Template talk:New York (state)

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New York (state) This template is within the scope of WikiProject New York (state), a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of New York on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.New York (state)Wikipedia:WikiProject New York (state)Template:WikiProject New York (state)New York (state)

Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates lists and displays all 50 U.S. state (and additional other) templates. It potentially can be used for ideas and standardization. //MrD9 07:19, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

	State of New York History | Education | Politics | People | Authorities | Political subdivisions | Towns | Villages
Capital	Albany
Regions	Adirondack Mountains | Capital District | Catskill Mountains | Central | Finger Lakes | The Holland Purchase | Hudson Valley | Long Island | Mohawk Valley | North Country | Shawangunks | Southern Tier | Upstate | Western
Metropolitan areas	Albany/Schenectady/Troy | Binghamton | Buffalo/Niagara Falls | Elmira/Corning | New York | Poughkeepsie/Kingston/Newburgh | Rochester | Syracuse | Utica/Rome
Counties	Albany | Allegany | Bronx | Broome | Cattaraugus | Cayuga | Chautauqua | Chemung | Chenango | Clinton | Columbia | Cortland | Delaware | Dutchess | Erie | Essex | Franklin | Fulton | Genesee | Greene | Hamilton | Herkimer | Jefferson | Kings (Brooklyn) | Lewis | Livingston | Madison | Monroe | Montgomery | Nassau | New York (Manhattan) | Niagara | Oneida | Onondaga | Ontario | Orange | Orleans | Oswego | Otsego | Putnam | Queens | Rensselaer | Richmond (Staten Island) | Rockland | Saint Lawrence | Saratoga | Schenectady | Schoharie | Schuyler | Seneca | Steuben | Suffolk | Sullivan | Tioga | Tompkins | Ulster | Warren | Washington | Wayne | Westchester | Wyoming | Yates

Just my suggestion for the box, since Pennsylvania's navigation box is similar to my proposal. --Kuroki Mio 2006 00:18, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

"State of New York" is too big and does not look good. //MrD9 20:58, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Made the "State of New York" smaller. Is it OK now? --Kuroki Mio 2006 23:38, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes. I think it looks a lot more professional than your original (larger version) proposal and than the current template design. Good job. //MrD9 00:18, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I think the hyphens in the metro areas section should be replaced with |'s. I would do it myself, but since it's your proposal, I don't want to change it on you... //MrD9 00:21, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

I made a template for Ulster County, and I used this format:

Maybe we could make a template like this for every county in New York. Pennsylvania has templates for every county, so why can't New York? --Kuroki Mio 2006 18:28, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Please be careful not to attach towns in metros that aren't in the name of the metro. E.g. it's Jamesville MSA, not Jamesville/Dunkirk/Fredonia. -newkai | talk | contribs 16:39, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

That link you gave is 3 years old...I think areas like Newburgh/Middletown do include Port Jervis now (a city, not a town). Perhaps an updated official list would be helpful. Newnam^(talk) 06:34, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure it's part of the metropolitan area. That doesn't mean it's in the name of it though. We have to keep this template as concise as possible. While it's possible that the name was expanded in the last three years, I highly doubt it. -newkai | talk | contribs 12:47, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I completely agree with Newkai that we should stick with the name of the metro areas as given by the census bureau. I have recently removed Saratoga from the list because the name of the metro area is the Albany-Schenectady-Troy. Saratoga or Saratoga Springs does not appear in the name of the metro area although occasionally a vandal will try to sneak it in on capital district related articles.Camelbinky (talk) 23:02, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Until the articles actually reflect the official regions, we can't do this. I'm going to revert it back to the way it was until we either change the articles or maybe decide to ignore the official regions. Here are some problems:

• Central Leatherstocking now goes to Central New York. It is more congruent with Southern Tier. Onondaga County and Cayuga County are part of the Finger Lakes Region.

• Perhaps the worst is Greater Niagara. This now goes to Niagara Falls, New York. Much of what is under Western New York belongs to this region. The eastern part of Western New York belongs to the Finger Lakes Region.

• The Thousand Islands region is much larger than the St. Lawrence Seaway

So we either have to do some major revisions, or leave the unofficial regions and maybe add the official ones that aren't already in the list. Please share your opinions. -newkai | talk | contribs 12:44, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Don't get me wrong by the way. I do see the problem with the current setup. It's just that before we have actual articles about these regions... -newkai | talk | contribs 12:51, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding standardization of state templates (primarily regarding layout and styling) at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates. An effort was made earlier this year to standardize Canadian province templates (which mostly succeeded). Lovelac7 and I have already begun standardizing all state templates. If you have any concerns, they should be directed toward the discussion page for state template standardization. Thanks! — Webdinger ^{BLAH | SZ} 22:56, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Is this really necessary in this template? –Zimbabweed 18:11, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand its necessity either. It's a fantasy, not something the state already has... So it's not a part of the state! -newkai t-c 00:50, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

