Wikipedia talk:WikiProject French communes

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[edit] Motifs et exposés du projet

Merci d'être venu lire ces quelques lignes. J'ai ce projet qui me trotte dans la tête depuis déjà quelques mois, mais aujourd'hui avec la défaite de Paris pour l'obtention des J.O. je crois que c'est ce qui m'a vraiment décidé à me lancer là-dedans. Il me semble qu'un des problèmes dont souffre la France de nos jours c'est un manque de notoriété en dehors du monde francophone, un problème de lobbying en quelque sorte (d'où mon allusion aux J.O. 2012). Nous qui sommes nés ou vivons en France, nous savons à quel point notre pays est riche culturellement, nous avons un patrimoine et une histoire incomparable, et pour ce qui concerne le domaine des encyclopédies, nous avons des trésors d'archives, de bibliothèques multi-centenaires, et de savoirs innombrables. Ce qui me frappe, c'est que cette masse énorme de "material", comme diraient les anglophones, est pour l'essentiel inaccessible à un public non-francophone. Du temps où la langue française était la langue universelle des élites, notre pays était au centre de l'activité intellectuelle, mais aujourd’hui je trouve dommage de constater que la richesse de notre pays est de plus en plus ignorée. Je prendrai un exemple: lorsque j'étais étudiant dans une grande université américaine il y a de cela quelques années, j'avais un professeur spécialiste mondial de la colonisation européenne. Il avait passé sa vie à écrire LE livre de référence sur le sujet, et à ma stupéfaction, il n'y avait pas un mot sur l'empire colonial français, alors que l'empire colonial britannique était traité en long et en large. La seule explication que j'ai pu trouver, c'est que, ne parlant pas français, il n'avait pu se servir des vastes ressources et archives françaises sur l'empire colonial français. Je pourrais donner des exemples comme celui-là à l'infini.

Une des raisons, parmi d'autres, pour lesquelles j'ai commencé à m'impliquer dans le Wikipedia version anglaise, c'est que je voulais rendre accessible à un public non-francophone tout un tas d'informations sur la France, et aussi rétablir certaines vérités, et remettre certains points sur certains i. Je pense que c'est un peu aussi le cas de chacun d'entre vous, d'après ce que j'ai vu de vos edits au fil des mois. Ce que nous faisons ici, je pense que cela contribue plus à la notoriété de notre pays que bien des discours, et en tout cas on aide sûrement à mieux faire comprendre notre pays, qui me semble souvent si mal compris depuis que je vis dans des pays anglophones.

Pour en revenir au sujet, cela fait un bout de temps que je pense que ce serait formidable si on pouvait créer un article pour chaque commune française. Nous sommes le pays au monde qui compte le plus de communes (cf. Commune in France), et donner accès à un public non-francophone à une telle masse d'informations historiques/géographiques/politiques sur plus de 36,000 villes et villages de France serait tout à fait remarquable. La tâche, c'est sûr, paraît gigantesque: 36,782 communes. Il doit y avoir déjà quelques centaines d'articles sur des villes et villages de France, mais cela laisse encore près de 36,000 articles à créer! Pourtant, l'entreprise n'est pas aussi insurmontable qu'il y paraît.

Vous êtes trois Wikipédiens français à qui j'ai envoyé un message (Ericd, Olivier, David.Monniaux), trois des plus actifs contributeurs à Wikipedia version anglaise, et trois des plus sérieux aussi je dois dire. Avec moi inclus, cela fait donc quatre. Voilà ce que je propose: il existe une collection de petits livres baptisée Villes et Villages de France, aux Editions Deslogis-Lacoste. Il existe un petit livre par département français, et dans chaque livre on trouve une notice sur chaque commune du département, avec quelques lignes sur son histoire et sa géographie (un exemple de ces petits livres ici: [1]). Ce que je propose c'est de créer un article pour chaque commune de France en traduisant la petite notice pour chaque commune. Il existe aussi des petites notices pour chaque commune de France sur www.quid.fr, et on pourrait aussi traduire ces notices et les amalgamer avec les notices de Villes et Villages de France (souvent les deux notices sont identiques... je soupçonne Quid d'avoir dans bien des cas simplement recopié la notice de Villes et Villages de France).

