Talk:List of designated places in British Columbia

Curious....

Noting that the list is incomplete, I suppose that accounts for why those listed are from only seven regional districts. But looking over a few of them, and the description in the linked designated place article, I'm curious about Bell Acres and especially Cultus Lake....isn't Cultus within the City of Chilliwack now? Bell Acres sounds familiar, but I'm not sure at all where; it's not in BCGNIS; where's Bell Acres? Brilliant, likewise, is I think now part of the City of Castlegar, as are AFAIK Raspberry and Robson....Skookum1 (talk) 20:21, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Further to previous, Laidlaw is now part of the District of Hope, and Ootischenia like Brilliant is part of Castlegar. It's curious to me, too, why North Bend and Boston Bar can even be counted separately, as they're pretty much the same place; I'm wondering if the designated place article needs some re-definition. And Harrison Mills is definitely part of the Municipality of Kent.....Skookum1 (talk) 20:27, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

The definition of a designated place allows for communities that used to be unincorporated but have since been amalgamated into another municipality to be counted as DPLs. As the article says, "Others may be former municipalities which have been merged into larger governments but have retained DPL status in order to ensure statistical continuity with past censuses." "Others may be formerly unincorporated settlements or formerly independent municipalities which have been merged into larger governments, and have retained DPL status in order to ensure statistical continuity with past censuses." (Caught a problem with the old wording and changed it...)

Basically, once a place gets accorded DPL status its first time, it usually stays that way forever unless it actually becomes a real municipality in its own right — if it just gets annexed into another place, it retains DPL status anyway, especially if it's geographically discrete from other parts of the municipality it got annexed into. Some of the DPLs in other provinces are inside municipalities too, so it isn't a uniquely BC issue.

The article is literally just a rewording of Stats Can's official explanation here, and the list and category collect the places that are actually listed as DPLs in Stats Can census data here. If there's a disparity between the two by which they're improperly applying their own definition, that's really their issue to fix rather than ours, because the whole shebang is literally just a mirror of the official source on the topic.

As for Bell Acres, unfortunately the StatsCan page just lists the places and isn't useful for tracking down where they are. But viva Google: 2001 Census Profile of British Columbia's Regions: Bell Acres.Bearcat (talk) 01:11, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

[post edit conflict] Curious indeed....I just re-looked up Bell Acres, this time using CGNDB, the NRCAN database, and it's not there either. Nor is Barney's Bar or Imperial Ranchettes and numerous others. Some I know where they are, but oddly they don't conform to other Census Canada divisions, e.g. Dog Creek Road Area, which of course is at/near Dog Creek, British Columbia on the east side of the Fraser opposite Gang Ranch, and I'm guessing that it refers to the non-Indian Reserve inhabitants around there; but it could be a linear area, as the Dog Creek Road runs from Highway 97 quite a ways to Dog Creek proper; but that area is otherwise counted as part of an electoral area of the Cariboo Regional District. In other cases, such as the Hornby Island Trust Area and Thetis Island Trust Area Parts A & B, and the half-a-dozen or so on Saltspring Island, are parts of electoral areas (in Saltspring's case the Capital Regional District, in Hornby's case I'm guessing but maybe Comox Valley Regional District, Thetis .... maybe the Cowichan RD? Or Nanaimo? The "Trust Area" designation relates to the Islands Trust (needs an article), whose powers pre-empt those of the RDs and are the actual governing body for the various Gulf Islands (another reason why RDs are inapt as region-demarcators in BC). It would be nice if their table provided map-definitions of these places, and also their coordinates, but no such luck; some appear to be real estate developments, like Imperial Ranchettes (wherever it is) and Bell Acres (which is supposedly in the Fraser Valley but I've never heard of it; there's a Bell Road in Mission but it's aalways been part of the District of Mission since that was created....ditto BX/Silver Star Foothills, which must be in the Vernon area (near Silver Star Ski Resort)....Commodore Heights seems another real estate development, wherever it is....a very curious list overall as it has a number of items which don't correspond, again, to the "main" census subdivisions. I'm unclear what use these areas have, statistically or ?? BTW I was wrong about Laidlaw, it's just outside the District of Hope despite being more populat4ed than some of the areas annexed to Hope (they probably wanted no part of the municipal government; I know the area, at least physically)...and why Hagensborg, which is very small, is cut into two Areas I can't figure out, it's not even relevant in electoral district terms (Stuie, at the upper end of the Bella Coola Valley, is in another electoral district than the rest of the valley, which given the place's isolation makes no sense at all). Not that you have answers for these questions; but these places are problematic article/list wise as in many cases there's no way of defining them or locating them, since they're not in geo-locational databases like BCGNIS and CGNDB, and how they're defined map-wise is a mystery. Why East Popkum is separate from the rest of Popkum, likewise is a mystery (could be because Popkum proper is an Indian Reserve?). Durieu is a micro-location of a few farms and maybe a post office; but just 200 yards up the road is Hatzic Prairie; Durieu as defined here must include a lot more than the actual place of Durieu, as there's definitely not 133 people at Durieu. All very strange, but then statisticians are often known not to make very much sense....Skookum1 (talk) 01:17, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Huh, yet another government geonames database.....turns out to be a subdivision off the side of Chilliwack River Road, just southeast of the bridge to Cultus Lake....I woulda thought that to be a part of Sardis, which is a part of Chilliwack but I'm not familiar with the City of Chilliwack's boundaries; what's strange is the boundary they've chosen for Cultus Lake, as the roads adjoining the mapped area area also considered part of Cultus Lake, i.e. if you lived up in there, you'd say Cultus Lake is where you lived....I"m curious also how to categoize all these; Category:Designated places in the Fraesr Valley seems more apt than Category:Settlements in the Fraser Valley Regional District, as these aren't discrete in local usage terms at all and there would be lots of overlap with "actual" settlements.....not a series of article I can see much worthwhile in propagating other than for utility of transcribing Census Canada data....but to what end? I mean, do these have any other notability than being Designated Places?Skookum1 (talk) 01:27, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Very often there wouldn't be enough notability to warrant a separate article, no. However, what I've done with not-obviously-notable DPLs in other provinces which are really just parts of larger municipalities is to create a redirect from the DPL name to the municipality's article, and then stick the DPL category on the redirect. It's worth ensuring that Wikipedia has complete information at least at the list level, but that obviously doesn't mean that each individual DPL necessarily requires a separate article if there's a suitable redirect target where the settlement in question can be more adequately addressed. Bearcat (talk) 18:35, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, this gets back to the Robson/Raspberry issue. Robson and Raspberry are separate communities, albeit next to each other, and both are now part of the City of Castlegar (SFAIK). They're separate om BCGMIS and CGNDB and Atlas of Canada, and nowhere in either of those does "Robson/Raspberry" occur - it's a StatsCan invention. I think there's a few other "pairings" in the list, too. The only reason for the Robson/Raspberry, British Columbia article to exist is because it's a DPL; those two communities have very separate origins/histories and each some historical notability; the DPL does not.Skookum1 (talk) 21:49, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

