Talk:List of towns in Skåne, Sweden

The article lists a number of cities in Skåne (Scania). The original author seems unwilling to accept the three 20-centrury towns Eslöv, Höganäs and Hässleholm being considered cities because of an unsourced opinion that they are not called "stad" locally. This is controversial. Their small size may make it more appropriate to call them "towns", but as they were all once entitled "stad" status, they may be translated as "city" as well, in accordance with other urban areas that gained chartered city rights before the municipal reform in Sweden in 1971. The notion that towns/cities in Skåne should be treated differently in English than towns/cities in other parts of Sweden, and that the three youngest cities should be translated differently than in the rest of the country, just because of their southern location, is controversial.Torsten22 10:42, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
 * There is no corresponding article in the Swedish (or any other)version. This article has no sustance at all and should be deleted. --Muniswede 22:13, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

From Requested moves
The following proposal was lodged at WP:RM: Is it certain that this refers to the historical province of Scania, as opposed to the modern-day administrative unit of Skåne County? If not, then the move request would not be justified. --Stemonitis 11:17, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Towns of Skåne → Towns of Scania — In line with Scania —86.152.203.212 11:08, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
 * The differnce between the historical province and the modern county is very insignificant. 10,393 km² vs. 10,939 km², so it really does not matter. But this article is totally unnessecary.

List moved
There was a list of localities within Skåne County. As it was quite good (perhaps a bit old) I moved it to the county article. --Muniswede 15:39, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Original research
Most of this article seems to reflect the author´s own wievs. There are no sources whatsoever mentioned, and there is no article on the same matter in any other language - not even in Swedish. --Muniswede (talk) 18:59, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


 * It is time to get rid of this article. The "original research" could be deleted and the rest included into other articles, e.g. the province andor county articles. --Muniswede (talk) 20:13, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Hej Muniswede, did you run out of spots to squeeze in another fact tag? ;) I can see you point though..it needs a lot of work. To request a deletion, go to this page WP:AFD. I have had intensions to rewrite this article for so long - it is a really interesting topic with many varied sources available, including Länssyrelsen i Skåne - I was planning to include how the urban development grew in different spurts, for different reasons, through the years. Then there is the issue of royal charters, architecture, building materials, how some towns were moved, and the issue of the words "by", "sted" and "stath", including the modern Scanian phrase "ute på byn" rather than "ute på stan", etc, etc...but mainly the how, why and when of town development. It is a fascinating subject, and uniquely different in different parts of Sweden. But I don't think I'll have the time to do anything about it right now, and nobody else seems to pick up the ball. The persons who wrote the article are long gone, I think. I'll recreate it when time comes, if you prefer to see it gone, although, with your nice "Svenska Ortnamnslexikon" and your organizational skills, you could probably do a perfectly nice little something here yourself, or at least a do a clean sweep with your wiki-broom of the stuff you tagged with fact checks. Sub-sets of Swedish cities are a smooth and inetersting way to deal with the historical aspects of Localities of Sweden or whatever the main article is called, sorted into different parts of the country. But whatever you decide. Please leave the list of towns as a part of the article if you decide not to list the article for deletion though. It's a good start. Best, Pia (talk) 00:29, 24 April 2008 (UTC)


 * There are of course some interesting statements in the article. But I think they could be moved to articles like Scania, Skåne County, Urban areas in Sweden, Stad (Sweden) &c. And some sources would be fine, as it seems to be the author's own wievs. Already a year ago User:Torsten22 pointed out some controversial statements in this article. Unfortunately his career here was very short (only 25 March 2007). But I totally agree with him in this: The notion that towns/cities in Skåne should be treated differently in English than towns/cities in other parts of Sweden, and that the three youngest cities should be translated differently than in the rest of the country, just because of their southern location, is controversial. Are there no other persons out there willing to participate in this discussion?  The eternal squabble between Pia L and me must be somewhat nagging. --Muniswede (talk) 09:01, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't see any problems in having an article on the towns of Scania. The province is in several ways a special case since it was Danish longer than it was Swedish. From the perspective of historic heritage, a Scanian town is both Swedish and Danish and it would not be doing them justice to subsume them in an article such as "Urban areas in Sweden" or "stad (Sweden)".--Berig (talk) 16:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
 * "Eternal squabble", but Muniswede! Here I am, supporting you, and you tell people we squabble. :) There's a paper in Medeltidsarkeologisk tidskrift by A. Christophersen called "Byen er død. Så hva gjør vi med historien?" (META, Medeltidsarkeologisk tidskrift, Nr 2 2000, pp. 3–15.) ("The city is dead. So what do we do with the history?"). That's kind of the problem here too, when towns have been replaced by localities and municipalities and there's no summarizing view of the town development in a region. I know how you feel about having anything written about one part of a country unless there are similar articles about all other parts of that same country, but please think about where that philosophy would lead for the Wikipedia project as a whole. We wouldn't be able to have separate articles like Architecture of Provence, Culture in Scotland, Traditions of Catalonia, unless they were replicated for all other parts of the countries where these places are parts? Articles about a country's divisions or certain types of places (such as provinces or regions) can't all be required to be the same! About sources: basic sources on my list for this article would be The urbanity of the landscape – new perspectives on Scandinavian towns by Mats Anglert, Swedish National Heritage Board ; The formation of towns – new perspectives on Scandinavian towns by Stefan Larsson, also Swedish National Heritage Board ; and the article "The Danish urban system pre-1800: a survey of recent research results" by Christensen and Mikkelsen in Urban History (2006, 33: 484-510) and of course, Stadens landskap, by Länssyrelsen i Skåne. Pia (talk) 19:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)


