Talk:Unorganized Borough

This looks like a census area. It appears to be an area used to gather statistics and may not be a natural region. I am not sure how these census areas fit into the Wikivoyage geographical hierachy. Does someone who knows this part of Alaska have any ideas? - (WT-en) Huttite 07:23, 27 July 2006 (EDT)

Unorganized Borough

 * Delete. Part of a well-intended attempt to create a region hierarchy for Alaska, but based on a very unintuitive scheme using names that only a bureaucrat could love.  Alaska has now been restructured (a bit loosely so far) using geography instead. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 21:15, 27 July 2006 (EDT)
 * While the policy and concept is sound, I'm concerned about a competing concept of not cluttering the regional pages. I've seen in a number of (random) places editors removing smaller cities from larger regions because if all the small articles were listed in the region, the region article would be full of them. Counties, while bureaucratic stand in that middle ground.  This, yet again, brings us to a discussion about tiny town articles - if we keep the tiny towns how won't they be orphans if we don't allow the large region articles to contain their mass?  I hate to keep trying to hijack VFD discussion into philosphical ones, but its very related in my mind... -- (WT-en) Ilkirk 22:22, 27 July 2006 (EDT)
 * Part of the solution is to stop trying to keep every worthless article created for a non-destination "town" as if they were actual contributions to Wikivoyage rather than random acts of chaos. But I digress.  If there are too many genuine destinations in a region to list them all, the region needs to be broken down further.  Counties are one way to do that, but they are very often poor regions from a travel perspective.  Look at a map of U.S. counties  and you can tell that most of them between the Colonies and the Rockies were drawn by some guy with a straightedge and no knowledge of the territority he's dividing up.  A city I used to live in had a county line drawn right through the middle of it, and there are a few counties in my state that don't have any cities in them (just a few tiny towns).  Alaskan boroughs are even worse. The fact that some guy in Juneau couldn't think of anything better than the name "Unorganized Borough" and used it for a collection of discontiguous tracts of land in various parts of the state, is all the more reason to ignore him and come up with something better. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 23:01, 27 July 2006 (EDT)
 * Keep - Until we have a better way of organising all the places within the Unorganized Borough, a census area or other administrative division is probably the best way we have. Besides the term is used in Wikipedia, so we should maintain at least a redirect for such a place to the Wikivoyage article that covers the place listed in Wikipedia. Even if it is only a notional division or grouping - and seemingly worthless. In the future we can direct this to the divisions we do establish. Until we do, keep it. We should not be deleting redirect articles, unless there is never even going to be a redirect to a relevant article. Besides, many search engines love redirects. -- (WT-en) Huttite 23:05, 29 July 2006 (EDT)
 * We have a better way of organizing the random parcels of land called the Unorganized Borough: It's called a "geographical hierarchy". Places in Southeastern Alaska we put in Southeastern Alaska, places in Southwestern Alaska we put in Southeastern Alaska, etc.  This bizarre bureaucratic construct defies geography.  It's analagous to the non-geographic pseudo-region Island nations, which was created only because there was no other top-level container to put them in.  And what are you suggesting we redirect this to... Alaska?  It's literally all over the map: from the Aleutians to the Arctic to the Inside Passage!  The fact that there's a Wikipedia article for it has no bearing on whether it is – or ever could be – of value to the traveler, and your argument that we should maintain an article or redirect for every place-name for which Wikipedia has an article, seems like a rather sysiphean task on a rather slippery slope. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 16:12, 6 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Keep, at least for now. Agree with Huttite.  Alaska is another place that doesn't fit the most common US hierarchical structure well; this shouldn't be deleted until there is clarity on what the best structure is (we don't have that yet) and what the most sensible synonyms/redirects are (ditto). -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 17:48, 6 August 2006 (EDT)
 * What lack of clarity? Are you looking at the same state I am?  Since February 2004, Wikivoyage has had Alaska divided into five regions based on geography.  Roughly the same regions are also used by the state's travel industry association  (which I find a pretty persuasive confirmation).  The only question about this structure raised in the past 2.5 years has been whether they should have names like South-Central (Alaska) or Southcentral Alaska and little bit of restructuring within those regions. [[Image:UBAK.png|right|250px]] Granted, I am not an expert about Alaska, but in the week I spent there and in the time I spent researching it recently to figure out whether the Unorganized Borough fit into that hierarchy, I found nothing that argued that we should toss out that whole existing structure to accommodate the UB.  Nor has anyone actually proposed that we do so. This article was created in good faith under the assumption that we're supposed to follow government boundaries... but we're not.  We use them when/if they make sense from a travel perspective, and look to other resources for guidance when they don't.  And this "region" clearly does not make sense. Look at it: it overlaps with all five existing geographic regions, because it exists only as a bureaucratic construct (i.e. territory without a formal borough government), not in the real world. This isn't a question of following "the most common US hierarchical structure"; it's a question of following Wikivoyage policies.  And as for the let's-redirect-it reflex, there are no "sensible redirects" for this article.  If someone created an article Unincorporated Townships (Kansas), we'd delete it (I hope).  Why wouldn't we do that with this?  Under what overhaul of the Wikivoyage guidelines would this be a valid article? - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 20:58, 6 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Preferably redirect to Alaska, although I wouldn't be opposed to deleting. Todd's right - this region is too all-over-the-place, and it overlaps with existing Wikivoyage regions for Alaska. -- (WT-en) Ryan 23:42, 11 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Okay, so what's the consensus here? I see one person who is adamantly opposed to keeping it, two who say keep, one who says "redirect, but delete OK," and one who -- I'm not sure what he says.  I believe the consensus is to keep; one person saying the same thing over and over does not a consensus make, no matter how forcefully he says it.  But we're overdue to resolve this. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 11:21, 12 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Alaska doesn't have counties, they have boroughs, so I think if we delete these articles we may see them re-appear in the future. A redirect seems like a good compromise to me, but that's just repeating my previous opinion so having someone else chime in would be a good thing&trade;. -- (WT-en) Ryan 12:50, 12 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Two people saying "Delete"/"Redirect", one person saying "Keep until we decide how to divide Alaska" (when there's an established structure that no one objects to), one person saying "Keep until we decide how to divide Alaska, and because I think we should have articles/redirects for every article in Wikipedia", and one person who created the article but has since said that he never liked it and only did it because he thought it was required... is not a consensus to keep.  I've continued my (admittedly rather annoyed) explanations in an effort to point out that your objections have long since been satisfied, and that the article has no value, hoping that maybe you'd find this information persuasive enough to effect a consensus.  If not... then we don't have one. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 13:02, 12 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Redirected to Alaska, then, so that we can get the miserable thing out of the way. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 14:17, 13 August 2006 (EDT)