Talk:Counties of Croatia

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[edit] List format

Aww, but I spent some effort to make it the list comprehensive :) Is it really important to make it so compact? This is, after all, the page where one goes for some detailed information about the counties from the main country page, I don't think it's really expected to be so terse. --Shallot 13:02, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Now that there's Template:Zupanije, there's no need for this link to be so compact so I've reverted (though with slightly smaller cellpadding/cellspacing). --Shallot 02:03, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Maps

Just so that I don't have to search for it: User talk:Morwen/archive5#Croatian counties has some relevant content. --Shallot

[edit] Subdivisions of counties

I've already told User:Jugoslaven on his talk page that there is little or no reason to link non-existent pages named "Municipality of $1" or "Township of $1" when there is scarcely any reason to have such pages in favor of those named "$1". I'm therefore reverting this last edit.

BTW, why use the term "township" at all? Which Croatian term does this translate? --Joy [shallot] 17:25, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Translating Jugoslaven's comments from my talk page:
Township is the translation of administrative areas connected to towns. When it says "town", that doesn't give the impression of a territorial administrative unit.
That makes sense, although I had the impression that the term was U.S.-centric, or at least only applied in that country. Could be wrong... --Joy [shallot]
Secondly, other countries also have articles about their municipalities (Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Pennsylvania, ...) so I don't see a reason why Croatia shouldn't.
I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that the *title* of the page shouldn't be "Municipality of Mjesto" and instead simply "Mjesto". --Joy [shallot]
Just to drop in to give my thoughts on this. Now, I dont know the details of Croatian geography, but I'm assuming that "Mjesto" is also a town. On Bosnian wiki we had a similar problem so now we keep the pages for cities and the municipalities carrying their name seperate. It makes more sense to me because when one thinks of a "city" they think of a concentrated urban area, but these municipalities contain dozens of square kilometers of land that dont belong to the city of the same name or, sometimes, have several other notable towns. Of course, sometimes the town is the dominant feature of the municipality, but in that case there should just be a relatively brief article on the municipality. Asim Led 01:25, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Naming

moved from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Subnational entities/Naming

So you decided to change a whole fricking bunch of pages with little or no discussion? Please cease and desist.
You also miscategorized the Croatian counties as "trailing no-bracket uppercase english" because they're actually trailing no-bracket *lowercase* English. I'm rolling back those county->County changes in the Croatian county names, because not only is this not discussed, but also IMHO pointless and uncalled for, and I *wrote* most of those pages. --Joy [shallot] 10:05, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
When I categorized them it was right. What do you mean by it is pointless and uncalled for? That you wrote the articles is nice, but pointless for the question what is the best name. Tobias Conradi 11:19, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It's pointless because the word "county" is only the most common word for "županija", the counties do not have an official name "Foo County". It's uncalled for because the county pages existed for months nicely with the lowercased "county" in the title before you came along with your capitalization scheme. Please leave them be, they're fine as they are. --Joy [shallot] 18:43, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I thought they have official name like "Foo County" (in croation Foo zupanija). Therfore, translating it to english brings "Foo County", because in english it is common to capitalise. Tobias Conradi 22:14, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
That may be so, but using the capitalization creates the false impression that this English translation provides for an authoritative name of a županija, but it doesn't, really. --Joy [shallot]

Tobias Conradi has done it again, and when I told him to stop, he just told me that I'm lying and that I'm ignorant. Yes, you heard that right. :) Someone please talk some sense into him. --Joy [shallot] 22:44, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

that's a lie again or at least big misrepresentation. You said
Hi. Please stop moving Croatian county pages to uppercased "County". Again. We've had this discussion once before and you've failed to provide any real reason why they should be moved.
you were ignorant regarding the overwhelming use and you lied when you said that I did not provide any real reason why they should be moved. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:42, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Again, overwhelming use of the uppercased form is not necessarily a real reason to move *everything* to use it. Especially given that you changed many pages beforehand to produce this overwhelmingness, before it was probably a normal majority. --Joy [shallot] 16:19, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

I've tried to explain my case to a bit more length on TC's talk page, I'll copy it here:

Yes, the majority of counties in the world are uppercase. But not the Croatian ones - this simply doesn't apply. The word county is not a direct, sanctioned translation of the word županija - it's just the closest available word. We could have used the word "province", or even "region", none of them are much worse than "county". When you uppercase "County", that makes it sound as if there actually is an entity called e.g. "Zagreb County". But there isn't. There's only "Zagrebačka županija". The rest is translation.

