Talk:List of municipalities in Pennsylvania

Comments

I'm working on updating this list, as there are certainly more than 22 cities in Pennsylvania. I question the logic of renaming the page, as to compile a list of ALL municipalities in the state by population is a overwhelmingly large task as there are probably thousands of municipalities in the state. I'll see what we have once I complete the list of cities and then go from there. 72.81.120.38 (talk) 20:51, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

There are two thousand five hundred and sixty six municipalities in Pennsylvania. 2,566 is a big freakin' list, and even if someone wanted to take the couple of days to put it together, it probably isn't something worth doing. See PaMunicipalitiesInfo.com for source of number of municipalities (plus 67 counties). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pittsburghn'at (talk • contribs) 16:12, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. I've read that PA has more municipalities than any other state. And when you look at a political map of Allegheny County it's easy to believe. However...I think the list may have been vandalized. Certainly, there must be municipalities with populations between Parker (#67, pop. 799) and Monongahela (#66, pop. 4761). My hometown, Penbrook Borough, was (and maybe still is) somewhere in the 3000s. I'm dubious that a town of 799 people could be the 67th most populous municipality in the Commonwealth.PurpleChez (talk) 18:44, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I added some of the larger municipalities from the Philly area that were missing (pop 30k+), the ranking seems to get quickly inaccurate around 25-30 or so. I can think of a bunch of Townships in the Philly area that have 15-25k population that aren't on the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.59.0.127 (talk) 05:59, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

More Images

Some editors from Pennsylvania are working on the list and and associated articles, with the objective of adding more images, by finding images on Wikimedia Commons or taking photos and uploading them, or getting images from other sources, such as Flicker. Feel free to join us.--DThomsen8 (talk) 00:51, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

As part of this effort, I am working on the municipality names on the list. Do not be concerned about red links, that is part of the effort to have links to the places.--DThomsen8 (talk) 14:40, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Lumber City, Pennsylvania

Lumber City, Pennsylvania is now a CDP, and part of Ferguson Township, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania. --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:03, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Questions for updating

Here are questions for updating this list:

1. Should it be Cascade township or Cascade township?
2. Should images be added, without changing the municipality name? (I try to do that, even if I don't have an image.)
3. Should municipalities split between two counties have the same image for both entry, or separate images for each part, or no image for one of the parts?
4. What, if anything, should be done about the entry for Lumber City, Pennsylvania?

Answer by number below.--DThomsen8 (talk) 01:00, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

1. Definitely the former. I would have done this long ago, but it's so much work that I didn't feel like doing it.
2. Not sure what you mean.
3. I'm not particularly fond of having three entries for a two-county location; I'd prefer that we remove the part-county entries.
4. Remove it. This is a list of current municipalities, not former ones; otherwise we'd need to dump in a ton of former townships (e.g. Upper/Middle/Lower Paxton Townships, Dauphin County were presumably once Paxton Township, Dauphin County), especially the pre-Act of Consolidation, 1854 municipalities in Philadelphia County, plus the numerous cities and boroughs statewide that have simply become parts of others, whether big ones like Allegheny or little ones like College Hill.

Nyttend (talk) 22:16, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

1. It is a lot of work, but I plan to "nibble" at it for a long time.
2. I change the name of the municipality, if I am also adding an image. I do not add an image without also making the municipality into a wikilink. Is that clear?
3. I prefer to leave things in that situation unchanged for now. Plenty to do otherwise.
4. If Lumber city is removed from the list, perhaps that will mess up the numbering. For now, we should leave it alone.

Thank you for the prompt reply. I hope to take photos in Lehigh and Northampton Counties this weekend.--DThomsen8 (talk) 00:27, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

1. No complaints. Thanks a lot! While you're at it, what about linking? For example, we have "Confluence borough", not "Confluence borough". This is currently applied inconsistently, so adding a few more links won't make things look weird.
2. But why would you change the municipality name? Are some of them outdated? The only recent name change I'm aware of, (Glen) Osborne, has been updated.
3. Shouldn't be that much work to remove some extra lines; there are only twelve multi-county municipalities, so we'd only need to cut 24 entries.
4. Lumber City was one of the tiniest municipalities by population, and the numbers go from largest to smallest; we'd only need to renumber 20-odd places. It's nothing like the work we'd have to do if Philadelphia gobbled up Upper Darby Township, which would make us renumber 2,556 municipalities.

Thank you! I've gotten a lot of the local municipalities: we're done here in Beaver and two of the adjacent four counties (Lawrence and Washington), and the other two adjacent counties (Allegheny and Butler) have just nine to go between them, so it's not as convenient for me to go out and get photos. Nyttend (talk) 01:42, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

I am not making myself clear. Consider the entry Cascade township. No link there. I then make it [[Cascade Township, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania|Cascade township]], and now the entry links to the article on the town, and appears in blue in the list rather than black.--DThomsen8 (talk) 02:00, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Ah, okay. "Change the name" made it sound like you were replacing "Cascade township" with "Cogan House township" or something of the sort, not capitalising "township" and adding a link. Nyttend (talk) 02:26, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Very good work on Beaver County images, but very few entries have entry links to the article on the town. Don't go back for those, but consider doing both the link and the image together for new image entries. Do you have a technical means of counting how many town wikilinks and how many images are still needed?--DThomsen8 (talk) 12:38, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

