlight: Counties in England, ex. Herefordshire, Staffordshire.
Yellow with brown highlight: List of California counties
Dark grey with light grey highlight: Lander County, Nevada, Esmeralda County, Nevada, and the rest of Nevada
White with dark red highlight: Cumberland County, Maine, as a sample

Dark blue with light blue highlight: m:Wikipediatlas, as a sample

Of these, red on white seems to be the most common, however. Blue-on-blue looks nice but is kind of at odds with the custom of using blue for water in maps (not to mention it may be hard for some people to distinguish between shades of blue). I do think the state border should somehow be thicker, or darker, than the county borders (thicker would probably suffice, since the county borders would get pretty light at smaller sizes anyway). The only con I can see with using white for the rest of the state is that it may be hard to distinguish the state from the surrounding area at smaller sizes (especially on coastal states with small islands). This is probably not much of an issue, though, since we're just trying to show where the county is.

On balance, I'd have to agree that red on white is probably the way to go. Size is another important issue. Most states are likely to look okay at around 300 pixels wide, at most. Even [Texas] isn't too bad at this size. However, some counties are very small, and would practically vanish at this size. Storey County, Nevada is the smallest one I can think of, but there may be tinier ones. A big state with some small counties might have troubles at this resolution. We can just make all our maps large, say, 600 pixels to be safe, and use an automated tool to resize them all. If some get too small, we can make those a bit larger. 200 pixels might be enough; we'll see how it goes. Maybe we should try a couple at that size, to see how they turn out (and whether we need to make the state border thicker or whatnot). -- Wapcaplet 14:10 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Sounds good. Will get on with it, then :-) -- James F. 15:27 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Well, 2 hours later, I've done another 3 states (coastline takes a while). Output is still at [1]. Still to do:

48 states (:-))
decide to what size to shrink the images to
run pngcrush on them
upload files

is there a batch image upload facility - there are going to be a few hundred of these for the east coast alone...?

If anyone wants to help (please, feel free :-)) here are some points as to how I'm doing them (based on the PD images such as this one):

Remove all text, symbols and markers on the image saying that it's from the 1990 census.
Remove all markers of external states/countries, including their subdivisions.
Remove lines that split counties from each other where there is already a split (such as two islands with a division line between them) - we're using colour to partition the counties, so such lines are not needed and detract from the image).
Fill in coastline where it was previously obscured by text
Downconvert the image to 1bit.
Upconvert the image to >1bit and add pure red as a colour.
For each county:

Fill in the county in question with red (including unattached islands, etc.)
Save each as an optimised PNG file.

I'm currently doing the northern east coast (working around New England), so anywhere off to the south or west would be safe from work duplication.

We should also work out how we want these put into the county pages, and how we mention that they reflect borders as of the 1990 census, and that they are for guide purposes only and people should not use them for anything important, such as navigation (is there a standard Wikipedia cartographic disclaimer, or should we make one up?).

-- James F. 16:52 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Looking good! I will gladly pitch in. For now, I will start on California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and (gulp) Alaska. I've just looked at the outline map of Alaska; many tiny counties with lots of coastline, which are quite hard to distinguish. I don't know how easy these will be to clean up, but I will give it a shot; Alaska is likely to be one of the hardest. -- Wapcaplet 17:40 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Have fun. Of course, 'tiny' is a relative comment; these 'small' counties are still rather large... Alaska is 1.5m km², after all. -- James F. 18:40 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Very true :) But when the whole state is < 300 pixels wide, some counties might end up being sub-pixel... anyhow, Alaska went relatively well. I doubt I got all the smaller islands with any degree of accuracy, but it should be enough for our purposes. I don't have them online anywhere; I'll set something up once I get a few more done. -- Wapcaplet 19:37 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Feel free to email them to me if you want; then they'll all be in the same place at once.

-- James F. 20:21 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'll email smaller-sized versions to you (since the RGB PNG files are around 60+K each). Also, I've adapted a small script (called shrink to resize them, if you would like to use something similar:

#!/bin/bash
for file in $2; do
  convert -size $1 "$file" -resize $1 -colors 256 "small/$file"
done

Usage:

./shrink [size] "[file(s)]"
./shrink 200 "*.png"

I'm an extreme newbie at shell scripting, so you may be able to do better if you have experience with it. Anyhow, I will e-mail you a chunk of them in a day or two. I've so far finished Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington (with Nevada soon to come). After that I'll start working my way eastward.

We should come up with a naming convention for these, too. Existing ones are like this:

Image:California map showing San Luis Obispo County.png

Which may be a bit too long. I'm thinking something along the lines of California_San_Luis_Obispo_County.png or even CA_San_Luis_Obispo_County.png. What do you think?

