Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of names of European cities in different languages


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus with no prejudice against speedy renomination. At this point, it is not even clear what is still being nominated for deletion and which arguments apply to what. A better focused discussion may be able to generate a clear consensus, but that is not going to happen here. Seraphimblade Talk to me 18:26, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

List of names of European cities in different languages

 * – ( View AfD View log )



[Note: This article was previously considered for deletion at Articles for deletion/Names of European cities in different languages. Per the top of Talk:List of names of European cities in different languages, the result was delete but the article was then submitted for deletion review which resulted in the restoration of the article.]

I came upon this while reverting a number of edits by one user to add the Slovenian names of a bunch of non-Slovenian European places to their respective articles. Because of WP:NOTDICTIONARY and based on the elucidation provided by WP:USEFUL. The Keep rationales offered in the previous deletion discussion largely focus on the usefulness of the list but, as WP:NOT tells, there are many useful types of resources that that Wikipedia is not. (They also object to concerns raised about verifiability, but I'm not raising that issue here.)

I don't know what it is about geographical locations that gives a sense that Wikipedia ought to give their names in many other languages, but I don't see any difference between this and conceivable lists like "Names of body parts in different languages" and "Names of animals in different languages". These would be squarely dictionary material, and these geographical lists are no different. Perhaps the answer is to port these to Wiktionary. OrI haven't lookedare similar lists already there? In which case these lists here are redundant anyway. and removing them wouldn't deprive anyone of these resources.

[I believe this discussion ought to cover all the sub-lists this list article sits on top of, including the breakdowns by sections of the alphabet and the exonym lists, but it seemed a formidable task to find them all and list them explicitly. If someone could give a tip for facilitating that, I'd appreciate it.] Largoplazo (talk) 11:00, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Largoplazo (talk) 11:00, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Largoplazo (talk) 11:00, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Largoplazo (talk) 11:00, 17 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete This is similar to an article deleted by AfD in 2017, and the sub-lists are largely or entirely unsourced. To nominate all the sub-lists, such as Icelandic exonyms, I'll list all of them here and file a WP:BOTREQ request to tag all of the articles. –LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄ ) 21:24, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Europe-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03</b> ( d  c̄ ) 22:06, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the assist with the article listing, LP. I just added eight alphabetical subset articles as well. Is there a way to get a bot to tag those pages? Largoplazo (talk) 02:46, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * NB that there are a number of redirects in the list (should they be deleted too?) and several items are duplicates (Names of Belarusian places in other languages is thrice listed). — <span style="border:1px solid #93010b;background:#ef0000;padding:2px;color:#efe6e6;text-shadow:black 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; font-family: Georgia;"> AjaxSmack 03:00, 18 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep Exonymy is an encylopedic concept so I'm not sure why these lists of exonyms are unencylcopedic vis-à-vis list of songs recorded by the Beatles or list of numbers in various languages or list of Greek and Latin roots in English or list of artworks known in English by a foreign title or whatever. What's special about European places that they need to go?  And if these articles are appropriate for Wiktionary, they should be kept and moved there, not deleted.  — <span style="border:1px solid #93010b;background:#ef0000;padding:2px;color:#efe6e6;text-shadow:black 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; font-family: Georgia;"> AjaxSmack  02:57, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Dictionary is also an encyclopedic concept but WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary; the same goes for newspaper, academic journal, and birth registry. As for other similar articles, see WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. A list of songs by the Beatles isn't dictionary material so it isn't comparable; a list of numbers is comparableso the same rationale for deletion applies to that article. Largoplazo (talk) 03:18, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Funny you should mention dictionaries, because we also have a list of dictionaries by number of words, a close parallel to these articles. I'm aware of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, but you did not address all lists of words in the nomination, only European place names.  And once again, if this is indeed dictionary material, it should be ported to Wiktionary, not deleted.  (A list of songs by the Beatles is WP:NOTDIR N°7 -- a little off topic here, granted.  My point was that some lists might be encyclopedically notable and others not even if they encroach on dictionary territory.  A list of Beatles songs might be notable whereas a list of Mudcrutch songs might not.) — <span style="border:1px solid #93010b;background:#ef0000;padding:2px;color:#efe6e6;text-shadow:black 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; font-family: Georgia;"> AjaxSmack  02:14, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I think this focus on Europe might be because it seems most of the articles in the Category:Lists of exonyms are about Europe. did you want to discuss all of that here? --Joy &#91;shallot&#93; (talk) 10:00, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * So there are entries that exist on wiktionary per User:Colin M but whether there are any entries here that aren't there is a question that needs an answer. However, the lists/articles that are unlike Geographical name changes in Greece are not encyclopedic. Catchpoke (talk) 19:33, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Note: The non-redirect pages included in this AfD have all been tagged. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk, FAQ, contribs) 17:25, 18 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Comment. Slavic toponyms for Greek places redirects to Geographical name changes in Greece which is an article that deals with the systematic Hellenization of Slavic/Albanian/Turkish place names in Greece. I don't think it belongs in this deletion discussion and, in any case, should not be deleted. -- Local hero talk 17:58, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree, that article has decidedly encyclopedic content. Now that I look at some of the other articles linked explicitly from the primary list page, I see that at least a few of them include encyclopedic as well as sections that amount to dictionary or phrase book content and should be removed while leaving the encyclopedic content. So these, I conclude, should be handled on a case by case basis. When I posted this nomination, my focus was on the alphabetically organized lists that I added to the 53 originally added by LaundryPizza03, and I was hasty in suggesting that all the ones LP added should be included. Those are absolutely nothing more than WP:NOTDICTIONARY violations. But now I'm wondering whether we can somehow reconsider our approach to the 62 articles now comprised by this discussion, among them some calling for custom treatment. Largoplazo (talk) 19:34, 18 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep List of German exonyms for places in Belgium. I have no view on the others and do not claim to be a linguistic expert. However, German is an official language of Belgium and the places listed have (or had) substantial German or Luxembourgish-speaking populations. I am not sure the term "exonym" is even correct in this context, but in this case it seems to me to have encyclopedic, rather than "dictionary" value. In my reading, WP:NOTDIC provides no obvious guidance in the situation where the subject is a collected group of terms and not a dictionary-style definition. —Brigade Piron (talk) 10:40, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this observation. The subject is of even more importance for all places that were part of a German speaking Empire. The German names are than NOT exonyms according to the Wikipedia definition. This AfD should consider this aspect. In the mean time I changed the title of  the List for the Czech republic. Jacquesverlaeken (talk) 16:47, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * In this case I agree with you both about German being a national language and about the term "exonyms" being questionable for that reason. At least in regard to the entries that are linked, the page amounts to a list pageredirect page combo, where corresponding single-article redirects would qualify for inclusion under WP:FORRED, which similarly distinguishes between utility links from the corresponding terms in germane languages and dictionary-like links from the corresponding terms in non-germane languages. Largoplazo (talk) 15:40, 20 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Keepas per the reasons above. The article may need a revamp though. Morgengave (talk) 17:58, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep encyclopedic glossary-type lists. Lembit Staan (talk) 19:20, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Now that you mention this, there MOS:GLOSS, and Contents/Glossaries, can these articles conform / be included there? --Joy &#91;shallot&#93; (talk) 10:13, 24 June 2021 (UTC)


