Wikipedia:WikiProject Netherlands/Dutch municipalities task force/Archive2011

This archives the old recommendations of this WikiProject before it turned inactive. This was archived according to the advice WP:INACTIVEWP to rejuvenate the project. The section is a full copy of the old structure advice, the  shows an example of an infobox with more options.

Old content
Every Dutch municipality has its own article, containing the information on the municipality itself and all of its settlements (cities, towns, villages). The information about each individual town is a separate section in the article; each town with its own section should have a redirect to the article on the municipality.

As an example, the article on Terneuzen is mostly formatted following these proposed guidelines.

The typical article on a Dutch municipality consists of the following elements:

Infobox
(for old versions, see below)

The article starts with an infobox. The latest version is

Infobox settlement

Example:



The variable density is calculated by dividing the population by the land area.

The infobox contains a location map of the municipality. These maps were created by User:Mtcv for the Dutch wikipedia.

For more detailed maps external links are provided, based on geographical coordinates of the municipality, expressed in decimal degree values, rounded to two digits after the point. (dn = "degrees north", de = "degrees east") corresponding to a precision of about a kilometer, so more decimals are not needed. You can find the coordinates from a gazetteer such as this one.

The link showing the coordinates leads to a map sources page (a page with direct and indirect links to maps) of which the contents can be edited on which applies to the whole of Europe, or the redirect at  can be changed into a version specially for the Netherlands.

For convenience the infobox also provides direct links to maps of the given location, produced by the main map services allowing these. The last of these direct links is to a satellite image or aerial photograph of Google Maps. For some rectangular areas a much higher resolution is provided than for the rest of the country, see satellite images and aerial photograps of the Netherlands.

For municipalities in the province of Friesland, nowadays the same template Template:Infobox settlement can be used. By adding a value for the "navtive_name", one can specify the name in the local dialect. Example: 

The municipality
The first (unnamed) section should be about the municipality. The first sentence should be something like
 * Foo is a municipality in province, the Netherlands.

If the municipality has the same name as one of its towns, this should be made clear:
 * Foo is a municipality and a town in province, the Netherlands.

The remainder of the first (unnamed) section should be about the municipality only. It may contain information about the location, name, or history (e.g. when it was formed) of the municipality. There can also be links to neighbouring municipalities.

Population centres
In this section, there should be a list of all towns in the municipality. You may include the population of each town. The list may be sorted by name, or by population.

Opinions differ on whether content about population centres should be grouped by municipality, and split off if the article gets too large, or these centres should have their own articles anyway. In the case that a population centre does not have its own page, a redirect page is important because a user does not always know the name of the municipality. Therefore many pages for population centres are redirects to the municipality page (sometimes a soft redirect).

On the other hand, a few people insist that the municipality article should have a link for each population centre.

To reconcile the two, and distinguish links to hard and soft redirects from links to population centre pages with additional content, the links to the latter are bolded, and the explanation "(links to additional info bolded)" is added. It is also a good idea to describe the additional content a link has to offer.

See also Redirect and/or link to non-existing page.

Individual towns
Every town can have its own section here. There is no need for such a section if there is nothing to say about it (except for population, which can be included in the section Population centres). The order of these sections should be alphabetical. If there is a town with the same name as the municipality (for example: the town Moerdijk in the municipality of Moerdijk, it should be the first item.

In the first sentence of each section, you should make the name of the town bold. This is because there is a redirect from the name of the town to the article. (The name of the town should not be bolded if it is the same as the municipality (e.g. Moerdijk), as it was already bolded in the first sentence of the whole article.)

If a section reaches a certain length, it may be divided into subsections, like History, Transportation, etc. If it gets even longer, you can move the information to a separate article.

Special case: if there is a lot of information about the main town (with the same name as the municipality), it should not be moved to a separate case. This is for example the case with Amsterdam. In these cases, the city itself is much more notable than the municipality. There are several possibilities: either the info on the municipalities and its other towns could be added somewhere at the end of the article, or it can go on a page named Amsterdam (municipality) (this solution was chosen on the Dutch wikipedia, see nl:Amsterdam and nl:Gemeente Amsterdam).

New infobox option
See the following example for a more recent use of this infobox

