Talk:List of municipalities in Michigan/Archive 1

First thoughts
It looks as though this list corresponds to the Michigan.gov list of Michigan Cities, Villages and Townships. Regadless of whether that was the source, this list does indeed contain Cities, Villages and Townships. So I am moving it to a name reflecting that. older &ne; wiser 03:11, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm currently using this list to create stubs for unincorporated communities (at least those which were not Census-designated places). One thing I have noticed is that there are frequently (though not always) UCs with the same name as the township they are in. What I would like to do is create a separate list of townships in Michigan and remove them from this list (except where they are Charter townships or where there is no corresponding city, village or UC with the same name). In most cases, townships are really not equivalent to municipalities or communities. They primarily govern land use in undeveloped areas. In urbanized areas, the townships have generally either been annexed or have incorporated themselves as Charter Townships. Anyhow, this is a work in progress, so any comments or suggestions are welcome. older &ne; wiser 17:05, 15 May 2004 (UTC) -PS, perhaps after removing Townships, the name of the article should be something like "Populated places in Michigan"?


 * Like for other states, I'm going to create a seperate page for administrative divisions of Michigan, and move the definition of cities, townships, and villages to this new page. I will make the appropriate links to the different pages. --Criticalthinker 21:24, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Organization of list
We currently have this list (List of cities, villages and townships in Michigan), which is huge. We also have List of villages in Michigan and List of townships in Michigan. My proposal is to remove all townships from this list and rename to "List of cities and villages in Michigan", providing a prominent link to the townships list. Then, merge the villages list into this one. I wonder if we should also restrict this list to incorporated cities and villages in Michigan (I think that the sublists here provide a good starting point), so that it compares to List of cities and towns in California, a recent featured list, or List of municipalities in Florida, a current FLC. Thoughts? Dana boomer (talk) 20:21, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


 * There already is List of villages in Michigan for incorporated villages. List of townships in Michigan also already exists. I'd support creating List of cities in Michigan in a similar format and removing townships from the list and turning this into a list of populated places in Michigan. Part of the reason for this list is that there is no easy way to see at a glance all the place names (both incorporated and unincorporated) in Michigan. older ≠ wiser 01:09, 6 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I know there are already lists for villages and townships - see the second sentence of my post. However, my concern is with the inclusion of unincorporated communities. In other states (see the Florida and California examples given above) the main lists just include incorporated communities. What is the reasoning behind having this different in Michigan. I don't think we need to split up incorporated villages and cities into two different lists - together I think they will be quite readable, as is shown, again, by the FL and CA lists. Dana boomer (talk) 02:15, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The reason is to have a consolidated list of populated places in the state. Doing something just because some other states do is the reasoning of lemmings. older ≠ wiser 03:08, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * But what list/reference is this list working from with unincorporated communities? What is the definition of a "populated place"? Is every wide spot with a couple of houses a populated place? The NGIS lists some mobile home parks as their own entities - are we going to do that too? And this list needs to be split - it's huge and for people on a slow connection it's unreadable. So, my proposal is to remove the townships, because they have their own list. By providing a prominent link to that list, we can do a lot to make this list more readable. Dana boomer (talk) 12:26, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The list was initially based on a list from the state of Michigan web site (which has since been re-organized and updated). The USGS GNIS provides the most comprehensive source for populated places, though I agree that some are a little obscure. But basically, I think the criteria for inclusion on this list should be a reliably sourced reference for the existence of a community. As I said, I've no objection to splitting off townships -- or even creating a separate list of incorporated municipalities in Michigan for villages and cities (though there might be some disagreement about where charter townships fall in such a schema). older ≠ wiser 13:41, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Reverting alphabet listing
Why reverting the edits? I added section headings, so anybody can edit any section comfortably. --George Ho (talk) 01:05, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * There is no point to having a sortable table broken up like that. Why would anyone want to see what the largest place starting with "D"? older ≠ wiser 01:13, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, why would anyone change one population number in one whole section rather than any of alphabet sections? What if we can divide them into counties rather than alphabets? --George Ho (talk) 01:18, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what your comment about population means. WIth a sortable table you can sort by population to compare the places. Adding counties might be of some interest, though nitpickers might want to include multiple counties for those cities and villages that span county lines, which would throw off the sortableness. older ≠ wiser 01:45, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I'll rephrase the number of people part: number of population changes, and it is inconvenient to edit the whole section of all cities, especially at this current version. Get that? --George Ho (talk) 01:55, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I think I see, sort of, though it would make no sense to update only one or a few -- the population figures should all be drawn from the same data set and if one changes, they would all change. But in any case, I have no particular attachment to this being a table -- but if you are want to break it into sections, I'd suggest turning it into a simple list and doing away with the table altogether. older ≠ wiser 02:02, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