Granted, one could argue that this isn't sufficient to make it lowercased instead of uppercased, like the other counties. But I want to see someone besides our resident let's-normalize-all-province-names Tobias support this opinion, and also someone who is a native English speaker. If assorted native speakers said that it was somehow wrong and/or abhorrent to see the word "county" in this case lowercased and that I just has to be uppercased, I would yield. But right now I see little reason to. --Joy [shallot] 23:05, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Something more straightforward would be appreciated. They're not saying that they absolutely have to have this consistency. --Joy [shallot] 16:19, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I did not claim lowercase to be wrong but maybe it is. Anyway what you asked for (assorted english native) could also be requested for your position that uppercase is wrong. This person should also clarify whether it is only wrong for Croatia or for more counties in other countries. Additional it would be interesting to hear about the upper/lowercase practice for other entity terms like province, district ... Maybe we conclude than that 70% of the wikipedia subnational entity titles are wrong. No problem! We can fix this. But I do not see why having a special case for Croatia. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:41, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
The whole problem is that you seem to find any form to be wrong in a manner that you have a compelling need to correct it. I don't see much reason to disallow forms that aren't exactly the same as some others, because in this case there is no right form other than županija, and if we used that, it would sound rather unnatural to the English readers and we'd surely have to spend more time explaining it than is desired.
Why is the consistency among all local-government forms so paramount to the explanations of the people who live in them? --Joy [shallot] 16:19, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
the "whole problem" is that you do not see the benefits of a unified naming scheme or in your utility function this is weighted less than in mine. I never said lowercase is wrong. Maybe you can help me in convincing people on russians and ukraine oblasts to use the word province. As it is with županija the term oblast is hardly used in english. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:35, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I would like to see the benefits of a unified naming scheme. What are they? We have redirects to compensate for the case difference, what are the other benefits?
redirects - do not work when used more than one after each other,
That's a triviality, and easily fixed, too. Also, a technical issue that you could bring up with the developers of the software. --Joy [shallot]
break the functionality of visited links in the browser.
Er, that's rather minor, too. Also note that it happens very rarely with the Croatian counties because most of the links are consistently to the lowercase version. --Joy [shallot]
It is easier for editors to know one rule for naming then having to know different rules and to know which country uses which rule.
Uh, but this blanket rule simply cannot apply to subnational entities, which are specific to each nation by definition. Sure, many are similar, but there are still many that are simply not named the same and cannot have the same title. --Joy [shallot] 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Some languages use latin based alphabets like croatian languages does. I do not know how long you followed the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers, I liked the statement of Mikkalai:

That's exactly why we have to have a single convention, to avoid guessing. Not to say that in one language River may be part of the name, while not in another one, for the same river. In such cases the primary goal is convenience for numerous editors; readers are more interested in correct and complete contents of the actual article, which may contain all possible names and spellings.