 * O.K. You think I am rigid about conformity. Perhaps you are right in a way. But there is not only an article article Scottish culture, but also one Culture of England and one Culture of Wales, so in that case not just one of part of Great Britain is sorted out. Good! But, of course this is an ongoing project. One article of about a certain aspect of one part of a country could later be followed by corresponding articles about the same aspect of another part. So, Towns of Värmland and Towns of Västerbotten are welcome and would make this article a bit more defendable. But 25 articles about "towns" in every province of the country could perhaps be integrated in articles about the provinces themselves or in articles like Geograhy of.... But there are also other problems with this article. It contains some odd, unconfirmed statements e.g.: Although Ängelholm today is larger than many older cities, the town is rather perceived as one of the "intermediate" towns that isn't really called a stad by the Scanians. Who has found out that it is not "really called a stad" and who are "the Scanians" not calling it one? Any statistical evidence at all for such a statement? (I do not think that you, Pia L, has written that, but I now see you as the "defender" of this article) One person speaks for over a million people. --Muniswede (talk) 21:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

[Outdent] OK, so I think, and your edits certainly indicate that you are, and if they did not, you couldn't have accomplished the things you have done for the Wikipedia project so far. You think that just because I haven't told you so, I don't appreciate the work you have put into municipalities or other Swedish entities, and can't see the sheer bulk, the hundreds of articles that have benefited from your contributions, especially your careful sourcing of numbers in regards to population size, the definition of localities, etc., etc. You're wrong. I just get impatient with certain types of edits and then don't feel like telling you anything, especially not what I admire. ;) My issue with some of your edits is related to deletion activity: In my opinion it is detrimental to the quality of the project to decide that the least developed articles should be the standard or pattern - and to then proceed to delete information from all other articles in order to maintain this "pattern". Articles must be allowed to grow and develop different focuses. When a particular aspect gets too bulky, it gets moved into a separate article, and yes, such articles will need to be created at that point, even if there is no Towns of Västmanland created yet. Municipalities in Sweden are recent entities created by the central state and the predetermined points 1, 2 ,3  to be included in these articles are therefore easily picked and homogenized. That is not the case for entities where culture and history become part of the main focus. They cannot be made to all appear "the same", like the legs of spider that only function in relation to the body in the center. Historical entities often have different patterns and the focus in these articles will therefore need to follow different trajectories. Now about the present article - I agree with you that we need to either delete the unsubstantiated claims in this one and keep the uncontested facts in a basic structure for later expansion, or send it for deletion, in which case I'll start from scratch later on. So, no, I'm not a defender of the current content. I am only a defender of having an article named "Towns in Scania", with sourced content. The reason I feel that such an article will be needed is that I have written a lot of the content in the Scania article and I know for a fact that this topic will not fit in the current article because it would make it way too bulky. I can't see that it will fit into the Swedish localities article either, if for nothing else then for the simple reason that editors of certain national articles have been known to resist mentions of other nations outside the context of conflict and it is therefore unlikely that the issue of town development in Scania would be welcome. Pia (talk) 00:34, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I think that articles like "Towns of Scania" are only defensible for notable culture areas, which Scania is. Västmanland is not a culture area in the same degree, and the closest comparison to "Towns of Scania" would be "Towns of the Mälaren Valley" or "towns of Bergslagen", which I think sound like promising subjects for articles.--Berig (talk) 14:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Clean-up
This article has been source of grief for me for years but I haven't dared to do anything about it. Thanks to MuniSwedes extensive tagging, I now feel that no information is better than that unreadable mess.

In my opinion, an article should be based on reliable sources. If one was to rewrite an article, it would contain somewhat similar info. The way the article stood, I think that would be impossible. I even wonder if the authors of the article were trying to make it as confusing as possible, it was something like something resulting of a brainstorming, or a sandbox of ideas...

Well, how about if we get rid of everything we can't back up, and just leave the things that can actually be referenced? Another idea is to replace the word "city" with either "stad", "town privileges" or "city privileges". That would remove the confusion about such sentences as "Similarly, others of the towns listed above may be considered towns and not cities according to locals"

Fred-J 23:28, 29 August 2008 (UTC)


 * It is much better now. --Muniswede (talk) 19:22, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Scania
The province is called Scania in other articles on the English language Wikipedia. --Muniswede (talk) 21:41, 10 February 2009 (UTC)