Contents 1 Disambiguation 2 Russian ref 3 Aren't Canton and Township the same thing 4 England 5 Municipalities in Croatia 6 Merger proposal

[edit] Disambiguation

I added a disambiguation message, thought that's appropriate since this page contains multiple definitions and points to other pages styled "Township". Am I overlooking some reason this might not be appropriate? Ellsworth 22:38, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

This is more of an article than the usual list-style disambiguation page. It may be compare to chancellor, imperial guard, and municipality rather than, e.g. canton. Rather then removing the text, I'd remove msg:disambig -- User:Docu

I agree with Docu. But now someone completly deleted the article, made a small note in the wiktionary, made wikipedia township-links into external links to the wiktionary which are of less use and turned the link in the subnational entity link into a "Township (dab)" - link. I reverted 90% of this, keeping townhip in line with other subnational entity articles. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:23, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, but the content, such as it is, is a disambiguation page. older≠wiser 04:08, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Feel free to extent. BTW - a lot of the content was deleted by some user. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:06, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

And worse yet, some user is going around making "disambiguation link repairs" to articles referencing this article, changing the link in many cases to township (United States). Sorry, but I don't agree that the distinction between American townships and other townships is great enough to warrant linking every instance of "township" to Township (United States). Sometimes, a discourse on just general townships will do nicely. (Of course, it would help if we still had that discourse available in this article.) -- SwissCelt 17:22, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Actually, I think there is enough difference between U.S. and other places to warrant such disambiguation. Most of the content that was "deleted" was either already in sub-articles or was moved to one. My peeve with the bot that is making these changes is that in many cases it should be using a more specific link to civil township. older≠wiser 17:26, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been more clear. There is cause to disambiguate, but at the same time not every link to township warrants a disambigation to a specific national article. For example, paper township linked to township. The article on paper townships discusses those entities within the context of Ohio law; thus, it already explains the function of townships in the United States (and Ohio in particular). What may be necessary is a discourse on townships in general: What they are, how they originated, etc. -- SwissCelt 17:41, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Actually, in that case, paper township, the link SHOULD go to township (United States) rather than to this generic topic precisely because it is a variation on the specifc forms that townships take in the U.S. older≠wiser 18:14, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. What information about townships specific to the United States wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) already be in an article about... you guessed it, a type of township specific to the United States? It's redundant. I can see linking to civil township, and have done so with this article by way of compromise, but linking to increasingly specific, disambiguated articles strikes me as a Very Bad Idea. The result would be similar to Native American, where it seems every week some bot is "repairing" the disambiguation link to yet another new article. It's a complete waste of time for us pedants, and it's inconveniencing those who are actually using this site as a reference. -- SwissCelt 22:00, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

What information about townships specific to the United States wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) already be in an article about... you guessed it, a type of township specific to the United States? I'm not sure how to respond -- is this a rhetorical question? Are you serious that you cannot see any difference between linking to township, which is basically an augmented disambiguation page, and linking to township (United States)? Or that you are unable to see the additional contextual information in township (United States) about how townships have developed and function in the U.S. that is not in paper township? I don't entirely disagree with linking to civil township, but to be honest, paper township right now is so poorly written that I could not tell whether such townships are actually functional units of civil government or are only some sort of vestigal paper entity without separate governmental powers. older≠wiser 01:54, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Are you serious that you cannot see any difference between linking to township, which is basically an augmented disambiguation page, and linking to township (United States)? Or that you are unable to see the additional contextual information in township (United States) about how townships have developed and function in the U.S. that is not in paper township? Neither. I'm stating that the contextual information about how townships have developed and function in the U.S. (Ohio, specifically) should be written in the article paper township, and that contextual information about the initial purpose of townships should be written in the article township. That this information is not presently in those articles is no excuse for a person (or worse, a bot) to guess at the intent, and lead reader and editor alike down an endless stream of needless disambiguation. What's next: Township (Ohio)? How about Township (Podunk County, Anystate)?

to be honest, paper township right now is so poorly written that I could not tell whether such townships are actually functional units of civil government or are only some sort of vestigal paper entity without separate governmental powers. Then edit the article. Or don't. But don't try to fix it in the links. That benefits no one. -- SwissCelt 05:33, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

