Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Germany/Cities

Infobox

If this sub-project starts up, please make use of {{Infobox German Location}}. It is mostly ready for widespread use, but there are still a few issues that need to be sorted out. Look at the instructions on the template page before use. If you have any problems or suggestions, please report it on the template talk page - 52 Pickup 18:24, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Criteria for inclusion

This project's goals are said to list every municipality in Germany. The Rand House Dictionary says that "corporate identity" is necesary for a place to be a municipality. There-fore, I'd like to change this goal to be more inclusive. There are many villages in Germany which might not have a corporate identity but are significant. Not having a direct entry for these is, in my opinion, a real weakness. Consider the example of Bremke in the Gemeinde Gleichen (http://www.gleichen.de/bremke/home.htm). Road-signs indicate Bremke, not Gleichen; many maps do not include the Gemeinde, but the village is shown; locals refer to themselves as being from either the Gemeinde or the village; many students at Goettingen know of Bremke but would be at a loss if some-one referred to the Gemeinde Gleichen. This village has a mayor. The population is between 900 and 1000.

It is these kinds of communities that are omitted from the Wik/de but that I feel very strongly we should include here. kdammers (tilde key doesn't work).

The scope of this specific taskforce is to create articles for all municipalities, and I mean Gemeinden and Städte with that term. Of course there are more places that are notable, and you're welcome to create articles for them. But as you know there are already thousands of municipalities in Germany, and probably there are tens of thousands of Ortsteile and villages like Bremke. I think we should focus on municipalities first. Markussep 16:59, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree - at the moment we should concentrate on getting down to the municipality level first (perhaps a tasklist is needed). But if you do make any entries for subdivisions of municipalities, please do not use Infobox German Location - the template is not properly designed by doing lower than the municipal level. - 52 Pickup 11:56, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Unincorporated areas?

I didn't know about Gemeindefreie Gebiete until I saw de:Landkreis Amberg-Sulzbach, which has 2 of these regions (apparently without enitries). These aren't even mentioned in Amberg-Sulzbach. What should we do about them? - 52 Pickup 19:31, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

According to de:Gemeindefreies Gebiet most of these areas are uninhabited. The three exceptions are Osterheide (de:Osterheide), Lohheide (de:Lohheide) and Gutsbezirk Münsingen (de:Gutsbezirk Münsingen). I suggest we skip the other 246 for now. Markussep 19:04, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Format for German places

In anticipation for what needs to be done once the current article check is completed, I've started working on some guidelines for what these articles should contain. We probably don't need something as detailed as de:Wikipedia:Formatvorlage Stadt but some clear guidelines wouldn't help. I've started up a page at here, giving what I believe to be the necessary minimum requirements for such articles - so maybe checking against these requirements would be the next step in this project. Any comments and help with setting this up would be appreciated. - 52 Pickup 15:31, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Navbars not always complete

I noticed that for some Bavarian districts municipalities were missing from the navbars. Please compare the navbars with the German wikipedia versions when you check a district! We should check the districts we did before again. Markussep 14:39, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I doublechecked all Baden-Württemberg districts, found only 1 error. Markussep 22:41, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Doublechecked all North Rhine-Westphalia districts, 1 omission. And Saarland, no errors. And the two Bavarian districts that had been done already (Aichach-Friedberg and Altötting), no errors. Markussep 09:43, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Categories

Please secure that every city, town or municipality is in the correct category. Cities only towns above 100,000 inhabitants as equivalent to "Großstadt", they should be in category Cities in North Rhine-Westphalia for example. Town every German "Stadt" see German articles, they should be in the category towns in ... Municipalities (Gemeinden) they should be in the category for municipalities in... If an article is about a part of a City like Tempelhof is a part of Berlin make a sub category for Berlin and put in there.

