Talk:Germans/Archive 1

message: He is not german he is from Austria.
:Whatever his (sub)ethnicity, I would suggest finding a less objectionable and more suitable portrait in the little gallery that's supposed to present the reader with faces of famous people of this ethnic group. When you browse the other ethnic group articles, you don't find Stalin's picture in the Georgian people article or Pol Pot in the Khmer people article. //Big Adamsky 22:57, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Adolf Hitler in the pictures

message: *This move is simply to conform to standard Wikipedia capitalization practices. Russ Blau (talk) 14:22, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
:I moved the page. Lachatdelarue (talk) 15:02, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: move

message: The following framed text is moved here from User:Ruhrjung/Germans, reflecting a previous attempt to an article on the Germans. Some paragraphs could probably be copied from below to the actual article.
--Ruhrjung 05:04, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: previous text

message: Hi, first I'd like to thank you for inviting me to comment on this issue.
With regard to present-day conditions, many, probably most, Germans consider Austrians and the Swiss to have nationalities of their own ? but their ethnicity is German.
This sentence still needs refinement.
It depends on two definitions, the definition of "ethnicity" and the definition of "German", both are vague and disputed. It should be more like "their ethnicity can be defined as German" or "some people define their ethnicity as German".
There is also another big German-speaking group in South Tyrol that might be mentioned (are they Austrians? - I don't think so ...).
I would not even think about calling a Swiss citizen that speaks French as her native tongue ;-).
So it should be "... Austrians and the German-speaking Swiss ...".
Best regards --zeno 12:38, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: zeno's comments

message: Thanks for inviting me also.
I see a few open historical items. The one that comes to mind first is the development of the strong national indentity (a progessive thing at that time in Germany!) during and after the liberation wars against Napoleon in the beginning of the 19th century. Bismarck and such was later. Examples are the Freikorps Luetzow (?!) from which the colors of the flag stem; politcal alliances like the Norddeutsche Zollunion / Norddeutscher Bund (Bismarck for first time) and the separation / exclusion of Austra in favor of Prussian dominance afterwards (culturally maybe even up to now) - UsagiYojimbo 17:07, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Baldhur's comments

message: "Historical persons like Mozart, Kafka and Copernicus might be called Germans" Das mag für Kafka und Kopernikus zutreffen, aber Mozart hält in Deutschland niemand für einen Deutschen, sondern für einen Österreicher. Mozart halte ich nicht für ein good example. ;-) --AnathemaTM 20:46, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Mozart, Kafka and Copernicus

message: In the German mind, they belong to the German culture, which is what decides if someone is considered a German or not, at least in a historical context.
This is just wrong. There is no such thing like a "German mind". It is also not NPOV to claim that they belong to the German culture.
--zeno 23:17, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: German mind

message: Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, and Germans may be considered terms with different connotations. It can of course be discussed, if it's good or bad Wikipedia usage to have separate articles for related concepts, but for the sake of references, and taking political sensitiveness into account, I guess this is the best.
--Ruhrjung 17:18, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
Nope, Volksdeutsche were often conscribed against their own will from other national groups in order to fill up army ranks.
--Molobo 13:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, and Germans

message: Why is this article not simply titled "Germans", instead of the clumsy "German peoples"?! --Joy [shallot] 10:34, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  title 