No idea on counting links. I've never done much with this page; I use User:Nyttend/Pennsylvania to track missing images, and I can give you a good count on the image-missing municipalities simply by figuring out how many pages it lists. I'm able to keep it up to date with recentchanges: every few days I check Special:RecentChangesLinked/User:Nyttend/Pennsylvania and am able to find new images quite easily. Nyttend (talk) 12:49, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Do you find images on English Wikipedia, or on Wikimania Commons, or on both?--DThomsen8 (talk) 13:17, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

After starting the User:Nyttend/PA project in November, I searched extensively through en:wp and Commons, but I've searched thoroughly enough that I don't believe it worth the time to go searching more. All removals from the list are now due to people uploading images and adding them to articles; there's not much on Flickr that I've been able to find (there's a decent amount, but aside from stuff already on Commons and images that are too poor of quality, most doesn't have identifiable locations), so we're almost entirely dependent on users taking and uploading their own works. Nyttend (talk) 13:23, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

I should be able to get some images in Lycoming and surrounding counties more towards the end of the month. I added two I knew were already on Commons (for Cascade Twp in Lycoming County and Flemington (borough) in Clinton County). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 13:43, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Good work, Ruhrfisch. If we keep at it, eventually it will be done.--DThomsen8 (talk) 14:01, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Hint for everyone: I have my preferences set so the beginning of an article with the image, if any, shows by merely being over the link. Consider Bethlehem Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, which shows a building there, but the image is not in the list. There are quite a few images to be found that way and added to this list. That technique is also a reason to add wikilinks to the municipality names, and to add the images here and on the municipality articles when taking and adding new images to Wikimania Commons.--DThomsen8 (talk) 14:14, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Click on Beta at the top, and add Hovercards to see images and text for every link. See mw:Beta Features/Hovercards.

Page size

As of 8:00 am, EDT, June 28, 2015, the article size is over 336,000 bytes and is currently the 59th largest article on Wikipedia. Are all of the columns in the list necessary for a full listing of the 2,500+ municipalities? IMHO, I would remove the image column since theoretically should the photo project be complete on top of the 300,000 bytes of text that's already here, you'd have to wait for all 2,500+ images to load as well. I also think that there should be only one population count column (either the official 2010 count or current estimate), population change, area, density, and classification. Perhaps if the cities, town and boroughs, and township lists are remaining, some of these items can be moved there. Thoughts? —Mr. Matté (^Talk/_Contrib) 12:14, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

You are quite right about the size of this list, but I am unsure about the remedies you propose. If every municipality name had a WikiLink to its article, then I would be willing to do without some columns, but we are a long way from achieving that. I work on adding images, but I also add a link when I do that, and I also add links. Other editors may add images without any other improvements. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:28, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

I question whether we need four population-related columns. "Current" population is necessary, and density is highly important, but having both 2010 and 2012 population is a bit extra, and including the percentage change is even more extraneous. What if we reduced it to the version that I've placed at Talk:List of municipalities in Pennsylvania/shorter? This reduces it by nearly 40KB — the difference is slightly exaggerated because the /shorter page is just the table, without the header and the stuff below the table, but this is a negligible difference. When we have an extremely long page, reduction by 10% should be a big improvement, especially when we're just excising some rather extraneous elements. I'm not fond of removing counties, both because they're particularly helpful for identifying where in the state a place is (especially for little boroughs; how many readers will know where Wellersburg is?) and because we need to disambiguate ambiguous names, especially with the townships — 216 different names are used by multiple townships. Nyttend (talk) 01:16, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

You are on the right track for this article. The columns you suggest removing are easily left out. If Smallbones agrees, we should do it.--DThomsen8 (talk) 06:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

No problem Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:28, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

• File size, last version before pics added = 209K
• File size today = 322k
• With generous assumption that 10K of meaningful text was added, that still leaves over 100K of thumbnail imagery. I have highspeed 'net with all the latest bells and whistles, and when this page tried to load I thought my system had locked up. The image column was good faith and a ton of work, but it needs to go away to prevent browser WP:CHOKING. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:48, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Has images

Check 1799, 2036, 2187, 2368, and 2550 and add images where available.--DThomsen8 (talk) 22:02, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

West Easton

West Easton has a JPG name, rather than an image.--DThomsen8 (talk) 01:47, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Are you sure that's not East Weston? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:35, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Notes column lacks sources

Everything in wikipedia has to be based on a WP:Reliable source, that is stated in the article using proper Citation. Currently, the portion of the "notes" column that I scanned had no cites at all. Either cites need to be added, or the column must be deleted. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:52, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

McIntyre

Just visiting. Noticed that there is a McIntyre, Pennsylvania in Indiana County that isn't in your list. It is different from McIntyre Township in Lycoming County. The grid is a bit beyond my skills. fyi. Pnoble805 (talk)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Elim, Upper Yoder, Cambria Co, PA.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. Community Tech bot (talk) 22:22, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Other large CDPs?

Levittown is cited as an example of a large community (over 50,000) that is still a Census Designated Place rather than a municipality. Are there other sizable communities in that category? LincMad (talk) 22:50, 11 June 2020 (UTC)