Nous sommes quatre. Si nous créons 10 articles chacun par jour, il nous faudrait 2 ans et demi pour achever le projet (4 * 10 * 365 * 2.5 = 36,500). Je pense que créer 10 articles nous prendrait en gros une heure par jour. Les notices sont très petites, parfois une simple ligne. Bien sûr, si vous connaissez d'autres Wikipédiens français parlant bien l'anglais qui voudraient participer au projet, vous pouvez les contacter. Je pense qu'il faut des Français uniquement: les non-Français auraient trop de mal avec certaines subtilités administratives françaises, où certains points d'histoire locale complexes, et les traductions ne seraient pas toujours bonnes. Si vous avez des amis non-Wikipédiens qui parlent bien l'anglais et qui seraient intéressés par le projet, contactez-les. Je pense qu'il faudrait qu'on ne soit pas plus de 10, sinon ça deviendrait trop difficile à gérer. Pour l'instant on est quatre si vous acceptez tous les trois de vous investir dans le projet, mais on peut accepter d'autres volontaires jusqu'à dix.

Voilà, dites-moi ce que vous en pensez. Réfléchissez bien avant de prendre un décision. C'est sûr que c'est un projet contraignant, qui nécessitera de donnera une heure de son temps tous les jours pendants deux ans et demi (912 jours), mais le résultat serait incroyable: disons que début 2008 il y aurait 800,000 articles sur Wikipedia version anglaise, avec nos 36,000 articles on "pèserait" 4.5% de tous les articles, ce qui serait énorme. Une belle notoriété pour la France. Au passage, les Norvégiens l'ont déjà fait, ils ont créé un article pour toutes leurs communes (Municipalities of Norway) ! Bon, c'est sûr, il n'y a que 433 communes en Norvège, mais si vous êtes aussi dégoûtés que moi après cette nouvelle défaite française aujourd'hui, vous aurez peut-être à coeur de vous impliquer dans le projet.

D'abord on voit qui est partant, et qui n'est pas partant, et après on discutera les modalités pratiques. Hardouin 6 July 2005 18:06 (UTC)

So Hardouin posted this message over 9 months ago, yet this doesn't seem to have progressed too far. Why? It is because the Francophones here have to split their time between the French and English Wikipedia? The Wiki project page seems underdeveloped too. And this despite Hardouins stirring, patriotic call to wiki-arms!!?
Let's get a move on. Where can people who have extremely bad French like me find a list of French communes -- or "commen Frenchwomen" as it is automatically translated :) for people like me who can read French quicker via Google translator -- for each department to automate the creation of stubs at least. People will be more likely to add content to articles where there is a stub already existing I think, especially your non-Wikipedian friends. — Донама 03:42, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I noticed two problems with the above: first isn't there a copyright problem copying stuff out of a book? Secondly, suggesting that non-French people keep out of it isn't exactly furthering the cause of rapprochement between the French and the rest of the world. Anyway, and for what it's worth I have created two commune articles, Pontorson, and La Trinité-sur-Mer. I suggest that the way to go is start with communes that have some sort of claim to fame (in these cases, large town near Mont St Michel, and birthplace of Jean Marie Le Pen as well as neighbour of Carnac). I don't see the great benefit in adding communes which are minuscule uninteresting villages inhabited by 6 people. Whereas bigger towns with real histories are completely underdeveloped (see Vannes, for instance).
I would also be more inclined to make an effort to get photos and describe the towns as they are now, rather than all this demographic information and history, which is not necessarily interesting. See it:Trinité-sur-mer for instance - tells you nothing about the actual town (I added the photo). Stevage 19:45, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adding the articles

I'm in agreement with Hardouin's stirring words, and had also independently taken upon myself the task of adding the communes. Having added the first 200 of Ain last night, I was directed to this project and am happy to work with it.

