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The following discussion comes from Wikipedia:Categories for deletion. This is an archive of the discussion only; please do not edit this page. -Kbdank71 15:29, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Category:Cities in Hungary

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There is only one city as such in Hungary, and that is Budapest. All the towns listed in the above category should be inserted into Category:Towns in Hungary, and the above category should be deleted. -- Adam78 23:27, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It is also to be considered whether a new Category:Towns and villages in Hungary would be of worth. In this case, the contents of the above two categories should equally be put into this latter category, and the Towns could also be deleted. -- Adam78 23:38, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • List of towns in Hungary does noot support your assertions here. Budapest is not the only city/town and city/towns are distinct legal entities from villages. Rmhermen 23:58, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose. As per Wikipedia articles, Debrecen is the second largest city, Miskolc is the third largest city, Szeged is the fourth largest city, and Pécs is one of the five largest cities, all with populations of more than 150,000. I've been there, I consider them cities. -Kbdank71 00:05, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose. This is a place for words in their ordinary meanings, not some legalese nonsense involving translations of the Hungarian words for whatever legalistic terms officially classify these cities for administrative purposes. Gene Nygaard 00:24, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • You obviously haven't read city, otherwise you'd realise that there are no "ordinary meanings" for these words. Even English-speaking countries differ amongst themselves according to what is a "town" and what is a "city". And as far as "legalese" goes: I don't know about Adam78, but I'd far prefer that Wikipedia told me what the distinctions a country makes actually are, rather than tried to impose some parochial idea of "ordinary meanings" upon all of the other countries of the world. We aren't the CIA World Factbook, you know. We aim for accuracy about other countries, here. Uncle G 16:55, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
  • Oppose blunt renaming. Maybe support renaming to Cities and towns of Hungary. I've seen this issue at Gyor - a city of 120K people should not be called a mere "town" at en:. --Joy [shallot] 00:26, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • Whether something is a town or a city does not necessarily depend from the size of its population. In many countries there are "cities" that are smaller than many "towns". Whether something is a city usually depends from some sort of grant of status, such as a charter. It also depends from whether that country actually makes a distinction between "town" and "city". I'm surprised to find, after reading List of towns in Hungary that there is evidence for the veracity of Adam78's assertion. The article states that there is no actual distinction between a town and a city in Hungarian. (And even after a little research the translation by some of megyei jogú város to "city" seems somewhat dodgy, and is certainly disputed by others who translate it as "town with county rights", just as Wikipedia does.) These two separate categories are thus imposing a false distinction, that doesn't actually exist in the country concerned, purely because the English language distinguishes the terms (although not in ways that all English speakers agree upon). I say make the categorizations that Hungary actually makes. Uncle G 16:55, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
  1. If you want to know what distinctions some particular country makes in this regard, that is information that could be included in the article about that country—it is not a point to be made by a Category classification in Wikipedia. The classifications are for different purposes; different jargon applies.
  2. Even then, unless that country's official language is English (and Hungary's official language is Hungarian, it is of no particular relevance whatever distinctions it makes. There is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between words of different languages. We might, for example, need a two-word or longer phrase to express in English what some other language expresses expresses in a single word. Or vice versa. Gene Nygaard 15:25, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I would support that change, not only for Hungary but for most everywhere else. Only if that would result in an unwieldy file should they be split into separate categories. Since categories are only identified for articles which actually exist (not for ones that are just red links in various lists), inclusion in the category file would mean that a Wikipedia article for that city/town/whatever you want to call it exists, and that would keep most of them from becoming unweildy.
Furthermore, there is no reason on God's green earth why you should have to already know not only a city's population but also either some local classification scheme or even some general Wikipedia classification scheme before you can find the article on that city by using the Wikipedia categories. When you get everything too fragmented, the categories become as useless as tits on a boar. Gene Nygaard 15:25, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Excellent point. Categories should be there to help find what you're looking for, not make it harder. Besides, on some off chance we all agree on, say, town, what's to stop Joe User from coming here looking for cities in Hungary because that's what he thinks of them as? -Kbdank71 15:49, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
        • It might also be worth writing up how complex this whole area is, given the soviet arrangements and things such as the grants of "royal free town" status that have happened over the years. Uncle G 19:04, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
      • I beleive you actually have that backwards. Adam78 is claiming that Budapest is the only city while everything else should be lumped in one category as to towns and villages. List of towns in Hungary claims that Budapest and a number of other places are city/towns while a greatly larger number of places are legally differentiated as only villages. So then the categories should be Category:Cities and towns in Hungary and Villages in Hungary. Rmhermen 17:15, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)

