Talk:Politics of the Netherlands (terminology)

This page was created as decided on Talk:Politics of the Netherlands. C mon 07:44, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

King / queen / monarch and his/her commissioner
There have been several discussions over whether to use the term king or queen when not talking about a specific one. 'Monarch' was one option that was mentioned to avoid the problem. But that doesn't work with a province's commissioner. One can't say 'monarch's commissioner', so a choice has to be made between king's and queen's commissioner. I'm in favour of the former for two reasons. One, the male version of a word is often used for such purposes and two, it'll be just a few years before the monarch will actually be a king, so we might as well anticipate. Neither argument is very strong, but we have to decide on something, so here's my vote.

Then again, we Limburgers just say 'gouverneur', which pretty much avoids the problem, but I suppose that won't do. :) DirkvdM 20:27, 25 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Interesting argument, but this discussion should (and probably has been) held at Queen's Commissioner the seperate article on the subject. C mon 21:03, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

How to link to entries in the list
The idea of this list is basically to avoid a lot of stubs (it wasn't proposed like that originally, but that's what it comes down to, right?). But we still need a way to link to the entries. One way is to use the standard format Politics of the Netherlands (terminology). But that's way too much to type every time. An alternative would be to make a page titled 'polnedterm' or something similar and redirect that to here and then use polnedterm. Assuming that works (I'm not really sure). But it seems to me to make more sense to make a redirect for each term. So we make an 'article' called 'term' and then redirect that to here. That is a bit more work to set up, but much handier in use (and intuitive for those who don't know this page exists) and it rserves the title in case the description goes beyond stub-size and it deserves a separate article ('gedogen' is a likely candidate for that). That would also avoid the risk of double work in case an article already exists (we'll have to check for that, so we might as well make the reirect then) or in case someone comes up with the idea to write an article on it. If there is no article under that title, they might not find out it already existst here. So plenty reasons for that solution, I'd say.

By the way, I checked 'gedogen' and there is no article under that title, but ther is a redirect from gedoogbeleid to 'Drug policy of the Netherlands'. Of course that will not do because the term is much broader than that. But that's a different issue. Just thought I'd point it out. DirkvdM 20:54, 25 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Both options are a lot of work. If you want to spend the structural time making these redirections, that's fine by me. It would also been useful if the pages of these terms might already exist, if we would like to move an entry from this page to a separate page (like Queen's Commissioner and it is not impossble that Staatssecretaris for instance would one day merit it's own separate article. Until then I'll just put in the conjunctural work. C mon 21:03, 25 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, it won't be that much work. Half an hour maybe (in the morning when Wikipedia is fast enough). But we do need a method to keep track of for which terms there already is a redirect in case of additions here by people who haven't read or followed this policy. Maybe some marker in the source that is invisible in the rendered text. DirkvdM 19:02, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Unsuccessful lijsttrekker leaves politics?
Under 'lijsttrekker' it says " If the party looses the elections, this person often leaves politics." What is meant here? First of all, what does 'losing the elections' mean? And I've never heard of a lijsttrekker leaving politics altogether as a result of bad election results. DirkvdM 19:27, 26 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Kars Veeling, Eelco Brinkman, Ad Melkert, Thom de Graaf. But you're right the text is rather vague. I'll try to make it more precise. C mon 19:52, 26 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Did they leave politics altogether? I haven't followed their careers, and they have been out of the picture, but I just find it unlikely that someone who has been lijsttrekker and therefore must have been very into politics would leave it completely. Didn't they get some relatively minor job for the party somewhere or something? DirkvdM 07:19, 27 February 2006 (UTC).


