Talk:List of populated places in Afghanistan

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How can a country of 16,000,000 people have so many "cities"? There's over 500 beginning with "S" alone! Some of these places must have a population of about 20. And surely there's a standard transliteration... seven names for one city is just too much. Grutness|^hello? 09:02, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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It seems like most of the links that lead to existing articles lead to completely unrelated articles, e. g. Ahmadabad, it should be written like Ahmadabad, Afghanistan. 193.171.121.30 20:53, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

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We need a minimum population to be on this list. Does 20,000 people sound around right? (rough cut off) Some of the really small towns might have no information though. Assume thoughs are unimportant? This list is quite out of hand and I think it has the most red links in all of Wikipedia! --Banana04131 00:25, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

I think this "list" is beyond hope and irrelivant List of cities in Afghanistan is much more helpful. I've started the VFD process. Please take a look and vote if you were involved.

pick a name and stick with it

One purpose of the list, is to give a standard wiki article name in a red-link. Its absurd to have two or three community names, each with its own article name. One would not (should not) create an article for each spelling of a community. Some "alternate names" are disambig articles. You should never point to a disambig article. You should also bypass re-directs. Somebody who knows the most common name, should de-link the lessor names. Some personal judgement has to be exercised here, if the list is to be of any value. Do keep showing alternate names, but un-linked.

Here's a puzzling case: "Aba" and "Abeh" are apparently the same place. "Aba" is a disambig article. "Abeh" re-directs to the disambig article. There is no actual article on the community, but they don't appear as "red-links", so nobody would realize an article is missing without clicking on it. The entry should instead have a red-link to "Abeh" or "Aba, Afghanistan". Pick one, and stick with it. --rob 14:10, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, that was me. I think you are right. Bubamara 23:20, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Article Size

Since this article is HUGE, I suggest removing the brackets from names without an article. There is no sense in having a page full of red links. Only keep brackets if the place has its own article. Acetic Acid 20:15, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

• That edit got reversed. As I said in my comments of Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Places_in_Afghanistan, I think signal to noise ratio is way too high. I'm going to revert it to the last edit before we had 1500 entries. Bubamara 23:20, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. This version doesn't freeze my computer up. :P But, I still don't see the point of having red links everywhere. Is this a reason for it? Acetic Acid 00:50, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

Shir Khan?

Is there also a place called Shir Khan? Because Shir Khan is a person . . . Bubamara 02:13, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Article length

I feel like the article with all those place names is unusable. Like I said, the signal to noise ratio is dismal (ok, I actually said it was too high which is dumb, but you get the idea). It would be much different if this were a list of all the notable places in Afghanistan. I don't feel strongly enough to get into a revert it back and I don't know enough to intelligently pare down the list. Does anyone have a compromise suggestion? - Bubamara 09:28, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

This is a typical case of systemic bias. We have articles on every locality, no matter how small, in the United States. We're well on the way to seeing the same in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom. There's clearly a precedent for having an article on every locality - just because it is in the third world is not a reason to exclude it from Wikipedia. We already have a list of all the particularly important places in Afghanistan; List of cities in Afghanistan. This, however, serves another - and I would say much more important - purpose.

It is true, though, that this article is very long, and does need quite a bit of work at present. The sensible alternative, however, is not to delete it, but divide it up into provinces, as has been done everywhere else in the world - and then fix the links that point to places they shouldn't. Ambi 10:27, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I totally agree. I think it's fantastic that we have this list. Does anyone know where it came from? It would be helpful in starting to do the necessary work. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 16:20, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

List of places

Shouldn't this be moved to "List of places in Afghanistan"? It's a list, after all -- Gurch 17:19, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Proposal to reduce length of article

The following are politically, geographically or economically notable places in Afghanistan. Please, the article clearly includes more irrelevant places than notable places. Let's get rid of all the places without an article. --71.200.63.193 18:10, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

No. This isn't "list of cities in Afghanistan". It is "list of places in Afghanistan". All of these places potentially warrant articles. Rebecca 08:57, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Where did this list come from in the first place? Genuine Afghan towns are as notable as British or American ones, but how do we know these places actually exist? They aren't referenced, and I think vandals have added some as "amusing" uses of slang words... check the logs for Bum, Afghanistan [1]. Moyabrit (talk) 21:25, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Ting?