If the state has already developed it, then it should.--Balthazarduju 20:45, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I am strongly opposed to the removal of the counties, it reduces the usefulness of the template. The counties are one of the main articles this template is used for, without the direct links, users have extra clicks to navigate between pages. Additionally it conflicts with the standard that has been established across the templates for all 50 states. Also, I don't see the need for the color change, all it seems to do is make a conflict with the color scheme of the county templates. I think such changes need to be discussed before they are made and should probably be reverted until such a discussion takes place. VerruckteDan 04:18, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

I've added back the complete listing of counties. VerruckteDan 15:31, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Shouldn't the Metro Areas section link to the articles for the metro area, rather than individual cities as it does now? I'd like to change this if there are no objections. Crazyale (talk) 05:18, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

I think the intent was to link the major cities; if you change those to link the metro areas, there'll be no links to Buffalo, New York or New York City in the template. Powers ^T 13:43, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

May i add a link to Climate of New York on the template? If so, under what section (current or new)? Bud0011 (talk) 23:19, 19 July 2011 (UTC).

Why aren't the actual metro articles linked? Why are the individual cities linked instead? I mean, why not link directly to Capital District instead of three links for Albany, Troy and Schenectady? Or to New York metropolitan area instead of New York City? Here are my proposals (these could be copied in directly if desired): Albany / Schenectady / Troy Binghamton Buffalo / Niagara Falls Elmira / Corning Glens Falls Ithaca Kingston New York City Poughkeepsie / Newburgh / Middletown Rochester Syracuse Utica / Rome Famartin (talk) 00:00, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Hello? Anyone? Famartin (talk) 04:01, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

It's a good question, User:Famartin. I suspect the idea was to get major cities into the template (they aren't otherwise linked), using "part of a metro area" as an inclusion criterion. The main drawback is that it leaves out a couple of major cities (like Yonkers). Powers ^T 00:49, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Several of the other U.S. state templates have both a section for metro areas and another section for largest cities. I think this template should take that approach. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:27, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree - looking at the other state templates, this seems pretty inconsistent across the board. (There seems to have been an incomplete effort to standardize the templates many years ago, but it seems to have died by the time the U.S. States WikiProject was absorbed into WikiProject United States.) I see two sets of issues coming up if we keep both lists:

• For cities, do we list largest by population, or major cities (which tend to be anchors of metro areas and/or regions)? If the latter, how do we set reasonable guidelines that won't cause perpetual back and forth?
• There is a lot of overlap between a list of metro areas and most versions of a list of major cities. I don't think that kind of redundancy is helpful.

I think what we have represents a good compromise - we use metro areas, a clearly defined and widely recognized metric, to focus on what we consider to be the most important cities, especially given that due to suburbanization, NYS' list of largest cities includes many suburban anchors with little relevance outside of the state (if not a local region). The template's used this metro area based approach since 2006, and I think it's stood for good reason.

Now, I take a weaker stance on whether we should link to metro area articles or city articles. I do think that most people will want to see the city articles, because they tend to be significantly more mature/developed than the MSA articles (which most of the time are little more than a laundry list of geographic facts). There's a longstanding issue IMO where main city articles should probably include a subsection summarizing their metro areas, but that's a much larger consistency issue (and one that I'm not sure consensus exists for yet). However, if there's a desire to improve MSA articles to become more usable to readers (e.g., add at least brief info on history, economy, transportation), I wouldn't object to switching to metro areas.

Curious what others think about this. Vmanjr (talk) 00:44, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Well, there's my take, so others can comment on it. I listed the top ten metros (though I considered cutting that at eight) and the top ten cities. There is minimal overlap in links. Other states listing both include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Rural states (e.g. Vermont) are not going to have metropolitan areas. It's unrealistic to expect consistency in templates across all 50 states. – wbm1058 (talk) 01:25, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Except every state, even rural Vermont, has at least one MSA as defined by the U.S. Census. In fact, every state except for VT and HI has at least two MSAs whose core city is in the state. It's not unrealistic at all to expect some standardization across all states, especially when we have fairly common definitions across the country thanks to long-defined federal standards. That earlier standardization effort from 2006 is the reason the infoboxes currently have the same style and many of the same groupings.

Coming back to New York, I don't see why we pick an arbitrary cutoff such as 8 or 10 for the metro areas - is there any reasoning to that? The state has 13 MSAs, and I don't see why it would be impractical to list all 13. I've been helping on New York's pages and this template long enough (almost 20 years now) to see quibbles because we left an editor's favorite place just below the cutoff - the MSA definition, and including all of them, is a standardized way to avoid otherwise constant bickering and garner some compromise. Just some perspective based on what I've seen over the years on this particular page.

You're right that several states include both, and ultimately I'll relent if consensus here agrees that we should do this as well, but it's not true that there's minimal overlap: 8 of the largest cities are part of the 10 largest MSAs listed there, so there's a high degree of duplication. I think our current approach avoids a bloated template, and I'll note that the Texas template does the same thing. Vmanjr (talk) 05:46, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Template:Vermont uses yet another approach, for its only metro: Burlington (metropolitan area). That would be a good way to cover both cities and metros in the same group.

