Talk:List of municipalities in Illinois

Before adding to this list, please check the other lists for Illinois.
Before you add a name to this particular list, please check the other lists, notated under "See also", to make sure that you are adding the name to the correct list. Funandtrvl (talk) 14:35, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

this page needs work Suggestion
The "Lists of towns and villages" page is much more complete, however, I had to add Frankfort and Lisle to this list. Frankfort and Lisle should definitely be in this page!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Soco 79 (talk • contribs) 21:04, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * That's how Wikpedia works! when you see something missing, you verify the information and add it.  However, the additions you made after Frankfort and Lisle (Yorkville, Zeigler and Zion) was reverted, because Yorkville and Zion are cities and belong on that list and without a wiki article, you cannot add Zeigler unless you provide a reference showing what type of settlement it is. John from Idegon (talk) 21:20, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * After understanding the difference between the two pages (cities and villages), I noticed that both pages, still have absent entries, for instance the town of Norway wasn't in either of them. I added it to cities but I don't know if it correctly placed. Soco_79 (talk)(UTC)


 * Norway, Illinois is an unicorporated place, not a village or city, and is appropriately listed on the list of List of unincorporated communities in Illinois. How about before you make any more additions to these lists, you bring them here and let us help you out. We're really friendly and we try not to bite -- D kriegls  ( talk to me! ) 23:45, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you! I did not realize that there were three pages for Illinois settlements and now that I do I will have an easier time. Thanks again.Soco_79 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:23, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Scheller, IL was not included on this page. It is in Jefferson County. My source is tools.usps.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.158.2.14 (talk) 16:34, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Cross and Color?
In the Most populous places table, is there any reason to have both a cross and a color denoting county seats? Why not make it simple and use just the color? -- D kriegls  ( talk to me! ) 11:56, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure if screen-readers can see background colors. I'm assuming that they can read special characters. Funandtrvl (talk) 17:11, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I added Template:Dagger instead of using the special character, so that screenreaders can see it. Funandtrvl (talk) 17:28, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Merge discussion
When the state has three different types of municipalities, I don't quite see the point of having two lists; either we could split out the small group of towns into a third list, or we could merge the two lists into one, with each entry being marked as "city" or "town" or "village". The latter option I think better; one can still get a list of municipalities of each type by sorting on the municipality-tyle column, and as well it's possible to compare information among municipalities of different types. For example, right now it takes a bit of work to see that Marissa and Albion have similar populations, while neither of the current lists has a complete collection of county seats — and you'd even avoid having the confused people adding cities to the towns/villages list or vice versa. Let's move everything into List of municipalities in Illinois, remove the "Incorporated" column from the towns (unless we're ready to add it to the cities and villages), and make a single big table out of it. Nyttend (talk) 05:37, 18 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Convention for most states has been to have two articles. One for all incorporated municipalities (often called List of municipalities in x) and one for unincorporated places (often called List of census-designated places in x). I'm trying to clean these lists up slowly and bring them all to the same consistent high standard. I'm already done Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and Montana, and would be happy to see this list meet those standards as well. Support merge into one municipalities page, and I do recognise that Illinois has an abnormally large number of municipalities, I still support a single list for comparison purposes. Mattximus (talk) 14:16, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Would the lists still be separated by type of municipality? It could all be on one page, but it wasn't clear to me that it would remain in separate lists or one indistinct list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.87.151.135 (talk) 20:28, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
 * The convention is for each state to have 2 big lists. One for incorporated places (where all the municipalities are found), and a second for unincorporated places (usually called census-designated places). Illinois was never standardized this way. There are a few other states yet to be divided as such. Mattximus (talk) 23:25, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Oppose- There are many settlements, such as Chicago or Naperville, which are cities, not towns or villages. Other cities include Peoria, Springfield, Joliet, Rockford, Aurora, and Elgin. Todd (talk) 17:57, 24 August 2017 (UTC)