 * There's a lot of this, I just quickly found a few more from vague recollection: List of Italian exonyms in Dalmatia, List of Hungarian exonyms for places in Croatia, Hungarian toponyms in Vojvodina. It stands to reason that it's useful to have an article or a redirect for every gazetteer entry per WP:5, and in turn we typically have lead sections with a lot of names, that in turn get moved to "Name" sections when it becomes unwieldy. I'm not sure if also having lists of these kinds of historical or secondary gazetteer entries on top of all that is actually useful to typical English readers? It can be a bit redundant. --Joy &#91;shallot&#93; (talk) 09:55, 20 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Comment I find the following analogy in the nomination pretty compelling: I don't see any difference between this and conceivable lists like "Names of body parts in different languages" and "Names of animals in different languages". For those who feel we should keep this article, I would be interested to know whether you think an article like Names of body parts in different languages would be appropriate for Wikipedia. And, if not, then what makes the articles nominated here different? Colin M (talk) 15:31, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The difference I believe lies in the fact that Wikipedia doesn't cover names of body parts, but it does cover names of places. Any sufficiently well developed article on a geographic place is expected to mention, and contextualise, any names the place might have in relevant languages. The real question, as observed by Joy, is whether we want that sort of content available in lists in addition to articles. – Uanfala (talk) 20:11, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Then swap "auto parts" for "body parts". This Wikipedia does carry List of auto parts. Would it be correct to begin stocking this project with List of Bengali names for auto parts and so forth? Largoplazo (talk) 21:36, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't get your point: auto parts are similar to body parts – and different from places – in that we don't normally have content about their names. – Uanfala (talk) 22:40, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I started this as a paragraph but it is long so I'm bullet-pointing my response:
 * I likened these lists of place names in other languages to lists of body parts in other languages, which is something I supposed we would all agree Wikipedia shouldn't have.
 * You appeared to disagree with my likening of the two types of lists on the grounds that the elements of the respective lists differ in whether they are of interest to Wikipedia: "Wikipedia doesn't cover names of body parts, but it does cover names of places."
 * So I reasoned, what if I'd originally said "auto parts" instead of "body parts"? Wikipedia does cover only auto parts, having a list article for them . So pretend I'd originally asked "Would Wikipedia have an article that lists auto parts in other languages"?
 * Substituting "auto parts" for "body parts" in your previous argument gives "Wikipedia doesn't cover names of auto parts, but it does cover names of places." Except that Wikipedia does cover names of auto parts. So if you were to attempt to distinguish auto part names from place names in the same way that you distinguished body part names from place names, the attempt would fail.
 * Largoplazo (talk) 00:13, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm... where does Wikipedia cover names of auto parts in various languages? – Uanfala (talk) 00:38, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The point is that it doesn't and wouldn't have a list of names of body parts or auto parts or any other parts in various languages. Therefore, why would we have a list of names of places in various languages? Above, someone answered that with (paraphrasing) "But exonymy is itself an encyclopedic subject." Well, so are auto parts. Therefore, either (a) we have a general principle that if a topic is encyclopedic, then it's acceptable for Wikipedia to have a list of terms associated with it in other languages (in which case a list of names of auto parts in other languages is fine) or (b) there is no such general principle, which eliminates the argument that the encyclopedic nature of exonyms automatically makes lists of them encyclopedic. Largoplazo (talk) 00:50, 21 June 2021 (UTC)


