Talk:United States metropolitan area

Contents

1 Tri-State Area 2 Mozilla 3 Unofficial "Metropolitan Areas" vs. Metropolitan Statistical Areas 4 Suspected vandalism 5 Excuse Me? 6 Out of date MSAs 7 Expansion to top 50

Tri-State Area

I'm a Chicago resident who has heard "Tri-State Area" being used to refer to Chicago, southeast Wisconson, and northwest Indiana. I didn't want to change the page, because the NYC Tri-State Area already has an article, but can anyone else confirm or deny that this is a Chicago-area term as well? -Trillian

"Tri-state area" or "tri-state region" is sometimes used to describe the greater Chicagoland area. It is also used for the southwest Ohio-southeast Indiana-northern Kentucky area around Cincinnati. There are probably other areas that are known by that name as well. older≠wiser 13:17, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

Mozilla

This page is hopelessly illegible using Netscape. I'm going to try mozilla and see if that works.

Did it work with Mozilla? It looks fine in IE. -- Zoe

I'm using netscape, and I don't have any prolbems seeing this page.Gentgeen 22:17, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Unofficial "Metropolitan Areas" vs. Metropolitan Statistical Areas

Crossposting from Talk:Delaware Valley:

We shouldn't confuse unofficial and vague ideas of metropolitan areas with specific census-defined Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area is a group of counties defined by the U.S. Census to exist. This is what is discussed in this article. The "Delaware Valley" is a vague term used unofficially. There is no reason to suggest that it is identical to the Census Bureau's Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City Consolidated Metropolitan Area. For instance, I doubt most people would recognize Cecil County, Maryland or Cape May County, New Jersey as part of the "Delaware Valley," even if they are part of the Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City Consolidated Metropolitan Area. We need to stop acting as though the areas defined by the census area are an NPOV description of metropolitan areas in the US. For instance, the Washington-Baltimore CMSA is ridiculously huge, including almost entirely rural counties as far out as West Virginia or Maryland's Eastern Shore. Many have suggested that this definition is largely done in order to lower the government's cost of living assessments for federal workers by including lots of cheap, rural areas in the metropolitan area where so many federal employees live. I think we need to get our acts together on this. john k 04:20, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Suspected vandalism

Apologies if the revert of an edit by 24.13.145.196 was inappropriate. Someone using that IP number has vandalized Abortion, Lynndie England and Andrew Jackson this morning. Since I cannot verify his edit I have reverted it.

User contributions

For 24.13.145.196 (Talk)

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   * 04:44, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) Lynndie England (top)
   * 04:44, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) Lynndie England
   * 04:33, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) Abortion
   * 02:11, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) Andrew Jackson
   * 02:10, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) Andrew Jackson
   * 01:51, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) United States metropolitan area (top)
   * 01:38, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) Korn
   * 01:37, 18 Dec 2004 (hist) KoЯn

--[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 04:52, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Excuse Me?

I was the person who made the Northern Jersey section of the article. I clarified it as North Jersey, as Trenton is actually a part of the Philadelphia metro area. Is clarification vandalism. Vandalism would be considered defacing the site with fuck yous all over it. This was not vandalism, it was a reasonable edit. Use your fucking mind before making stupid vandalism claims.

Also, look at my other contributions. Some of them aren't vandalism edits. Nobody else bitched about them!

As I said, I wasn't clear and was only reverting on suspicion, and you have my sincere apologies, your edit was not vandalism. Look at all of the other changes above, and you'll see that quite a few were clear vandalism and were reverted either by me or by other editors. This was the one borderline case in which I chose both to revert and leave a message so that if I had been mistaken the edit could be restored by you or another editor. Your IP number is probably a WWW proxy and thus your posts are difficult to distinguish from the vandal. This kind of occurrence--being mistaken for another poster using the same IP number--will never happen to you again if you choose a username. Your IP number is currently listed on Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress so any edits from that IP in the near future will be scrutinized closely and the IP number itself may be blocked. As I use a WWW proxy which is also being intermittently blocked because it is also used by a vandal, I sympathize. --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 02:34, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

As a wise man once said : "It's all good"

