Commons:Categories for discussion/2024/05/Template:US cities
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As of this writing, there is no Commons:Templates for discussion, so I am using Commons:Categories for discussion to minimize turnaround time and maximize the number of people who see this. Per [1] User:Birdie wants to change the scope of {{US cities}} to include those "that were in the top 100 and are now over 100 000".
Template history
[edit]- 2009: Created with 19 cities
- 2012: Expanded to 20 cities
- 2016: Expanded to 22 cities
- 2019: Expanded to current day 100 most populous cities of the United States, included link to List of United States cities by population to establish template scope and to provide an easy verification of scope. Template:US cities/doc created, providing the first documentation of how to use the template.
- 2022: Updated for 2020 US Census
- 2024: Expanded to 109 cities, nine of which are claimed to be former 100 sometime in the past and over 100000 population as of the latest population estimate. Verification as to whether this designation is correct and complete is left to people other than the editor who changed the scope.
Note that this Wikidata SPARQL query reports 11282 current and former cities in the United States.
- Limit to 100 cities — Although I'm not so familiar with the US cities, I know from my common sense that 100 cities are enough for navigation between the most populous cities of a given country. I have made {{Cities of India}} based on this template and listed 50 most populous metro cities (excluding satellites and other suburbs) and 39 sub-national capitals of India. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 08:25, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
Oppose the scope change for the following reasons:
- Up until the scope change, the scope of the template had been "cities in the United States as of the present day" since the time of its creation and for the past five years, that scope has been explicit as demonstrated by the linked List of United States cities by population which itself provides the exact dated reference ("July 1, 2022" as of this writing) to the source US Census Bureau population estimates.
- As noted in Template:US cities/doc#Note, there are plenty of state-specific alternatives for smaller cities, plus a template for state capitals, plus another template for independent cities, all of which could be used for inspiration to create other state-specific templates.
- When I examine the 1000 edits before the scope change and the 1000 edits after the scope change, I find that it was really applied to only 16 categories for only two of the nine ">100 (former top 50 and still over 100.000)" cities and no evidence that the modifier verified that the added cities are the complete list that meets the criteria change. It's as if the scope changer took the most short-sighted, least effort approach to shoehorn these nine cities into a preexisting template rather than consider what navigation boxes for past 100 most populous cities should look like.
- The editor making the undiscussed scope change belatedly discovered that there are verified "100 most populous cities of the United States" lists in the English Wikipedia articles on the United States censuses (for example 1900 United States census#City rankings) which suggests that had he or she done his research, he would have concluded that he or she should have created decade-specific {{US cities in 1850}}, {{US cities in 1900}}, {{US cities in 1950}}, etc. instead of modifying {{US cities}}.
- If the scope modifier's change is allowed to stand, it invites others to tack on still more changes. Why limit the list to 100 cities? Why not include all 11282 current and former cities in the United States? Why stop at cities? Why not add every last possible populated place in the United States? Why not add every neighborhood in every populated place? Why stop at the United States? Why not include every place outside the United States named for a place within the United States? The long-term effect of letting the scope change stand is that the navigation box will eventually dwarf the media and subcategories in the category for which it is providing navigation.