At the moment my starting point is fr.wikipedia and its pages, hoping to transfer the knowledge that many have put effort into posting on the French site over to the English site. I have automated methods of retrieving the French pages and converting key aspects to make creation of the basic commune stub a simple task. At the moment I then create the English version manually from my automatically generated stub. It works on the assumption that the stub on fr.wikipedia has nothing but the Tableau_comm template, and a formulaic intro sentence. The English stubs thus contain the equivalents of these. In addition I add as much of any additional information on a page by translating key parts. However, for longer articles I haven't been translating the whole and more work could be done on this in the future.

As I sweep through the départements, the result should be that there will be an article for all communes that have an equivalent French article. At the moment this isn't quite the case, mainly due to automatic parsing issues that I'll slowly fix.

Any help with the process would of course be appreciated -- let me know and I'll send the scripts to generate the local stub files for a whole département.

Smb1001 14:02, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Bot

It's getting late and I'll pick this up tomorrow, but just to describe what I have to date. I've an Oracle DB that holds information about admin structure of communes and data for the stub and a Java program that reads and formats that into a wiki article. Typical output is shown below. I've identified public domain data sources and have started on a screen scraper to put the raw data into my DB.

All the following is machine generated (well I'm cheating a little on Cassini).

[edit] Output

  1. REDIRECT Amberieu-en-Bugey
 This French location article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Category:France geography stubsit:Template:Stub Francia

Category:Subdivisions of France Category:Lists of communes of France Category:Communes of Ain fr:Ain fr:Ambérieu-en-Bugey Ambérieu-en-Bugey is a French commune situated in the department of Ain and the Rhône-Alpes region (préfecture Bourg-en-Bresse).

Commune of Ambérieu-en-Bugey
Location
Coordinates  ??? North ??? East
Administration
Country France
Region Rhône-Alpes
Department Ain
Arrondissement  ???
Canton  ???
Intercommunality  ???
Mayor  ???
(???)
Statistics
Elevation  ??? m–??? m
(avg. ??? m)
Land area¹  ??? km²
Population²
(???)		  ???
 - Density  ???/km²
Miscellaneous
INSEE/Postal code 01004/ 01500
1 French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries.
2 Population sans doubles comptes: residents of multiple communes (e.g. students and military personnel) only counted once.
France

[edit] Demography

Demographic evolution of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject French communes between 1962 and 1999
1962 1968 1975 1982 1990 1999
3,363 3,457 3,898 3,748 3,663 3,454

Census Enumeration : Population without double-counting

[edit] See Also

[edit] External Links (all sites in French, unless otherwise indicated)

[edit] Map Links

[edit] Links which require payment for detailed information


Dlyons493 Talk 22:04, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Semi bot

Thanks for the info, Dlyons493. The link generation is a great idea, though I think perhaps needs work, as 5 of the links on your Ambérieu example are 404. Otherwise the concept seems to be much the same as mine.

I've written a perl script to (currently) fetch all the pages for a single département from fr.wikipedia and parse the infobox into the Template:French commune format, as well as the standard intro paragraph, plus category, fr.wiki link, and stub link. In addition the file it produces contains the remainder of whatever text was on the fr.wiki page. I thus take each in turn and paste it in, translating any additional French text that I think deserves adding.

We should certainly take your approach to creating the links section, but I think my way of generating the infobox currently ends up with more info overall as well as using any other French content -- though this last part is obviously beyond the scope of a bot.

You can see many examples of my current output in the pages from Communes_of_the_Ain_département (though I've already improved my script as a result of these).

I suspect I can be of perl help in getting more info - perhaps we can get the Lat/Long from your lion1906 links to add to the infobox.

So where now? I'll wrap up my sweep through Ain then we can coordinate plans.

Smb1001 22:35, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Dead Links etc

The plan was to use the screen-scraper in two ways. Once the links are generated they are passed to it and it does an existence check and reports back - e.g. some communes don't have a mairie or a fr.wiki article and I'd planned the stub would have a section for standard links that don't exist in this particular case.

The other sites are data sites for scraping e.g. INSEE will always exist and I plan to get all commune's demography from there.

I'd planned that all article titles would be in English and to generate a REDIRECT for names containg French accents (that's coded and working).

