Per Project:Reliability of GNIS data there are many ( sub)stub articles on Minnesota places that have been created sourced to GNIS entries. A lot of them falsely designate things as "unincorporated communities", which is several GNIS importers' catch-all equivalent to the the GNIS catch-all feature classification code " populated place". GNIS has many errors, and all of these (sub)stubs need cleanup.
The simple truth is that Minnesota does not have "unincorporated communites". Per the Census of Governments and Brill & Kaplan 2011, p. 55, figures being rough because they have gone up and down over the past 40 or so years:
The overwhelming majority of the state is either a home-rule city, a statutory city, or a town/township under a board of supervisors; the rest ( most of which is in the north of the state) being "unorganized territories", which we have Category:Unorganized territories in Minnesota for.
Category:Unincorporated communities in Minnesota should actually have zero members. Anything there is either a mislabelled city (sic!), faulty GNIS data, or faulty articles.
The United States Bureau of the Census has consistently said from at least as far back as 1936 to the 21st century that "[t]he terms 'town' and 'township' are used interchangeably in Minnesota with reference to township governments"( USBS 1936, p. 46).
When what was now the state of Minnesota was one of several Territories of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, it was surveyed into rectangular areas named "townships". Old 19th century sources (e.g. Kiester 1896) and the 19th century Laws of the State of Minnesota (e.g GLSM 1860, p. 113) consistently call these survey townships congressional townships because it was of course the United States federal government that invented them. After statehood, provision was made so that congressional townships could be incorporated as units of local government below the county level, an optional so-called Township Government system.
Strictly speaking, Minnesota local government townships (a.k.a. civil townships) are towns.( Adams 2003, p. vi) The legislation from 1860 to the current Minnesota Statutes of the 21st century consistently uses the word "town" and says that legally these are corporations and their governing boards of supervisors are called "Town Board of name".
Rather than a town being a settlement larger in size than a village and smaller than a city, as our town article would have it, a town in Minnesota is actually countryside, a rural area and explicitly not a population centre or an urban area. The urban areas used to be villages and cities and are now only cities.
Per Project:Reliability of GNIS data there are many ( sub)stub articles on Minnesota places that have been created sourced to GNIS entries. A lot of them falsely designate things as "unincorporated communities", which is several GNIS importers' catch-all equivalent to the the GNIS catch-all feature classification code " populated place". GNIS has many errors, and all of these (sub)stubs need cleanup.
The simple truth is that Minnesota does not have "unincorporated communites". Per the Census of Governments and Brill & Kaplan 2011, p. 55, figures being rough because they have gone up and down over the past 40 or so years:
The overwhelming majority of the state is either a home-rule city, a statutory city, or a town/township under a board of supervisors; the rest ( most of which is in the north of the state) being "unorganized territories", which we have Category:Unorganized territories in Minnesota for.
Category:Unincorporated communities in Minnesota should actually have zero members. Anything there is either a mislabelled city (sic!), faulty GNIS data, or faulty articles.
The United States Bureau of the Census has consistently said from at least as far back as 1936 to the 21st century that "[t]he terms 'town' and 'township' are used interchangeably in Minnesota with reference to township governments"( USBS 1936, p. 46).
When what was now the state of Minnesota was one of several Territories of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, it was surveyed into rectangular areas named "townships". Old 19th century sources (e.g. Kiester 1896) and the 19th century Laws of the State of Minnesota (e.g GLSM 1860, p. 113) consistently call these survey townships congressional townships because it was of course the United States federal government that invented them. After statehood, provision was made so that congressional townships could be incorporated as units of local government below the county level, an optional so-called Township Government system.
Strictly speaking, Minnesota local government townships (a.k.a. civil townships) are towns.( Adams 2003, p. vi) The legislation from 1860 to the current Minnesota Statutes of the 21st century consistently uses the word "town" and says that legally these are corporations and their governing boards of supervisors are called "Town Board of name".
Rather than a town being a settlement larger in size than a village and smaller than a city, as our town article would have it, a town in Minnesota is actually countryside, a rural area and explicitly not a population centre or an urban area. The urban areas used to be villages and cities and are now only cities.