Talk:Municipality

message: The article says "In Hungary, a municipality (kistérség) is part of a county (megye)." I don't know if this terminology is correct; when speaking about Hungary in English, municipality is often used as a term that encompasses cities, towns and villages, while kistérség is usually translated as district, the same as the translation for járás (note that a kistérség has importace mainly in statistics only, I'm not even sure they have some kind of local government). – Alensha 寫 词 13:10, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Hungary

message: At the time of writing the bit about the UK reads as follows:
"In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a municipality is governed by official political borders, such as that of the Greater Belfast area in Northern Ireland. As is the same for the Greater London area and not just the City of London."
I know little about local government in Northern Ireland, but I know how it works in London, and the Greater London level - the Mayor of London and the Greater London Assembly - has power over policing, public transport, strategic planing and a few other bits and pieces but the lower-tier London Boroughs - Westminster, Ealing, etc, have power over most major services, e.g. education, social services, housing and local roads.  Describing Greater London as a municipality in the sense described in this article seems a little odd.  To be honest, as has been mentioned earlier, this article seems to be exporting the US concept of municipalities worldwide and so doesn't map very successfully to the local government structures in most other countries.
80.229.220.14 19:07, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: United Kingdom

message: This distinction needs to be defined and motivated (what is exactly the difference? why is it important?), or removed. Chl 11:07, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed it. Slovenia and Portugal had their municipalities in the section First-level and in the section Second-level. The combined table allows to state under "subdivision of" the value "the country" to indicate first level. But Slovenia and Portugal both have entities containing multiple municipalities. JelgavaLV (talk) 06:03, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: First- / Second-Level Entities

message: municipalities in mexico act like counties. there is a municipality seat and surrounding communities. just like a counties.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.25.15.158 (talk) 21:54, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I presume you are talking about the United States concept of county, not the European concept.  In Europe, a county is normally a second-level administrative unit, and is subdivided into municipalities.  Skinsmoke (talk) 20:51, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Seeing as American and Mexican states are comparable to European countries in size, it's understandable that countries as large as the USA and Mexico would be subdivided into states first.  The states, geographically similar to European countries, are then further subdivided.  In the US, these subdivisions are usually called counties, making them equivalent to what you're discussing.  In Mexico, they are called municipios.  A Mexican municipio is more akin to an American (and European) county than it is to an American municipality.  98.221.141.21 (talk) 17:47, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  municipalities in mexico 

message: This article is completely unreferenced.
I have serious doubts about the lower level / first level definitions by country. Other editors have voiced similar doubts. The problem comes from an attempt of mapping the generic meaning of municipality into a specific context of another nation.
* Merriam-Webster defines municipality as "1 : a primarily urban political unit having corporate status and usually powers of self-government. 2 : the governing body of a municipality." Other encyclopedias come to similar conclusions. We can't attach another meaning to it when translating it to another country. 
*Now, pull out a dictionary. If it does its job right, it will say that "municipality" can mean anything from a village to a city, and even a municipal government.
*My English-German dictionary faithfully translates municipality to anything from "Gemeinde" (village, parish) to "Stadtverwaltung" (city government).
*However, this article claims that ..
**In Austria, a municipality (Gemeinde) is part of a district (Bezirk), which is in turn part of a state (Bundesland).
**In Germany, a municipality (Gemeinde) is part of a district (Kreis). Larger entities of the same level are called towns (Stadt). In less populated regions, municipalities are often put together into collective municipalities (Verbandsgemeinde)
**In Switzerland, a municipality (commune/Gemeinde/comune) is part of a canton (canton/Kanton/cantone) and defined by cantonal law.
*This is all true. But it's only partially true. It gives the impression that in all three countries, municipality means "Gemeinde" (village,parish.) In reality, municipality can mean anything from a village to a city in all three countries, or even a city government. In the German language, there exists a complementary generic term, "Ort". Literally, it means "place", but within that context, it is as generic as municipality. It does not encompass the governing body of a municipality, that would be "Ortsverwaltung."
*I checked some other countries I am familiar with, and they are likewise problematic. For instance, the Chinese direct-controlled municipalities (直辖市 in pinyin: zhíxiáshì) are correctly reflected as cities ("shi" means city in Chinese and Japanese), but the reverse translation into "municipality" has problems. They are cities with the rank of a state/province, just like Berlin or Vienna. In their own language, they all are called "cities."
*Ì assume other countries have similar problems, as the comments above attest.
I strongly recommend removing the country-specific explanations, unless they can be properly sourced. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so translations into other languages are out.  -- BsBsBs (talk) 05:59, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urgent urban renewal 

message: "The largest municipalities can be found in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greenland, and Iceland."
This statement contradicts the Wikipedia article on Chongqing. The article on Chongqing states it is 'possibly the worlds largest municipality by both size and population". At 31,000,000 people I suspect this is probably right, at least for population. 122.59.243.157 (talk) 02:53, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Largest Municipality 

message: I've added a template cleanup-reorganize to section Municipalities by country because its the best I could think of.  Look at the Notes column formatting for Brazil, Chile, and Portugal for example.  Making this column wider would help, but not enough.  The Notes column is essentially how 'municipality' is defined in the enclosing political jurisdiction, and there can be considerable detail, a lot of which isn't included here.  If this were a printed document, it wouldn't waste all that white space.  Maybe there should be a separate full page width Notes section below the table with an entry for each relevant definition of municipality.
Sbalfour (talk) 18:23, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Column formatting 

message: 19 hits for this spelling in WP.GinAndChronically (talk) 04:52, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: What is the meaning of the above obscure posts? Hwy43 (talk) 05:42, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  sp " municiaplity" / municipality 

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thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: Removed: "It is to be distinguished (usually) from the county, which may encompass rural territory or numerous small communities such as towns, villages and hamlets." 77.191.251.111 (talk) 08:29, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  No source - it is to be distinguished (usually) from the county 

message: Dropped unsourced content in this tabular section, which had been been tagged as unsourced since 2014. 
I have serious doubts about whether this section is appropriate here at all, as Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and in general, this sort of information is not appropriate for an encyclopedia in this format. Possibly the content could be transwikified to Wiktionary.  Certainly there's nothing wrong with having per-country sections about municipalities in other parts of the world, the way it is done in Village, Town, or City, and some of the information in the table rows could be moved to the appropriate country subsection in the article.  In my opinion, the section Municipality#Terms in various countries should be changed to #By country, analogous to the way it's done in section Town#By country. In that section, information about the term in the local language could be included, in the context of other information about municipalities in that country. The remaining information from the Municipality#Municipalities by country table could be merged into that section. Mathglot (talk) 18:56, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Municipalities by country