It's not my own idea that a settlement under 500,000 inhabitants is more of a town than a city: I have a native U.S. friend here in Hungary, who's been studying here for almost three years, and he made me aware of this distinction. We were translating a Hungarian short story into English, and he told me about this, ie. that he wouldn't call a settlement under half a million inhabitants a city. You can say it's POV, but in any case it's a native English POV, probably not an uncommon usage. – The second biggest settlement in Hungary after Budapest is Debrecen, with about 200,000 people, which, unfortunately, happens to be significantly below the above value. – Anyway, can anyone show me any specific definition stating that any settlement (eg. a village) which is given a charter has to be called a city, rather than a town? In any encyclopaedia or wherever?

-- Adam78 20:09, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Where I live, if we make a distinction between a "city" and a "town" the cutoff point is about 10,000 inhabitants, or maybe less. Gene Nygaard 20:30, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
With only a cursory search, I found at least two places called "cities" in Wikipedia, with their own articles in Wikipedia, with a population of 6. There are likely smaller ones; can anyone find them? Gene Nygaard 20:46, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I grew up in a city with a population of about 70,000 (I consider it a "small city"). In the United States, the city designation often has to do with certain technical governmental and population requirements. There are many American cities with much less than half a million inhabitants, yet they are legally (and in common American English usage) cities. An American who honestly thinks that 500,000 is the cut-off for cities is probably from an exceptionally large one and therefore has a somewhat unusual perspective. -Aranel ("Sarah") 22:35, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Oppose. What is defined as a city should be resolved by the political subdivision in which it resides, not simply on population size compared to others in the world. The provinces of Canada have different criteria as to what is classified as a city. One province grants city status with a mere 5,000 people. If Hungary declares a city at 25,000 (I don't know what it is exactly) then that is the criteria to be used for cities in Hungary RedWolf 02:32, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)
  • This is a difficult issue, actually. Going by formally used political subdivisions, there is not a single city in Sweden, for instance, as all municipalities are just municipalities (kommuner), although some of them call themselves "city" (stad) and quite a few were cities and had city privileges when such a difference was made. It is obvious that there may be human settlements generally known as cities or towns and recognized by visitors as such, irrespective of the legal and political divisions. Some compromise between a legal and a demographic/geographic definition clearly has to be made. / Uppland 11:31, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • I would support either two categories: one for the 283 cities/towns (városok) and one for the 2862 villages (Hungarian: falu or község). Or maybe three categories: one for the 23 urban counties (megyei jogú város), one for the remaining towns/cities and one for the villages. Rmhermen 16:36, Mar 17, 2005 (UTC)

I counseled another U.S. friend of mine (who's studied a lot about Hungary and speaks its language fairly well) and he said it's rather subjective and arbitrary, and these terms may vary by region and by local jurisdiction. He said that any locality can be legally defined as "town" or "city" or "village" but to his knowledge there is no strict definition of these, so he could only use arbitrary ways to decide what is "town" and "city" in Hungary. For instance, by looking on a detailed map like his European Road Atlas, he could decide that if a place has an "urban area" in yellow (like Pápa) then he could call it a city, and if not (like Piliscsaba or Nagymaros) then he could call it a town. The map probably states that a place colored yellow has more than a certain number of people (this can vary from map to map).

So I think the best way will be to treat them together, like "Hungarian cities and towns" on the one hand and "Hungarian villages" on the other. I don't think, however, that "urban counties" should be treated on their own, because some of them are relatively insignificant towns, with few historic monuments and not very high population (like Szolnok) and it wouldn't be necessarily useful to highlight them only by formal criteria – as opposed to other, more important towns (like Sopron) which are not urban counties.