Cutting the metro list at 10 avoids the awkward situation of #11 Jamestown-Dunkirk, NY μSA (124,891) being larger than #12 Watertown-Fort Drum, NY MSA – go figure, some μSAs are bigger than some MSAs. I suspect there's a reason for this, but that's what strikes me as arbitrary. At some point these get so small that still calling them a "metro" seems a bad joke. Simpsons parody of the town I grew up in – wbm1058 (talk) 13:02, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

There is a reason: MSA and μSA definitions use county borders for ease of classification (except in New England, where they used something called NECTA until two years ago...), but counties have large variation in size. The true definition of the size (and arguably importance) of a population center in Census terms is the urban area, whose borders are defined roughly as an urban core and neighboring areas of high enough population density. Urban areas, while more precise, are a mess, and subject to frequent changes at their edges, hence why we tend to stick to MSA/μSA for more stable definitions. I bring all this up because urban area factors into the distinction between the two: MSAs have an urban core of at least 50k, while μSAs are those places with an urban core less than 50k. To me, that gives a clear reason why a smaller MSA is still more prominent than a larger μSA. Apologies if this is too much of a distraction, but it seemed like something that might interest you :-)

I do like the way Vermont's template handles things, and perhaps that could be a nice compromise solution? Texas' template does this inconsistently. If we go this route, then I might suggest that we call it Major Cities instead of Largest Cities, where we use some criteria for major based on MSAs. Vmanjr (talk) 22:30, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm confused by this list. Is it meant to be MSAs or CSAs? If it is meant to be CSAs it has too many entries, if it is meant to be MSAs it has too few. If it isn't meant to be either, then it seems to be an arbitrary list with no clear objective criteria for what its members should be. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 03:10, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

My interpretation is that it is meant to be MSAs. From what I can tell, all of the MSAs are in there (not uSAs, which are minor). CSAs are bad to use because they are not meant to be all-inclusive of major population centers - they literally just reflect ones that are adjacent and with some commuting across the constituent MSAs. Vmanjr (talk) 16:25, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

I'd say any metro area that has its own dedicated article, rather than a section in a more general article. I'll see how well that works. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:27, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Wait. Capital District and Tri-State area are listed in the "Regions" group, a group that's "all over the map". These should (also?) be listed in the metro areas section. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:01, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

The OpenStreetMap community recently discovered that many articles on localities in New York transclude this template. This possibly causes some pernicious side effects in PageRank-like algorithms that calculate search relevance based on backlinks. For example, a Nominatim search for "Cortland" ranks Cortland County, New York, well ahead of Cortland, New York, apparently because there are so many backlinks to each county article in articles about localities across the state that have nothing to do with the county.

While it isn't unusual for a county to be more prominent than a city, I can't think of an obvious reason why an obscure article like Hopewell Junction, New York, needs to provide navigation to all the major topics of New York State, in addition to the county-specific navbox and regional portal link. It seems a bit lopsided that this navbox provides access to only 160 articles but is transcluded on 378 articles. Can we remove the template from local articles that aren't listed in this navbox?

 – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 18:36, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

@Mxn: Thanks for bringing this up on Telegram. Funny you picked out Hopewell Junction. As I recall, that was the hometown of my first college roommate, way back in the day. You're preaching to the choir. One of my pet peeves is editors who add so many navigation boxes to the bottom of an article that they end up collapsing them all. I've clicked "show" to expand them all, and that often leads to the entire screen of my big desktop monitor filled with nothing but navigation templates! The template was added to that article way back in February 2007. My time on the wiki is way oversubscribed, so this issue hasn't bubbled onto my to-do list, but I'll take some time to help you address it before getting back to my regular programming, as I agree this needs to be addressed. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:32, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Removed from Hopewell Junction, New York. And now there are 377. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:38, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Added to Cortland, New York back in February 2006. Two removed, now there's 376. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:55, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, @Wbm1058! I wonder if there's a more efficient way to get these removed so you don't have to do it so manually. Regardless it's much appreciated. Minh Nguyễn ^💬 04:56, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Right, our thoughts are on the same page. The only way to efficiently and effectively deal with this is to develop some sort of semi-automated tool to make mass edits, which, at some point if it operated without significant blow-back, could potentially be fully automated as a bot. I think I could code something up using PHP and the MediaWiki API. I'll add this to my to-do list; no promises about how soon it might bubble to the top. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:35, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

{{ten months later}} Script developed & tested, letting it rip... will be watching it operate, and halt it at the first sign of trouble, of course! wbm1058 (talk) 10:01, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

@Mxn:  Done 201 edits, that last one was a manual update of an outlier (using an invalid parameter). User:Wbm1058/template.php – I'll wait a while for this to sink in, hopefully without any blowback, before leveraging this to make similar edits for other states. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:15, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

@Wbm1058 and @Mxn, thanks for bringing this up. For similar templates about other states, I think it may be permissible to remove these templates from pages that the template doesn't already link to, per WP:BIDIRECTIONAL: Every article that transcludes a given navbox should normally also be included as a link in the navbox, so that the navigation is bidirectional. Incidentally, this link shows that this template could be transcluded onto a few dozen more pages, though it may be of little relevance to something like, say, U.S. state. – Epicgenius (talk) 14:48, 18 November 2025 (UTC)