Talk:Lists of twin towns and sister cities

message: Should we add twin towns to infoboxes? This would create a common format for recording these connections. I imagine this would take massive consensus building among editors? I'm scraping all the twin town data, so could provide a script to update infoboxes. Anyway, something to think about/discuss...Reviewing the various lists for twins shows different countries and areas have used different formatting rules. Some use tables, some more free form lists. Within the town/city main articles there are also different titles and ways to describe twin towns. If this info is in the infobox it will be picked up more readily by dbpedia and wikidata allowing more interesting data analysis such as this https://www.flickr.com/photos/29266908@N02/15846030356/ --Fozy81 (talk) 19:53, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistent formatting 

message: Being a Limean myself, that is, a Peruvian from Lima... I must denounce the impossibility of San Borja or Villa El Salvador being sister cities to any other city in the world... Simply put neither of them is a city... Both are districts, that is, subdivisions to a city; The city of Lima... So... Whoever  put them there, either he/she was joking, betrayed by pride or else, rather than being corrected by other people, he/she must correct this blatant inconsistency himself/herself... Undead Herle King 02:23, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illogical lies 

message: This list is looking pretty good now, and if anyone were to search Google for a "list of twin towns" (or indeed without the quote-marks), this is what they'd find. However, I'm worried that the list is somewhat taking over, and hiding the fact that there could be a lot more discussion of town twinning itself. Furthermore, the disambiguation between twin towns, twin cities and sister cities is currently a little vague and would benefit from better clarification. I therefore propose something like the following:
* This page be moved to List of twin towns, since that's what the bulk of the text (and edit history) consists of. (Although note comments about sister cities, below).
* The introduction from the current version be cut out to form a new stub.
** Although it could be here, this name is a bit of an anomaly: normal policy is to always use the singular form, and although "one twin town" doesn't generally make much sense, it is possible to end up with sentences like "The village has a twin town in France, called..." 
** To avoid ugliness, I therefore propose Town twinning be the article which discusses the concept/scheme itself.
** This would also allow Twin town to become a disambiguation page, with links to Town twinning, Sister city and Twin city.
* Somebody who knows a bit more about the schemes (or a different somebody for each scheme) needs to work out a better way of discussing the differences between the European concept of town twinning and the American one of sister cities.
** If the schemes are as similar as I suspect, the list here should probably be made to include both kinds of agreement - in which case would List of twin towns and sister cities be a better name, or is that too much of a mouthful? (Of course, we can always have redirects at shorter titles).
What do people think? - IMSoP 18:21, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, it's been on my to-do list long enough! I'm going to do it; right now. Let's hope I don't accidentally break the wiki in the process! - IMSoP 20:31, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Refactoring this and related pages

message: Here's a "fun" project for someone who's really really bored - "St. Petersburg has 53 cities-partners"  (how greedy!). And there they all are, all listed in apparently no kind of order, some using Russian rather than English naming conventions, but nonetheless all with years of formation. So, who fancies:
# sorting the list alphabetically
# wikifying it to link to the correct articles for each place, labelled appropriately with the year, separated by semi-colons to match the rest of the list
# finding the points in the list for all the twins, and listing St. Petersburg there, with the correct year
I could automate the first 2 steps with another of my famous perl scripts, but since the third step requires merging with any existing listings for each place, it's not so simple to automate...  IMSoP 16:50, 9 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This has been done at List_of_twin_towns_and_sister_cities_in_Russia#Cities_starting_with_S. The sister cities list has been evicted from the city article by the discussion at Talk:Saint_Petersburg#merge_of_list_of_sister_cities_of_saint_petersburg. I sorted the list in the same order as used on the source. Feel free to go to every one of the listed cities, and update the sister cities list at them :) --Enric Naval (talk) 16:37, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  This lot should be fun 

message: The following were lying around on this page: somebody's suggestion for "see also"s? - IMSoP 17:40, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Um, not sure where these links came from 

message: I've added links for Marcq-en-Baroeul, France, and Kreis Steinfurt, Germany, both of which have links in their respective languages [] [].  I'm not sure if and how these links should be represented in the English page. Isidore 20:18, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I found the English translation for Kreis Steinfurt, but my question remains. Isidore 20:33, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My gut feeling would be just to "red link" them, like you have - the fact that they can be created from their foreign-language counterparts is something which would need a new software feature to represent. Of course, you could always create a stub in English based on what you can understand of the original (e.g. with the help of a machine translation) and then you could put the "other languages" link(s) in for other people to finish off the job. But in short, it's not information we can hope to incorporate into this list. - IMSoP 17:02, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Links to non-English wikipedia articles 