I was going to use screen-scraper.com (free download of basic software and it's working OK). If necessary I'll buy the pro version as I'll have other uses for it in the future.

Perl is fine but there's quite a bit of inbuilt parsing in screen-scraper that'll hopefully save time. And my Perl is limited (to put it mildly) - but I can always do a crash course if that seems the best way to go. 11:58, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] OK for a bot

The idea of a bot sounds very good to me. I will not go into the technical details, but I would suggest that we agree on a template for the stub articles before the full launch of the bot. Can we pick a bot generated article and make comments on it, in order to refine the standard stub design?

A few remarks:

  • There are several existing templates for the infobox, including:

I prefer the second one, to which I have made some modifications. My suggestion is that we further improve this one and use it.

I noticed that the stubs created by Smb1001 do not include a link to the French article. Could that be added? olivier 12:22, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I suggest that we use the article Le Puy, Doubs, as a reference article for discussion purposes. olivier 13:29, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm the creator of Template:French communes and I created it before the other template existed and I didn't even know about this project. I have no problem deprecating it (I just ran into this page actually making Poigny)... although I'm not really sure that it's wise to use the French? A bot could easily change the French into English for template fields. Good luck on setting up a bot. gren グレン 10:37, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
The template had odd results on Chevrainvilliers. gren グレン 10:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Le Puy, Doubs

(I am moving the following 2 comments from my talk page. olivier 15:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC))

Hi, I notice you've done some cleanup - thanks. Two things maybe worth discussing:

  • Deletion of (doesn’t appear to have any information) from Quid. What I was trying to say there is that Quid is a site that normally should be visited for commune information but that in this case it's so small as not to be listed. So I'd prefer to either leave the comment in or delete the link totally. It'll just frustrate anyone following it.
  • Change of template. I deliberately made changes when I copied this from fr.wiki on the basis that boxed titles should be in English (even if the French is more accurate). Similarly I've been creating page titles without accented characters and creating a redirect from the correct French name. What are your thoughts on this?
 Dlyons493 Talk 13:41, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Quid: I agree with you. The information available for free usually does not add anything to the suggested infobox. In some cases, though, it might include some historical information. Maybe the bot should leave the link, and this link could be removed manually for those articles which do not contain additional info.
  • Other links: the list of links at the bottom of the article pages is really long. Is there any way to reduce it, maybe less maps?
  • département vs. departement: there have been quite a few discussions about this type of topics in many places in Wikipedia, including in the WikiProject French départements. There seem to be some consensus around keeping the original word, and I definitely agree with that. If you look around, you will find something like 99% occurences of "département" and 1% of "departement". olivier 15:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Response to Olivier

1) Re maps links there's no problem reducing the number as they are largely duplicates of each other. My thinking was that if any of the hosts changed formats then there would still be some working links - ideally we'd either patch to the new format or just delete but I couldn't guarantee doing that in any specific timeframe.

Michelin and Mapquest would probably be the two most familiar on the two sides of the Atlantic?

2) Re template, if there's a concensus on wiki I'm happy to go along with it. Are there any other public domain bits of info (in standard formats on the Web) that might usefully go into a template?

3) Links to fr. article. When I get the screen-scraper working it can check to see if there's an article on fr.wiki and, if it, is then add it into the en. article. There's a name-matching issue that needs some thinking about - I can standardise on the bot side but there may be different capitalisations etc on the wiki side.

[edit] Template

Switching to Template:French commune is OK with me - there aren't substantive differences between that and the version I created. I had thought of removing mayor and term of office as I don't yet have a reliable bot-accessible source. They can be left blank though.

[edit] Further comments

Minor comments on the last few sections. Missing off the links to fr.wiki in my Ain articles was an oversight that I've already corrected in my script. One strength of my current method is that the fr.wiki link is guaranteed to be right as I get the basic info from the French page.

Between the templates, I've no strong opinion on colours and the like, but certainly prefer that the left column be in English (though incidentally really don't like the word 'intercommunality', but I guess there's no better label). Thus I think the Template:French commune is currently a bit better and we should concentrate our changes on that.