That makes the categories more clear and usefull. Thanks--Gabriel-Royce 20:53, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

When {{Infobox German Location}} is added, this categorisation is done automatically "(Towns / Cities / Municipalities / Ämter / Gemeindeverwaltungsverbände / Samtgemeinden / Verbandsgemeinde/ Verwaltungsgemeinschaften / Verwaltungsverbände) in (state)", depending on what is placed in the "Art" parameter. If left blank, it is classed as a municipality. If the given population value is higher than 100,000 then it will be classed as a "city". If "Art=Stadt/town/city" is given, it will be classed as a town - unless the population exceeds 100,000, then it will be a city.

This means that once an infobox is added, the "Art" parameter should have the correct value, and the old manual categorisation should be deleted.

As for parts of Berlin, such categorisation should be done, but this infobox is not designed for parts of a city. I did tinker with the idea before but I've concluded that it is too messy to have a single infobox that does both locations and parts of locations. That's why this infobox is not to be used for suburbs, borroughs, villages or any other subdivision of a city/municipality/etc. If there is enough demand for such functionality, a separate infobox can be designed. - 52 Pickup 12:28, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

New rating for Hamm

The Article is rated "Start class" and "High Important". Since it was rated the article has changed in several points. It would be nice if someone could check it, giving Hamm (Talk:Hamm) a new rating and some comments about it's weaknesses. Thanks so far.--Gabriel-Royce 10:57, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Geographical co-ordinates

Lately, I've been working on improving the functionality of the German Location infobox. Apart from the autocategorisation (see above "Categories" topic), the {{coord}} template now works properly, making it possible to clearly display geographical co-ordinates on the title bar. Displaying the co-ordinates in the title bar is important for the extraction of geo-data by other programs (eg. Google Earth). Since this functionality is now enabled, editors can be a little more precise when giving co-ordinates in order to make sure that the right co-ordinates are given. I don't know how often Google Earth refreshes its Wikipedia layer, but I guess it will do so soon.

Now the infobox displays the co-ordinates both inside the infobox itself and on the title bar. I'm not sure what people feel about that, so I'll leave it as is for now.

Prior to the inclusion of the infobox on most articles, geographical co-ordinates will probably have already been added (there are bots that check other wikis for this), using the {{coord}} template (or one of its variants). With the infobox in place, this extra template is not only obsolete (the infobox needs the co-ordinate data anyway in order to generate the location map at the top) but obstructive (example). So please delete these coord templates upon addition of the infobox.

And just a reminder, I've started up a page for suggested article format for locations. It's pretty bare at the moment, but I've mostly been working on the background technical side of things. Please have a look at it and add to it. - 52 Pickup 13:14, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Navbar suggestion

Almost every Kreis has its own category, so in order to make sure that each article that uses a particular navbar is correctly categorised, I propose the addition of the categorisation to the navbar itself - this way it does not need to be done manually. Also, the manual categorisations already in place can be later deleted (via AWB is the easiest way to do this). To make sure that the categorisation only occurs on the articles and not on these project pages which also use the navbars, a simple if-function can be used - see this edit for an example. - 52 Pickup 07:27, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Idea for a new project

Since this project is restricted to municipalities, I'd like to suggest a project that covers towns that do not qualify as municipalities. The format could be the same as that of the cities project. That way, we could go down the munic. list and add all the villages in that order. This would be harder than doing the municipalities, since Wik/de generally ignores these villages, much to its detriment. I'd set the thing up, but when I tried to C&P from the edit page, too much of the format was not visible. Could some-one help me? Kdammers 02:43, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

What did you try to copy&paste? Do you mean the infobox? There is a way to use it for municipality subdivisions, see for instance Ernstroda. Markussep ^Talk 08:54, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I am personally against the idea to make such an effort at this moment in time, as it would be pretty much just for the sake of it. Notwithstanding that there are some villages that stand out from the crowd. Those tend to find article creators, who will create and look after those articles. In those cases we can provide a framework and support, but no way can I see the benefit of having 140000 articles in the format x is a village belonging to y, with hardly any way of keeping detail data sourced and up-to-date. Agathoclea 15:08, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

But throwing an idea into the arena what about a {{R from geographical subdivision}}? Agathoclea 15:11, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Naming convention ?

