Thanks for your comments, @doreen . That’s helpful. Does that mean that the SBS pamphlet and the Comptroller’s statement are defining “Rockaways” differently? Do you think something like that could be the source of the conflicting numbers? Are they defining the community differently?
Honestly, what you might want to do is to post something on the Talk page for the article. That will be seen by any editors who have the page on their watchlist, meaning they have some interest in the article.
Not necessarily. Looking at the Talk page, there’s not a lot of activity on the page.
Plus, this is more fun! 
The page info says there are 44 page watchers, although there’s no way to tell how many of them are active; some may have stopped editing Wikipedia years ago.
I agree with this!
They’re all defining the area differently - The OSC report uses
Located from east to west, the communities along
the Rockaway Peninsula are Far Rockaway,
Bayswater, Edgemere, Arverne, Hammels, Seaside,
Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor, Neponsit, Rockaway
Beach and Breezy Point. These communities, along
with Broad Channel which lies north in Jamaica Bay,
make up the Census-defined area of Far Rockaway,
Breezy Point and Broad Channel, referred to in this
report as the Rockaways
Broad Channel is not actually on the peninsula - it’s a island between the peninsula and the rest of Queens .
The SBS pamphlet does not include Far Rockaway , which according to the Wiki page has a population of about 50K itself. That seems to be based on census data , but that table has this note
*Neighborhood Tabulation Areas, or NTAs, are aggregations of census tracts that are subsets of New York City’s 55 Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs).Primarily due to these constraints, NTA boundaries and their associated names may not definitively represent neighborhoods
Part of the reason it’s difficult is that below the county level, the only official boundaries in NYC are for particular purposes and don’t coincide with each other. They are for community boards or census tracts or for the districts of elected officials but there is no official boundary between Neponsit and Rockaway Park. Those are just neighborhoods and may be represented by the same city council member who represents part of Brooklyn or Far Rockaway may be represented by the same state senator who represents a piece of Nassau County. So you can’t really find an official population number for Rockaway Park or the Rockaway peninsula.
And about those LIPA numbers - I don’t know how LIPA could have particularly good population numbers. They know how many accounts they have but I don’t see how they can know how many households that represents , much less how many people ( it’s not unheard of for a building with more than one apartment to have a single account for a utilities).
I think that the Comptroller’s report comes as close as we’re likely to find to the list of communities in the Wikipedia article, so I’m going to update the population estimate with that one.
This is so cool. LMK when it’s all done.
Did it right after my post here yesterday.
I put the new population estimate in the infobox, and in the mention of the population in the third para of the introductory section. Updated the link in footnote 5 to be the Comptroller’s page, instead of the 2008 newspaper article. Edit summary for the changes:
Update population estimate with stats from Comptroller’s office.
You can click on the page history section to see the edits.
By the way, @doreen , thanks for your comments upthread. Very helpful.
Thanks! I feel like this guy:
Now I can go to bed.
In that one comic, Randall has summarised why Wikipedia works.
Haha! Definitely.
You’re welcome - I figure I’m probably the only person in this thread who lives twenty minutes from the Rockaways.
I’m about 45 minutes away, but I grew up there.