Talk:Metropolitan area

What is a "city", what a "metropolitan area"?

I've started a discussion at Primate city#What is a "city", what a "metropolitan area"?, which is more relevant here and for the city and conurbation pages.

I see it as a matter of self-definition, which can be ideologically or politically driven, so not objective in any way. See for instance Jerusalem municipality vs. Tel Aviv & Gush Dan aka Tel Aviv metropolitan area. There must be many examples, but this one is arguably within the same country and therefore more poignant. The "city" might have less contiguity of its built-up areas than the "metropolitan area" or "conurbation", but being called a (or one) city makes it be at least perceived as more unitarian and compact. Conundrum. Arminden (talk) 06:29, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Addition of citation template

This edit by User:107.127.46.35 adds a citation template to this article. I don't understand the justification for the edit, which is summarized in edit history as "Tagged". In order to improve the article, I'm asking for some guidance about what specifically needs to be improved. A number of editors have put effort into including reliable citations. However, reading the article now, most statements are factual and supported by legitimate sources. So I'm at a loss as to why the citation template would apply here, or what would need to be changed to justify removing it. Clarification would be appreciated, and absent any clarification I will WP:BEBOLD and remove it. Cleter (talk) 17:04, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

United states metropolitan area populations are incorrect with an odd source

The section listing the united states metro areas and their populations is not correct, and it cites some european website ("Global Human Settlement - Stats in the city visualisation - European Commission". human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu) that seems to have no grounding to actual reality.

Clicking on the cited link and browsing around to known cities shows many incorrect breakdowns of metropolitan areas, likely from some faulty data set.

The New York metro area is off by nearly 10 million people, for example. Jacksonville, FL is missing almost half of its population and for some reason has a neighborhood split out into a city.

This should be updated based on US data that reflects actual US administrative divisions, such as the official MSA facts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area) 173.199.247.114 (talk) 06:38, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Splitting proposal: List of metropolitan areas section to List of metropolitan areas

Going by this massviews analysis, the Metropolitan area page is currently the most-visited Start-class Vital-4 page on Wikipedia. In an effort to get this article back on track, I propose that the section 'List of metropolitan areas section' be WP:SPLIT to List of metropolitan areas so that it can be properly focused upon as a List-class article, as it needs a ton of cleanup. The main article should discuss the concept, history, etc. of metropolitan areas, not list them all. chickenpox4dinner (talk) 19:29, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

• Support per nominatior.

Versions111 (talk • contribs) 02:58, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

While it would be good to split off the "List of metropolitan areas" section to a separate article, it would be even better to WP:TNT the section, and I'm not joking, and here's why.

IIRC all the population data in this section points to a single data source: Global Human Settlement - Stats in the city visualisation - European Commission. While the European Commission is an excellent source for statistical data, the data in that particular set are not for metropolitan areas! And not for urban areas either. (as already pointed out by the discussion topic above, and by the template I've inserted at the beginning of the article section). They are for "Urban centres", which are defined as a contiguous blob on a population kilometre grid with a certain minimum population density. So in many cases these "Urban centres" will be smaller than the city proper even. A conurbation will usually have multiple such "Urban centres" despite being a single urban area, etc. That makes it counter-informative to provide these figures when disguised as metropolitan area populations, especially with methodology unexplained.

Furthermore, the only reason these figures appeared here, is because I've somehow managed to persuade the IP-user who keeps on adding these figures to "keep them out" from the conurbation article where the figures, for the reasons already mentioned, don't belong either… And so he moved on to here. Dżamper (talk) 17:38, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

You're totally right, this is WP:INDISCRIMINATE based on one source. I'm gonna be bold and delete it, and hopefully the article rewrite won't look half as daunting. Yours, chickenpox4dinner (talk) 19:01, 22 January 2026 (UTC)