Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. counties/Archive 7

Ghost towns
Apologizes in advance if this has already been discussed or if this is the wrong forum. There's a lot of inconsistency with how formerly inhabited places in California are dealt with by the California county navboxes. For example, Template:Amador County, California refers to them as Ghost towns while Template:Merced County, California calls them Former settlements. Other templates use combinations of the two. So there is this consistency issue. But a bigger problem, IMHO, is that for those navboxes using the Ghost towns descriptor, most of the places listed as such do not appear to be true ghost towns, by which I mean they don't match description of ghost town given in our article on the subject. For example, Stockyards, California is designated as a "ghost town" on Template:Alameda County, California, but the coordinates listed in the GNIS database geolocate to here. Clearly this is not a ghost town, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is not described as such anywhere other than wikipedia, as far as I can tell.

I proposed standardizing these templates using the term former settlements instead of ghost towns here. I think the term former settlements is preferable because it doesn't imply anything about the current state of the location: it may be currently inhabited under a different name, like Stockyards, California; there may be nothing there at all like Apyu, California; or it may be a true ghost town, like Drawbridge, California. Only one other editor commented on my proposal, and s/he didn't object, so I went ahead and WP:BOLDly made the chances. This was, however, quickly reverted by another editor who, when pressed for an explanation, commented "Nationwide, we use "Ghost towns", but there's nowhere (outside of some California templates) that uses "Former settlements". It's not simply a matter of California internal consistency, but of nationwide consistency." I would argue that accuracy and avoiding original research is more important than consistency. But I also think that we should probably also change ghost towns to former settlements on the nav-boxes for other states, too.

What does this project think? I'll note that this was previously discussed, but with too few participants and no really consensus at Template talk:Humboldt County, California Thanks to User:Zzyzx11 for that link. Yilloslime T C  05:57, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
 * A major confusing factor here is articles such as Stockyards, which are now part of municipalities (in Stockyards' case, it's Berkeley) and thus fall under the category of pages that generally get merged to their municipalities and never are included in county templates. Let's leave those out of this discussion, since they shouldn't be on these templates at all.  When we forget about places like Stockyards, we're left with spots that either have the buildings left (e.g. Bodie) or have ruins of still being populated places.  There's nothing of original research or inaccuracy here to argue that abandoned communities (if they're stated as being communities, for which purpose our GNIS sources will serve well) are ghost towns.  Moreover, we have no article on former settlement, while we have a decent one on ghost town.  This of course isn't the determining factor, but it's important: virtually everyone knows what a ghost town is, but we'd be hard pressed to say exactly what a former settlement is — is it former in the sense that nothing exists, or no population exists, etc.?  "Ghost town" works well for the purposes of sorting communities on county templates, and as long as we have no major issues with using that term, it should suffice for the simple purposes of these templates.  Nyttend (talk) 06:18, 28 January 2010 (UTC)


 * These are good points. I agree entirely that places like Stockyards don't belong in these templates at all. They probably all need a thorough going through, and places such as Stockyards to be removed. But that's a lot of work. Certainly much more labor intensive than changing "ghost towns" to "former settlements" or even "ghost towns and former settlements". So can we not make that simply change first, now, and do the more arduous work of ferreting the Stockyardses later? And I disagree that if forget about the Stockyardses then "we're left with spots that either have the buildings left (e.g. Bodie) or have ruins of still being populated places." If that were the case, then I'd agree that "ghost towns" is fine. But we're also left with places like Apyu, California, whose "precise location is unknown" according to our article, so it's safe to say that is has neither abandoned buildings nor "ruins of still being populated places", and is thus not a ghost town. Seems like blatant WP:OR for us pull a place name out of GNIS and declare it a "ghost town" when there are no sources calling it that. This is especially true for GNIS entries that it calls "historical", as according the GNIS FAQ, "A feature with '(historical)' following the name no longer exists and is no longer visible on the landscape. Examples: a dried up lake, a destroyed building, a hill leveled by mining... A ghost town, for example, is not a historical feature if it is still visible. Valid features... become historical if they no longer exist." I agree that "virtually everyone knows what a ghost town is", and I think that virtually everyone would agree that this (Rugg, California) is not one. Former settlement, even without an article on the topic, seems much more accurate. Yilloslime T C  07:18, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
 * FYI wikipedia includes List of former United States counties and its Category:Former counties of the United States. At the moment, the category begins with a headnote (one link blue and one red, today).
 * See also: Category:Ghost towns in the United States and Category:Former settlements in the United States
 * The list of former counties does expressly include name changes and state changes for persistent counties. So the former counties really are former [County, State] pairs of names. --P64 (talk) 15:05, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

So-called former counties
Wikipedia includes List of former United States counties and its Category:Former counties of the United States. Neither one is claimed by this project or any other. Are they unknown here? Is the practice deprecated?

Some of the listed counties were simply renamed or transferred between jurisdictions, so the the listings really are former [County, State] pairs of names. Every listing is marked up with some internal link, so the former names are represented by a mix of redlinks (because three are no articles on counties under their former names) and redirects to the current name. Under Alabama, the first subheading in the list, five out of eight "former counties" are merely former names, according to their one-line entries.

List of former United States counties is emphatically incomplete in the lead sentence and a few lines later with a plea for help. I have added Josh Bell County, Kentucky, a former name, by editing both the Kentucky grouping at List of former United States counties and the lead paragraph at Bell County, Kentucky, with references at the latter.

Let me solicit comments. I anticipate finding more of these soon, probably today. --P64 (talk) 15:09, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Today I began to study the "Remarks" provided in decennial US Census tables of aggregate population by county. Most of the remarks explain establishment of new counties, intercounty transfers of territory, and interstate transfers of counties. Only about 19 mere name changes are remarked in the Tenth Census (1880, note the early date). See User:P64/Counties/Names for a brief list of those nineteen, only seven of which are in the List of former United States counties that expressly includes name changes.
 * I wonder whether mere name changes should be listed as "former counties" together with all the rest.