It's not your role or mine to second-guess why StatsCan does the things it does — every place that StatsCan lists as a DPL needs to exist on Wikipedia as a link to something. It's best evaluated on a case-by-case basis whether any given DPL is better handled as a separate article on the community/communities or a redirect to the municipality that the place is part of, but it's simply not Wikipedia's job to decide that some of the places aren't real. Not every DPL needs an independent article — if Robson and Raspberry are really part of Castlegar, then they can certainly be redirected to Castlegar and mentioned in there instead. But we don't get to decide that anything on StatsCan's DPL list doesn't even exist, or that DPL status isn't sufficiently notable to warrant some sort of mention on Wikipedia. Any position other than "if they list it then so do we, period" would fail both WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. And in point of fact, StatsCan only assigns DPL status to communities at the request of the provincial government — so it's the BC provincial government that decided that a single combined "Robson/Raspberry" and a separate-from-Cultus-Lake "Bell Acres" were specific localities that it wanted data for, not StatsCan. StatsCan doesn't invent things to count — it just counts what the provincial and federal governments ask it to. Bearcat (talk) 06:14, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Incidentally, I happened to be near an Indigo store the other day, so I went to the travel section and took a look at MapArt's BC Interior atlas. Just to clarify, at least when that book was published a year or two ago, Robson and Raspberry were close enough to Castlegar that they were probably functionally part of the city, they lay outside of the actual municipal boundaries of Castlegar. And they were depicted as being essentially one continuous band of development — while one end of the band was clearly Robson and the other end was clearly Raspberry, it was basically impossible, at least from the map perspective, to determine where one would actually demarcate one from the other. So since any actual boundary between the two would effectively be an arbitrary line somewhere in the middle of a continuous band of settlement, that would be why they're considered one single DPL. I wasn't able to get an answer on the Bell Acres issue that way, however. Bearcat (talk) 19:23, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's not the issue that if there's a cite for something we have to have an article for it, even though there's f-all to add but its population stats, but if that is the case then StatsCan is not the only source with lists of places (including lists of places which obligingly include latlongs and sometimes name origins, such as BCGNIS, which lists Robson and Raspberry separately, as does CGNDB/Atlas of Canada). This gets to the heart of what I was saying about RDs, too, as there are other often more important subdivisions of BC than regional districts are, and these aren't just the Land Districts but also the Forests Regions/Districts and various other systems; they're all valid, they all get entries. Just because StatsCan is a government source doesn't mean it's the only government source and other ministries and agencies of the federal government have different region-breakdowns; RDs and EAs have been used as census regions only because they coincide with municipal data-gathering needs, but they don't represent social or cultural realities or even administrative realities (other than administration of municipal-type services like building and septic permits, though varying on the RD many engage in regional planning/emergency planning measures, but as only one of several players in those formulae; Regional Management Planning Units are pan-ministry and call in various "stakeholder" groups ranging from Chambers of Commerce to local NGOs and others; and there's the unique instance of the Islands Trust which supersedes the authority of the regional districts as far as governance of the various Gulf Islands goes (and they have their own regions and classifications). All of these warrant articles and/or categories. Now, re the provincial government asking for places to be DPLs, I'm curious to know why they want that, and which branch of the government it's for; some kind of data abstraction no doubt, possibly to do with social services and/or economic planning, but they don't even show up in census community profiles, where the EAs are used. And noting in passing, when regional district articles cite census figures totalling their municipal and EA populations, the on-reserve Indian populations are not counted, so as geographic desriptor articles even for population purposes some OR is inevitable if the so-called "region" that is the RD is used to give an accurate portrayal of who lives inside its boundaries. I've wondered, too, in many cases, who to accurately state population without committing 2+2=4 and therefore an OR/synth calculation. The population of the District of Lillooet does not reflect the actual size of the