Talk:Section (United States land surveying)

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[edit] Overzealous with the U.S. bit

Somebody got carried away in merging the old "Section (land)" into this "Section (U.S. land surveying)". Even if at the time the articles were a lot of duplication, the use of "section" with this meaning is not limited to the United States. For example, go look at Dominion Land Survey dealing with the Canadian land surveys, and count up the number of times the term "section" is used. That is indeed normal Canadian usage, at least in the Prairie Provinces, as I know from my own experiences.

Note that the Canadian "sections" which are numbered differently within a township than they are in the U.S. (each row is the same, but the rows are inverted with section 1 in the southeast corner rather than the northeast corner).

So what should we do about it? I think this should be renamed "Section (land)" with the current title redirected to that. That would be much better than separate articles for what is essentially the same usage. Gene Nygaard 22:46, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That was me who merged the two (after a merge notice had been added to both pages by someone else). At the time, there was not any mention at all of the Canadian usage in the old Section (land) article. The only mention was a cross-reference on this page. The content of the old article was entirely U.S.-oriented, so I didn't see any problem with merging the content. But I've no problem if you want to move this back to Section (land) and expand the information on Canada. older≠wiser 23:06, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I expected that was probably the case, and it was the reasonable thing to do at the time to get it into one article. I'll probably move it eventually, after leaving this here for a while to see if anyone else wants to add to the discussion. Gene Nygaard 23:42, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Any preferences for inclusive name?

I think "section (land)" would be best, "section (survey)" or "section (land surveying)" gives more of an impression that this is only used in reference to the surveying and not in our everyday lives. Any other ideas would be appreciated. Gene Nygaard 14:51, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I could go for "section (land)". Kbh3rd 14:59, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

My vote is for "section (land)." jengod 21:31, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Conversion to other measurements

I think it would be nice to have a section which would provide links for conversion to other ways of measurement. Such as UTM, Lat/Long (degrees, mintues, seconds) ... etc.