 * What about the animals example then? Well-developed articles about animals will often "mention and contextualise" names for that animal. See, for example,, or . So is Names of bears in different languages on the table? (It's true that not all animal articles will have sections on naming which mention exonyms, but the same is also true of even GA-status articles on places - e.g. St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador). Colin M (talk) 23:42, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, that Newfounland article does have content (if not a dedicated section) about the name of the place in Irish (in the last sentence of the lead). At this stage I feel like we're veering into a general discussion about how we treat names of things – there may actually be a place for that, but it's going to be a long and messy discussion, while here we're at least trying to focus on places (huge though it is already), not auto parts or animals or body parts. So, if an animal has significance for some culture, and also this culture's relationship to this animal is worth mentioning in the article about the animal, then yes, I believe it is appropriate to cover the name that the culture uses for the animal. But this sort of two-way relevance is, I guess, rarer for animal topics and so it can't as easily be harnessed to create a cross-cutting enumeration along the language axis (the way it is for German names for places in Belgium, or Basque names for Spanish places near the Basque country). – Uanfala (talk) 00:38, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep: the article may be disorganised, but it is informative. Beshogur (talk) 17:20, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note that lack of organization wasn't a rationale I presented in favor of deletion, and my observations that WP:NOT and WP:NOTDICTIONARY exist largely to address material that, though informative, doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Largoplazo (talk) 17:26, 20 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep, the German names for places that used to be in Germany or founded by Germans are clearly encyclopedic. Denmark also had a large empire that gives us lots of exonyms, for example in Greenland. Suggest to close to prevent further WP:TRAINWRECKing. —Kusma (talk) 10:34, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Also keep List of Australian place names changed from German names, clearly encyclopedic piece of WWI history. Additionally, it is very poor taste to include lists of Australian cities in a mass AFD called "List of names of European cities". —Kusma (talk) 09:16, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete — I am convinced by the argument that a list of place names in other languages is no more encyclopaedic than a list of auto parts in other languages. This is an English-language encyclopaedia, wherefore it should, in general, cover words and topics in English exclusively; it only makes sense to address foreign names if such names have intrinsic encyclopaedic value (such as examples of an above-mentioned process of hellenisation or whenever they be necessary to explain the sequence of the etymological formation of an English name, for example). Otherwise, anyone looking for the name of a city in a different language should check its article in the Wikipedia of said language, rather than here. The fact that exonymy is an encyclopaedic concept does not imply that there be a list of examples of non-English exonyms, although a list of English exonyms would be probably acceptable. Finally, although this final issue has not been raised, it must be said that it is very difficult to verify lists like these: you would need people knowledgeable of all featured languages who would be willing to give the names and find references for thousands of cities; the potential for undetected vandalism, especially in rarer languages, seems immense (in fact, just by looking at these articles, we see that they are almost entirely unreferenced). To be clear, my vote applies to the reformulated proposal. LongLivePortugal (talk) 17:21, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep, per all above. It appears as though at least some of these are notable. Ejgreen77 (talk) 11:23, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Proposal to reformulate my deletion nomination as previously amended
I propose to reformulate my deletion nomination so that only the following pages are included. These are long lists of words with no encyclopedic coverage.

