Talk:List of the most common U.S. place names

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Farmington?[edit]

Farmington, with 21 occurances, should also be included.

-Speedeep (talk) 17:42, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Additions[edit]

If anyone is interested, there are quite a few more that could be added to this list...

Chester, Union, Burlington, Newport, Troy, Ashland, Arlington, Florence, Hamilton, Georgetown, Lincoln, Lexington, Dover, Jefferson, Oxford, Richmond, Warren, Clayton, Dayton, Farmington, Kingston, Aurora, Centreville...

Rarelibra 03:28, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Portland... --334 19:48, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

According to this site: http://geography.about.com/od/lists/a/placename50.htm the top ten are as follows: Riverside-46 states Centerville-45 states Fairview-43 states Franklin-42 states Midway-40 states Fairfield-39 states Pleasant Valley-39 states Troy-39 states Liberty-38 states Union-38 states and (I think) #11 is Springfield at 35 states So I don't know who to trust because the site specifically says that Wikipedia's list is incomplete/less accurate. Perhaps we should consider if this site's claims are true. Beeswax07

Perhaps the ONLY authority would be something like a US registry or Census, yes? Rarelibra (talk) 01:09, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Danville?[edit]

Danville, with 17 occurances, should also be included.

ZirconBlue (talk) 15:14, 21 May 2008 (UTC)ZirconBlue[reply]

Citations[edit]

Riverside etc. from an About.com article citing a Word Ways magazine article (not named) by Dan Tilque from 2001.

Ironically the About.com article cites this Wikipedia article, perhaps erronously? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.43.232.248 (talk) 13:13, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unincorporated areas[edit]

There are a lot of unincorporated areas in Wisconsin in this list. For those who may not know, towns in Wisconsin are unincorporated. It doesn't seem like they should really be in the list. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.76.131.49 (talk) 02:39, 23 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dubious list[edit]

The list in this page looks *extremely* dubious. A list of "populated places" in the US can be downloaded from the USGS. Processing this with the following Perl script (please excuse my terrible Perl; I've not written any for ages)

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
while (<>) {
/\d*\|([^|]*).*/;
$count{$1}++;
}
while ( my ($city, $num) = each(%count) ) {
print "$num $city\n";
}

and piping the result through sort -nr gives the following

Rank Name Count
1 Midway 218
2 Fairview 213
3 Oak Grove 169
4 Five Points 150
5 Riverside 129
6 Pleasant Hill 124
7 Mount Pleasant 119
8 Bethel 111
9= Centerville 109
9= New Hope 109
11= Liberty 98
11= Oakland 98
13 Union 97
14 Pleasant Valley 96
15 Shady Grove 94
16= Pine Grove 92
16= Salem 92
18 Greenwood 91
19= Forest Hills 89
19= Pleasant Grove 89

Now, the list includes over 190,000 places, which seems rather a lot. Maybe it's not the right data to be using?

Dricherby (talk) 14:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why so many Wisconsin towns...[edit]

...yet no townships at all? In Wisconsin, a town is essentially a township, it just goes by another name. So, if the towns of Wisconsin are included, why not the townships of many other states? For Washington, if we included all townships (in addition to boroughs, cities, towns, and villages), it would bring its total to over 60. Phizzy 01:41, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Plymouth?[edit]

Aren't there loads of places called Plymouth? on the Plymouth disambig. pg there are at least 16. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.104.69.37 (talk) 20:52, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Belleville[edit]

20 states have a Belleville, and if you include ghost towns and towns that used to exist, it goes to 23. The variant spelling "Bellville" adds 3 more. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.60.213.26 (talk) 01:00, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Belleville only suggests 17 locations of significance on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages?from=Belleville&to=&namespace=0&hideredirects=1 for a slightly more comprehensive list. TehAnonymous (talk) 06:43, 7 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What's the truth?[edit]

I found this list: Riverside in 46 states, Faiview, 43, Centreville, 45, Franklin, 42 etc. etc. Totallay different of what I see in the article. Even in that list I miss Hamilton, which is mentioned in 30 states on Wikipedia. [[1]] Salix2 (talk) 21:13, 10 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup?[edit]

There are two or three ways to establish criteria for this:

  1. Use the US Census list, which includes the CDP category (census designated place)
  2. Use another list, such as USPS or USGS lists

I'd prefer using the Census list as a base, since a designated place has a place name.