-- Wapcaplet 23:11 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The best example of a large state with a small county that I have encountered is San Francisco County. In the current version at 200 pixels wide, the county is visible, though it's a mere speck. I guess maybe choosing the size on a state-by-state basis might be the best idea (it'd look weird to have the same state at different sizes on different county articles). California might need 300 pixels, but for Rhode Island with its 5 counties, 300 pixels might be excessive. Of course we can wait and see what looks good. I've finished California! This goes pretty quick once you get going... -- Wapcaplet 20:16 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Image names are supposed to be long and descriptive, and if possible should make for acceptable alt text by themselves. --Brion 23:14 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've so far done 11 states (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont) , totalling 326 counties; the names are of the format "Fairfield County, Connecticut.png", which is perhaps not really good enough in term of descriptivity.

As for size, a one-size- (ahem) -fits-all policy would seem to me to be best, so that the format of county pages across all states would be the same. Consistency is a good thing.

However, I'm now going to bed.

-- James F. 23:22 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, so I lied. Images now resized to both 200 and 300 pixels wide, and crushed: go here and follow the names.

So: Which size should we go with? How will I upload them efficiently - one at a time will bore me to tears?

-- James F. 00:01 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Good point Brion. We should probably stick with the existing California/Nevada naming format. I am not too opposed to a one-size-fits-all scheme, but I've just tried shrinking some of the Alaska ones; they are going to need at least 350 pixels (probably 400) of width in order to make some of the (relatively) smaller counties visible. Perhaps with some creative cropping, I can fix that... most of Alaska's width is accounted for by the Aleutian islands.

How would you feel about using additional highlighting on the smaller counties? I'm thinking that a smallish red circle around the county would help make it easier to spot, especially if it's close to being a single pixel. Alaska's West Aleutians county consists of lots of small islands. Encircling these would make them much easier to distinguish at sub-400-pixel sizes. If we can do this, I think we can definitely keep all the states at 300 pixels wide.

I have no idea if we can batch-upload these... surely there is a way. (Maybe Rambot can do it for us?) -- Wapcaplet 00:06 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What about "Map of <state> highlighting <county> county" for the naming format?

Additional highlighting is fine with me; with this, would 300px be OK? It seems most reasonable a compromise.

I think dumping the uploading onto a bot sounds most suitable.

And now, I really am going to bed. :-)

-- James F. 00:21 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

300 pixels will suffice. We'll make it suffice, one way or another :-) I agree with that naming format too. -- Wapcaplet 01:00 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Crap. I am noticing that setting the width at a consistent 300 pixels tends to cause some size differences in terms of height. We probably should have agreed on a maximum width and height, since the tall skinny states (like Illinois, Vermont, etc.) end up looking huge at 300 pixels wide. I just compared all of the states I've done, and most are okay... Illinois and Indiana should probably be padded with whitespace on the left and right prior to resizing, so the height doesn't get out of control. -- Wapcaplet 16:20 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's normal (well...) to have variation in height; I'm not concerned about this at all; the images flow down the page normally. The reason for restriction of width is the problems it creates with text flow; no such problems are created due to height. I think changing the size of the borders would be a less-good idea, as it's a bodge to make it look different (not IMO better)...

James F. 01:42 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've made some modified versions (using whitespace padding, so they stay at 300 pixels). To me, the following disparity is jarring (county is arbitrary):

File:TX County large.png File:IL County large.png

The above is what happens if we set a fixed width of 300 pixels, and let height vary accordingly. If we constrain them all to less than 300 pixels in height, also, it seems to keep the proportions a little better (and also keeps the file size under control). Here's the resized Illinois, which to me looks better:

File:IL County smaller.png

Let me know what you think. -- Wapcaplet 02:48 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I find the padding un-neat. After all, it is unlikely that people will see two different states' counties' maps at once, but we do want coherence and similarity between their pages.

James F. 18:07 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

That is certainly true... the padding is something of a hack, but it won't be as visible on the resulting pages. Let me try a couple of mock-ups (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties/mockups.)

States done so far

By James F.

