Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of urban areas in the Nordic countries

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. Renaming issues and moving issues may take place at the article talk page, and/or through the WP:REQMOVE process. -- Cirt (talk) 04:40, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of urban areas in the Nordic countries[edit]

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Three articles, all of them on a very similar subject. Maybe the three articles could be merged to one but it's not clear what is the criteria for inclusion and I'm not sure it's an appropriate topic for a list (i.e. how do you rank them exactly? There is confusion on the page itself and the notes - Actual "urban area" population numbers are listed for some cities, and municipality population numbers are listed for other cities.) The Largest metropolitan areas in the Nordic countries article itself says that there is no clear definition of the ranking: "The largest metropolitan areas in the Nordic countries are difficult to rank in size because the definition patterns are different from country to country..." . Anyway, if we're already here, I propose creating a new article called List of largest cities in the Nordic countries that will be based on the model of the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Wikis : [1], [2] and [3].Maashatra11 (talk) 12:24, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I created a small stub for List of largest cities in the Nordic countries based on the danish, swedish and norwegian articles. All improvements are welcome. Maashatra11 (talk) 13:02, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Denmark-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:44, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Finland-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:44, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Iceland-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:45, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Norway-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:45, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sweden-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:45, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:45, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: This is even more complex than you make it out to be. The Swedish word tätort as used in sv:Lista_över_Nordens_största_tätorter does not mean "city". It is a statistically defined term with the official translation "locality" and it covers everything from metropolitan Stockholm, covering (at least parts of) several municipalities in addition to that of Stockholm itself, down to places with 200 people concentrated within a certain area, of which there can be many in one of the larger, mostly rural, municipalities (some municipalities in northern Sweden are the size of small countries). "Urban area" is an officially used variation of the term "locality", as shown from this Swedish-English glossary but possibly limited to the larger ones (not sure). The only word in Swedish corresponding to the word "city", as in a particular type of municipality, stad, has a clearly delimited meaning only in historical contexts. It is still used in vernacular Swedish but it has no current official meaning, which makes it rather difficult to define it in a way that allows for statistical ranking of this type. I believe the other Nordic countries use similar terms for populated places. Using officially used terms with somewhat clear definitions seems preferable to using historical terms whose current usage lacks any degree of clarity. I am not sure if even "locality" or "urban area" or whatever is clear enough to use for comparative purposes, but it has to be better than "city". --Hegvald (talk) 19:45, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Another comment: Perhaps the best solution is to just have the lists for the individual countries (such as List of urban areas in Sweden by population) and avoid the problem of even somewhat varying definitions. --Hegvald (talk) 19:51, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Hegvald. The Danish and Norwegian articles [4] and [5] call it "by". According to Wiktionary it's the Danish and Norwegian word for city. I'm not sure why we should stick to the Swedish Wikipedia procedures. If you think that a list combining all the Nordic countries together is arbitrary maybe you could consider voting to delete. Maashatra11 (talk) 19:56, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure where you imagine I invoked "Swedish Wikipedia procedures". I have little idea about procedures at the Swedish Wikipedia, as I have barely ever done anything there. But I hope that you agree that definitions used by the official government agency for statistics in one of the countries concerned have some relevance. If we decide instead to use our own definitions, this would seem to result in what the English Wikipedia policies calls "original research". As for "voting to delete", I was under the impression that these AFD discussions were supposed to be precisely that, discussions, not votes. But then, I don't participate much in AFD discussions, so what do I know? --Hegvald (talk) 20:15, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, if you have no firm opinion, you're not supposed to vote and you can only leave comments as you just did. However, from what you wrote in "another comment", I was under the impression that you have an idea what could be done with the articles. I might have been wrong, sorry.