message: I have made a new heading for European Russia, as hitherto we had the absurdity of 10 European cities (for example, Kaliningrad) appearing under the heading "Asian cities". I have used this map as representing the received delimitation of Europe; however, it could be considered somewhat controversial at its southern end -- many would say that the boundary of Europe actually runs along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains. Using this map also means that Rostov-na-Donu is in Europe only by virtue of the fact that the city centre is on the right (north) bank of the Don. I would tend to be of the opinion that Rostov is a European city without question (similarly Russian cities like Novorossiysk on the NE coast of the Black Sea), so perhaps a "border" on the Caucasian ridge would be preferable? -- Picapica 11:19, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The only problem with this is, that it gives us two headings for Russia, making the listing that much harder to navigate. I'd say just having cross-references between them should be enough, but there is also the issue of people adding twinnings: a UK citizen adding the twins of their hometown will likely not know whether they should add a list item under "European Russia" or "Asian Russia" - or worse, they may not notice they need to make the decision at all. This makes the already uphill struggle to keep the list consistent even harder. What do you think of listing Russia under Asia only, and having a reference under Europe -> Russia saying "For the purposes of maintaing this list, Russia is considered to be in Asia" (or, of course, vice versa). - IMSoP 23:35, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Might that be a bit confusing for people who've never really thought about Russia spanning continents before: "Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, Russia, South America" reads rather like a 'spot the odd one out' competition to me. But I'm not sure. - IMSoP 13:44, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Yes, I think this cross-referencing approach is the best, because it makes it obvious for both readers and editors that they need to go to a different section; I was thinking that trying to put Russia under Europe would be problematic because "#Russia" always refers to the first heading of that name, but it seems the software now automatically creates an anchor "#Russia_2", so we can use that. - IMSoP 19:43, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Asian and European Russia 

message: Since it's been a while since I did so, and since the whole thing's been mashed by a software bug at some point, I'm going to try and write another script to "normalise" this page. For now, I'll put the French section back in, until we come up with some system for splitting or not splitting the page (see above). - IMSoP 16:25, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time for another Perl script! 

message: Should we just revert or try to integrated the two sections?
--Anubis1975 10:42, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Someone has duplicated Africa, Asia, Europe and North America 

message: Having just paid a return visit to this page (as I haven't yet entered even half the items on my "little list" of 852 links found just by browsing on the various European-language wikipedias), after a long absence...
I see that very many country names have now been "hotlinked" (forgotten the correct Wiki-term!) as in e.g. 
*Lisbon - Bissau, Guinea-Bissau; Brasília, Brazil; Budapest, Hungary; Luanda, Angola; Maputo, Mozambique; Praia, Cape Verde; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [...]
Is this a good idea? 
:No.  There are too many links and they add nothing. WP:MoS recommends not to add such links unless they are relevant to the article.  All the country name wikilinks have now been removed  Slowmover 21:21, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: These links have also been removed in accordance with the date linking recommendations.  There is no information in the articles on specific years that is relevant to this article. Slowmover 21:21, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm inclined to agree with you on the country links.  With the entries I've added, I linked the countries only to maintain consistancy, without realizing it was once different.  As for the separate articles, it seems necessary in certain cases, but I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. Powers 18:48, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thoughts on format and layout 

message: They can't be listed as Palestine as there is no such thing. I would say they can't be listed as Israel either because Israel has not formally annexed them. I think for the time being they need to be listed separately. Valley2city 18:11, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  West Bank & Gaza 

message: am deleting it as there is no external reference i can find. also done by anon IP. --ti 06:33, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  pune and fairbanks 

message: I added Tarragona and Girona to the list, I used wikipedia as source. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Iru9k (talk • contribs) 11:23, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tarragona and Girona 

message: Walla Walla, Washington should be twinned with Wagga Wagga, New South Wales simply on the grounds of assonance, if nothing else. Jhobson1 15:39, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Appropriate twins 

message: This article MUST BE SPLIT UP. I red it the first time now and I find it completely chaotic. There gotta be links for the lists of each single country's town's twin towns. Every country must have his own list of twin towns. Ohterwise is the article completely chaotic [as it now is]... it is really not providing an easy survey.--Lycantrophe 10:34, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Every country might be a bit excessive, especially since several countries have few cities on this list. I'm going to divide it into continent lists, since that it currently the primary division. Hersfold (t/a/c) 04:16, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: DONE! I'll make a nav template for the whole set shortly. Hersfold (t/a/c) 05:15, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  SPLIT UP necessary 

message: Could someone provide an aproximate number of pairs? robots?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.60.96.22 (talk) 03:21, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of pairs 

message: I see from trying different wikilinks that Central America and the Caribbean are apparently included in the North America list. In the United States, however, these two regions frequently are not considered part of North America. For the sake of U.S. users, is there a workable name for that list that would make clear that it includes those regions? That way, it doesn't appear that those regions are not covered by the set of lists, yet they would still be broken out in a way that makes sense to the rest of the world. Lawikitejana (talk) 22:13, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I must say I would tend to associate "South and Central America" rather than "North and Central America"; either way, however, I would support a move to one of those titles, as appropriate. - IMSoP (talk) 22:18, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe something based on the United Nations geoscheme? -- Jao (talk) 22:24, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming so as to clarify Central America and the Caribbean