 * - No one is saying to omit cities. The question is should we continue to have two lists, one of villages and towns, and one of cities which is the present state; switch to three lists, one each for villages, towns and cities, or switch to one list for incorporated municipalities including all three: villages, cities and towns.  Do you have an opinion on that? John from Idegon (talk) 02:31, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I support a single list of incorporated municipalities to accompany the existing list of unincorporated places. Doing the same for every state has much merit in increased reader usability.  John from Idegon (talk) 02:31, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Wait, why was this declined, it seems to have 3 supports and 1 oppose... shouldn't that be considered a successful merge? Mattximus (talk) 16:02, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I reverted the close. The editor that closed it is quite new and perhaps a bit overeager. Pinging to review his close and my revert for technical correctness, and since he originated this discussion possible announcements to get more traffic here. This isn't done IMHO. John from Idegon (talk) 17:45, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
 * From a technical perspective, what's to review? Todd made a series of edits, you hit "undo", you made sure to preserve his non-closing comments, and you added some comments yourself.  Net result of those edits, plus Mattximus' intervening comments.  Unlike closing a discussion, unclosing is hard to mess up :-)  Nyttend (talk) 23:53, 26 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Support. In states where there's a meaningful distinction (e.g. a population cutoff) between cities and villages, there's some logic in separating them, but Illinois has cities with fewer than 500 residents and villages with over 50,000. It's less confusing to the reader if they're all part of the same list of municipalities, and they don't have to figure out the legal status of a place before figuring out which list it's in. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 00:29, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
 * looks like we have 4 supports and 1 oppose, but the reason for opposition is not clear. I'm not in any hurry to end discussion, but it does seem like much opposition to this merge suggestion.Mattximus (talk) 00:39, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Support makes sense. Agathoclea (talk) 11:08, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Support per TheCatalyst 31-thank you-RFD (talk) 11:23, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

List updated to 2020
Hi all, I've updated this list with 2020 census information. Everything was pulled from census and USGS tables using some really complex data queries. At any rate, everything should be accurate as of 2020. Because this was automated, it's possible that there are a couple of funky links to towns, especially those with duplicate names. I'll check those out soon. If there are issues with how the data is presented (e.g. you don't like having area or area rank or something) let me know and I can try to correct this.

By the way, the town that disappeared between 2010 and 2020 is Whiteash, Illinois. That's why there are now only 1298 municipalities in Illinois. It's technically 1296 now, since Alorton, Centreville, and Cahokia merged to form Cahokia Heights in 2021, but since that's not represented in the 2020 census, I only indicated that with a footnote.

On to unincorporated places and CDPs??? Straughn (talk) 19:32, 7 July 2022 (UTC)


 * It's great that you've updated the data to the 2020 census, thank you. I wonder if it would be terribly difficult to match the formatting of the featured lists of municipalities of American states, see: List of cities in Alaska, List of municipalities in Alabama, List of municipalities in Arizona, List of municipalities in California, List of municipalities in Maryland, List of cities in Nevada, List of municipalities in New Mexico... etc you get the idea. They all have a very nice consistent format, would be great to have Illinois match! Mattximus (talk) 00:34, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I've created a new table at my Sandbox. What do you think? I'll paste it into the article in a bit. Thanks for all of your work on these lists of municipalities! Straughn (talk) 17:19, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Wow that looks great! I don't know who originally created this format (I think it is whoever did California) but I copied them to try and standardize these lists, but this looks perfect! Did you use a bot to grab this data automatically? If so there are quite a few other states needing this updated! Mattximus (talk) 13:12, 9 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I ran queries against the census API, downloaded geography files, then did a bunch of manipulation in Excel, a database, then used PHP to spit out the code. I'm more than happy to work on a few more lists. It's really tedious to do manually. Let me know on my user page and I'll see what I can do. I'll paste in the new table now. Straughn (talk) 18:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)
 * This is excellent work, thank you. Your method sounds way more advanced than what I did, which was to download the csv and use some basic coding in excel to autofill the columns, but yours looks way smoother. There are only 13 states that are up to this standard, and I'm happy to work on the prose sections to clean the new ones up. Any state interest you in particular? The next alphabetically would be List of municipalities in Arkansas in need of work, but I'm open to any. Mattximus (talk) 19:32, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

I like how this is updated for the 2020 census, but I do believe a few changes need to be made to this article. The list is not updated for the Centreville, Cahokia, and Alorton merger into the new city of Cahokia Heights. Additionally, the village of Clear Lake in Sangamon County has recently disincorporated. These two changes would bring the total number of 1,300 down, so I'm hoping that this article can be updated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dabmaster5 (talk • contribs) 05:35, 21 July 2023 (UTC)