As for the "Swedish Wiki procedures", what I meant to say was, as before, that the danish and norwegian wikis don't necessarily use similar complex words so this issue might no be as complex as you claim it to be... But nothing is clear as it seems. :) Maashatra11 (talk) 20:27, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe I can be allowed to defer having a firm opinion on exactly how to proceed until I have read some other people's comments (if any are forthcoming, that is)? It doesn't seem to be a particularly urgent issue. --Hegvald (talk) 20:36, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Norwegian word "by" (town/city) no longer has any official meaning in Norway. It used to be an official status given to municipalities, then (as I understand it) it became an "unoffical status" a municipality could give itself if it met certain requirements. Recently, several "tettsteder" (urban areas, similar to tätort in Sweden) have declared themselves as "byer". Some of them are even inside a municipality that itself had been a "by" for a long time. Ters (talk) 21:15, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - This is a pretty random permutation of descriptions and amply covered in a dozen other places and lists. I don't see any added advantage to this, or find the reasons above compelling for the English Wikipedia. Shadowjams (talk) 05:46, 8 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Merge, i.e., keep one. Different definitions (which should be properly referenced, of course) is better handled within one article with different lists within the article, rather than in three or four separate articles. I say four, because List of largest cities in the Nordic countries was just created, which I redirected. Tomas e (talk) 12:43, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Totally agree with you :) The question is, which one of the four? Maashatra11 (talk) 12:48, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  - I think the most suited title of the 4 would be either List of urban areas in the Nordic countries or List of largest cities in the Nordic countries. It can also include material merged from the metropolitan areas article, so another title can be List of largest urban and metropolitan areas in the Nordic countries. But it's to long IMO. Do you have other suggestions? Maashatra11 (talk) 16:11, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:20, 14 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No massively strong opinion on this but I'd prefer a longer but more accurate title to a shorter and misleading one. TheGrappler (talk) 23:14, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a suggestion for a title? Spatulli (talk) 23:23, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think the title should reflect on what the final decision for the article content is - and that's the thing I'm not keen to venture an opinion on, because it involves compromising between various Nordic geo-statistical terms which I'm not clued up on. But Maashatra11's comment that "List of largest urban and metropolitan areas in the Nordic countries" seems too long is something I'd disagree with - if he thinks it's the most accurate title available I'd urge him to just go for it :) TheGrappler (talk) 23:34, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For some reason this was never relisted. So I relisted it now. Spatulli (talk) 01:34, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all and create them by country, the restriction to "Nordic countries", while it is a notable group, is arbitrary. What about "Northern European countries"? Or any other grouping of countries? Other than the country and continent level, no other grouping makes sense without overlap. Axem Titanium (talk) 07:29, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
~~Delete~~ Although the article is well-intentioned, this is textbook original synthesis, and it's one of those situations where one has to look at the precedent that would be set by a keep. One can juxtapose groups of adjacent nations in many combinations and then rank cities within that combination by population; in this case, it's Nordic countries, but one could do the same with Baltic states, Mediterranean nations, Caribbean countries, Middle Eastern states, etc. Mandsford 12:47, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Both the rationales above are based on an incorrect assumption. I don't necessarily support the continuation of this article here unless someone can define better what administrative units are to be included in the list. But whatever the problem is, it's not OR or synthesis. If this was "list of largest urban areas in Scandinavia and Sub-Saharan Africa", and nobody else had baked up such a list before, then it would certainly be both (a) arbitrary and (b) synthetic. It's true that "Nordic countries" form a notable group - other good examples would be the Baltic or Caribbean countries. So at least it's a reasonable thing to group by. But it seems that most reasonable groupings do in fact prompt people to create lists of "largest towns/cities in X region". The idea of a "List of largest cities in the Caribbean" is not only reasonable, but other sources actually have compiled them. Similarly it's fairly normal to hear Oslo described as the "third largest city in Scandinavia" for instance, so the idea of ordering such countries is not novel either. That at least suggests we can safely compile a Top 3 without any synthesis involved! TheGrappler (talk) 01:21, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I'm withdrawing my objections about original research, and Grappler is correct, I made an incorrect assumption. The definition of the "Nordic countries" (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) is, according to that article, those within the Nordic Council of Ministers. Those five nations have a relationship through the Helsinki Treaty of 1962. A definition does need to be put above the table, and I'm not sure of the best way to phrase it. Mandsford 12:47, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. 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.