I have added maintenance tags to reflect the current state of this article. I hope this is not disruptive. --George Ho (talk) 02:27, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

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List is too long
Currently the list has about 2000 names on it which is way too long. I propose removing all unincorporated communities since they are the odd ones out. The list would decrease by 414 names, bringing it to around 1500. Still long, but much more reasonable. Mattximus (talk) 20:31, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Michigan has 83 counties, NOT 87
Correct no. of counties in Michigan to 83 in article "List of cities, villages,... Threequarterofacenturyold! (talk) 12:52, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

83 counties in Michigan
Correct article Threequarterofacenturyold! (talk) 12:53, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Counties?
There are almost no counties in the counties coulumn. If I add them in, do I need to source the change? There are 2 sources total on the entire page.MarcusOfMichigan (talk) 19:23, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I have a program that can pull all the counties automatically from the US census website. Want me to do that? It ends up looking like this: List of cities in Montana. Mattximus (talk) 19:41, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

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Dexter, Michigan
The voters of the Village of Dexter voted in 2014 to become a city. It continues to be listed as a village in this list. mdkarazim (talk) 19:41, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Separate article
While this list is useful, it seems to be way too long and cluttered. I am currently working on moving List of cities in Michigan to it's own article and not a redirect. There are 279 cities (as far as I counted so far) with more than enough information to stand alone in a more organized and sortable list for someone who wants to look up cities on their own. I believe this format can also apply for stand-alone lists for CDPs, townships, villages, and maybe unincorporated communities. Some have their own articles already but could use a good cleanup. The combined municipality list should stay (and be cleaned up) for a comprehensive reference point.

I am working on the list of cities on one of my sub pages at User:Notorious4life/Pending article5. Because it is just an initial draft, no information within should be considered reliable yet, especially since sources haven't been compiled. If anyone does have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. -- Notorious4life (talk) 14:56, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I disagree, almost every state has a list of incorporated places and a list of census-designated places which together should result in all names places according to the US census. To split the first list into multiple lists would cause much confusion. I'm working on bringing all states to this same standard of 2 lists per state. Most states are done, but Michigan is not yet complete. Mattximus (talk) 13:05, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not saying to split the first list (List of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan). All the information should stay there, but the different municipalities may benefit from having their own sub-articles as well.  If someone wants to look up only a list of cities, it would much easier than sorting through a list of two thousand other places.  There's a List of townships in Michigan, List of villages in Michigan, and List of census-designated places in Michigan... but not for cities?  Not to follow suit with all other states that have their own "List of cities in..." articles, but I feel a "List of cities in Michigan" article would be beneficial.  --Notorious4life (talk) 18:06, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * You've obviously done a lot of work in this area, which I didn't realize until I looked at your contributions. If the Michigan lists are something you want to standardize with the rest of the states, what are your ideas for cleaning up and organizing Michigan? --Notorious4life (talk) 18:23, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Ideally the villages and townships should just be redirected here. I modeled most of the state lists off of California (I don't know who first started that format, but I liked it, so I copied it). I do have a program that draws from the census, the problem is that we are 1 year off from the new census so it will pull data from 2010. It's possible, but a bit out of date. I think it's probably best to move this page to List of municipalities in Michigan, keep List of census-designated places in Michigan, but redirect villages/townships/cities to the municipalities page. What do you think? Mattximus (talk) 18:51, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

The List of cities and towns in California is a very well constructed article. If the Michigan article was constructed and finalized in the same manner, it would look so much better. My idea was originally to scratch the huge list since it looked like shit and focus on separating the municipalities for easier editing. Perhaps, I can focus on improving the combined list, even if it would have close to 1,800 listings. When that list is finalized, maybe we can discuss branching off some information into smaller sub-articles while still leaving the main list intact. In doing so, I support moving the page to List of municipalities in Michigan and focusing only on listing cities, villages, and townships. That would mean removing all CDPs and listing them separately as they are now in the List of census-designated places in Michigan article (which needs some attention). After all, CDPs are not municipalities, and they can have their own article.

I also saw in an earlier comment you made above about removing unincorporated communities from the main list. I definitely agree that all unincorporated communities should be dumped from the list completely. I don't know what can be done to organize the unincorporated communities that aren't CDPs. There is no solid definition on what it means, other than being unincorporated, having no defined area, and no defined population statistics. Does it need a FIPS code or GNIS feature ID? Does it need a sign on the side of the road that literally has nothing there (Donken, Michigan)? Does it have to be an empty field in the middle of nowhere just because its name appears on Google Maps (Winde, Michigan)? They're insignificant and can be sorted out later, but now, I favor removing all mention of them from the list. I'd say maybe a List of unincorporated communities in Michigan article, but I can already see that getting out of hand unless some inclusion requirements are met to prevent it from being a dumping ground for everyone who thinks their trailer park, apartment complex, or grandparents' farm should count as an unincorporated community because there's a sign out front with a name on it.