At least a few of the remaining pages include encyclopedic material in addition to WP:NOTDICTIONARY-type word lists (a couple of folks have used the term "gazetteer", but all that means is "dictionary of place names"), and they ought to be considered apart from what I was getting at for purposes of this discussion. Largoplazo (talk) 22:45, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

In addition: my apologies for my poorly conceived initial go at this. Largoplazo (talk) 23:05, 20 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Comment Just in case it makes a difference, I want to address a question from the original nom: Perhaps the answer is to port these to Wiktionary. Or—I haven't looked—are similar lists already there? Yes, information of this sort is currently recorded in Wiktionary. For example, to see exonyms for Lausanne, expand the "Translations" table at Lausanne. The category system also offers some additional options for navigation. For example, wikt:Category:ca:Places in Switzerland will list Catalan exonyms for places in Switzerland. Colin M (talk) 23:52, 20 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for checking. In addition, even here, if one wants to know the Lithuanian name for The Hague, they can visit The Hague and click the interlanguage link for Lithuanian. Granted, that's not the same as having all the names in one place, but the information is available. (It's Haga, in case anyone here is interested.) Largoplazo (talk) 00:02, 21 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete the main A-Z list set. Translations of every city's name are available in the sidebar of each respective article. This is dictionary-type content, not encyclopedia. Reywas92Talk 16:53, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
 * First, not all of the foreign language variants have interwiki pages. Second, foreign language interwikis using non-Latin alphabets do not usually contain transliteration or pronunciation information (e.g. the Greek or Chinese articles do not tell how to render Μαδρίτη or 馬德里 into something readable to a non-Greek or Chinese reader.) Third, the lists here include local or historic variants that would require reading knowledge of a language to glean from interwikis (See the Pskov entry for sourced examples of both.)  Finally, this is a reason for porting the lists to Wiktionary, not for deletion. — <span style="border:1px solid #93010b;background:#ef0000;padding:2px;color:#efe6e6;text-shadow:black 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; font-family: Georgia;"> AjaxSmack  06:48, 25 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep Particularly List_of_German_exonyms_for_places_in_Poland. I'm pretty sure this is 'encyclopedic' rather than 'dictionary' content, as many of these places were German-speaking localities - some for centuries - before 1945. (I confess I'm not sure if that article is still under consideration for deletion, although it still has an AfD banner.) Gilgamesh4 (talk) 12:56, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * It seems to me that the proposal has been reformulated to exclude that article. With all due respect, I think it would be more relevant to have your opinion on the articles affected by the reformulated proposal, given that your rationale only seems to apply to one article which has already been excluded. LongLivePortugal (talk) 20:37, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * OK - but the AfD tag on List_of_German_exonyms_for_places_in_Poland is still there, and it links to this discussion page. Where do you suggest I should object to that AfD proposal? Gilgamesh4 (talk) 06:25, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
 * It would probably be better to withdraw this entire nomination, close it and then resubmit the lists above for deletion. That'd be a heck of a lot clearer and allow people to come to a decision about a limited set of articles. Then if any others need to be nominated I might suggest doing so individually - clearly some of these (German in Poland, Welsh exonyms etc... have some support, whereas others might not. Over bundling causes issues in these cases. Blue Square Thing (talk)
 * Makes sense. 12:13, 27 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete all, these are simply dictionary entries. I only checked more or less thoroughly the Portuguese language one (me beeing Portuguese). If it was an article, and a list, about names related to Portuguese language - e.g. because they were founded by Portuguese people, or under Portuguese rule at some point - I think it could be fine, after heavy editing. So if any other article is a stub for such article - maybe German names of places in Poland, or Polish name of places in Germany... - please, do keep, rename and improve. But as is these are mere dictionary lists - Nabla (talk) 13:26, 27 June 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.