Category talk:Towns in Oregon

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Oregon

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Towns

Though using the term "unincorporated communities" may be legally correct, it's not the best name for this category. Good categorization is intended (among many other things) to make finding articles easy for ordinary users browsing through Wikipedia, and as such should use the simplest terminology that's appropriate to the subject.

In my experience, very few people understand or care about what it means legally for a community to be unincorporated versus incorporated, much less mentally group things that way. They think of cities and towns. This may be less technical but is more widely accepted and understood. For ease of use, I think "Towns of Oregon" should be used as the category name.

Thoughts? I won't make any changes before getting comments/consensus (or, failing that, waiting a decent grace period). Thanks! --Huwmanbeing 04:24, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This category was redirected per this discussion. If you look at the intro at Category:Towns in the United States, you will see that it explains that towns are categorized "based on the local nomenclature for subdivsions". When seeking to redirect this category, I followed the lead of Missouri, per the discussion here. I believe anyone who comes to the page, Category:Towns in Oregon, can read the explanation of the local nomenclature posted there and easily find what s/he is looking for. If you still have a problem with this category, perhaps bringing it up at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (categories) would be an option. I have to say though, I would vote to oppose any changes to this category. Yes, I do have a vested interest in keeping the Oregon categories tidy. Perhaps if you could explain to me a scenario where someone would not be able to find what s/he is looking for because this category is actually a soft redirect, I could better understand your argument. Since "town" does have legal meaning in other states, I think it is confusing to have a category "Towns in Oregon", especially because before all the articles in the category were designated as towns arbitrarily based on a subjective impression of size and importance, thus was far from a complete inventory of "places that are too small to be considered cities", and in fact included some incorporated cities. Note that in Oregon there are incorporated cities (Fossil, Oregon) with smaller populations than so-called towns (Pleasant Hill, Oregon). Also note that there are 41 entries under Category:Unincorporated communities in the United States, thus the category is hardly without precedent. Katr67 06:20, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]