Talk:Central Massachusetts

Regional Definition

I really don't think Framingham or really anywhere inside 495 should be considered central MA. Technically, central MA is just worcester county, but I can see some argument for including places like Groton and Brimfield even if they are in different counties just because they are more tied to the middle of the state. For now, I'm separating Framingham attractions out, but still mentioning them. Thoughts? Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 01:40, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Subregions

Are subregions necessary? Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 02:55, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Having reconsidered this a short 7 years later, I think the sub-regions could use a redefinition and they currently don't even cover the whole region. Blackstone Valley more or less works, it just currently contains a bunch of towns that don't belong. South County is also more or less fine, although I think we'll struggle to generate enough content to make the Oxford and Dudley articles useful. North County should be replaced by a Montachusett region covering everything along Route 2 from 495-Philipston. Greater Worcester can be a region consisting of Worcester, Shrewsbury, and the other communities that directly border Worcester other than Millbury, since I don't see how you can separate it from the Blackstone Valley. The area west of Worcester to the Quabbin and stretching north to the NH border through Athol can be "West of Worcester" which is a way people around here refer to the area in a "here be dragons" sense. Could also just call it "Western Worcester County. I'm puzzled about what to do with MetroWest, it's firmly Boston oriented so I don't think putting the whole thing in Central Mass makes sense, but most people consider Westborough/Southborough to be part of Metrowest despite how close they are to Worcester. Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 23:49, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I'd tend to defer to you, but let's not rush and see what User:ButteBag has to say, for example. On MetroWest, do you propose to put part of it in Greater Boston and keep the rest in this region, or are you thinking of other ideas? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:56, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

maybe the whole thing in Greater Boston? I don't think there's a neat solution. I guess it depends what's most useful from a travel perspective. Geographic proximity or culture/general feel of a place? Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 02:16, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

It sounds like you could go either way. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:54, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Hey, welcome back @Godsendlemiwinks! I am rarely west of 95, much less 495... I'm sure whatever you want to do would be an improvement over the status quo. For my money, there should be some system to let editors know that town X is in article Y. Even if it's just redirects. Mass just has too many towns for any simple solves.

Instead of splitting regions out, I would work more bottom up I guess. Like for example I tried to turn Rockland (Massachusetts) into more of a rural area. It's not really done, like Halifax and Plympton should probably be merged in along with Pembroke which apparently exists and isn't covered anywhere on this site. Anyway, once you do all that you'll have a better idea of what regions make sense. Like this is a great example! Worcester Hills.

That was a bit of a ramble, so I guess I would say I recommend making everything look like the Worcester Hills article and then go back and see how the regions are feeling to you. Thanks for the ping @Ikan Kekek! Happy hacking! ButteBag (talk) 00:37, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

yeah, oh, and adding a mapframe with a collection of mapshapes from wikidata representing the towns present in the article is (I think) a must. The visual aspect really helps readers know that this (one) article refers to these (many) towns. ButteBag (talk) 00:42, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

I had been thinking about creating a few more Worcester Hills-type articles as well as pairing some towns with a neighbor so there would be enough content for a decent article. Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 01:36, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

We don't want a cluttered map showing every town in this non-bottom-level region, if that's what you were suggesting, ButteBag. Do you mean only the towns mentioned in "Cities"? Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:43, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek yeah no, sorry if I was being unclear! I meant to say that if a bottom level page talks about/covers more than one town, than we should add a mapshape for each town mentioned. Like the Rockland page for example. Maybe it's just me but it's easier for me to tell Rockland covers many towns, but it's harder for me to tell what's being covered in Quabbin for example. ButteBag (talk) 13:01, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Fully agreed. :-) Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:48, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Hey I went crazy and created a "West of Worcester" sub-region just for completeness. I'll move metro west out of here later on, so this region is the same as Worcester county. I'm sure no one will ever agree on what town goes in what sub region, but at least you can see the way we have it on here and make better decisions at least. Thanks! ButteBag (talk) 01:32, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Hey @Godsendlemiwinks to answer your original 2015 question, I think we don't really need the subregions. They don't hold too much content today, and it seems like we could lift it up to the Central Mass page without losing any nuance. The subregions are helpful for breaking up the long lists of towns, but I think a few subheads in the cities section could also work nicely. Especially if you are able to combine more towns into cohesive articles like worcester hills. Then maybe handle other destinations section like they do in Berkshires, just list the state parks and forests with a link to the town the listing lives in? Also sorry if I messed up the exact towns you had living in the subregions. You can use the districtifier to perfect things, or ping me and I'll update it once it's sorted. Thanks! Maybe something like this for the cities section:

==Cities==

• Big city 1
• Tiny but touristy village

===North County===

• town 1
• etc

===West of Worcester===

• ...