message: I've added US and Canadian Germans to this list, it's a significant number and every other ethnic group listed on Wikipedia includes their numbers in the Americas.
:I'd like to add that the US Census numbers are not terribly reliable, since collection of additional population characteristics is not the Census Bureau's primary mission. However, the decennial census and periodic population polls coducted by the Census Bureau are probably the best data we have. 
:On a related note, according to the 1990 Census 98.2% of people who have indicated German ancestry were born in the US. Only 4% indicated that they speak a language other than English (with German being the most logical candidate). Something to keep in mind when interpreting the numbers. Jbetak 21:04, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The US and Canada have for many years spoken of hyphenated hybrid ethnicities based on self-identification (not mother language) which they call ethnic origin groups (as opposed to ethnic affiliation groups). Assimilated Germans in the Americas should be mentioned in the text, perhaps more prominently than they already are. How these people of the Diaspora should be enumerated in Wikipedia's ethnic group boxed is another matter. Perhaps we need to look at examples from other articles so as to maintain comparability with, say, articles "Irish people", "Han Chinese" or "Armenian people"? --Big Adamsky 21:35, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's an excellent comment. I wasn't familiar with the concept ethnic origin groups, it sounds like a good way to go. Meanwhile , listing the diaspora number in infoboxes seems to be a common practice. I wonder if the infobox template should be extended to include references to assimilated ethic groups in the Americas to explain the situation. There is a nice article on Immigration to the United_States which could be referenced. Jbetak 21:08, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Numbers of US and Canadian Germans

message: From the article:
"The idea that Germany is a divided nation is not new and not peculiar. Foreign powers had long interceeded in German affairs, pitting one German principality against the other. Since the Peace of Westphalia, Germany has been "one nation split in many countries". The Austrian–Prussian split, confirmed when Austria remained outside of the 1871 created Imperial Germany, was only the most prominent example. The initial unification of Germany came as a great shock to these foreign powers, who have been trying to undo Germany as a national entity ever since. Most recently, the division between East Germany and West Germany kept the idea alive. "
From a different source:
"The Balkanization of Europe, up to a certain degree, was desirable and indeed necessary in the light of the
traditional policy of Great Britain, just as France desired the Balkanization of Germany.What France has always desired, and will continue to desire, is to prevent Germany from becoming a
homogeneous Power... Therefore France wants to maintain a system of small German States whose forces
would balance one another and over which there should be no central government. Then, by acquiring
possession of the left bank of the Rhine, she would have fulfilled the pre−requisite conditions for the
establishment and security of her hegemony in Europe."
Would anyone agree that the upper paragraph is a re-written version of the lower, or that they share practically the same idea? Miskin 20:50, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OMFG!!! My sides are splitting. HAHA. 10/10 man, 10/10! - FrancisTyers 21:03, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Very likely, the whole article shares the same idea as the articles about Germans in other encyclopedias. That's "being about the same subject", not "plagiarism". Zocky | picture popups 21:06, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I wouldn't call the different source an encyclopedia. :-) bogdan 21:15, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Me neither, but I wasn't talking specifically about the above passage. Zocky | picture popups 23:19, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

text: The two texts are as different as any two texts dealing with a broadly similar topic could possibly be. Miskin's concern is incomprehensible. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:25, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I must admit the second text didn't immediately ring the bell with me. Anyway, the article excerpt is of course strongly tendentious and most probably wrong ("have been trying to undo Germany as a national entity ever since" can hardly be true after 1990; Germany was politically split up long before the Peace of Westphalia; and neither the medieval splitting nor the Prussia-Austria split of the 19th century seems to have been the work of foreign powers, as far as I'm aware. Not that I'm an expert though.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:43, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism 

message: On the English people page it has been agreed that although peoples from what is now parts of north western Germany did migrate to England 1600 years ago, the linkage between modern Germans (except perhaps the Low Germans) and the English is very weak.  The marked difference in contemporary culture, language and genetics/blood show that the English are naturally at one with the rest of the British peoples and to a lesser degree Netherlanders/Frisians, Danes and Norwegians but with regards to the German people as a whole, very distinct.  I'm removing English people from the related peoples section.  I do think though that if someone is very strongly committed to having it there, that it should also include Scottish people as the Teutonic tribes also moved into Scotland.  What must be remembered is that German people of the 21st century does not equal 'Germanic' tribes of the dark ages.
The current listing also implies that the English are a Germanic people.  This is true in that they speak a Germanic language, but in terms of an ethnic group, the use of such a classification is misleading. Enzedbrit 10:12, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: English people