The potentially outdated information from the 2010 Census is all we can use for now until the scramble to update new information in all applicable articles is available after 2020. There are still a lot of municipalities in Michigan that were never updated after the 2010 Census (mostly rural township articles that haven't really been edited in many years). Aside from population changes and very small land transfers from townships to cities, I don't think much has structurally changed otherwise. But, who knows?

I like the table used in the California article, but if I could make two suggestions to better apply in the Michigan article:
 * A lot of Michigan municipalities have a good amount of water territory added to their total area. How would you feel about changing the column titled "Land area" to "Total area" and using the combined land/water area as the number?  In a random example, Algonac has 1.42 mi2 of land area and 0.31 mi2 of water.  In the table, Algonac's "Total area" can be listed as 1.73 mi2.
 * In the last column for the "Incorporated" date, since townships are not technically incorporated, they mostly use an "established" or "organized" year for when they were founded. Some list a "settled" year when people first moved to the area, but that usually isn't the year the township officially came about.  I prefer using "established" for townships and "incorporated" for villages and cities in individual articles.  But, for the Michigan list, what word would work best since I'm not sure "incorporated" fits best for townships, and the other words don't really fit best for cities or villages?  Also, most places simply list a year and not a specific day/month, so in the Michigan article it might be best to list only the year.  Charter townships sometimes list two years—one for when they were established and a later year for when they were chartered.  I would simply use the first year listed.

So, long story short, I'm agreeing with your suggestions to use the following articles using the table format from the California article:
 * 1) List of municipalities in Michigan — cities, villages, townships (around 1,800 entries); removing all CDPs and unincorporated communities. This article would obviously just be a title move from the existing article.  All other individual articles can redirect to it, and links to the redirects can be appropriately fixed.
 * 2) List of census-designated places in Michigan — 159 current entries; an article that could use some attention. ——Notorious4life (talk) 00:01, 27 July 2019 (UTC)}}


