Talk:North Yorkshire Council

Merger of North Yorkshire County Council and North Yorkshire Council

I was surprised to see this merger done with little or no discussion, apparently on the sole grounds that "The memorandum to the Structural Changes Order makes it clear that the county council was not abolished, instead becoming the unitary authority council."

While it is true that for reasons of administrative efficiency the county council was not legally abolished but renamed North Yorkshire Council, the reorganisation was presented by both central government and the old council as the formation of a new council which replaced both the county council and the 6 district councils - see here and here. The new council, as a unitary authority, has very significantly different functions from the old council, is differently organised and has a different number of councillors representing different electoral divisions. This is surely a case where substance should prevail over legal form.

In any case the merge has not been completely done. For example, the effects on the category structures have not been carried through.

There is a similar issue in Somerset Council. In that case there was a brief discussion. A user objected to the merger and reversed here, the editor who had been reversed then added a merge tag here. There was then a discussion here. There were no objections in 2 days, and the merger was submitted as a Technical Request here 2 days, and carried out by a non-admin editor here. It did not appear to meet the criteria for a TR, and 2 days is completely inadequate to alert interested editors, let alone generate proper discussion.

I propose that this merger should be reversed and we should have an adequate discussion about the proposal. Mhockey (talk) 20:21, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

I second Mhockey's proposal. There is a lot of gun jumping and moving around and changing stuff with minimal disussion among UK Geography editors at the moment. Procedure is important. Rcsprinter123 (confess) 22:22, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

@Mhockey: This was discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography/Archive 29#Unitary county councils: separate articles or not? for over 3 weeks and no objections were raised, 3 other editors supported the proposal. After the objection and restoration the discussion at Talk:Somerset County Council had 5 people support with the person who originally objected withdrawing their objection and supporting. Yes these could perhaps have been discussed on the talk pages of the articles with them being tagged for a while but the consensus at both discussions seems clear.

Yes they may have different functions but they cover the same area so I can't see why we need 2 articles even though there may be a good reason to make a distinction it doesn't seem worthwhile. WP:OVERLAP applies as even if we want to argue they are 2 different things they're at least very similar things and having a single article seems more helpful than splitting on the grounds of a reorganization. We've managed for years with only 1 article at Durham County Council and Northumberland County Council where the same changes happened but the council wasn't renamed. The only reason for having 2 articles for the others otherwise seems to be the fact "County" was removed from the name.

Categories for the older council names will stay the same while those for the new one can use the new name per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 November 5#Swaziland. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:13, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

If you strongly feel there should be 2 articles I don't really have a problem with having 2 articles as someone who is generally an inclusionist but I don't think we really need 2. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:27, 15 August 2023 (UTC)