Talk:List of cities and counties in Virginia

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• The Skyline of the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.jpg

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Fictional counties page

• The 2016 supernatural horror film The Autopsy of Jane Doe is set in Grantham County, located close to the city of Richmond.
• The Netflix drama miniseries Echoes takes place in Easton County and the county seat of Mt. Echo.
• The Playstation game series Syphon Filter has a fictional Virginia municipality by the name of Langley Virginia where the main character Gabriel Logan is from.
• The historical drama TV series The Waltons is set in Jefferson County, specifically in the fictional community of Walton's Mountain.

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Here's the current section (shown above). The 3rd bullet point is vague. It does not imply whether the fictional municipality is a city or town (which is important because towns can be part of counties). According to the the Syphon Filter article, the game takes place around Washington DC. I suspect that the fictional municipality called Langley is a fictionalized version of the unincorporated community of Langley, itself part of the census-designated place McLean because Langley is where the CIA is located (and therefore a metonym). Because the aformentioned entry on the list does not specify what municipality (unincorporated communities in Virginia such as CDPs are assumed to be towns or cities), this is an ambiguous case. I deleted the bullet point, but if they assumed it was a city, it might be worth putting, though that's ultimately moot if this fictional municipality is simply assuming that a real-world unincorporated community is a municipality, as some websites refer to unincorporated places like Tysons or Reston as cities or towns (both are census-designated places).

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18:19, 14 September 2023 (UTC) SlopeInterceptor

Form of government

Should the list of counties include a form of government column? It seems Virginia has a variety of government structures for counties that may be beneficial to list and sort here. See sources here: [1] [2] --Gimelthedog (talk) 16:26, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Independent City Creation Dates are inconsistent and, frankly, make absolutely no sense

The listed creation dates of Independent cities make no sense whatsoever. First of all, there needs to be some kind of agreement on when any of these cities genuinely became Independent from the counties, as an argument could be made that it happened anywhere from the formation of Williamsburg in 1699 all the way up to the official constitutional recognition of these as being independent from the counties in 1974. What are we considering to be the date of establishment here? Is it the time they became settlements, the time they became incorporated towns, the time they became incorporated cities or the time they became Independent Cities? I'm finding vote totals being listed for specific cities in 1872 alongside counties various newspapers before they are listed as having been created, and more importantly the Library of Virginia states Danville as being incorporated in 1890, even though this page said it became an independent city in 1870. Most of the dates of "Establishment" (Which is exceedingly vague) have no source whatsoever, and the ones that do cite the 14th US census, or in some cases cite the city's webpage. These sources are highly unlikely to be consistent. There's also a source listed at the top next to the label of the "Establishment" column, but it does not work anymore. It links to the intended webpage, but to a 404 regardless. There is no consistency here, this is a vague topic and while I understand that there are different perspectives on when they truly became Independent Cities, but we cannot use every perspective AT THE SAME TIME and not differentiate them! For Lynchburg, the Establishment date is 1786, which is when the "city", which was then seemingly nothing more than a settlement, was CREATED. It didn't even become a TOWN until 1805! On the other hand, we have Richmond being stated as having been established in 1870, when it was incorporated as a city all the way back in 1842! Is there some strange milestone here, some kind of specific occurrence in each of these cities that made them true, genuine counties that I'm not seeing? It seems to me, and I understand completely that I could be wrong, but it seems that we are using DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS OF "ESTABLISHMENT" for DIFFERENT CITIES. If we cannot agree on one definition, then we need to list the dates for EACH definition. We need to do anything, as long as it's not this, because this isn't working.

Again, I could absolutely be wrong, that's 100% possible, but with all due respect to the person who made this page, I'm sure they're very dedicated to ensuring we have information on this kind of stuff and I admire that, but something HAS to change. And If this is actually correct and I'm the crazy one, then can somebody please explain the situation to me? TheGrassWhistle (talk) 19:57, 16 June 2024 (UTC)