Connecticut
Delaware
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Vermont

By Wapcaplet

All the rest

Links to here

Any chance of a link here from the image description page of all the images? Martin 12:27, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Oh, my bad - the bot-images seem to have them - I just happened to pick on some that were uploaded manually. Martin 13:18, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Main articles

Btw, are y'all serious about "History of county X" seperate articles? Sounds ambitious - I wonder whether the structure will be supported by the content. - Martin 12:27, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think links to such "Main articles" like "History of county X" are not needed until the article exists. - Patrick 12:55, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

And of course the link is only needed if the history is extensive (more that just a few paragraphs). Mike 23:45, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Requests

I'd like help adding "Adjacent Counties" sections. This is probably automatable...I've done most of the work already -- the data is here -- RobLa

Kansas - done Mike 09:01, Aug 8, 2004 (UTC)
Maine - done. Wapcaplet 02:51, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Minnesota - done Lou I 08:14, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Rhode Island - done. Wapcaplet 02:51, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Vermont - done Redjar 03:07, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Washington - done RobLa 04:41, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC) (actually, a long time ago)

To do: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

Suggestions

Regarding for articles on counties, you could probably get the government to do a lot of the work for you. This stuff is already done and there are bureaucrats being paid to advertise their counties. They'd probably send you their standard stuff that's been in development for years. The state tourism boards would know who to contact.

To Be Filed

I don't know where this should go but I assembled a list of all states with the number of counties in each state (I omitted non-functioning cities and counties) Data compiled (but not copied) from http://www.infoplease.com/states.html I individually went through each one and put it in an excel spreadsheet.

State Number of Counties Alabama 67 Alaska 27 Arizona 15 Arkansas 75 California 58 Colorado 63 Connecticut 8 Delaware 3 Florida 67 Georgia 159 Hawaii 4 Idaho 44 Illinois 102 Indiana 92 Iowa 99 Kansas 105 Kentucky 120 Louisiana 64 Maine 16 Maryland 23 Massachusets 14 Michigan 83 Minnesota 87 Mississippi 82 Missouri 114 Montana 56 Nebraska 93 Nevada 16 New Hampshire 10 New Jersey 21 New Mexico 33 New York 62 North Carolina 100 North Dakota 53 Ohio 88 Oklahoma 77 Oregon 36 Pennsylvania 67 Rhode Island 5 South Carolina 46 South Dakota 64 Tennessee 95 Texas 254 Utah 29 Vermont 14 Virginia 95 Washington 39 West Virginia 55 Wisconsin 72 Wyoming 23 Total Counties 3094

-- TMLutas

Just a quick note - I've been cleaning up a U.S. Census Bureau PDF map showing the U.S., all states and county outlines; it's been converted to SVG. The file is about 3MB, but it's fairly detailed, and could be used for any purpose that calls for showing the whole U.S. with county-level detail. The Census Bureau uses maps like this for showing population density, race or ethnicity, etc. There's already a PNG version of a map like this (Image:Map of USA with county outlines.png), but a SVG version has the advantage of much greater resolution and detail. If anyone needs such a map, let me know and I'll provide a copy of it. -- Wapcaplet 04:01, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Township Question

There are a few township articles in Wikipedia. If we ever complete them we'll have serious linkage and disambiguation questions. I've wrestled with this for some time. I'm relatively content with the subdivision section of Hamilton County, Ohio, but still have naming and disambiguation concerns. To see the extent of the problem, just check out the list at List of Ohio townships. One style of disambiguation can be seen on Washington (disambiguation), and I've tried another format on the Concord page. My own choice would be a format something like Concord, but I'd like to see it be cleaner. What do you think? Lou I 00:07, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wow. I think Washington Township is probably an extreme. I'll suggest changes to both. For Washington, I'd break the list out for each state. Maybe use subheading or maybe not. For lists not quite as long as Washington, I think I'd like your Concord example. I would include the word County in the list following the Township though. I had to scan all the way to the end of the line to figure out what the list was -- I think including the word County would make the list easier to scan, even if it does make it take up more space.

Also, from what I have seen in Michigan, it seems like there were generic articles created for all the townships there from census data. I wonder why that didn't happen for townships elsewhere. Bkonrad | Talk 00:57, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

For disambiguation matters, it probably depends on how many we must distinguish between. For just a handful (like on Concord), an in-line list like what you have seems fine; for Washington, it's clearly better to have a bulleted list. I don't think there's any question that we should stick with the article naming format of (Township name), (County name), (State name), and avoid article-name ambiguity problems from the outset, though. It may also be necessary to have intermediary disambiguation pages such as Concord Township, Pennsylvania, or even Concord Township, Champaign County if such a need exists. Another thing that might be good is townships by county; somewhat like List of Ohio townships, only organized by county instead of township name. But most of this probably won't be much of an issue until a decent number of township articles actually exist. And (off-subject, but having been involved with the creation of county highlight maps) I'd hate to even imagine the possibility of township locator maps; if Ohio has 1340 townships, the U.S. must have on the order of 50,000 townships. At any rate, I wouldn't worry too much about it at this point. -- Wapcaplet 01:04, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I didn't even notice the the Concord Township, Pennsylvania intermediate page, even though I had run across something similar. I think I like that approach best of all, even if it does result in a lot of stubby articles. That way you can also search for "township name, state name", just as you would for an unambiguous township in that state. I'm not sure if I'm reading Wapcaplet correctly or not. But I would want to name articles using (Township name), (County name), (State name) ONLY if there is ambiguity. If there is no ambiguity, then it should be (Township name), (State name).

