Plan for Metro areas

[danimatian]

Are you guys working out a better way to link metro areas?

People keep creating suburbs inside the major city..

some cities have Greater City Name in the hierarchy..

last I read we weren't gonna sort them out that way and a plan would be decided

It seems that the less hierarchy involved is better in terms of browsing, people that aren't familiar with the area wouldn't know how to find a suburb of Toronto if it was inside Greater Toronto

but perhaps something where you could expand or collapse by geographical area could be implemented. So it exists in the easy to find place, but then you could enable a feature where you see cities that are close together somehow..

I did a lot of tagging of suburban areas like this, around Detroit we say Metro Detroit so I have most of the cities near there tagged that way and also Southeast Michigan

Chicago uses Chicagoland so I tagged all the nearby cities to Chicago with Chicagoland

I think it's only Toronto using the Greater Cityname method.. there are other places with Greater but they are mostly standalones from what I could tell, no cities sorted inside them

[Joe Goldberg]

Honestly, we haven't given it much thought. I'd say that as one of the most prolific helpers on the site, we'd go with whatever plan you thought was best to organize major cities.

Are the existing set of Problems tools sufficient to organize things the way you think would be best? If not, let us know.

[joshp]

I think we want the less hierarchy and somewhat more specific geographic placement, but we also want it to be clear how and when to add things.

So, I'd prefer not to see Metropolitan Seattle that includes the suburbs, because that designation is a bit of a fiction and it doesn't really tell you anything. You end up with Washington > King County > Metropolitan Seattle > Redmond when Redmond is a city, almost 20 miles away from Seattle.

We are doing some work right now that involves making it harder for people to add duplicates and harder to add places too high in the tree. Maybe we can use something similar using the "what sort of place is this" field to avoid people adding cities inside cities.

[sipes23]

I'd also prefer to keep the hierarchy relatively flat.

Since the example of Chicagoland has been brought up…

It covers, at the very least, 6 counties in Illinois. Parts of Indiana and Wisconsin too, depending on how you define it--which is a whole 'nuther can o' worms. The MSA (a government statistical unit) for Chicago is minimally 6 counties in Illinois and 1 in Indiana. The CSA (another way of defining the whole mess that the government provides) includes 8 Illinois counties, 4 Indiana counties and 2 Wisconsin counties. But that's not all. Another way of slicing it, this time by a company that does media statistics, counts it as 12 Illinois counties, 2 Indiana counties and 2 Wisconsin counties.

None of those three methods overlap except in the core region. All of them overlap major borders, including those that 43 Places has deemed major enough to turn a place yellow or blue.

I shudder to think about Metro Detroit and the US/Canada border.

Tags for large metro areas are probably the best way to handle this, in my opinion.

[danimatian]

Some sort of region feature would be cool. Like a button to Explore Region. So you could classify a metro area as a group but it doesn't show up in the hierarchy.. but then when you are looking at somewhere like Kansas City MO you can also jump to Kansas City KS easily. Looking at Oak Park, IL you could jump to Chicago easily. Dearborn MI would jump to Detroit easily

Minneapolis / St. Paul could use something like that, there is a Twin Cities but they aren't places inside of it. but people refer to it as both and people say they live there.

Something like a merge /AKA as one where you could say Twin Cities 'declare metro region' and then add places, like when you create a list, add st. paul and minneapolis. then Twin Cities disappears from the area when browsing, but shows up in searches still. If someone tries to say they live there, it makes them choose from the list a more specific area.

and similar to the 'help solve a problem for places you've been' that shows up, if a city/town is not part of a designated region, a sidebar shows up to people that have been there asking them to help specify what metro area it is a part of, say if more than 5 people choose 'not applicable' or something then it stops asking other people.. but once 3 or so people declare it's a part of a metro region then it takes effect.