Talk:Beaver Falls

Several municipalities in same article

Swept in from the pub

Hello, just interested in putting together a page about my current city, a Rust Belt community in the USA that (not surprisingly) doesn't seem to appear here at this point. As a political map will show you, it has several tiny satellite municipalities adjacent to it, e.g. w:Eastvale, Pennsylvania; w:West Mayfield, Pennsylvania, and w:White Township, Beaver County, Pennsylvania; they're legally separate, and the locals know which one they're in, but for the out-of-town traveller, they're essentially just different neighborhoods in the same city. At Wikipedia, these get separate articles because they're legally separate municipalities, but the Our regional hierarchy doesn't always follow the "official" breakdown... line at Wikivoyage:Welcome, Wikipedians makes me guess (although of course it's talking about a different level of "official") that here we want to cover the closely interconnected communities in a single article.

Three questions come out of this: (1) Would it be best to cover all of these communities in a single article? (2) The Cincinnati article has a "Notable neighborhoods" section. If we say "yes" to question #1, is it reasonable to cover the legally separate municipalities in a similar section, e.g. entitled "Related communities"? (3) If we say "yes" to question #2, is it reasonable to create the titles of the satellite municipalities (e.g. Eastvale (Pennsylvania) as redirects to the related communities section? Nyttend (talk) 04:51, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

It's perfectly fine to cover several adjacent communities in one article if that's what would best serve the traveler. Whether it makes sense to cover the other communities in a separate section depends on how much content each one would have. In the article for the town of Nyack, New York, which had 6,765 inhabitants in 2010, there is simply the following statement in the intro:

"This article also covers the nearby towns of Upper Nyack and South Nyack, immediately to the north and south of Nyack, respectively."

I don't hold that up as an example of a good article, as it's really lacking in content, but that's kind of the point: If there isn't much content and there are adjacent small towns that don't have a strong separate identity (which I think those probably don't), why create separate articles for them?

But my feeling is, just plunge forward and start writing, structuring the article in a way that you think best, within the basic guidelines of the Wikivoyage:Small city article template, which is flexible ("This template has a much briefer listing format than the big city article template, with fewer sections. If you think that your village or town or whatever needs more sections than are noted here, check the big city article template first for clues. Feel free to copy in some or none of those sections."). Once the content is all there, we can always change the structure if we determine in a discussion on the article's talk page that something else works better. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:53, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes our legally-incorporated municipalities are arbitrarily built that way too, throwing in multiple villages in an otherwise sparesely-populated area to get something of reasonable size instead of creating one separate entity for each one-horse town and hamlet. Prince Edward County is a prime example (grouping Picton, Bloomfield, Wellington); Greater Napanee is another (grouping Napanee and Adolphustown, although the Wikivoyage article also continues into the next municipal township). It makes no sense for the traveller to print off ten individual-village articles with just one attraction in each to cover a large rural area, even if a crowde city like Paris is split into twenty arrondissements. K7L (talk) 14:31, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the input. I've created a basic form (no images yet) at Beaver Falls (Pennsylvania); I thought disambiguation needed because there's also a w:Beaver Falls, New York. Do we disambiguate in hopes that someone will write a NY article, or do we just skip it because the NY article doesn't exist? Meanwhile, I'd appreciate comments on the article itself. I didn't understand the add-listing feature, so I simply skipped it. Nyttend (talk) 21:17, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Nyttend - Good start. You seem to have the hang of what the content of each section should be. However, I'm afraid that despite your trepidation, it's a necessity per policy to include proper listings in the article. Adding listings is easy enough to do, and you don't have to click on the "Add listing" tab to do so. Wikivoyage:Listings explains the whole process, or else to automatically insert listing templates you can click on any of the seven icons on the top bar of the Edit screen, next to the word "Listings" - from left to right, they're for "See", "Do", "Buy", "Eat", "Drink", "Sleep", and generic "Other" listings. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:11, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Also, regarding whether to disambiguate: in cases where one city of the same name is far more well-known than others, we tend to add parenthetical disambiguators to the lesser-known ones but omit them for the most famous one - i.e. Buffalo, New York vs. Buffalo (Wyoming). That being the case, I think it's safe to move Beaver Falls (Pennsylvania) to Beaver Falls as it's eighteen times the size of its New York counterpart, not to mention that it has some degree of fame as the setting of the TV sitcom "Mr. Belvedere" (you might want to include that bit of info in the article, btw). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:17, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Man, I was a fan of that show and couldn't have told you that factoid. =) I don't think Beaver Falls, PA, is "so much more famous" than Beaver Falls, NY, as to be able to apply that guideline... but I also don't think Beaver Falls, NY, will ever get its own article. There's nothing there. So for now I think putting the PA article at the base name is fine. Powers ^(talk) 19:31, 24 September 2014 (UTC)