Template talk:County Donegal

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Towns / Villages

Just a note, but the only towns per se in County Donegal would be the four with town councils, i.e. Ballyshannon, Buncrana, Bundoran, and Letterkenny. Everywhere else is, by all measures, population, law, etc., a village. Someone may want to change this? Thanks. --Schcambo^{aon scéal?} 10:45, 21 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I know what your saying but you can't really describe the others as being villages though.
I've included all census towns from 2006 with more than 1,000 people as although they don't have legally defined boundaries, they're still 'towns'.
If you think the destinction needs to be made - perhaps a division should be made between those towns with legal boundaries and those with more than 1,000 people that are commonly reffered to as towns? Donegal92 (talk) 14:10, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm looking at List of census towns in the Republic of Ireland; there are 75 towns in Ireland as defined by the Local Government Acts, whereas under the CSO definition there would be 612. The problem is, we can't say that we'll list any of them with 1,000 or more people living there, because that would be misleading, and we can't list them all, because then we'd probably end up with more towns than villages in most of these boxes, which would be just as misleading.
Unfortunately, the only proper definition we can rely on is that of the above acts, otherwise we're just acting on what people perceive to be a town, which could be classed as POV. --Schcambo^{aon scéal?} 14:18, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, we could follow what they use in US county templates, and list them as '[[Incorporated place|Incorporated towns]]' and '[[Census-designated place|Unincorporated towns]]'? It got shot down when I created the base template as being an Americanism, but I think it would work. --Schcambo^{aon scéal?} 14:27, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's the best solution, as it makes the destinction between recognised towns and large urban centres often referred to as towns. At the minute it just seems a bit nonsensical to me to be calling places like Carndonagh for example, (with a population of almost 2,000), a village. In order for this to work you would have to set up some kind of population level, as pretty much every village is a 'census town' - otherwise it would just be the current village section under a new name. The CSO themselves use the 1,000 mark as a destinction between census towns (see here with regards ' Small Area Population Statistics'), so a possible structure could be:

• Incorporated towns: towns with legal boundaries
• Non-incorporated towns: census towns with 1,000 people or more, without legal boundaries
• Villages: census towns with 999 people or less
• Townlands: small areas of note

What do you reckon? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Donegal92 (talk • contribs) 19:32, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]