The BGN - Bureau of Geographic Names is another source that should be considered. You can download files like http://geonames.usgs.gov/docs/stategaz/NationalFile_20101001.zip

The USPS web site doesn't appear to have a downloadable list of their place names (which are tied to Zip codes). rhyre (talk) 16:47, 26 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Population figures[edit]

Why doesn't this article have any population figures for the cities?? Georgia guy (talk) 16:47, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Because no one has put them in. —Tamfang (talk) 22:30, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Criteria for inclusion[edit]

There's no established guideline/rule/anything resembling for inclusion, so I propose the following arbitrary solutions:

  1. Top 20 most common US place names (ties likely)
  2. US place names with 20 or more locations

As of this edit, the page lists 19 names exceeding 20 locations, with 13 for 18-19, with likely many more if it were accurate and inclusive. As for criteria for consideration, I suggest using the disambiguation page & relevant section (ex. [Washington#United States]]) as a rule of thumb, unless/until a better solution is found. TehAnonymous (talk) 06:43, 7 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wildly inaccurate and misleading article.[edit]

I stumbled upon a similar result as Dricherby (see Dubious List above) when I looked at the USGS List Of Populated Places at https://geonames.usgs.gov/docs/stategaz/POP_PLACES_20170401.zip today. Today's version includes 201066 places.

The USGS list shows up several major failings of this article.
First, though, before examining the USGS list, a quick look at the article reveals major problems with the current list.
The top name is given as Washington, with a claimed count of 88. That is inaccurate for two reasons:
  • The claim of 88 places is wrong. There are only 43 places listed.
  • Of the 43, only 25 places have a name that consists solely of the single word "Washington". As wrong as the count already is, it also includes names such as Mount Washington, Port Washington, Washington Park, Washingtonville and others which are not uniquely "Washington". How can they be included merely because they share one part of their name with another place? If they should be counted together, why do we not count place names together if they have any elements in common? How many places include the word "North"? (There are more than 2100). How many include "ville"? (There are more than 24,800). Where do we stop?
Back to the source of the count quoted by Dricherby. It doesn't give identical results to the list I checked, but it's headed in the same direction. To examine the list I simply imported the pipe-delimited data into Excel and did a simple analysis of the Place Names. Despite taking less than five minutes, the resulting counts are completely accurate. The list has Midway (217), Fairview (212), Oak Grove (171), Five Points (150) and Riverside (130) as the most common place names.
In the case of Washington, the list I used has 34 with that word as their entire name. Counting the place names which have "Washington" as the first 10 letters of their name, there are 158 places.

I believe there's more than enough evidence to suggest that the list in this article is not only poorly constructed, it's also wildly inaccurate, and I am sure that extensive research would only confirm that. Without even considering that there must be a consensus regarding the source of the data, I'm wondering if it would be too large task to revise and easier to simply remove it from public gaze and rewrite it completely. Twistlethrop (talk) 05:18, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Postal Service data[edit]

I've completely redone/renamed the former Post Offices section; it now has the official USPS list of the most common city & post office names, and is up to date for 2017. Twistlethrop (talk) 09:54, 22 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Greeneville vs. Greenville (Tennessee)[edit]

The "Greenville" listing includes an entry for the place in Tennessee. The correct spelling of the placename is Greeneville. I believe placenames that are not spelled exactly are still acceptable for inclusion, so have left the entry with correct but different spelling in the list. It's worth noting that Greeneville is the only place in the U.S. with that spelling, although its parent county name is not unique. Twistlethrop (talk) 16:18, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Antioch[edit]

There are at least a dozen Antiochs just in Texas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioch,_Texas). Suspect there are many more in the US. 2600:6C56:4000:3062:6038:31E6:DDD8:BB91 (talk) 14:22, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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