It turns out that the Indian geographical hierarchy is a mess, and it is my doing. Quite clearly, I had not understood the policy. I have now reread Project:What is an article?, Wikivoyage Talk:What is an article? (including my own question and Jani's answer) and the Project:Geographical hierarchy policy. Let me lay it out to ensure that I am clear.

Briefly, the geographical hierarchy under a typical Indian state is:

• State S
  • (Optional) Region R
    • District D
      • The district headquarters, a city or a town, usually also named D
      • (Optional) smaller towns
      • Lots of small villages which may have attractions that are spread out - lakes, temples, resorts, etc.

The approach we have been taking is to have a D (district) that follows the region template, and a city page D that follows the small city template.

The problem:

1. In the vast majority of the cases, there isn't and will never be enough content to justify two articles. Maintaining them is a problem, especially when you have two articles with the same name and people are confused about where to put their stuff.
2. In the vast majority of the cases, the district headquarters is just a little town with nothing worth seeing. Most of what's there to see is in the surrounding countryside.
3. In some cases the above is not true.
4. The current region article template says that we should only summarize the attractions in the region, and only the really important ones should be mentioned in detail.
5. The What is an article? policy says that remote attractions outside cities should not get their own articles, but be put in the Get Out section of the nearest cities.
6. Put 2, 4 and 5 together, and we end up with a D which has hardly any content in its main sections, but an enormous Get Out section.

This does not make much sense. I guess what we should do is:

1. Have D as an article that covers the entire district. List all the attractions there. Do not create a city article unless it is absolutely needed.
2. When it is needed, break it out, but continue to list attractions that will be found in a district in that district. Put an "explore the district" in the Get Out section of the city article.

Does this violate our guideline that attractions go into the lowest level? Does it require any change or clarification to our policies, or was I misunderstanding it all along?

I think it's absolutely fine to merge cities/towns with their surrounding districts, we already do this quite often elsewhere. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:59, 22 August 2009 (EDT)