 * OK looks like we are in agreement. I'll begin the transfer. We can't use water area because then it screws up population density (people don't live in water, so you can't calculate pop density without land area), but that is standard in all these pages from around the world. As for incorporation dates, that is a bit of a challenge, as my program does not do that column, it would have to be done manually. But I do agree if we decide to add that column, it should just be year. I'll get to the transfer, I will need some help with the disambiguations and so on (many places in Michigan have the same name but in different counties), and perhaps some issue with municipalities that cross county borders. As for the census data, I will pull that automatically. It takes a bit of time for quality control so I will do it in parts. Thanks for your help, this article will look a lot better after these changes. Mattximus (talk) 17:58, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I never use programs or that such, and everything I do is manual. Painstaking, yes, but I'm not the most computer savvy person.  I see you've done some work on it already, and I can do my best to double check the information.  All of the incorporation years are easily accessible information, but it's not crucially important information at this time.  Cross county municipalities always throw off everything.  I'm glad we came to an agreement on these articles, and I look forward to helping out. --Notorious4life (talk) 01:02, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I notice a lot of links go to the wrong places, but that should be an easy fix once the list is in place. One thing I wondering is if we can differentiate between civil township and charter township for the municipal type since Michigan has two types of townships in this regard.  Also an easy manual fix, but would that muddy up the table?  --Notorious4life (talk) 01:07, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * That's a good idea actually, moving the charter from the name column to the type column. I think we should also work on disambiguation (lots of these Michigan places have the same name) and my program for some reason put the county as "County" if there was more than 1 counties, so a few of those need to be fixed too. I'll keep working on it, but thanks for your help! Mattximus (talk) 12:26, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Just a quick question. I've done quite a bit of work on the Administrative divisions of Michigan page.  I'm curious - because it appears this way - that the definition for the municipalities were simply copied over?  I feel like this superfluous, and it actually kind of clutters this page.  I've not looked at a ton, but I don't really recall most of these kind of pages having such detailed descriptions of each individual municipality type; that's usually reserved for the administrative division/subdivision page, right?  Is there a way to pare some of this down? For instance, I'm not sure if we even need anything beyond a mention for the types of cities (charter, fourth class, special charter) and villages.  It's just this is really clunky for this kind of page, IMO. --Criticalthinker (talk) 08:17, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Agree it's a bit much, I think it's better than nothing right now but I will chop it down shortly to a more manageable length. I'm aiming for something like this: List of municipalities in Alberta. First there are many disambiguations to fix in the table itself. Mattximus (talk) 13:22, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Better format
Looks like this page is pretty messy. I have a program that outputs this table instead. What do you think? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mattximus (talk • contribs) 19:50, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Your table is pretty messy, too. Several editors have already jumped in to disambiguate, and there are a lot of red links to townships requiring redirects to be created. I've also noticed several incorrect links to villages which should be linking to townships, and these will not be manually detected by the dab-solver tools. More effort to make your program generate the correct links would have been appreciated. We have WP:BRFA because (semi-)automated tools can be quite effective at creating manual work queues at a much faster speed than manually-editing editors can. The general expectation for WP:Bots is for their operators to clean up after any issues that their (semi-)automated editing creates. wbm1058 (talk) 16:46, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Yep, it's created by a computer program so it's full of little errors. It's already much, much better than before however, which was an incomplete and fairly randomly compiled table of some places in Michigan, some with populations, others not. Several users, myself included, have worked on most of the disambiguation. I think the counties are all disambiguated, now the first column needs attention. There is also a few municipalities that straddle 2 counties which my program had trouble with so those will come next. For only a few days, the number of disambiguations corrected is very impressive. Thanks for your help on the project. Mattximus (talk) 16:54, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Too long?
There was a tag posted on the front page about excessive length. It's true this list is long, but it is shorter than the longest list (470kb), and it matches the other state's bifurcation of local place names. States on Wikipedia usually have one article for municipalities and another for census-designated places. This list did consist of both before I uploaded the census data, removing all CDPs and splitting it into 2 lists. I don't think we should split any more, as Michigan will become an odd one out. Mattximus (talk) 19:13, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I think the list of long, but as a comprehensive list, it is going to have to be a long list. There's no information that can removed to make it a smaller list.  There are a lot of municipalities and therefore a large list.  I don't know who put the tag up, but unless that editor explains why (as we have discussed earlier), the tag should be removed.  —Notorious4life (talk) 20:11, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
 * More accurately this article is too large, and so is every article larger than this one, and many other articles on Wikipedia. The simplest explanation is contained in policies such as Article size. It should not be a matter of removing information, but of finding ways to present the same information in a way that uses less data. Onetwothreeip (talk) 04:58, 11 August 2019 (UTC)
 * It is smaller than some of the largest lists, but like Notorious4life said, it is complete. This is indeed a complete list of all municipalities in Michigan. I think we should remove this tag which is not present on even longer lists, and that the length serves a purpose of completeness. Mattximus (talk) 15:27, 11 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The lists that are larger than this should definitely have the tag on them, and it's mostly just a matter of nobody having bothered to. It would certainly be an improvement if this article could be loaded in much less space. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:47, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Strongly disagree with removing the entire area column. This is standard in all list of municipalities across wikipedia. If you must cut the article, the best way is to probably split off the townships into their own page, then rename this page List of cities and villages of Michigan. Mattximus (talk) 13:08, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see why lists of municipalities should have columns for area. Onetwothreeip (talk) 10:18, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Population and area are the 2 most significant quantifiable measures for any local government, as per the United States Census, which reports those two pieces of information for every municipality and census-designated place in the country every census. Mattximus (talk) 12:43, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
 * If area is to stay, then I think we don't need to list the populations in the year 2000. That information should be on their own articles. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:31, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Well your edit broke the table. But again, that's the information the census reports. These lists, which are often the only link to many orphaned pages, are generated using the US census data, which reports this information. The column you wish to delete removes information that is even more useful than the area column. I suggest if you are so concerned with the length, that you split off the townships. Removing columns also makes it hard for the bot to update the information when the next census comes out next year. Would you rather a slightly smaller list but that is never updated? Or one that has these columns but is automatically updated with each census? Mattximus (talk) 13:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I say leave it alone. I am in complete agreement to leave square mileage.  The only thing I was concerned about was the initial wordiness of the opening and description.  Otherwise, this article is completely consistent and inline with wiki standards.  I'd suggest Onetwothreeip stop messing with it. --Criticalthinker (talk) 13:32, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
 * It's certainly not in line with standards like WP:SIZE. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:27, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Possible Mistakes on County Names
First: the link "County" on the header of the table redirects to Montana. Second: some cities have "county" as the name of the county. From where does this error arise? I think this is for cities that span multiple counties. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.176.153.105 (talk) 23:44, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
 * These are things you can fix, yourself, if you feel comfortable doing that and know the state. Otherwise, go to my talk page and give me all of the cities where their county is listed simply as "county" and I'll see what I can do. --Criticalthinker (talk) 00:19, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Similarity discussion
A converstation about two very similar list is started here: Talk:List of municipalities in Michigan (by population) —¿philoserf? (talk) 19:58, 10 May 2020 (UTC)