Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Naming of German municipal subdivisions

While browsing through articles on subdivisions of Cologne with the intention of adding translations from German Wikipedia, I noticed that the terms used to translate different levels of subdivision are inconsistent across these pages. The overview article Districts of Cologne translates Stadtbezirk as "(city) district", and Stadtteil very literally as "city part". Articles about individual Stadtbezirke on the other hand, like Lindenthal and Rodenkirchen instead render Stadtbezirk as "borough" and Stadtteil as either "(city) quarter" "city part".

By way of comparison, articles on Berlin, which calls its top-level subdivisions Bezirk and its second-level subdivisions Ortsteil (which meanings do not differ substantially from Stadtbezirk and Stadtteil), uses "borough" for the former and "locality" for the latter.

This is confusing in several different ways:


 * Readers may take a minute to work out that what some articles call a "borough" is the same thing other articles call a "district".
 * The literal translation "city part" for Stadtteil sounds vague and doesn't really convey any scale or significance to the reader. It also sounds a bit "awkward" to my mind. The term "locality" used for Ortsteil is less awkward, but no less vague.
 * The use of "quarter" for Stadtteil is wholly nonsensical as the Stadtteile themselves can be further subdivided informally into (Stadt)viertel / Veedel, which literally translates as..."(city) quarter". Berlin articles use "neighbourhood" for such further, informal subdivisions of their Ortsteile.

I would like to propose the following consistent approach for the subdivisions of German cities:


 * (Stadt)bezirk or other top-level division to be rendered as borough
 * Stadt-/Ortsteil or other second-level division to be rendered as district
 * Viertel or other (usually informal) third-level division to be rendered as neighbourhood except in proper nouns (e.g. Severinsviertel → "Severin Quarter", Belgisches Viertel → "Belgian Quarter")

Subjectively, as a binative of English and German, this is what seems most intuitively comprehensible/evocative, but there are also objective reasons speaking for it:


 * 1) The City of Cologne's official web page on its subdivisions alongside this official map of Veedel uses precisely this borough-district-neighbourhood schema while retaining "quarter" for proper nouns (example)
 * 2) Berlin likewise officially uses "boroughs" for Bezirke and "districts and neighbourhoods" for Ortsteile and their subdivisions
 * 3) The borough-district schema has also been used for translating Stockholm's top-level stadsdelsområden and second-level stadsdelar, the latter even being cognate with Stadtteile.

However, I didn't want to charge ahead and make these changes without first inviting comment to see if there might be any good reasons this isn't already what's used across the board. So...what do other editors think? --Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 12:13, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Where is the previous discussion that has made it necessary to have a full-blown thirty-day formal RfC (on its own special page, I might add)? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 06:34, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
 * What necessitates a full-blown RfC on its own page is the fact that this is a project-wide nomenclature question (cf. titles of monarchs). There is clearly disagreement on how these terms ought to be translated (otherwise the inconsistency wouldn't exist), and this relates to upwards of 2,800 articles (just based on how many contain the terms Stadtteil, Stadtbezirk and Ortsteil alone, there are likely some where the German term isn't given). While I could've initiated a less formal discussion at WikiProject Germany or WikiProject Cities, a fundamental nomenclature question like this specifically benefits from input from a wider range of editors than those who "specialise" in Germany or urbanism-related topics, as we presumably want the terminology used to be meaningful to the "lay" reader.--Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 10:04, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
 * OK, so where has it previously been discussed, reaching stalemate? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:34, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

We have discussed the topic in the past at places like Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Germany) and at Wikipedia talk:German-English translation requests/Translation guide (and probably at WP:GER and WT:GSWN), but not recently as far as I know. The official terms are not consistent in German (sixteen different federal states with up to sixteen different conventions), so it is not easy. See Bezirk for some of it. The proposed "district" for "Ortsteil" conflicts with our use of "district" for the "Kreise" (Districts of Germany), so I would advise against recommending it in general. Note also that "Viertel" is sometimes used untranslated in English if part of a proper name, as in Märkisches Viertel. Overall, there are often good reasons to use local schemes, and I would need to see more research (also on different conventions used in English) in order to be convinced that committing to a single scheme is a good idea. We also need to keep WP:ENGVAR/MOS:RETAIN in mind in such situations. —Kusma (talk) 22:06, 19 July 2024 (UTC)