I have no idea where Wikipedia gets its info. I used a single source, which is the largest geographic database around. A single source has the advantage that there are less likely to be duplicates in the data. I mostly had to worry about the cases where a Fairview had an alternate name of Fair View and eliminate those duplicates.
But not every subdivision and named place is in GNIS, so perhaps they used additional sources and got a higher count. The difficulty/danger of using multiple sources is that you have to weed out duplicate references and may miss some.
I also should note that I only queried for populated places. GNIS has a variety of other types of geographic features, including locales. There aren’t a lot of them in the database, since many places that most people would describe as a rural locale are in there as populated places. At any rate, adding them ups the count to somewhere over 260, based on a query I just performed.
Also based on that query, the count for Fairview would be at most 254 if I were doing it today. GNIS is not a static database. They are constantly updating it (and its interface and URL) and I did the research for my magazine article about 8 years ago. Its current location is at U.S. Board on Geographic Names | U.S. Geological Survey and then select >>Search GNIS<< to get to the query page.
It’s a sub-county level of government in my state. A big city might have several. Indiana is cautiously edging toward doing away with the township level of the wedding cake of duplicate governments.
In many states, like Ohio, all land is part of some county. Within a county, there are incorporated municipalities (cities and villages) and unincorporated areas. All unincorporated areas are part of a township.
To put it very simply, a township is like a municipality, but without much of a government or services.
No, I don’t think so. A borough generally has a full municipal government and services. A township is just a territorial subdivision of a county. A county or a municipality will provide police, fire, power, water, etc. Townships don’t.
In the Geographic Information Systems world, townships are a kind of entitity known as a Minor Civil Division, or MCD. In some states, MCDs can be as important as municipalities in terms of addressing and locating points of interest. Those are called “strong MCD states”. In other states, MCDs are not important in the same way. Those are “weak MCD states”.
This is the sort of information used in the processing that goes on in the background when you ask Google Maps, say, to look up an address.