ButteBag (talk) 19:18, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

City articles

As of right now, the only city articles that have enough content to justify their own page are Worcester and Sturbridge. A few articles that could be fleshed out more:

• Fitchburg
• Leominster (Massachusetts)

I live in Central Massachusetts and don't think most of the towns need their own articles. Maybe, eventually there will be enough content for some of them to justify articles for groups of towns (i.e. the Brookfields) that they can be subregion/town hybrids. There are 30 something towns in Central MA, that seems like waaaaaaay too many articles.Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 02:55, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I have created an article called the Boroughs, which includes Westborough, Northborough, and Southborough. None of these towns on their own really needs an article and people often refer to the collection as "the Boroughs." Together, I think they could make a decent article. I think East, West, North, and regular Brookfield, combined with Warren could make another article. I'm also going to propose that the Worcester article absorb any content from Auburn (Massachusetts) and Shrewsbury (Massachusetts). Both of these towns are suburbs of Worcester that are so well integrated, you wouldn't realize you were in a different town if they took down the signs at the border.--Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 14:58, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

ODs? Rural Areas?

Worcester Hills and Brookfields as best as I can tell fall under the "other divisions" category in the geographical hierarchy. They are large rural areas that have no center and most of the attractions are either state parks or farms. Even many of the eat/sleep/buy listings aren't even in a village. Putting them in the cities section is misleading, but apparently they can't be Other Destinations.Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 01:29, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

New England benefits from having townships that clearly indicate where things are. If those divisions are townships, that might solve the problem. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:31, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

The area is loosely defined by town boundaries, but only for convenience and I would support using a finer grained definition. The Cherry Valley section of Leicester could and should be included in the Worcester article since it's basically a neighborhood of the city that spilled over the legal boundary, but the rest of the town needs to be in a different article. Parts of Paxton are similar(although there isn't anything to list in this case), so the region isn't entirely defined by town boundaries.

Now I understand what you are doing with these rural areas I think you are fine to put articles like Worcester Hills under the title "Other destinations" in this region page. These will be classed as a city article, which just means that it is a bottom level article, not necessarily a city or town is the true sense of the word.--Traveler100 (talk) 05:39, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Ok, I originally had them that way then another user moved them to cities with the note that "these are not ODs as we define them." I can't find an official policy on this, hence my confusion about where to put them. Should I remove the list of towns covered? It's mostly useful for editors as a general guide of what should go in the article, but the official town lines aren't a hard boundary for the region which seems to be confusing people.Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 14:04, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I would keep the list of towns, useful for people who do not know the area. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:28, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I had simply assumed you didn't know that OD is for non-city destinations. I suppose what you are doing is slightly different, so I'll leave it to the discretion of others, but I don't think we need to go inventing a new name for OD. Personally, I would make a "Rural areas" subsection under Cities, because even if your articles are clusters of towns, they are still town-based articles, whereas the other things in OD are usually park articles or islands. Texugo (talk) 15:02, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

(un-indent) I looked at a lot of the other Northeast ODs and there seems to be some overlap between cities and ODs. Nantucket, for example, is listed as an OD for Massachusetts even though it resembles what people think of as a city far more than rural bits of Central Massachusetts. Lake George is another example. Since everything in New England is part of some town, regardless of whether or not its a wilderness area, it might be useful to clarify how groups of rural towns should be listed in the region articles. In Vermont, "town" in many cases just means "this 40 square mile chunk of land is called X." There is nothing that people from outside New England would describe as a town. I'm eventually planning to work on Vermont, where most towns don't have articles created (and probably don't need their own articles) so much of the state would be covered under a similar system of groups of towns. New Hampshire would probably receive similar treatment, as would Maine so maybe it would be useful to have an more explicit policy of what to do with bottom level regions that include listings. I kind of like "Rural Areas" within the cities list, but would also like to be able to use some of these as ODs for state level articles to replace more nebulous things like Green Mountains(Really?, They cover most of the state, that's like calling the Alps an OD for Switzerland).Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 16:07, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

On this particular point I'd be careful about using what you find elsewhere to justify putting something in OD, because it's more than likely just a sign that much maintenance is needed in that region. It is an extremely common misconception for people to come along and think "these are towns/villages/etc., too small to technically be 'cities', therefore I'll put them in OD", and it's something that often slips by without notice. It doesn't necessarily mean it's supposed to be that way. Nantucket is listed that way because the name coincides with both the city and the island, and our coverage is of the larger scope, the island. Lake George has a similar focus, not on the town but more on the homonymous lake region, with more-park-like coverage including areas on the east side of the lake which are actually a different town. Unlike those two examples, the ones in question here have no focal point other than the towns themselves, for which reason I'd prefer to keep them under cities. Texugo (talk) 16:24, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I thought the focal points for the articles were the things to see & do? Like Lake George, most of the them are not in the villages. Some of the buy/eat/drink/sleep listings are, but nearly all of those listings in the Lake George article are in the village of Lake George. Sure, the Nantucket article covers the entire island, but the entire island is part of the Town of Nantucket so I guess I don't see how it's different, other than the fact that it's on an island instead of the mainland.Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

My point was that neither of those examples are exactly analogous to the conglomerate town articles in question. Texugo (talk) 19:28, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I understand your point, but I don't agree that Nantucket and Lake George aren't "town based" and Brookfields and Worcester Hills are. The Nantucket article is exactly defined by the boundaries of the town. The Lake George article doesn't spell this out in the article, but, per Talk:Lake George, it covers things in the Town of Lake George, Town of Bolton, Town of Warrensburg, Town of the Hague, and part of the Town of Queensbury, although it seems there is some unfinished debate about what should and should not be included.Godsendlemiwinks (talk) 20:07, 17 May 2015 (UTC)