Does anyone know how many generic township articles have already been created from census data? Or even how they were created? It seems that all the ones I have come across so far use (Township name), (State name) unless there is ambiguity. Whatever naming system we use should probably take into account what is already done.

Also, on a tangential note, if you are creating or editing township articles, there is a civil township article that explains what they are. Might be worth linking to. Bkonrad | Talk 01:22, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Most of the township articles I've seen are named according to the (Township, County, State) scheme rather than (Township, State), though there are some that use the latter. I don't know which is more prevalent. Just to have some stats: a quick count of the township names in Ohio indicates that of 611 unique township names, 442 of them are only used once within the state; the other 169 are used more than once. It just seems easier to avoid ambiguity if possible, since we know there will be a lot of it. I know it's sort of against the naming policy, but we can of course have (Township, State)-named articles that redirect to the appropriate (Township, County, State) article if the township's name is unique within that state. -- Wapcaplet 05:43, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

My preference is for naming them AAA Township, BBB County, Statename. There are differencs by state, but my rational is based on my own OIhio experience. As a unit of governnment, the township is sort of 'subordinate' to the county. When (it has happened) a township goes out of business as agovernment, it still exists as an area and itds records are transferred to the county courthouse. To me, the long name form is a sort of a full proper name. The exustence of Rambot entries for some eastern states with censu data was mostly because they are called 'Towns' in those states. Lou I 11:51, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I agree. AAA Township, BBB County, Statename is the way to go. I think Michigan is similar to Ohio and to probably all the states using the Public Land Survey System. Townships in this system are very minor civil divisions of government. However, there in Michigan there is a thing called Charter Townships, in which a township is promoted to have more or less the same status as a city. In such a case, I think it would make sense to have a redirect at Township, Statename with the original named consistent with other townships. I think towns or townships in eastern states that were surveyed before the PLSS may have different statuses. It may be necessary to use a different standard in such cases (though it should be consistent within that state). Bkonrad | Talk 12:24, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

County Infobox

Template:Infobox Counties

Since it didn't exist, I created a new Template:Infobox Counties that you might find useful. It might need a few changes, but it has most of what you would see in the similar State Infobox. (See the example at right.)

Question

The Wikiproject page says that county maps for Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia still remain to be uploaded. I think that is finished -if someones knows, could they remove that line from the page. Rmhermen 15:35, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)

"Hispanic", "Asian" in Rambot data

Please have a look at Wikipedia_talk:Bots#Disambiguation_Bot_.2F_Rambot_data. -- User:Docu

"Cities and towns" header

I think this should be changed to "municipalities" or "municipalities and census-designated places" (where appropriate)—the kinds of municipality vary from state to state. Postdlf 23:03, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think this template needs to be updated in general. Looking at well written and content rich county articles I have found some using "Subdivisions" as the title. This is the style I have elected to use with the Kansas county articles:

==Subdivisions==
===Cities and towns===
(though I suppose this could be divided into "Cities" and "Towns" if one is so compelled)
===Unincorporated communities===
===Townships===

—Mike 07:35, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)

"Subdivisions" is not technically accurate, since in most states cities are largely independent of the county they are within. If you look at the Census' Ammerican Factfinder, cities are not listed among the entities under county subdivisions. I had changed a few headings in Michigan to "Cities, villages, and townships", but I think I starting to like the more concise "Municipalities" better, even though it is debatable whether all townships are actually municipalities. I.e., many townships are not organized in such a way as to fulfill any governmental function other than as a survey division of land. I am not certain, but I believe this is the case in Kansas--the survey townships were drawn up (and are used by the Census), but are not really used for governmental purposes. In Illinois and possibly Indiana--it was optional on a county-by-county basis whether to utilize a township form of gorvernance or to leave governmental functions centralized within the county. So while the townships may exist in terms of the Census and for survey and some land use purposes, most residents of counties that have not organized the townships might not even be aware of their existence. [[User:Bkonrad|older≠wiser]] 10:56, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)