Talk:Postal village

This article was nominated for deletion on 14 August 2021. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Region?[edit]

Which country or countries does this article related to? Bermicourt (talk) 18:27, 3 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Post village" seems to be largely American; "postal village" seems mostly Australian though it sees some US usage as well. Mangoe (talk) 04:40, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I was able to turn up some stray Canadian uses of "post village" as well. Hog Farm _Talk 05:08, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Accuracy[edit]

The actual substance of this article is completely uncited, and given US postal practices of the time, I'm not convinced it's accurate, or for that matter, that people in different countries meant the same thing by it. The two citations are merely for the definition of abbreviations, but I have not found in either work where they define the term. Nor have I found any place else that does. And in the US, it was a common practice before RFD to put a post office in a train station, a store, or even a room in someone's house. These all had names as if they were towns, but there was no town per se there. Given a lack of a contrary definition, it could just as well be that a "post village" in the US was such a 4th class office and therefore not a town. Likewise, it is entirely possible that the compilers of these works could not distinguish between post offices that were in towns and those that were not. At any rate, we need a source with a definition. Mangoe (talk) 04:40, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried everything I can think of, and I can find no source providing a clear-cut definition of this term. Tellingly, one of those late-19th century lists of places that the term often appears in I found to also list "post-hamlet", "post-borough", and "post-township" separately. Right now, I'm not convinced that this term has a set definition. Stuff in the article such as By establishing a post office in a particular community it receives official recognition, often for the first time, for a name, an important step in the development of any community is almost certainly original research. The article as written is almost certainly US-centric, as the term is in reasonably heavy use for non-US places.

Unless someone can find a source nailing down a definition for this, at least for the US, I'm inclined to think that this is an amorphous term meaning anything from an actual village to an undefined rural area where there happened to be a post office in the area. Hog Farm _Talk 05:08, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is similar to the UK concept of a "post town" which is part of the system used by the Royal Mail to deliver post. So if postal village is or was used in this way, then the article should be kept, but make much clearer what it means or meant in which postal system. Bermicourt (talk) 09:19, 14 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]