Template talk:Santa Clara County, California

	California portal This template is within the scope of WikiProject California, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of California 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.CaliforniaWikipedia:WikiProject CaliforniaTemplate:WikiProject CaliforniaCalifornia articles
	San Francisco Bay Area portal This template is supported by San Francisco Bay Area task force.

A couple of little things. One, no indication of San Jose's population is given. Second, Los Altos Hills and Los Gatos are incorporated as towns, not cities. Gentgeen 16:32, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, those were two concerns in the back of my mind when I created or did work on similar templates on 9 other California urban counties -- but I decided to get them started and worry about the details later. As I replied on Short Verses's talk page on not placing the county seats into the population classes, I wrote The only reason I picked those three categories was because many of the regional and state maps I own have seperate symbols for each of them. [1]

As to your second question, the main point of all of these templates was to list all the places that are incorporated. So maybe the header should be "incorporated municipalities" instead. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 17:27, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Update: Looks like I'll be putting the county seats into the population classes as well. Counties like Fresno, Kern, Monterey, and Sacramento have many incorporated cities, but the only one with over 100,000 in population is the county seat. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 09:22, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Just a question out of curiosity, are there any counties in the state where the county seat isn't the most populous municipality? Gentgeen 15:56, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The one that pops into my mind is Sierra County, California, north of Lake Tahoe. The county seat has always been Downieville. It was a major town during the California Gold Rush. But it still is not incorporated. The most populous city there is Loyalton, which is the only incorporated city in the county. In fact, (I am still trying to track down the sources to include here on Wikipedia), a lot of the county business is done in Loyalton. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 16:24, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Possible template tweaks

I like the new template, but after looking at it a while I started thinking it might be possible to make small improvements in two areas: 1) to increase the number of population groupings to make 'like' cities more apparent (EG Monte Sereno is nothing compared to Mountain View), and 2) to increase the 'content to blankspace ratio'. I created some examples of what I'm thinking of at User:Niteowlneils/Sandbox. I think I like the bottom one best, but am interested in seeing if any of them strike anyone else's fancy. Niteowlneils 22:52, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I also like the fourth one, but I prefer to move the seal image to the left side instead. The only reason it is on the right side was that I just basically copied Template:United States. Whatever you decide, I'll probably make the same changes on Template:Cities of Los Angeles County, California because it probably needs these improvements more than this template does. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 01:21, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

OK, here's the bottom one, but with the seal on the left:

Incorporated municipalities of Santa Clara County, California

Population over 500,000	San Jose (County seat)		Population over 100,000	Santa Clara \| Sunnyvale
Population over 50,000	Cupertino \| Milpitas \| Mountain View \| Palo Alto		Population less than 50,000	Campbell \| Gilroy \| Los Altos \| Los Altos Hills \| Los Gatos \| Monte Sereno \| Morgan Hill \| Saratoga

I'm not sure if the population breakdown would be practical or helpful on the LA county one, but I could probably figure out how to move the seal and shrink the purple banner to reduce the height, anyway. Niteowlneils 02:53, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am thinking that the LA county one would probably be a special case because it has the most incorporated cities. Similarily, I am still tweaking the one I just created for Alpine County because there are no incorporated cities in there at all. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 03:22, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- Thus, I might start doing the county templates on a case-by-case basis. I am also thinking about how to list Castro Valley on the Alameda County one because that unincorporated place has more people than a number of incorporated cities in the state. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 03:28, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I took a stab at beautifying the existing template with some line breaks and a new image. The existing image creates a great deal of blank space in the template and really doesn't add much. Let me know what you think.--Brianvdb 21:04, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

- First, see rule#8 on WP:FUC: images tagged as fair use are not allowed directly on the template. Secondly, see the related discussion at Template talk:US county navigation box#Not much need for the map. Thanks. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 21:24, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Actually, IMHO, it looks fine with no image at all. --Brianvdb 21:38, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Do we really need all this crap in the template?

I just added some more detail to the template to make it more accurate, but I think we need to look at the bigger picture. Do we really need state parks and colleges and universities in this template? And if we allow those exceptions, where the hell does it stop? I could make a good argument that certain prominent K-12 schools are just as important (like Harker, Gunn, etc.), as well as county parks, transportation (we already have articles on VTA, the expressway system, and San Jose International Airport), utilities, and law enforcement. And so on, ad infinitum.

I think limiting the template to geography, as was originally done, is a much safer bright-line rule that is easy to enforce. A cluttered and three-page-long template is just as useless as one with categories that are not properly filled out (in attempting to expand the template, user Seven Days left out a lot of community colleges). If people are really interested in all that extra information, we can always stick it into a See also list at the bottom of the Santa Clara County article. --Coolcaesar 21:08, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is certainly not my intention to create a useless template. Since we already had a template listing all the cities in the county, I thought it would actually make it more useful to add more details about the county itself. I may have made a mistake, and if that is so, I deeply apologize. If the community feels that my changes are not useful, then the changes should be reverted, and I will personally remove the templates from every link I created in the template. Good luck with your law studies. — Seven Days » talk 04:54, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like how CapitalR has split off the colleges and universities into a separate template. But I think we need to get the state parks out of here. If people really care about that, we can list them in the Santa Clara County article itself. Plus there is already a List of California state parks. I am taking care of this right now. If anyone has an issue with that, please discuss.--Coolcaesar 02:54, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the removing of the state parks; they just aren't necessary in this template and few other county templates for other states list state parks. Thanks for taking care of that Coolcaesar. --CapitalR 06:33, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]