Hi there, I'm editing on Hamburg and related articles, now my question, why are all quarters of Hamburg named Hamburg-Foo and not Foo. (I started editing and found the articles named like this and named new ones also Hamburg-Foo) But I found districts of Berlin, Munich ... named Foo not Berlin-Foo (or Munich-Foo) and so on and so on ;-) Is it okay if I change all Hamburg-Foos to Foos ? Or may there to many Foos around ? Sebastian scha. (talk) 18:14, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Search and found? Wikipedia:WikiProject_Germany/Conventions#German abbreviations? So it is Foo not Hamburg-Foo? Sebastian scha. (talk) 18:38, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I would agree that it should be "Foo", not Hamburg-Foo. If disambiguation is required (because there are actually several Foos) it should, as I interpret the guidelines, be "Foo, Hamburg" (or "Foo (region)" if disambiguating by type of unit rather than location). But I would wait to see what others say before making any mass moves.--Boson (talk) 06:37, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

A commonly used disambiguation is to put the municipality in parentheses, like Zehlendorf (Berlin). Comma disambiguation is used to distinguish municipalities with the same name in different states or districts, like the various Neuenkirchens. We haven't really discussed what to use for quarters and villages within municipalities. Markussep ^Talk 08:13, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I think the naming convention is clear (after I found it). It is Foo, or Foo, Hamburg if there is a Foo in Y called Foo, Y. The problem is what about the quarters called the same as the boroughs see Eimsbüttel : the borough is Foo (borough), the quarter Foo (quarter) or Foo (quarter of Y) like Foo (city). Sebastian scha. (talk) 11:19, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Peer review/general question

I totally overhauled the Stuttgart article earlier in the year based on the better quality Berlin article, plus Frankfurt and Munich. I would like to submit it to a peer review or request closer scrutiny, but, even if I'm a fairly active editor on wikipedia and make regular contributions, I've never got my mind round the WikiProject pages. In other words: I'm not sure how to do it. Any pointers much appreciated (make them clear, when I'm not overworked I've an eye for writing but I'm not good on processes!) BuzzWoof (talk) 20:07, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Nordhausen

Hi,

Can anyone please answer the question at Talk:Nordhausen?

Thanks in advance. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 06:43, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

population figures

The population figures in the infoboxes are lagging behind de-wiki and even de-wiki is about a year out of date. Would there be any objection to a bot, that would keep the population figures up-to-date from a source list? Agathoclea (talk) 09:23, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Hohne

Hi there,
as mentioned on its talk page, there are two different communities named Hohne, embarrassingly mixed up in the Article. Would someone be so kind to have a look there?

Maybe I'm not technically experienced enough on en: to split this by myself in a proper way - but as I know both of them and got some material, I could contribute with some additions then. -- Wasabi (talk) 04:06, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

I have split the information and created a new page. Someone with more knowledge of the subjects needs to check if it is correct. Also there is are a number of pages linking to this page, some will have to be corrected to point to Bergen-Hohne instead of Hohne.Traveler100 (talk) 08:28, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks so far, neat improvement. I got both on my watchlist now and will have a futher look next week. -- Wasabi (talk) 00:55, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Evaluation requested for Eltmann

I have made several additions to this article. It is currently rated as a "C-class" article. I would appreciate an independent review of this article to evaluate if it now meets the standards for a "B-Class" rating in (Talk:Eltmann). Thanks for any comments, suggestions and help with this article. NDM (talk) 10:07, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

new population figures

I am a little out of touch but just noticed an infobox where the population data was removed but the new data appeared automagically. Can someone point me to the discussion of the subject. I know de-wiki uses an automated device based in the id of each municipality in the template. Agathoclea (talk) 13:44, 15 September 2010 (UTC)