Talk:Cariboo A, British Columbia

BIG problem with these titles

On this page in the locator/neighbouring areas box the names of IRs are given in their Wiki formats - e.g. Alexandria 1, Alexandria 1A, which in combination with the Wiki format for EAs like this one gets very confusing. Neither is the accepted local term for the areas/locations these articles are for; "Cariboo A" is actually the North Cariboo region, i.e. the area has a geographic name irrespective of its status as an EA, and Indian Reserves are always (except by StatsCan and the Wiki guideline derived from that mis-call) referred to in the form "Alexandria IR No.1" or "Alexandria IR 1" - I cant' think of anyone in the area scanning on "Alexandria 1" as meaning the Alexandria IR. No. 1, and there's no correlation between actual FN settlements on reserves adn the IRs themselves; most bands "run' several physical reserves, including uninhabited ones; a given locality may have twenty or more reserves attached to it, and the band-name and the reserve-names don't necessarily correlate either - around Lillooet I can think of the Pashilqua reserves, which are under the governance of the Cayuse Creek Band, and there's a series of Lillooet-numbered reservers, most under the Lillooet First Nation but not necesasrily; and there's "isolates" like the Silicon IR No. 1 and Retaskit IR No. 1 for which there's no reason for Silicon 1 or Retaskit 1 to exist (those I think are under the Seton Lake Indian Band but they're uninhabited; Slosh IR No. 1 on the other hand is a BC Hydro lease (the Bridge River powerhouses and townsite) and has a complex land and usage history that does deserve an article; the community there btw is in the same EA as the upper Bridge River Valley; that EA is pretty much synonymous with "Bridge River Country" (a term which generally doesn't include the lower Bridge River below its canyon, but does include Seton, which isn't in the Bridge River valley.....point is there's an existing and historically-well-used region name, there's no reason for an EA article to exist other than in relation to representation on the RD board; just as Cariboo A is the "North Cariboo" (a subregion article in need of writing); complicating matters is that the South Cariboo includes areas in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, and the Chilcotin-Coast-Cariboo tourism district indludes Lilllooet and the Bridge River as if part of the Chilcotin....(as define by Cariboonians and Chilcotinites, not by Lillooet-area locals). The relevant articles for such peoples/communities cannot hope to be adequately accounted for by treaing IRs and EAs as if they were communities/locations or quantifiable/specifiable in the same way as a municipality; IR articles have their place, but like EAs they are not substitutes for geographic/community entities that already exist in the local mindset in other ways. EAs in particular, as outlined elsewhere, are not how people in the localities they encompass as they way they see their area; StatsCan may need to parcel people out using EAs as some kind of quasi-county boundary, but that's not what they are. Treating them as if they were is actually "synthesis" - taking A, adding B, and making X because you need there to be an X, even though the components of A and B don't say that there actually is. I think there's a lot of faulty logic relating to RDs and they way they've been implemented in Wikipedia as a substitute for county/region divisions, and in the way the Electoral Areas have been titled by a bureaucrat in Ottawa (when the BC government itself doesn't use such names)......and people only speak of their Electoral Area when referring to matters of regional district jurisdiction, not in terms of raw geography or human history....Skookum1 (talk) 18:04, 1 September 2008 (UTC)