(BTW, I'm not sure if it's clear yet: the term "urban county" is meant to refer to cities/towns which are the capital of a singlular county. This means that if a specific county has several important cities/towns, and another has few, then it's quite possible than a city/town appointed as an "urban county" will be much less significant in several aspects than a "plain" city or town in another county.)

It may be a further argument that some average villages have been given the right of a town mostly because of their historic etc. importance (eg. Pannonhalma), and they wouldn't be very fortunate in either category of the above two. So maybe the best possible solution would be which is followed in the case of France, that is, the category of "Hungarian cities, towns and villages" in one.

--Adam78 23:32, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • There doesn't seem to be a category for villages at the moment, and a separate villages category would probably never be overly populated, due to non-notability. I see no reason not to lump them all together. Why not Category:Municipalities in Hungary? --Azkar 23:51, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I don't really oppose a combination of categories; in fact I actually think there should be a combination. My original opposition was largely because it was based on a misconception by the proposer, who admitted he believed that it would be improper in English to apply the term city to a place with less than half a million people. Yet Wikipedia has over a hundred "cities" with fewer than 50 people. Now that he realizes that was incorrect, we should continue the discussion on broader grounds.
I think some analogies are in order. In the U.S., political considerations drive the Census Bureau (they want to avoid any alienation of the populace which might reduct participation) so they use all sorts of names for cities, including not only towns, village, hamlets, and the like but also weird ones such as "plantations" and "boroughs" and "purchases" and "gores" (often translated from Vermont English as "roads"), as well as the ubiquitous "census-designated places" (CDP). Some similar political correctness considerations apply to the writing of the articles about these places in Wikipedia.
On the other hand, the search engine of the USGS for their Geographic Names Information System serves a purpose similar to the "Category" system in Wikipedia. As a finding aid, GNIS uses two "feature type" designations which apply to cities and towns under whatever legalistic jargon might be used locally—"populated places" and "civil", both of which apply to most towns and cities, though "civil" doesn't include all populated places, but does include broader government categories such as townships (as they are called in western U.S.) and counties (parishes, boroughs). Similar considerations should apply to our categories, and our general rules here should be based on different considerations than our general rules for the articles themselves. I think either the combination "cities and towns" would be sufficient indication that it isn't strictly based on local legalese, or if "municipalities" doesn't offend too many peoples legalese sensibilities (that term may also have specific legalistic meaning in some places such as Canada, for example), that would be an acceptable alternative. At some point, it is reasonable to say we jsut don't care about all the picky little localized, specific meanings and just go ahead with one of the alternatives. Gene Nygaard 16:52, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Hungarian language does indeed have only one word for city and town, "város", but legal terminology distinguishes between a simple "város" and one with county rights. (I usually call something "city" if it has more than 100,000 inhabitants, but of course it's only a personal preference – just like everyone else's opinion.) And of course there are villages too. I think the "Cities of Hungary" category should be renamed to "Cities and towns", and it should be a subcategory to one that lists all municipalities. On Hungarian wikipedia we have these two categories. So Eger, for example, is a part of "Cities and towns of Hungary", "Municipalities of Hungary" and "Cities and towns of Heves county". I'm planning to write a longer article on subdivision and administration in Hungary (its summary would be what I wrote at List of towns in Hungary.)

(Adam, I think there is some misunderstood, I believed "urban counties" are cities with county rights (megyei jogú város), not county seats. I'm not sure, though. But Sopron is listed among the urban counties so I guess the term "urban county" was meant to be "cities with county rights".) Alensha 16:21, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Neutral I think this is part of a wider debate about the usefulness of distinguishing "Towns in X" from "Cities in X". Quote from Category:Towns by country:

    Note that the category Cities by country seems to be significantly more populated than this one. If you consider creating a subcategory, think of creating it as a subcategory of "Cities by country" instead. There may, however, be a useful size distinction between City and Town: see Category:Coastal cities — but here we have no definition of the demarcation line. 100,000 looks good.

    In my view, if there is a basis for distinguishing the two (for X=Hungary or whatever), then at a minimum, the Category pages should cross-reference each other and note the criteria on which the distinction is being made. Joestynes 09:09, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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