The Persian word abadi (Persian: آبادی, romanized: ābādī) comes from آباد ābād which translates to "populous, thriving, prosperous".^[1] Abadi correctly means "settlement, inhabited space" but has become a term used in common Persian speech to refer to a village.^[2]

According to the 2006 Iranian Census Enumerator's guide (in machine translation)^[3]:

"In this census, a settlement is defined as a set of one or more interconnected places and lands (both agricultural and non-agricultural) located outside the boundaries of cities and having an independent registered or customary boundary. Accordingly, not only villages, but also , etc. that have independent registered or customary boundaries ."

Note that in the original the word used for "settlement" in the above section is "abadi". As the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry for abadi also notes^[4]:

"The five type of ābādī comprised (1) the village, i.e., a complex of habitations and fields with an official head, (2-3) non-village agricultural areas (mazraʿa), administratively either separate or part of a village, (4-5) non-agricultural sites (makān), likewise in two administrative categories (ibid., pp. 70-71). According to this definition, as applied in the 1973 agricultural census, Iran’s ābādīs comprised about 59,000 villages, 6,000 independent farm areas, 16,000 administratively dependent farm areas, and 2,000 non-agricultural sites (Natāyeǰ-e saršomārī-e kešāvarzī: marḥala-ye avval, 1352, Tehran , 1354 Š./1975). Together they contained nearly 3.3 million households, with villages containing 99 percent of them. ; the rest averaged 51 households each (30 percent contained fewer that ten each, 13 percent contained 100 or more). Forty-seven percent of the households were found in ābādīs of fewer that 100 households. As to geographical distribution, half the ābādīs were in mountain regions, and half in the plains."

The Iranian census, like other censuses and other official statistics, is aimed at statistically assessing the country as a whole. This necessarily means it monitors places where either no-one lived, or only small numbers of people live, or where people live but only temporarily. It is not intended, and should not be used, as a "list of villages".

A 2018 summary of geographical points within Iran gave the figure of 106,167 different sub-points (i.e., all subdivisions of any kind) within Iran. Of these 94,185 were abadi.^[5] In contrast, statistics produced by the Iranian ministry of the interior in 2020 found there to be 45,926 official villages (rosta) within the country, with the total number of codes given to all villages and farms being quoted as more than 130,000.^[6] Therefore, by any measure, abadi, including individual farms, greatly outnumber officially-recognised villages within Iran. As Encyclopaedia Iranica points out, due to the widely varying data available for Iranian villages, "It is thus necessary to use the data from gazetteers with caution".^[7]

Articles 2 and 3 of the Iranian "Law on Definitions and Rules of Country Divisions" dated 14/4/1362 (Islamic calendar) states, in machine translation, that:

"Article 2 - A village is a unit of origin of country divisions that is homogeneous in terms of environment (natural, social, cultural and economic conditions) and is independent of a specific registered or customary area and territory, where at least 20 households or one hundred people, whether concentrated or dispersed, reside there, and the majority of its permanent residents are directly or indirectly engaged in one of the activities of agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture in general, rural industries and fishing, or a combination of these activities, and is commonly called a village, settlement, hamlet or village. Note 1 - A farm is a geographical and local agricultural point that is not defined as a village and is known in two forms: independent and subordinate. Note 2 - A place refers to a point that is not a village by definition and is mostly a place for non-agricultural activities (factory, station, workshop, coffee house and the like ), which is known in two forms: independent and subordinate. Note 3 - A farm and subordinate place are within the registered or customary area of ​​their respective village and are generally considered part of it in terms of the country's division system. Note 4 - An independent farm and place have a specific and independent registered or customary area and are covered by the relevant divisional unit in terms of administrative systems, as the case may be.

Article 3 - A rural district is the smallest divisional unit of a country that has a specific geographical area and is formed by the joining of several neighbouring villages, places, and farms that are homogeneous in terms of natural, cultural, economic and social environment and provide the possibility of providing services and planning in a single system and network."^[8] (emphasis added)

It should therefore be noted that an Iranian abadi that has never had a population of more than 100 people in 20 families is unlikely to have ever officially been a village, but also that abadi can have more than this number of people living within them and still not qualify as a village due to the other requirements and explicit exclusions for e.g., places for non-agricultural activities. Note also that farms can have their own class separate to that of villages under this law. The law explicitly excludes the possibility that non-agricultural facilities such as factories can also be villages. Art. 3 states that rural districts are combinations of villages and farms, meaning that farms need not be part of villages. The terms used in the original are "rosta" for village, "dahestan" for rural district, "makan" for place,"abadi" for settlements, and "mazraeh" for farm.^[a]

During the years between approximately 2006 and 2014, Carlossuarez46, then an admin, created tens of thousands of articles about Iranian abadi based on the 2006 Iranian census, each of them according to a common template which described them as villages. The fact that many of these locations were not villages was pointed out a number of times during the period of creation and afterwards, without actions being taken to stop this. Following their retirement and de-sysopping in 2021, more than 13,000 articles of these abadi articles were deleted.^[9] Subsequent bundled deletion discussions have deleted abadi identified as factories or other industrial enterprises in their name,^[10] abadi identified as pumps (mowtowr^[11] and tolombeh^[12]), abadi identified as counting-places for nomads,^[13] abadi identified as banks (Bonkuy),^[14] farms (Mazraeh),^[15] and a range of other kinds of abadi. In spite of this, tens of thousands more of these problematic, unverified Iranian "village" articles continue to exist on English Wikipedia.

The creator of these articles decided on the locations of these abadi listed in the Iranian census with information from GEOnet Names Server (GNS), another inaccurate source based largely on military maps from the 1940's onwards containing systematic errors.^[16][17] According to a consensus on RSN, GNS is not reliable for identifying populated places and cannot be used to show a pass of the WP:GEOLAND standard.^[18] For this reason many of the locations given in these articles based on GNS are also inaccurate.