This page is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions.
I have some doubts about the importance guidelines here. Having any city with a population of >100k automatically be a top-importance topic just doesn't work when the city in question is a suburb of a major metropolis. I've lived in Texas my entire life, and I've never even heard of Grand Prairie, Texas until today; it may technically be a city of more than 100,000 people, but to anyone outside DFW it's just a neighborhood in Dallas. Even WikiProject Dallas only rates it as mid-importance! I suggest ammending the city guidelines to something more like :
Top: The anchor cities of metropolitan areas with populations >1M inhabitants (Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso); these are cities that all Americans have probably heard of.
High: The primary cities of metropolitan areas with populations >100k inhabitants, EXCLUDING suburbs of other, larger metropolises (Corpus Christi, Laredo, Lubbock, Amarillo, Brownsville, Killeen, McAllen, Waco, Midland, Abilene, Beaumont, Odessa, Wichita Falls, Tyler, College Station, San Angelo, for example); these are cities that someone outside the state might have heard of, and that almost all Texans will have heard of.
Mid: Cities and micropolitan areas with populations >25k inhabitants, INCLUDING large suburbs of metropolitan areas (including large suburbs like Arlington, Katy, Round Rock, Schertz, etc.); these are cities that will be familiar to many Texans but to few outside the state.
Low: Cities and inhabited places with population <25k inhabitants (such as Llano, Albany, Brenham, Hondo, etc.) that even Texans who don't live nearby may not have heard of.
This seems much more informative and reasonable to me than having e.g. Irving, Texas be a top-importance article under the current guidelines.
I'm neutral. To help understand how this might look (minus the considerations for suburbs), here's some data: Wolfram Alpha says these are the Texas cities with population larger than 1 million: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio (total: 3). with population larger than 100k: Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, El Paso, Arlington, Corpus Christi, Plano, Laredo, Lubbock, Garland, Irving, Amarillo, Grand Prairie, Brownsville, Pasadena, McKinney, Mesquite, McAllen, Killeen, Frisco, Waco, Carrollton, Denton, Midland, Abilene, Beaumont, Round Rock, Odessa, Wichita Falls, Richardson (total: 32). It lists 115 cities with more than 25k, and 1397 with fewer than 25k. Hebisddave (talk) 13:20, 9 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In my opinion, "cities" aren't as meaningful as metropolitan areas; contiguous cities in a major conurbation, while legally distinct, are, for practical purposes, little more than historical regions of the larger metropolis. As I tried to indicate above, I would determine importance inclusion by populations of metro areas rather than of cities; I'll edit my original proposal to make that more clear. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:02, 9 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
