Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota/GNIS cleanup

Per Project:Reliability of GNIS data there are many (sub)stub articles on Minnesota places that have been created sourced to GNIS entries. A lot of them falsely designate things as "unincorporated communities", which is several GNIS importers' catch-all equivalent to the the GNIS catch-all feature classification code "populated place". GNIS has many errors, and all of these (sub)stubs need cleanup.

Detailed problem statement
The simple truth is that Minnesota does not have "unincorporated communites". Per the and, figures being rough because they have gone up and down over the past 40 or so years: The overwhelming majority of the state is either a home-rule city, a statutory city, or a town/township under a board of supervisors; the rest being "unorganized territories", which we have Category:Unorganized territories in Minnesota for.
 * It has approximately 900 cities, which we have in Category:Cities in Minnesota.
 * It has approximately 1800 townships, which we have in Category:Townships in Minnesota.

Category:Unincorporated communities in Minnesota should actually have zero members. Anything there is either a mislabelled city (sic!), faulty GNIS data, or faulty articles.

Questions and answers

 * But I have a source that confirms that something is a village!: The Project:Notability (geographic features) criteria talk about legal recognition. If you have a source that says something is a village, especially in the present tense after 1973, it is not legal recognition.  Minnesota legally abolished villages and boroughs on 1974-01-01.( and )  Legally, there is no such thing as a village and hasn't been for 50 years.
 * Cities? That's ludicrous!: It's not the only United States state where even a mere hundred people could legally be a city.  There were 85 cities with populations of under 100 people in Minnesota in 2010.undefined  The definition of "city" around the world is fairly arbitrary.  Minnesota has home-rule cities that have adopted a charter, and statutory cities that are unchartered.  The city of Solway, Minnesota has 96 people and is surrounded by the town/township of Lammers Township, Minnesota.
 * So Cloverton, Minnesota is a statutory city?: Yes.   And now you know that the statement about it being named by a second company 5 years later is false.
 * Cities within towns?: Yes. There's even legal provision for townspeople to vote a statutory city out of the town.

Towns/Townships in Minnesota
The United States Bureau of the Census has consistently said from at least as far back as 1936 to the 21st century that "[t]he terms 'town' and 'township' are used interchangeably in Minnesota with reference to township governments"undefined.

When what was now the state of Minnesota was one of several Territories of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, it was surveyed into rectangular areas named "townships". Old 19th century sources (e.g. ) and the 19th century Laws of the State of Minnesota (e.g ) consistently call these survey townships congressional townships because it was of course the United States federal government that invented them. After statehood, provision was made so that congressional townships could be incorporated as units of local government below the county level, an optional so-called Township Government system.

Strictly speaking, Minnesota local government townships (a.k.a. civil townships) are towns.undefined The legislation from 1860 to the current Minnesota Statutes of the 21st century consistently uses the word "town" and says that legally these are corporations and their governing boards of supervisors are called "Town Board of name".

Rather than a town being a settlement larger in size than a village and smaller than a city, as our town article would have it, a town in Minnesota is actually countryside, a rural area and explicitly not a population centre or an urban area. The urban areas used to be villages and cities and are now only cities.

Resources

 * : This will at least tell you what town, city, or unorganized territory a GNIS-imported article is in. But being based upon OpenStreetMap it is not a source, merely a guide for figuring out what a faux "unincorporated community" likely really is.
 * : This is an edition of (which is ) that was revised by "the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society".  Unfortunately, it is unclear when during those 80 years the revisions were made, as this edition consistently uses "village" for places in Minnesota, almost 30 years after "villages" stopped being villages in Minnesota.
 * Arcadia Publishing books : As usual, these are broad guides to where the history will be found. Here are just some of them:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:
 * If the local historians that Arcadia usually uses have something, that probably means that there are older, full histories and newspapers and other sources to be found and consulted, such as, again to pick just some:


 * Gazetteers : These are useful for telling whether an "unincorporated community" is a post-town/post-village or only a post office. Lippincott's, in particular, has a uniform scheme for this.  Many do not use the Minnesotan meaning of town, though, and long pre-date the conversion to city.