Talk:List of twin towns and sister cities in Germany

[Untitled]

What exactly is the aim of this page? Every town and village in Germany has at least one, and often four or five, twin towns. Is the intention to list every community in Germany? --Traveler100 (talk) 07:16, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

The list

WP is noted for its lists, some of which you just are not going to find anywhere else. If someone wants a list I do not question it. WP has plenty of space not available to other media. I do think it should be attractively formatted and easy to use. Nothing worse than cluttering up the airways with garbage. I just now started a tabular form I think is much more attractive. It utilizes previous code so the work required is minimal. You can get the idea from the first entry, A. By the way I appreciate all those colorful and attractive icons. That is a good feature.Dave (talk) 11:14, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Useful link

On this Page [1] (de) of Council of European Municipalities and Regions (German section) you can get this List of German towns and partner-cities (de). At the moment there are listet 5186 Partnerships, but I noticed that (at least) the partnerships between two German towns are missing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kleiner Tümmler (talk • contribs) 11:27, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Useful list ??

This list is nonsense - it will be far from completeness in the next ten years. See the remark above - there are thousands of these partnerships, but they will be quite different, some existing only on paper. Not useful to make such a list. The twin towns should be mentioned in the respective article about the city, that must be enough. I am astonished that there was no attempt to delete it. Plehn (talk) 05:07, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Agree. This list is not just incomplete but also incorrect, and never will be due to the number of twinning partnerships in Germany. I suggest this page just refers to the individual town pages.--Traveler100 (talk) 09:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposed new format of this page

Germany has a long history of partnering with towns in other counties with the first recorded being between Paderborn and Le Mans in 836 and one of the first modern twinnings between Hanover and Bristol in 1947. Today all cities and towns and most villages in Germany have partnerships with places or regions in other countries and other parts of Germany (mostly across the former East/West German border). Specific lists of twin towns can be seen on the individual German place articles on Wikipdeia.

Talking about the usefulness of this list you also have to talk about all these lists of the Lists of twin towns and sister cities. This List of twin towns and sister cities in Germany may be much shorter and incomplete than this List of twin towns and sister cities in France, for instance, but I would say it already involves all important partnerships of the bigger German cities. BTW: Nearly the whole content of the Proposed new format of this page is already mentioned here: Twin towns and sister cities. -- Kleiner Tümmler (talk) 15:05, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

A list fulfilling a need is useful. Wikipedia traffic statisitcs show a daily high frequency. However, I personally tend to see lists as boxed information desert. Reengineering german government lists is idiotic. Professional researchers would contact the responsible german office anyway (Statistisches Bundesamt, maybe). Nevertheless, i am impressed of the number of requests. The true reasons for looking it up are far of my imagination, but i would suggest, to think about those reasons deeply, and to restructure the list accordingly. If possible, limiting the depth of the list with a criterium of relevance, for example, the number of inhabitants, to cut off the endlessness and adjust the list to the available manpower, to deliver safe information.--Fluss (talk) 17:46, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi,

Wikipedia is never complete. It is always expanding. This list is for reference. I do not think it should be deleted. I could go on and on....

Thanks, pbl1998--Pbl1998 (talk) 15:12, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Munich#Scottish flag

For editors here, please see the discussion at Talk:Munich#Scottish flag. I used the conventions found in this list. Thank you,
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 16:42, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

flagicon replaced with flagdeco

I replaced {{flagicon}} with {{flagdeco}} throughout in order to bring the page's "Post-expand include size" down below Wikipedia's software limits. References and templates near the bottom of the article now display properly. For technical details, see the text at the top of Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded.

This means the flags are no longer click-able.

When Wikipedia raises its limits or when the code behind {{flagicon}} changes so that it doesn't "consume" as much "Post-expand include size," the flagicon template can be restored.

I had to do this to three very large "sister cities" pages:

• List of twin towns and sister cities in France
• List of twin towns and sister cities in Poland
• List of twin towns and sister cities in Germany

davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:09, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Methodology

FromCzech, you reverted my edit adding Paris to the list for Berlin: [2] My edit was based on the list of 17 partnerships listed on the official Berlin website: [3], making this list match that one. Each of the 17 entries are described there as a "Städtepartnerschaft", most often translated as "town twinning agreement", including "Städtpartnerschaft Paris". It also harmonizes this list with the one in the main Berlin article, as well as that found on de:Berlin. It would seem to be a reasonable goal to have these lists consistent. I do understand that Paris has an "exclusive" sister city agreement with Rome, and that it does not use that specific terminology with other partner cities. However, this seems to be largely a case of semantics and ceremony, and the nature and scope of partnership agreements it has with other cities are for all intents and purposes the same thing as other international sister city agreements. I don't think it is a good reason to simply ignore and not mention the important city partnership between Berlin and Paris.

My edit summary was: The introduction says the article is not strictly about formally "twinned" cities, but more general "standing links to local communities in other countries", which may be described with "other terms, such as "partner towns". The Berlin website lists a "Städtepartnerschaft" (city partnership) with Paris among their 17 partnerships, and Paris lists Berlin among their "Friendship and cooperation agreements". I think that fits within the scope of this article.

Your comment was: same methodology applied for all twin towns lists, all cities; btw on Paris' profile on https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/politik/internationales/staedtepartnerschaften/paris/artikel.9861.php Berlin acknowledges the partnership as "Das Abkommen über die Freundschaft und Zusammenarbeit", which is what Paris says. What is the "methodology" you refer to? It has never been discussed on this talk page. Is there a relevant discussion, RFC, or consensus somewhere you can direct me to? Also, other Berlin twin city agreements, including those with Warsaw, Moscow, Brussels, etc., are as well referred to as "Das Abkommen über die Freundschaft und Zusammenarbeit", so that doesn't seem to be evidence of the Paris agreement being substantially different. On the contrary, it suggests that they are practically speaking the same. --IamNotU (talk) 20:42, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

IamNotU, sorry that I didn't explain myself well in undo comment.

There is no official methodology or consensus here on how twin towns lists should be made. A year ago, every list was made separately without any system or methodology, outdated, uncompleted. So, as twin towns are my interest, I redid majority of the lists, c. 6,700 municipalities, with using the most logic principle that suggest itself: mirror comparison. If city A lists city B as its twin town and city B lists city A as its twin town (like Berlin–Warsaw case), the partnership is on both twin towns lists. If not (Berlin–Paris), the partnership usually is not included. There shouldn't be situation like these that Berlin has Paris as its twin town on Germany list but Paris don't have Berlin as its twin town on France list. There can be mistakes as there are many problems with sources (different national definition what is twinning; outdated informations on official websites; not-separated twinnings and other forms of partnerships in website section – possibly Berlin case; etc.). But in my opinion the mirror comparison principle is essential and cannot be broken as it would be against the logic of town twinning.

I don't think that Paris should be included because, as you wrote, it's widely known that its only twin town is Rome. The "harmonization" with Berlin and de:Berlin would be against harmonization with Paris, fr:Paris or de:Paris. In my opinion it is Berlin page what should be elaborated.

I agree that the Berlin-Paris partnership is important but importance is not a criterion for any of entries on any of the twin towns lists. The page name clearly says "List of twin towns and sister cities". In your edit summary you wrote about generally written page introduction, used on most of the lists. I agree, it's little vague. If you think that the introduction (which I didn't write) doesn't fit the page, feel free to improve it.

Theoretically, if there would be consensus that Berlin–Paris link should be included, it would be necessary to apply it on all Paris' partnerships and all other cities in same position and not just unsystematically edit this one particular link. --FromCzech (talk) 08:46, 8 September 2020 (UTC)