Talk:List of regions of the United States

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PNW & Cascadia

Should the list of multi-territory regions include both the Pacific Northwest and Cascadia, especially when they link to the same page? Procyonidae (talk) 04:17, 20 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Census regions

I work for the census bureau so I'm afraid editing this would be a conflict of interest, but the census regions on this page haven't existed since 2013.

The current ones are here: https://www.census.gov/about/regions.html ACupOfCoffee (talk) 22:02, 3 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Order of the states within the divisions.

In the section called "Census Bureau-designated regions and divisions" the states in each division are listed in alphabetical order. This is better than randomly ordering them, but I think it would be better still if they were ordered according to position on the map, with attention paid to which states touch which, because that would allow the reader to more easily picture the states and the division in the mind's eye. For example, I propose that instead of alphabetically ordered,

  "Division 1: New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont)
   Division 2: Mid-Atlantic (New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania)"

we have "cartographically ordered" (for want of a better term),

  "Division 1: New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont)
   Division 2: Mid-Atlantic (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania)"

The proposed order for Division 1 and Division 2 is north to south along the coast and then the landlocked states from west to east. Ordering the states within Division 5 the same way gives,

  "Division 5: South Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, West Virginia)"

Other similarly "mind's eye friendly" algorithms could be used for ordering the states of divisions that lack a coast. Optionally, the ordering principle could be stated at the outset, for the benefit of the reader. Arctic Gazelle (talk) 17:31, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The reason why Washington D.C. not listed as part of Division 5.

I always think of Washington D.C. as being part of Division 5, although it is not a state, but rather a federal district. It says "Puerto Rico and other US territories are not part of any census region or census division.[9]" but it isn't clear to me that D.C. is a territory like Puerto Rico, and I expect that this would also be true of most readers. So I think there should be some explicit mention of D.C., e.g. "Puerto Rico, District of Columbia, and other US territories are not part of any census region or census division.[9]" if D.C. is territory like Puerto Rico, or "Puerto Rico and other US territories, and the District of Columbia are not part of any census region or census division.[9]" if it isn't. Or if it is part of Division 5, it should be added to that list, perhaps at the end of the list. The list could be, for example (see my section above for why it my proposed order is not alphabetical), "Division 5: South Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, West Virginia, *District of Columbia)" with the asterisk indicating that D.C. is not a state. Arctic Gazelle (talk) 17:52, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]