Talk:Barrios of Puerto Rico/Archive 1

Why districts? Because it's clearer, maybe...
Fyi, Subdivisions of Egypt  is an example, also where we use "districts" to explain divisions and the further subdivisions. It's the language issue on English Wikipedia -trying to add words that are foreign makes it a little complicated. Thanks. the eloquent peasant (talk) 04:42, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Been struggling with what to call the subbarrios. A barrio in English is defined as a "district, burough or quarter" in wordreference.com  - I've seen the P.R. articles have "district, sector, ward"
 * According to the US Census definition the subbarrio is a "primary legal subdivision of the barrio-pueblos and some barrios" here 1. I think subdivision is the best term for the subbarrios. What do you think?  Or "legal subdivision" or "primary subdivision" or "administrative subdivision".    I think the infobox should specify "barrio" and "subbarrio" or even "community", to specify what each one is called (the real term) in the U.S. Census. But also in the lead paragraph and within the article we can explain that barrios and subbarrios- are subdivisions of the municipality, and further subdivisions.--the eloquent peasant (talk) 14:21, 10 February 2019 (UTC)


 * There's no need to struggle with that. A barrio in English is barrio and a subbarrio in English is subbarrio. All the Spanish administrative and geographical names carried over in 1898. If you look, for example, at NOAA's most recent maps (old ones as well) for the Bahia de San Juan, that's what they call it, "Bahia de San Juan". Nowhere do they call it San Juan Bay and yet many editors here, in English WP, are just fascinated with translating administrative and geographic proper names from Spanish into English to use as the title of their articles - but it's wrong to do that.  Englishmen don't call Palo Seco, "Dry Stick"; nor Caño de Martin Peña, "Martin Peña Channel"; nor Las Cabezas de San Juan, "St. John's Heads". They are all called in English by their names in Spanish. Mercy11 (talk) 03:30, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
 * That is not funny. ' I've seen it all over the place as well. I do try to see both sides of the issue. But you're right... and the USGIS has their official names with barrio and subbarrio, as well. I do think that it's okay, when the article gets longer, to use the word "subdivision" within the article versus continously repeating "barrio" and "subbarrio" because they are "subdivisions" (but I disagree with using "sector" and "ward") - subdivision is correct in my opinion, if we need to refer to the place again and again within the article.  Also, what was that about "communes"?  That seemed crazy! When I looked into it further I thought the editor had "good faith" and maybe it was just a poor translation of community. But initially my thoughts on "communes" were like yours "this is nonsense" and ridiculous!  On a related issue translating the Festival names will be my next headache. I want to keep both the Spanish original festival name and add a translation when it is fit. We need to sort of standardize how we do it across the board. Each municipality has its own way of listing the festivals. I think prose would be better than lists of festivals. (We should discuss this on the Fiestas patronales page. See you over there.) --the eloquent peasant (talk) 15:39, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I did see that the prencyclopedia archived mentions the law and the word "wards" to refer to the parts of a municipality, here 1 in the archives and did see that some countries second level subdivisions are called communes here 2. So I do think most editors are doing things in "good faith" and it's just a matter of preference. (But commune was definitely incorrect for P.R. --the eloquent peasant (talk) 02:47, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

This could be an endless topic; "communes" was DOA from the get-go. In 1898 all Spanish administrative and legal systems carried over to the new "American Puerto Rico". The fact is that Puerto Rico does have counties, they are called "Municipios", so PR has 78 "counties". They are the 78 counties under the State (ELA) unit, that we call municipios. This is just like the US that has counties under the State level. Also, in the US, each County has towns; in PR each Municipio has barrios. However, because the American system is more decentralized than the Spanish system, PR's barrios have no admin authority, all authority is held by the Municipio. If the American system had been implemented in PR after 1898, PR's current barrios would have administrative powers: Santurce could now be a separate city from San Juan; Coto Laurel a separate town from city of Ponce; and Castañer a separate village (with its own mayor, etc) from the township of Lares.

IMO barrios are most like wards because wards in the US do not have administrative powers (exist for federal Census, State demographics, and city hall districting, etc., purposes.) Definition of municipality can be confusing because the American reader can interpret it to be a county because they are divisions just below the State level, yet they do not themselves have lower level ("third level") divisions bestowed with administrative powers. I have seen editors write "PR doesn't have first order administrative divisions akin to counties in the US" when counties in the US aren't first order admin divisions but second order divisions. So this adds to the confusion. What they should be writing is PR doesn't have 3rd level administrative divisions, bc while we have barrios (they are 3rd level) they aren't vested with administrative powers. These editors are saying this, imo, because they are assuming PR don't have counties, but PR do have counties - PR counties are called municipios. Where a lot of editors seem to err is with equating "Municipio" to the American term "municipality", maybe because the 2 words are so similar, but that's a mistake bc a municipality in the states can be a town, city, borough, village, etc., anything that has administrative powers, and they may or may not have a mayor (could have a township mgr or some other name); the mayor may be PT or FT, in fact, could even by elected but non-paid.

I agree that editors edit in good faith (generally) but that doesn't mean that "good faith" errors shouldn't be corrected or removed. Then there is another group of editors (maybe these are the "bad faith" ones!) who seem to be ignorant/naive at best or agenda-pushers/POV-pushers at worst. Those that without any citations whatsoever will state things like San Juan is a "borough" [see infobox here (barrios) and here (subbarrios) and here (category) for 3 examples by, as I recall, the same individual). This was done at least 18 times for the 18 barrios of SJ plus 50+ times for all its subbarrios] - What?! These are the sort of extremes that result from editors trying to apply U.S. administrative structure to PR, when post-1898 the US chose to leave PR's own administrative structure intact.

To avoid all those problems, I edit using the Spanish terms whenever it can sensibly be used (rather than arbitrarily picking my preferred English language term) or, depending on the specific circumstances, I may use the Spanish term followed by what I feel is the English equivalent in parenthesis; in this cases cases I would use municipio, barrio, and subbarrio (community). Notice that since municipio and barrio have their own articles, I didn't even have to translate them letting, instead, the reader decide for himself what it means based on info from the wikilink. Plus I stayed away from using English terms like "district" because that term would have been my own preference - plus what we think may be "clearer" to a reader from San Francisco may be confusing to one from rural Massachusetts where district may be used differently. If you got this far, it means you really like this subject. Congrats on taming all the subbario articles. Hope this helped. Mercy11 (talk) 05:04, 15 February 2019 (UTC)


 * I read the whole thing, first thing this morning. So "ward" is correct and I agree with your assessment of not using other words like "district" etc. The barrios articles were fun to make. My new focus is finding citations. Have you ever seen this digital Caribbean library? Yesterday I found when in 1899 a bunch of people from different countries, living in Yauco became U.S. citizens. Some of the stuff in here is fun. Cheers!--the eloquent peasant (talk) 11:35, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
 * And don't forget dry sheet and "deep river". It is funny. --the eloquent peasant (talk) 21:59, 16 February 2019 (UTC)