 * They left parliament, and therefore 'politics' in a narrow sense. Following the elections (May 2002) Veling resigned his post in May and left parliament in September due to stress. Following the elections (May 1994) Brinkman resigned his post in August and left parliament in April to become head of an employers' organization. Following the elections (January 2003) De Graaf resigned his post in January, unexpectedly he became vice-prime-minister in May. Following the elections (May 2002) Ad Melkert resigned his post in May, and left parliament in october, to enter international governance. C mon 07:48, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Cabinet = Government?
Under ministerraad it says that the government is the cabinet plus the monarch, but I've understood from various sources that the two terms mean the same, with the monarch included in both. DirkvdM 19:57, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Handy isn't it such a list explaining terms. But you're right the dutch system is rather complicated
 * § 2.42.1 of the dutch constitution: De regering wordt gevormd door de Koning en de ministers. (government is formed by the King and the ministers).
 * § 2.45.1: De ministers vormen te zamen de ministerraad. (the ministers together form the council of ministers). The Council of ministers meets every friday in the Treveszaal, the Queen never attends these meetings and is not forced to do so by law. See the dutch wikisource for the entire constitution ( http://nl.wikisource.org/wiki/Nederlandse_grondwet/Hoofdstuk_2#.C2.A7_2._Koning_en_ministers ).
 * Cabinet finally is not mentioned in the constitution but it is supposed to include ministers and staatssecretarissen.
 * I hope this clarifies.
 * C mon 20:33, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * What I said was that I thought cabinet and government were the same, with the monarch included in both. But I now realise that 'cabinet' is in practise never used in that sense. I just never saw the terms presented this way. So from my pov it would have been original research, but then I didn't write it, so I'll leave it at this. Sorry to have troubled you. :) DirkvdM 06:11, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

There are two issues here. First of all, there is in Dutch the distinction between the formal terms "regering" and "ministerraad", and the informal term "kabinet", where "regering" is the "ministerraad" plus the monarch, and "kabinet" is the "ministerraad" plus the junior ministers (staatssecretarissen). The most straightforward translations of the three terms are obviously "government", "council of ministers" and "cabinet".

Now there is another problem, with the English language, rather than the Dutch. There are two meanings to the word "government" in English. The first coincides with that of the Dutch word "overheid", or the concept of "the state" as used by philosophers. The second refers to a specific form of executive institution, composed of "ministers" and accountable to "parliament", which exists in most English speaking countries, including Britain and Canada, but *not* in the United States. In the United States, there is no "parliament", no "ministers", and no "government" in the above sense, but rather an executive branch embodied in the presidency, whose direct entourage is often referred to as his "cabinet". Anyhow, educated Americans are usually aware of the more specific meaning of the word "government" in the context of parliamentary systems, but the distinction bears repeating whenever the word "government" is used in this sense.194.109.198.99 17:15, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Old table
For historic reasons: the old table on which this article is based
 * C mon 21:34, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

As a result of how I made this list, it is topically grouped, not alphabetically, which seems handier for now. I wrote down the terms for which I didn't think the translation was obvious (which includes ambiguities). In many cases, I didn't even know one off hand. And now for the alphabetical list.

And then finally a list that can be expanded with other terms, like the ones you mentioned.

Incorporating pages
There are a few pages, which could better be lemmas of this page instead of separate pages. They're all pages with dutch names referring to political phenomena. Also they're only a few, tend short, often orphanized and not terribly well written. I intend to merge them with this page.

A list of them:
 * Allochtoon
 * Polder Model
 * Schout
 * Queen's Commissioner
 * Water board

What do you think? Keep or merge? --C mon 13:16, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Stadsdeel
Since Rotterdam is divided into deelgemeenten the term stadsdeel only applies to Amsterdam. I suggest the entry be corrected or perhaps even removed completely because of its narrow scope.

-Tonkiro 14:12, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

2007-02-7 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 12:26, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Cutting up this page
I've decided that this page does not work very well, the problem is that Therefore I've started to cut this page up, mostly by creating separate pages based on this page. For now I will keep this page, if only because I've been unable to find a good way to deal with several entries. C mon 15:14, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) not all people know that this list exists, especially not the people one would make this for
 * 2) It is getting too large
 * 3) it is outdated
 * Issue one can be solved by making sure that the list is wikilinked when useful; otherwise people will not learn the partial lists exist as well. Arnoutf 17:30, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I did not make short lists but mainly short articles. See my contributions. C mon 19:25, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Wow, that is a lot of interesting work you have undertaken. That will make checking up on the differnt terms much easier. Arnoutf 19:34, 31 August 2007 (UTC)