Talk:List of county subdivisions in Michigan

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Michigan List of county subdivisions in Michigan is part of WikiProject Michigan, a WikiProject related to the U.S. state of Michigan.
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This list needs to be cleaned up or moved. If it is going to include cities or villages under the rubric of minor civil divisions, then the list would more appropriately be called [List of minor civil divisions in Michigan]]. Either that or this list should include only townships. Also, there is a Rambot article for every township in Michigan, so there shouldn't be any redlinks in such a list. I'll be glad to lend a hand when I have a bit more time--gotta run now. older ≠ wiser 13:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Also, I just noticed that these are not even MCDs -- this is based on the Census cgeographic type of 'county subdivisions" which is NOT at all the same as minor civil divisions. I'm not sure what to do with this list -- Category:Townships in Michigan contains a complete list of townships in Michigan, so I'm not sure why a separate list article would be needed. And an article such as List of county subdivisions in Michigan seems rather more like arcane Census minutiae than encyclopedic knowledge. This either needs to be drastic pruned or else renamed to something that more accurately describes the list. older ≠ wiser 15:15, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the comments. Perhaps the best resolution for Michigan would be to have a single page, but with two sections -- one listing the state's 1,242 townships, the other listing its 283 cities/villages. This would allow all of the subdivisions immediately below the county level to be together in a single article (as logically they should), but would also avoid the problems present in the current list of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan -- most notably the fact that multiple classes of items are together in a single list. (This is what I was intending to address by creating my new list.)
The inconsistent smattering of "unincorporated communities" in the A's and B's is part of the problem. These should be removed, since (as mentioned above) they're of a different nature and should not be just lumped in.
Also, just a quick mention as regards the "county subdivisions" included in the census records: they can hardly be considered arcane minutae since they parallel a state's minor civil divisions in those states where regular sub-county division pre-exist. For example, in Indiana, which is subdivided into 1,008 townships, the census data is divided in the same manner: each county divided into the proper number of "county subdivisions", which it identifies as townships. (As an aside, it also lists some unsubdivided county areas -- like those over water -- for the purpose of showing surface area, but these can be disregarded in a civil list.) In other words, the census provides a means of easily obtaining lists of some states' minor civil divisions in convenient tabulated form.
Hope this helps!
Huw 17:46, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Forgot one item: You'd wondered why the list I made was necessary. You may note that mine is consistent and presents the county of which each township is a part. The Category:Townships in Michigan list you cite is a strange hodgepodge, with maybe half showing county, half not. A rather messy presentation of encyclopedic knowledge. :-)
I agree that list of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan needs some work. It was originally derived from a list on the state of Michigan website. It was not any sort of "official" list of municipalities, but rather a sort of directory of named communities. I think such a list has value, especially since many people either do not particularly care, or are downright confused by whether a large urban community like say, West Bloomfield, Michigan is a township or city.
Although I actually started half-heartedly sorting things into separate lists, since the advent of categories, I'm no longer sure how much additional value such a list would provide above and beyond the categories. Currently Category:Townships in Michigan *should* be a complete list of townships in Michigan. Same for Category:Cities in Michigan and Category:Villages in Michigan. Because Charter Townships are not explicitly identified as such by the Census (or even by any state agency that I know of), I think Category:Charter townships in Michigan remains incomplete.
If you want to turn this into purely a list of townships, I'd be OK with that, but then I'd just leave out the Census mumbo jumbo--yes I do think it is arcane minutiae--and I have spent considerable time trying to understand it, but in many areas, Census categorization simply does not correspond very closely to how most people think of such things. Indiana is unique in that every portion of the state is part of a township (although the townships are such weak governmental forms that most residents are unaware of townships--I lived in Indiana for eight years in three different areas and don't recall reading or hearing any mention of townships). That is the only state in which that is the case, however. In most of the other states with MCDs, the situation is a confusing because of the multitude of different status of municipal organizations in the various states (for example, there is no such thing as a township in Connecticut, even though the Census Bureau uses MCDs in that state--or simlarly in Massachusetts, all of the towns there are incorporated, though the Census Bureau by treating them as MCDs creates confusion since it considers MCDs as distinct from incorporated places). In sum, IMO, if you want to make this purely a list of townships, don't introduce Census terminology because that just confuses the matter. Or, if you want to keep it as a list of census entities, that'd be OK too, but again I'd avoid confusing the matter with implications that it is a list of a type of municipality. older ≠ wiser 18:41, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
You make good points, and it's interesting to know that Indiana (where I live) is unique in having a consistent township organization throughout. That probably did give me an unrealistic expectation of how easy it would be to chart the internal structure of other states. Also, my father was our township's trustee for over 20 years, which admittedly gives the subject more significance to me than to most others. :-)
Anyway, after reading your comments and studying more on the subject, I'm also coming to the conclusion that this page is indeed unnecessary -- perhaps it could be changed to a redirect? For the list of cities, villages and townships in Michigan page, the only changes I'd suggest again are to separate the list into sections (to avoid an overly large/broad mixed-class list), and also note the appropriate county for each. It'd also be good for all the entries in the Category:Townships in Michigan to follow a single naming convention (i.e., Township, County, State), but that may be a rather time-consuming task.
Thanks! Huw 12:40, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I see it as a good thing that list of cities, villages and townships in Michigan is a comprehensive alphabetically sorted list. Many people have no idea whether a place is a city, township, village, or unincorporated area. For such persons, the list provides one way to browse all of the populated places in a single list. What I'd like to do eventually for that list is ensure that it is more comprehensive and that the place names have an appropriate description. I'm not opposed to a list of townships in principle, just that it shouldn't mix Census terms. As for the naming of the township articles, this is a principle of Wikipedia:Naming Conventions. Basically, the rule is to use the simplest name for an article and only add qualifiers as necessary for disambiguation. So where there are multiple townships in a state, the county name is included in the title for disambiguation. Where there is only one, the county name is not needed for disambiguation. At one time, I would have agreed with you that always including the county name would make things more consistent -- but in Michigan, you have large townships like West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, that, unlike most townships (which are for the most part relatively obscure and known mostly to locals), it is fairly well-known and it would look decidedly odd to have such a place named with the county.
Of course, don't get me started on Wisconsin, where "township" is not even a part of the name and so there are often villages or cities with the same name as a town[ship]. In such cases there are all sorts of contortions to disambiguate the names. I gave up on that effort, though there is an active Wisconsin Wikiproject, so hopefully they will sort things out. older ≠ wiser 14:11, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion?

I really don't see the point of this article. It's simply a list. The user who created this article has created another similar article called lists of newspapers in germany. I nominated it for deletion. I would nominate this article for deletion as well, but I want to see what peoples' opinions are before I do so. --Umalee 17:38, 24 January 2007 (UTC)