Talk:Departments of Burkina Faso

Incorrect maps of departments by province, source of population figures, lists of villages...
Beware that the current maps of departments by province are frequently wrong:
 * they were roughly drafted by a single user using incomplete data, but they often forget to list some department divisions. However the 351 departments are fully listed by province (there are 45 provinces in the 13 adminsitrative regions).
 * they are frequently labelled with incorrect names (not matching the official names used in official institutions of the Burkina Faso, notably the CENI which includes accurate data for electoral purpose)
 * their outlined borders are very fuzzy. Many of them should be updated (unfortunately they were created in PNG bitmap format), and they are difficult to use without locating the capital city/twon/village and without their main rivers and roads.

Beware also of population figures: many articles are listing population estimated in 2006 in a preliminary report, but the official figures were consolidated only in 2012 (with an complete list of villages as they were surveyed in 2006). You can find consolidated figures in the official report of the CENI (Commission électorale nationale indépendante) published in 2012 for the municipal elections. See http://www.ceni.bf/sites/default/files/elections/repartition-sieges-conseilles-municipaux-02-2012.pdf

For the elections of 2012, new villages were also administratively recognized (byt splitting former larger villages) and their population was estimated in most cases, to determine the number of municipal seats for each administrative village, given that each administrative village elects a minimum of 2 municipal seats). Finally, not all existing villages are listed (in the municipal elections, their populations were merged with the population of another nearby administrative village.

Most administrative villages with population over 10,000 became towns in 2006 by creating new departments: these villages were then subdivided into urban sectors and grouped with the nearest surrounding rural villages into the new department. But a few urban communes are remaining with their capital town subdivided into urban sector, even though their population has decreased below 10,000 inhabitants, without changing their municipal status to a rural commune (with a capital village). The capital village is also not necessarily the most populated one in the department or commune. Villages may also be kept separated, even though they are now part of the same urban area: the urban area around the country capital city also extends to administrative villages located in separate provinces or regions.

There are also many other hamlets not recognized administratively as villages as they are in rural areas. Some of them have local names and locally refered as "villages" but legally they are "cultural hamlets", part of another administrative village (their population is not counted separately) in their commune. In the capital town (or city) of urban communes, the population is counted by urban sector instead of by village (but a urban sector may also include population of cultural hamlets living in nearby rural area). verdy_p (talk)
 * Note: I'm progressively updating these location maps, but most of the work for fixing everything is done in French Wikipedia where there are all the sources added, and major updates of data are done using these references.
 * There remains a few maps to to update in Commons. Not ethat these maps are just in PNG format, due to lack of vector data (I also work on OpenStreetmap to improve the geographic data. This is very time consuming. verdy_p (talk) 09:48, 28 November 2021 (UTC)