Talk:Detroit

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• History and geography

I'm wondering if anyone had thoughts on whittling the history section on this page down substantially. I ask this because the History section has become quite large and perhaps unwieldy. Should we:

I'd love thoughts from folks. Happy editing!

(This is my first RFC. I hope I did this right. I had to edit it because I didn't initially even see that we had a separate History of Detroit page!) Bill Heller (talk) 05:34, 29 December 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

• (A) Keep size as was on 19:22, 28 December 2025 here -- (I'm deliberately avoiding taking a position supporting or opposing the changes by the RfC poster just prior to this RfC.) The individual sections within the history section look about the right length to me. It's good to see a substantial history of the city, which is lacking for far too many locations on Wikipedia. If the entire length of the article is getting close to the maximum allowed, I would reconsider. How close is it? --David Tornheim (talk) 12:01, 29 December 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

  It's very far below the maximum size. Max size is usually about 2 million bytes. This article is 240,879. After I added some recent history and cleaned up some out of date stuff ("will be developed into" to "was developed into"), I figured I'd ask what the community thought about the length. Bill Heller (talk) 18:36, 29 December 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

• (B) Edit to include a reduced size History Section in WP:Detroit with a link to the other page..

I do think there is an unnecessary level of detail. The legacy section also seems oddly positioned. It might be worth referring the length of other US city / state history sections and somewhat following along their organization.

There's a lot of historical explanations to stuff that isn't directly related to Detroit, for example:

When Great Britain evicted France from its colonial possessions in New France (Canada) in the peace terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, it also removed one barrier to American colonists migrating west across the mountains. British negotiations with the Iroquois would both prove critical and lead to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which limited settlements South of and below the Great Lakes and west of the Alleghenies / Appalachians. Many colonists and pioneers in the Thirteen Colonies along the East Coast, resented and then simply defied this restraint, later becoming supporters of the rebellious American Revolution.

As well as a passage that mentions they switched to LED lights, and the history of the Michigan Central Station seems extraneous.

All this being said, I don't live in Detroit, so take my words with a few grains of salt. :) MSWS (talk) 08:43, 31 December 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

• Somewhere between (A) and (B).

By which I mean: The history section could be trimmed to be something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the current length, but I would not support a more substantial removal. ("Reduced size" in option B covers a whole lot of ground.)

There is some unnecessary detail (as User:MSWS has pointed out), and like a lot of articles there tends to be a recency bias. However, I like having the in-depth historical perspective in the article, particularly for a city like Detroit where the historical changes are a big part of defining what the city is today. Andrew Jameson (talk) 17:49, 31 December 2025 (UTC) [reply ]