Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 204

Our articles on administrative subdivisions of the United States, and particularly on cities and metropolitan areas, lack useful descriptions of their economic structure. With a few exceptions, they offer little information on regional economies beyond anecdotal mentions of companies headquartered there. I would like to write brief sketches of the economic structures of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas (starting with the largest by population and working down the list in order of population size as my time permits). To do so, I would use publicly available data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to perform the arithmetic calculations described in our article on economic base analysis. I would not draw any conclusions beyond those directly indicated by the data (for example, that the manufacturing sector of a given metropolitan area is larger than the U.S. average). I checked the detailed description of the policy of No Original Research because I was concerned that others might object to this information on those grounds. But the policy seems to allow arithmetic calculations using clearly sourced data. I want to see if others agree that this would be an acceptable way to strengthen our coverage of regional economies. So my proposal is to provide simple economic base analyses of U.S. metropolitan areas. Forgive me if my presentation departs from the norms here. I've been an infrequent editor for years and am not familiar with these norms. I appreciate your contribution to the consensus on my proposal. Marco polo (talk) 17:43, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Simple calculations are fine, but I'd be careful with things like statistical analysis. The best approach would be to find sources that have already done this analysis and then summarize them. There should be plenty of journal articles or books that cover the economies of major American cities. And if there's certain information you can't find, that probably means it's not important enough to be included. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:33, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

My thought was that it might be helpful to have a uniform set of information for each metropolitan area to facilitate comparisons among them, but maybe that sort of thing isn't wanted in Wikipedia. Marco polo (talk) 19:38, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

User:Marco polo, judging from the linked article economic base analysis – which has two sources, one of them an applied research project submitted "in Partial Fulfillment for the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Public Administration" – this theory of economic analysis does not seem to be especially popular. If this is something you're interested in, maybe a first step would be to expand that article with more sources, and examples of economic base analysis using real data of major US cities could be included there. Folly Mox (talk) 18:09, 23 September 2023 (UTC)