Someone needs to disambiguate the link to Ting in this list. Note that Ting has no mention of a place in Afghanistan. The article name (perhaps Ting (Afghanistan)?) should be agreed upon, and added as a redlink both here and at Ting. Thanks. --Tkynerd 13:02, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I went ahead and disambiguated the link, pointing it to Ting, Afghanistan. --Tkynerd 23:54, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Some serious numbers

I'm glad the page was kept -- given the country's military situation, small places are of more than normal interest, since combat at them may be more than domestic news -- but the list is in a wretched state. It would be more valuable with info as to each place's district and province, and lists alphabetically within districts and provinces would also make more sense.
In any case, here are some numbers other than just of the top of someones head:

1. I used the J section as a more or less random sample. It has 129 entries, each applying to one place; several of them included 2 to 4 lks to different names for the same place, and these totaled 63 "extra" links, bringing the total number of lks in the section to 192. That gives an average of 192/129, or 1.5, lks per place.
2. Of those J lks, 22 are blue, but the number of those lk'g to articles on Afghan towns (or in one case, a city) was 13. (The remaining nine were "false-blue" lks, failures to Dab'ate the lk, consisting of 6 lks to unrelated articles, and 3 lks to Dabs, which each had either a rd-lk'd entry for the corresponding place, or entries only for articles unrelated to that place.) Dividing 13/129 gives 10% of the J places having articles. (But about 7% have counter-productive links.)
3. Per pop-tools, the number of links on the page is 7241. Twelve of those (presumably) are for the 12 cities of 136K or more, leaving about 7229 lks for more typical places.

   As to the smaller places as a group, FWIW:

4. Subtracting the 6.5M people in the 12 largest cities from the national pop'n of 31.9M leaves 25.5M people outside those 12.
5. Applying the J-section lk-per-place rate (1 above) to 3 above suggests that the number of smaller places is 7229/1.5 or about 4920.
6. Combining the preceding two suggests a mean smaller-place population of 5,200, but the median should be much lower, since (down to a level -- somewhere between 1000 and 10? -- where a group of people is no longer likely to be counted as a named place) smaller places tend to be increasingly more numerous than larger ones. (Hmm, bcz populations of towns and metropolitan areas are limited by the sum of the physical and social resources within "commuting" distance, and economies of scale drive portable resources toward resource concentrations, tending to make town size usually a function of nearby natural-resource density...?) Places that small mostly lack the significance and visibility that makes an article likely. (I'm reminded of Mỹ Lai, Vietnam which was obscure enough that early reporting on the My Lai massacre was confused enuf to suggest that Song My was another name for the hamlet, rather than the name of the village that contained the hamlet. And even in the face of that internationally notability, our lk to each of the two places is to a Rdr for a district's article, not to an article on the respective place itself.)

So i urge out-of-(at-least-the-last-3-years'-)box thinking about what editing will make this list useful. (That's as far back as i looked for signs of a change in the page's big picture.)
--Jerzy•t 05:44, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Incomplete List

This list is seriously lacking in the number of entries needed to truly be called a "List of places in Afghanistan". The article on Afghanistan states that it has an area of about 251,772 square miles. If you consider each individual square millimeter to be a "place", then there would have to be approximately 6.520864865155e+17 entries in this list for it to truly be complete. The current listing most likely doesn't even come close to that! --98.114.243.75 (talk) 22:53, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Nice try :) But not every square millimeter has a name. A place needs a name in order to be listed. -- œ^™ 08:15, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Gutted

I have gutted this page. At over 150K bytes, it was unnavigable and practically uneditable. It is pointless and impossible to have a list of every "place" in one country, along with a sea of unverified alternate spellings for all these places. Therefore, I have reduced the scope of the article down to villages, settlements, and towns (basically any kind of human living place that isn't an urban area, which should go on List of cities in Afghanistan).

The majority of the links on the page were red. Many of these were duplicates or alternate spellings of each other. With no way to verify which were legitimate separate villages with similar names and which were misspellings or alternate spellings (or, indeed, which were complete hoaxes), I removed all of them.

The majority of the blue links on the page were for villages in Iran (seriously, dozens of them, to the point that it seemed like intentional vandalism) or other articles not about settlements in Afghanistan. I replaced those where I could with links to Afghani settlements, but many had to be removed as no article could be located. I also removed the majority of alternate spelling listings, as most could not be verified and these are easily three or four ways for any given Afghani place-name to be spelled in English.

My intent over the next few days is to make a few extra passes to ensure the removal of all duplicate links and links that don't go to settlements in Afghanistan. Then I'll re-check this list with Category:Populated places in Afghanistan and its sub-categories to ensure I didn't miss any places.

I intend to keep an eye on the article and tidy up any non-verified (redlink) additions, but I have no agenda past that. If someone else wants to reformat it to be sorted by province / district, by all means feel free. Alphabetical seemed easiest for now as province / district isn't always verified in the articles. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:50, 26 March 2017 (UTC)