message: According to the disambiguation, this article is about an ethnic group (Germans in the sense of Ethnic Germans) instead of a nationality. That's terrible, for at least three reasons.
#There is a perfectly nice Ethnic German article where such things should belong
#That's certainly not the most common usage of the word German. So this idea seems to violate WP policy
#The article itself, though it is unclear, also seems to want to talk about citizen of Germany (but the introductory paragraph is such a mess that I am not sure)
#The article is very difficult to wikilink. I want to write XYZ is a German politician... in some other article. I don't want to imply (or find out) if XYZ is ethnically Turkish or Polish or French or whatever. I just want to write that he is a German citizen. Having to pipe to Demographics of Germany is extremely unelegant and sends the reader to a surprising page instead of what she expected.
Checking Dutch and French and Russian I do understand that there are many other WP articles that follow the example of this very article. Is there some sort of centralised discussion? For—at least at a quick glance—this simply violates policy. (Which is fine if there is some sort of consensus that has been established about using these words consistently in a surprising fashion.) At the very least, I suspect there is a huge amount of cleanup necessary that pipes all links to German to Germany instead of to German people.  Arbor 11:36, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: this article is about German citizens plus ethnic Germans with no German citizenship. Ethnic Germans is just about 'Volksdeutsche', while Demographics of Germany is about all residents of Germany, including resident aliens. I would be grateful if anonymous editors would stop re-inserting "Swiss and Austrians are ethnic Germans". They are not, they are speakers of German dialects, that's all. Btw., this is Germans, not German. You want to say XYZ is a German politician, not XYZ is a German politician, let alone XYZ is a German politician :p dab (ᛏ) 21:25, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article being about an ethnic group (rather than a nationality) 

message: The article claimed: Among (West) European peoples, Germans may hold the strongest roots and identity to their ancestors - worldwide. (Also refer to Ethnic Germans). This sounds weird, and no evidence was given anyway. I will delete it. -- ZZ 11:43, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some cleanup 

message: Ulritz, I have been using this talkpage, and you haven't. You seem to be pushing the minimal estimate of "pure Deutschstämmige of some 75 million. That is a possible way of counting, and I agree with citing it as low estimate (although, strangely, in former edits you seemed to be keen on including anyone speaking German dialects, including Swiss and Austrians, which is a strange Grossdeutschland attitude that is not alleviated by the colours you display on your userpage. What gives? Nobody refers to Austrians as "Germans", neither Austrians, nor Germans, nor anybody else). Still, if we give ranges like 5-45 million in the USA column, it is only consequent to sum these numbers for the overall total, yielding a range of 75-130 million, depending on how you count. We agree on the facts of the distribution, it's just that your preferred way of counting is not the only one, just the most restrictive one. Now if you continue pushing your point of view as if it was the only one without discussing, I will just revert you from now on, and also place this article on peer review or rfc. dab (ᛏ) 14:58, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: anon, look at Wikipedia:Resolving disputes. If you just keep reverting, you'll just be rolled back. If you have a point to make, do it here. See also WP:EQ. You are just wasting everyone's time like this. If anon revert-warring continues, I'll just  to enforce proper talk behaviour. dab (ᛏ) 17:18, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: population totals

message: To anybody re-inserting the 4.2 million Swiss, 7.3 million Austrians to the infobox: I have repeatedly asked for a reference for this. WP:CITE is policy. Unless and until you cite such a source, you are in violation of Wikipedia policy, and will be reverted, I really don't know why you even bother. Go to some library instead and see if you can find something to back up your claims. dab (ᛏ) 14:50, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: CITE

message: The german population figures in certain regions has far too wide of a margin to provide significant statistical information.  For example, the united states, according to the side window, has a 40 million person margin of error.  40 million is a very significant piece of the US population.  We can get a correct figure from the US census website.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.197.143.73 (talk • contribs) 
:the margin is not a margin of error , it is a quick summary of the situation (of varying definitions of the term), explained in greater depth in the article body. If you want to know the background of these numbers, I am afraid you'll have to read the article, not just the infobox. dab (ᛏ) 14:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  German Populations