Talk:Montgomery County, Maryland

Proposed merge of Montgomery County Sheriff's Office (Maryland) into Montgomery County, Maryland

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is consensus to merge Montgomery County Sheriff's Office (Maryland) into Montgomery County, Maryland. As consensus is not a vote, the closer must assess the arguments brought forward by the two sides to a debate. In this case, the arguments of those in favour of merging centre around notability and encyclopaedic value. On the opposing side, only Sallicio gives reasoning for their view, and they have not rebutted the lack of notability of the source page or asserted its encyclopedic value beyond what would be due on the target page. Felix QW (talk) 10:58, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

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The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office does not appear to be notable on its own. Although the present page has a decent number of references, none appear to constitute significant coverage, and the majority are primary first-party sources. Most of the page content is picayune and not encyclopedic, consisting of trivia about the department's equipment and lists of nonnotable sheriffs. I was actually a little surprised by this one considering the size of Montgomery County, but maybe the Montgomery County Police Department is the important law enforcement agency in the county? Apocheir (talk) 01:13, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Opposing view: I think the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office page should remain its own entry, regardless of size of the agency or article length. Maybe the article itself can be improved. It is true that the same county's police department is better funded and is the primary law enforcement agency in Montgomery County, but that alone should not justify killing the Sheriff's Office page on Wikipedia. (talk) 00:05, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Nobody is proposing to "kill" anything. The proposal is to merge this page into the county's page, preserving that content which is encyclopedic and verifiable. No organization is inherently notable, and this sheriff's office is not an exception. -Apocheir (talk) 20:01, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

The agency was founded a year after the republic, in 1777. The article is (relatively) well-written, and is not spam or self-congratulatory. WP:IAR would seem to apply here. Remove the tag, keep the article, and move on to more pressing issues in this project. Too much time is spent on doing things just for the sake of doing them because it doesn't strictly meet WP guidelines. Lucky for us WP:IAR saves us from nonsense such as this. It's me...Sallicio!^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 15:21, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I really don't think IAR means you get to ignore the entire verifiability policy. It's also not helpful to call good-faith efforts towards increasing the quality of this encyclopedia "nonsense". -Apocheir (talk) 23:47, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

No one is suggesting to "ignore" the entire policy (and I'm pretty sure you already know this). And actually, IAR is exactly for instances like this. IAR is to promote a modicum of common sense and judiciousness when editing. This is a LE agency that is as old as the nation itself. I don't have time to save articles like I used to, but I am pretty sure one could find plenty of "verifiability policy" information on the net. I could be wrong, but if one really wanted to "increase the quality" of the project, one would transpose every bit of includable information from the article one was blanking to the new article (including relevant photos and infoboxes). Based on your history of "merging", you don't do much work beyond blanking pages, redirecting, and adding a few passing sentences about the original article. And you do this at a rate that would rival the world's fastest supercomputer. Because of this, it seems you are more concerned with increasing your edit count than the quality of the project. There is a lot of good information being lost when one doesn't responsibly merge articles. I make no bones that I am an inclusionist; but do as you will: delete it, merge it, or do whatever you want. (Note: Just so you know, I really don't think you're a "bad editor". But I do think you are not taking the time to properly merge articles, and not nearly enough time to think "Is what I am doing actually making the project better?" And I'm not saying all your merge suggestions are wrong. Your heart is in the right spot. Just slow down. Way down.) It's me...Sallicio!^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 00:44, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

I am not trying to inflate my edit count, as you keep accusing me of. This would be a very inefficient way of doing that, for one thing. If that was all I wanted to do I'd go fix typos or something like that.

Removing material that is biased, unverifiable, or not notable improves Wikipedia. Despite your assertions to the contrary, the article's citations almost entirely consist of content produced by the MCSO or bodies closely related to it. Practically no organization is an unbiased source for information about itself. The article cites posts on their Facebook page, for crying out loud!

Since you keep pointing to the department's age, I would also mention that 1777 is not old for a sheriff's department in the US. The Albany County Sheriff's Department was formed in the 1660s. Prince George's County Sheriff's Office was formed in 1696, so the MCSO isn't old compared to other sheriff's offices in Maryland. Like most sheriff's departments in the US it was created shortly after the creation of the county it serves. There's a difference between "old" and "historic".

If you have an interest in sheriff's offices in Maryland, you are in the best place to find reliable sources to establish notability for this page. Instead you've just been saying that the rules don't apply to you and cheerfully accusing me of bad editing practices. I don't know how to have a discussion with someone who refuses to even acknowledge that the rules might be useful guidance. Apocheir (talk) 20:41, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

• Keep leave it as it is. --evrik ^(talk) 22:18, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
• Support merge The sheriff's department article isn't really an encyclopedia article, it's a handful of lists that all vaguely relate to the same thing. The individual sheriffs are NN and are not going to become notable, and it's not clear what encyclopedic value is served by a long list of names of people about whom nothing interesting can be said; there's a single source for essentially the entire list, which would make an appropriate EL or reference in the merged article. The history section has more space devoted to sub-headings than to actual content; the duties are trivial content (shocker, it's a sheriff's office!) and mostly unsourced; and the sourcing in the Equipment section is farcical. Trim out all the junk and what's left would make a very nice section in the article on the county. --JBL (talk) 12:04, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Proposed merge of Montgomery County Council (Maryland) into Montgomery County, Maryland

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Anything that would go on the page of the Council is either already on the main County's page or the List of Councilmembers page. While it is notable on its own, it would also just be the same thing that's already listed elsewhere. Oath2order (talk) 14:20, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I started Montgomery County Council (Maryland) with the notion that there might be council history that would be relevant on the council's page but not really on the county page. I also would propose that the merge should be List of Councilmembers into the Council page. But I certainly haven't done anything about it since, and it is a rather stubby page, so I won't object if people want to merge the Council page into the County page. PRRfan (talk) 20:30, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

A thought: how about merging List of members of MCC into the MCC page? PRRfan (talk) 21:07, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I like that idea, it keeps it the same. But what else would be on the MCC page? Just copy and paste the history from here to there? Oath2order (talk) 19:31, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

That's what I'm thinking. Put it under the existing intro ("The Montgomery County Council is the legislative branch of the government of Montgomery County in the U.S. state of Maryland. It has nine members who serve four-year terms. All are elected at the same time by the voters of Montgomery County"). Eventually, I would think, we'd add more council history and information about its processes between the intro and the list of members. PRRfan (talk) 19:39, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Should be merged with List of members of the Montgomery County Council (Maryland), I feel. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 03:52, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

How come, and what do you think of the above stuff about List of into MCC? Oath2order (talk) 06:37, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

County nickname

I had long heard that the county's nickname was "Monkey County," especially when goveernment or their officials did something especially incomprehensible to residents. Montgomery Wards department store was also nicknamed Monkey Wards, for those of you over 50 years of age and remember that! The statement that the county's nickname is "MoCo" well, I mean I've heard that recently, but the source material is a poll taken for naming a bus in 2015 and the county executive's endorsement of a hashtag (#) MoCo. Neither of these sources scream, "origin of an official nickname" to me. StarHOG (Talk) 21:30, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

I've lived in MoCo for at least a decade and have never heard "Monkey County". I'm also relatively active on the subreddit, also never heard that there and believe me there are complaints when the officials do things. Oath2order (talk) 21:40, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Someone mentioned to me that it was so common that the department store, Montgomery Ward, was also referred to as Monkey Wards. StarHOG (Talk) 16:09, 22 August 2023 (UTC)