When writing an article full of personal and geographic names it is a great pain to double-check each and every name. It is especially confusing in the case of missing articles. When we have red links for Qaxan River, Qaxan, Qaxan river, Qaxan (river) Quaxan River, Quaxan, Quaxan river, Quaxan (river), Qazan River, Qazan, Qazan river, Qazan (river), great chances are that after some time we will have duplicate articles, with pain in the neck remaining to collect all the remaining red links into one place. This kind of discussion happened for numerous other things: Aircraft carriers, lakes, etc. And nearly always the best solution is a single solution, even if sometimes it produces awkward and unusual article titles, like Vasili IV of Russia, who is overwhelmingly known as Vasili Shuisky Mikkalai 21:42, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's all great but again it's not relevant to your argument given that we already have a lack of uniformity in the province names - we have not picked "provinces", "counties", "regions", "prefectures", "republics", ... but all of them. Granted, when seeing that other counties are named "X County", one might think to choose "Istria County", but that depends on the premise that they know that the term is county and not something else — and that premise is false. --Joy [shallot] 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
by allowing for lower case and upper case on choice of wikipedians involved in the respective entity sets, one doubles the lack of uniformity.
Yes, we double it from N to N+1 where N is >5. If we were talking of smaller N, I would see the point in avoiding further discrepancy, but it's already large. --Joy [shallot] 11:23, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
At least the style of writing can be uniform. Allowing only for lower OR upper case the chance of typing entity names right by simply guessing is heavily increased. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:14, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
uniformity: If one creates a list of articles for subnational entities then only the croatian ones are lower cased. Would look strange to me. Also while surfing I would think, badly organized, reasonless or by complex rule or single rule created mixture of upper and lower case.
So, personal preference. Okay, for what it's worth. --Joy [shallot] 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
This is _one_ wikipedia. For people that like some consistency this should be provided.
But there is consistency in the set of the Croatian counties. There isn't consistency in the set of all counties, but given that they're actually županije and that there isn't consistency in the set of all subnational entities, there is no simple logical equation saying that this partial consistency needs to happen. --Joy [shallot] 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Would you like the zupanija of Dalmatia to be lower case and the non-Dalmatinian to be upper case? Or a division for counties A-M upper case the other lower case?Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:55, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
That would break uniformity within the set of the same entities. You're talking of uniformity between the set of different entities that are have a similar function. It's not the same. --Joy [shallot] 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I did not claim it to be the same. BTW the Dalmatian counties are coastal counties, so we could make them uppercase. It is the set of coastal counties that will then have uniformity. Or would you like taking random set of counties? We could tell people because you wanted some lower case we made some lower case and because I wanted some upper case we made some uppercase. This is maybe more weird than your proposal to have only the croatian counties lowercase but it is weird anyway that you want seperate naming rules for subnational entities of different countries. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:07, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
You have again tried to make it look like I want to make a leap in logic, but I don't. The coastal and the continental counties all have the same properties: the name županija, the župan and the dožupans, the assembly, ... essentially, the same law that covers them. Same goes for any random set of Croatian counties. But there is no single law that covers the Croatian as well as any other subnational entity in the world, so there is no reason to try to pretend that we can unify them all under one simple scheme. --Joy [shallot] 11:23, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Whether there is a leap in logic depends on the point of view. The logic can be write all entity terms in uppercase, or write terms for non-croatian lower case and the rest upper case. Or write all croatian entites like Joy likes it and the other like Tobias likes it. You say they are covered by the same law. So what? I say the costal ones have a border with adria and for adria we could take upper case. We could apply this rule worldwide, - you know I like uniformity ;-).
Yes, but the intrinsic quality that sets apart the subnational divisions from any other random divisions of land and sea is that a law prescribes them. Not a convention between geographers or between linguists, but a law of the country they are part of. This has to be an overarching criterion because it is based on their very definition. --Joy [shallot] 10:13, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think all rules or logics have different complexity. And the upper case all is the least complex. When I uniformed the parishes in the carribbeans I found a lot that actually had the same name. By unifying I resolved a lot of red links and wrong links. Country A: "X (parish)", B: "X parish", C: "X Parish", D: "X Parish, D". In the first run I made them "X Parish", and while discovering that several of the same name existed I partially added ", Countryname". see: Saint George Parish. Same goes for Córdoba 2x provinces, Amazonas 2 states.

I do not expect to have a "Zagreb County" outside of Croatia and "Zagreb county" inside. But maybe there is "Zagreb County, Austrian Empire". Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:59, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I admit that I was surprised to see the Ukrainians insist on oblast &co., but I was reluctant to contradict them because they should know better than me. --Joy [shallot] 17:33, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
And I was surprised that a ukrainian journalist called me asshole. Why should they know better? Could also be the other way around: They know worse, because their knowledge about the term oblast is biased. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:55, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I do not care that much about google results but maybe you search for zagreb county what gives lower and uppercase hits. Prefecture was only found when articles had to do with Japan. You also might look at http://www.croatia.hr/activities/content.aspx?idActivities=3 , they use county and they use it uppercase. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:52, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

And again I see that after I completed reverting them all, and then Tobias reverted all again. <sigh> --Joy [shallot] 21:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

You are once again missinforming the reader. I told you I stop moving at letter "O". This was meant to prevent moving forth and back. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:07, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Er, and then after you said that I continued to move A-O back, and then you again moved all, from Bjelovar-Bilogora onwards. Where is this misinformation? --Joy [shallot] 11:23, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
I called it missinformation because you talked about "all" leaving out the piece of information that I stopped at a certain point, namely after you contacted me on my talk page. I did not stop immediatly because I was in middle of moving and for not to lose overview of what was moved and which redirects were changed I completed all those that were open in my browser. "All" for me sounded like "all counties", not "all moved counties" Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:59, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Page Title

While "Counties of Croatia" is a reasonable title for a Category, as an article title it was radically at odds with WP naming conventions. In terms of WP style, the former article combined two topics that, despite their close relationship, are capable of clear separation. That separation aids users in finding the info they want:

  • County (Croatia) gives the information that is true of each county in Croatia, and conforms with the near-prime directive that titles should be singular nouns.
  • List of counties of Croatia conforms to the naming convention for the primary group of topics whose scope is inherantly plural in nature, the enumerations of the members of a group.

--Jerzy•t 16:43 & 16:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)(UTC)

I vehemently disagree. There is no point in separating the concept from the list, because the two are inseparable! I also don't see any substantiation whatsoever for your claim that the current title is against the naming conventions. Have you ever even *seen* the List of subnational entities?! This is absurd and I'm reverting it. --Joy [shallot] 16:57, 28 June 2006 (UTC)