place, because of the three large reserves that border immediately on the district and are part of the town in a very functional sense; this is only one of countless examples ranging from West Kelowna through to Alexis Creek through to Hazelton, British Columbia (that article was written by User:CindyBo to encompass Hazelton, New Hazelton, and Old Hazelton (Gitaanmaax) - "the Hazeltons" - but in combining them it's effectively synthesis....now as far as whether Robson or Raspberry being now part of Castlegar, all I know is I saw a map of Castlegar in the paper when I was hanging in the Slocan in '07 that seemed to indicate a broader area than just-earlier boundaries, and I know there have been amendments to the Municipal Act and various municipal expansions and RD-rearrangements just in the last few years, so despite its newness that book you found might well be already out of date; I have a contact in the area and will just ask; and maybe find a cite from the City of Castlegar or its own up-to-date map; and just because somewhere is a neighbourhood of a larger incorporated area doesn't mean it has to be a redirect; it's not like categories for municipal neighbourhoods don't exist, and when places have distinct identity and distinct histories it's all the more reason for them to be listed separately, and again StatsCan isn't the only defining parameter for how Wikipedia should arrange things; quite the contrary; assigning a priori supremacy to one government agency's system over that of another official source makes no sense at all and is an OR choice/arbitrariness; in correspondence with the CGNDB folks they agreed with me, for instance, that it's difficult to get other ministries to respect official toponymy, this in relation to Environment Canada's use of newly-coined ecozone names in places of actual geographic names (e.g. Boreal Cordillera, which they write up as if it were a known mountain range name but is of their own coinage). DPLs are notable as DPLS, they're not notable as community-names; that some happen to coincide or overlap with "real" communities, or to include two of them for whatever arcane purpose of the provincial govenrment (but not others, such as North Bend and Boston Bar); but whatever history there is for Bell Acres, it seems not notable in that regard; Robson and Raspberry and various otheres on that list are, however. Popkum, British Columbia includes, SFAIK, the East Popkum DPL; it also includes the reserves of the Popkum First Nation (those taht are in/around Popkum, that is, as some may not be). So for that one place, there's Popkum, the community, East Popkum DPL, the Popkum IR(s), whatever EA it is of the FVRD that includes Popkum; and that's not including the Popkum First Nation government article or Popkum people. So built-in redundancy is all over the place, and all are citable. But the East Popkum DPL is only citable as a DPL - so we probably have East Popkum's population statistics but not Popkum's, which will be reported as part of the aforesaid EA of the FVRD and not spcefically. What might be out there, maybe from BC Municipal Affairs, is community-by-community statistics, in the same way that the BC number crunchers take StatsCan regional data and re-structure it into Development Regions, the boundaries of which may not coincide with RD boundaries and likewise the Foressts and Environment and Health regions; some do, some don't. So they're at some point all notable AND distinct in meaning/scope/purpose. And shouldn't be mingled/jumbled or one given pride-of-place before the others, except as applicable to the jurisdiction in question (by jurisdiction here I mean which branch or agency, and again provincial and federal ways of cutting up BC are, or can be, very different....). Now, sure, I'd like to find proper population stats on Dog Creek, but what StatsCan offers, by way of its DPL, is "Dog Creek Road Area" - I'll look at the map, but I doubt it coincides with the place of Dog Creek. StatsCan has its limitations, and its own vagaries; Wikipedia shouldn't be bound only by IT.Skookum1 (talk) 01:45, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I never said that Wikipedia should be bound only by what StatsCan says. But anything that is on their DPL list needs to be a link to something on here. Whether that's as an independent article or as a redirect to something else is a matter of editorial discretion, to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. A considerable number of the Ontario DPLs, for instance, exist on Wikipedia only as redirects to larger parent entities, not as articles of their own — and I'm the one who made them redirects. So I don't see why you're continually making this about me, because I'm not saying or doing what you seem to think I'm saying or doing. We can decide in each individual case how best to present the information about any given item on the list, whether that's as a separate article or a redirect somewhere else — but the list itself needs to be an exact match of theirs with no arbitrary "I deem that to be not a real place" exclusions. Bearcat (talk) 21:55, 8 June 2009 (UTC)