the contextual information about how townships have developed and function in the U.S. (Ohio, specifically) should be written in the article paper township, and that contextual information about the initial purpose of townships should be written in the article township. Sorry, but I think this approach is extremely bad. Paper township should be about Paper townships, not about the broader spectrum of how townships developed in the U.S. The specific case of paper townships is one specific case which contrasts with how townships developed in the rest of the U.S. Inserting the U.S. contextual information into an minor article about a limited set of instances results in forking of information, which is in general not a good thing. That this information is not presently in those articles is no excuse for a person (or worse, a bot) to guess at the intent, and lead reader and editor alike down an endless stream of needless disambiguation. This is in now way needless disambiguation. It is locating the appropriate context. Township is far too general to provide any useful context. IMO, it would be better as a pure disambiguation page. But some apparently want to see it as some sort of article. Fine. But even at best, it will only provide a fairly superficial overview with pointers to more detailed subarticles. Why link to such a useless article, when you can link directly to an article that provides appropriate context? What's next: Township (Ohio)? How about Township (Podunk County, Anystate)? If necessary, sure. The functioning of townships varies considerably from state to state. There already is a Township (New Jersey). But IMO, in such cases it would probably be better to consolidate such information into an article describing all the varieties of local government in a state. But don't try to fix it in the links. That benefits no one. Baloney. IMO, adding a better link is an improvement worth making. older≠wiser 13:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

but IMO from the US-, Canada-, SA- etc township pages the links should go to "Township" and not to wiktionary. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:50, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree the linking to Wiktionary is odd. If a more specific link is not known, then linking to township is better than linking to wiktionary. older≠wiser 20:19, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

This article makes no sense —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zellian (talk • contribs) 20:58, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Russian ref

I found and cut down in length:

• In the context of Russia, the Soviet Union, and CIS states, the term is sometimes used to denote a small semi-urban, sometimes industrial, settlement and used to translate the terms поселок городского типа (townlet), посад (posad), местечко (mestechko, from Polish "miasteczko", a small town; in the cases of predominant Jewish population the latter is sometimes translated as shtetl).

--Commander Keane 15:48, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Aren't Canton and Township the same thing

See discussion in Talk:Canton (subnational entity) Nfitz 04:39, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] England

Townships exist in ... England

Removed this reference to English townships since they no longer exist. (References is made later in the article to the English township as an obsolete legal entitity.) -- Picapica 14:45, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Municipalities in Croatia

Croatian municipalities today aren't the exact equivalent of township because township is a single settlement wich is an administrative unit, while most croatian municipalities today consist out of groups of villages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.1.24.166 (talk) 14:23, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger proposal

This article's definition of township is OR[1][2], and the parts that are not OR are more or less a duplicate of municipality. --Espoo (talk) 20:57, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

I think your proposal makes sense. I believe we need one article where the terms municipality, town, township, city, village, etc. are explained country by country. Otherwise, for quite many countries the info is put at random in one of the two, and by Murthy's law, usually in the wrong one. Interestingly, this is such a case that, should the encyclopedia be limitted to a single country, there would be more clear distinction between the two terms, and hence two separate articles, while with all 193 countries, the terms are so mixed up, that defining them in general, and not country by country, leads to tons of missunderstandings and/or information missplacement. Dc76\^talk 23:24, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Both articles, township and municipality, are pretty awful. The definition for municipality is almost as bad as that for township. While there is considerable overlap, the terms are not interchangeable. I would object to having township redirect to municipality or having municipality redirect to township. In many parts of the U.S., townships are not considered municipalities. Perhaps local government is the most generic terms that covers both. older ≠ wiser 16:37, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

So, you are suggesting to move most of the info (numbers, structure) from municipality and township into local government, while the former two should be reduced to a collection of definitions with country by country links to sections in local government? That would make sense. Dc76\^talk 21:41, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Combining two bad articles will just make one worse article. Just improve each of them. Kennel Kough (talk) 05:38, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I would say keep them apart and improve each article to standard. The reason is I think they have slightly different definitions. I think township is an much older government, political and geographic definition, while municipality is more modern and tends to be applied more to cities. scope_creep (talk) 21:25, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about in other countries but in Canada traditionally a Township is one kind of Municipal Government (like a City, Town, Village or Borough), so to Canadians it would be like combining the City page with the Municipal page. This kind of Township (a rural municipality with an elected Reeve and a separate street grid) should be defined on this page separately from the overview on the Municipality page. Definitions for townships in South Africa and historic townships in Great Britain are very different from this model but are still, I think, closer to the Canadian Township than a general term for a Municipality.JosephIWMolto (talk) 09:00, 25 April 2009 (UTC) These aren't that synonymous. Improve what exists.Synchronism (talk) 20:29, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Some of the detail on this page is a duplicate of the Municipality information and is most appropriate there so I am removing it from this page where it is nothing to with the word township. This will make the township article shorter but also more informative on its own.--AssegaiAli (talk) 14:03, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Municipalities and townships are very different. Municipalities are organized through a charter. Townships are divisions of unchartered land in a given state. These shouldn't be merged. 69.208.7.46 (talk) 03:39, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Except, of course, in the places where that is not the case, like New Jersey. 121a0012 (talk) 15:38, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

I am against the merger. A township is a type of municipality. Two articles make it more precise, which is the purpose of it all on Wikipedia.--24.226.20.118 (talk) 23:11, 17 October 2009 (UTC)