Out of date MSAs

Why are we using here out of date MSAs? The latest version ([1] (http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/metro-city/0312msa.txt)) has rather broken up some of these, notably. john k 14:55, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've heavily revised the article. I used the new (2003) MSAs. I removed discussion that pertains to the old definitions (PMSAs and CMSAs, New England MSAs being based around towns and cities rather than counties). I hope this is acceptable. john k 03:21, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Somebody mentioned that the CMSA/PMSA definitions are the ones used for the most recent census, and the MSAs are for the next (2010) census. Mackerm 03:37, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yuck. I don't like throwing out the old CMSA definitions in favor of MSAs only, since I feel the combined areas better reflect metropolitan populations. While it looks like the Census Bureau has stopped using CMSAs, they now record data for Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs) [2] (http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/metro-city/0312csa_ccbsa.txt). I'd be much happier if we used these instead. - EurekaLott 03:51, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

To Mackerm, I'm not sure what you mean - MSAs aren't determined by the Census Bureau, but by OMB. The new ones went into effect in 2003. They have no necessary connection to any individual census, in that they are merely categorizations of counties, which do not change. EurekaLott, the CSAs are even more outlandishly huge than the CMSAs. The CMSAs were pretty awful at reflecting metropolitan areas, imho - Baltimore and Washington being combined into one was an awful idea, for instance. At any rate, whatever the CSAs are, they are explicitly not metropolitan areas. Notably, the word "metropolitan" does not appear. Furthermore, they are combinations of metropolitan and "micropolitan" areas. As such, using these instead of the MSAs seems inappropriate. If we are going to base our description of US metropolitan areas on OMB's definitions, we ought to use, well, the definitions that OMB uses, and not manipulate their stuff to fit better with our own sense of what things should be. john k 04:48, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Expansion to top 50

Would anyone object if I expanded the list to show the top 50 rather than top 25? The main reason this is important is because advertisers/marketers often target top 50 metro areas, and anything below 50 is comparatively neglected. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Contrib} 18:56, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sounds okay to me. The next 25 are listed at List of United States metropolitan statistical areas by population in a table basically the same as this one. Conveniently, the top 50 are also the 50 with populations >1,000,000. john k 19:51, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I won't have time to do this very soon, so if anyone else wants to tackle it, please feel free. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Contrib} 01:57, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

If you all are going to change the data to the 2003 statistical areas, it would be good to cite the census page which lists the population figures. (I can only find data at census.gov with the 2000 population figures). Mackerm 23:11, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I was just using the 2000 census population figures. john k 02:11, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Is there a page at census.gov with these figures? I find it surprising that the Dallas and Philadelphia areas have exactly the same populations. I say go back to the official totals. Let's wait for the new census to use the new statistical area definitions. Mackerm 03:03, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Huh? I added up the populations of the counties included in each MSA. This would be exactly what the census will do at some point. No need to wait until 2010. As to Philly and Dallas, that is a mistake I made while transferring my info from one form to another. I will correct it. I used the county and city data book to get the population figures for the counties. john k 03:19, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

FYI, the data for all these is available at [3] (http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t29.html) under table 3a. Should there also be a list of consolidated metropolitan areas, which are also defined by the OMB? older≠wiser 03:48, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me that ultimately we should have a list of all Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Micropolitan Statistical Areas, Combined Statistical Areas (which are groups that combine MSAs and McSAs into units similar to the old CMSAs), and so forth listed. We should also, ultimately, have articles on all of them which are separate from articles like Greater Cleveland, which should detail the unofficial ways in which terms like that are used, and perhaps discuss both the CSA for Cleveland (which includes Akron as well), the MSA (which includes Cuyahoga and several neighboring counties) and the cosniderably smaller urbanized area, which is mostly just the larger part of Cuyahoga County. The last definition, of urbanized area, seems to me at least as natural as the MSA definitions, and much more logical than the utterly enormous old CMSA definitions, or the new CSAs. Being from the Washington DC area, the urbanized area - which seems to consist of DC, Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax City, and the majority of Montgomery, Prince George's, and Fairfax Counties, with perhaps parts of Prince William and the city of Manassas - seems much more reasonable to me in terms of where I would expect somebody from the "Washington Area" to be from than the enormous MSA, which includes places like Frederick or Solomons or Fredericksburg, not to mention some county in West Virginia. john k 04:30, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I changed my mind about expanding to top 50, as I hadn't noticed the full list linked in here before. That list resolves my concern. However, I do agree with John Kenney that a more refined listing is needed in the Wikipedia. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Contrib} 13:26, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I am definitely in favor of an additional page that focuses on CMSAs and other categories, just to show that there are different ways to define a "metropolitan area". Funnyhat 22:47, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)