As for remaining info that isn't easily available from a fetch of an external site, I believe the best source is still the fr.wiki pages themselves. If you like I can do you a csv of 'commune name' to 'fr.wiki page name', and indeed all the details - mayor, altitude, population etc if they are on the French page - as I suspect they were all culled from a single reliable source somewhere.

Smb1001 23:02, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] CSV etc

CSV would be good - possibly easier to mail it to me rather than pasting here. Agree inercommunality is a clumsy word but don't have a better one myself - maybe create a souces, explanations, background etc page and have a link to it in the stub? Dlyons493 Talk 07:42, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

  • CSV created and sent to your address. Let me know if you didn't get it. Smb1001 16:07, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
    • Thanks, it arrived all right. Will be a bit distracted next week what with start of term and family stuff. Dlyons493 Talk 16:20, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bot to create French administrative division info

I've had Dlyons493Bot approved and run it to create arrondissement stubs - see e.g. Arrondissements of the Ain département. I plan to move on to cantons and communes next. Dlyons493 Talk 21:31, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

    • As an intermediate step, I'm currently creating the arrondissements - see e.g. Arrondissement of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. I had one bit of feedback yesterday to put cantons and communes into multi-column format and I'll look at that. Any other feedback would be very welcome - especially on templates and categories! Dlyons493 Talk 11:24, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] French communes template

Hello, I left a comment regarding your template for French communes at Template_talk:French_commune regarding latitude/longitude information. Cheers, AxelBoldt 02:12, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Naming convention

Have members of this project reached an agreement on the naming convention for articles? I noticed (looking in Category:Communes of Puy-de-Dôme) that 4 out of 23 are named Commune_name, Puy-de-Dôme, which probably is a nice and sustainable format, but not widely used. I just started Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson and would have named it Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puy-de-Dôme if I'd found a directive to do so on this WikiProject. Anyone know what's agreed here? — Донама 15:12, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

General Wikipedia policy is not to disambiguate unless needed. I think it's much more elegant to do it that way than to force a rather unnatural naming scheme on articles. Would "Lyon" or "Lyon, Rhône" seem more natural? Sure, I imagine that lots of communes will have to be disambugated (especially the Saint-someone's), but it should be manageable. Stevage 19:48, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Ok, cool. I wondered because, for Australian cities and towns (except 4 or 5 of the largest cities) the policy is that the article is at Town name, State name because so many of the Anglophone, German and Irish names are duplicated in USA and the UK. — Донама 00:05, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I don't like that policy either. "Byron Bay" is a much better name for an article than "Byron Bay, New South Wales" - I have *never* heard it referred to as that. The "Town, State" nomenclature is totally artificial, and I suspect as much for "Commune, Département". More authentic would be "Lyon (69)" or something. Stevage 08:17, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
I have no idea what Lyon (69) means :) Hopefully Lyon is a big enough city to take the Lyon title, which is the same for large Aussie cities too. At first the Aussie naming convention annoyed me too but now I'm use to it and don't really mind. The thing is that for Australia so many of the names originate from some place in the UK or elsewhere in Europe, we're inclined to feel the need to disambiguate in the title. And we do use the full name like this in normal speech when we need to distinguish a town or city name internationally. France is different though so I fully agree that this naming convention should be avoided where possible. — Донама 02:11, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
Personally I think I'd rather see brackets or something: Valence (Rhône-Ales), which is recognisable as a Wikipedia convention for disambiguation, rather than a totally artificial but pseudo-official naming like "Grenoble, Isère". As such, we would disambiguate at the highest level possible: If there was a Montreal in France, we would just have Montréal (France), rather than Montréal, Loir-et-Cher or something. The point being, the reader who finds himself on that page simply wants to know whether he's in Canada or France - he doesn't care (yet) about the name of the department. Stevage 22:33, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
I think that having "Lyon (69)" (69 being the departements number) would be a good idea since it doesn't express the liklyhood of people thinking that cities are classified after the river they are on (LOTS of departements are named after rivers) and it also distinct, easy to remember, and is a system only used in france so wouldn't reflact the problems with australia. The only problem is that people might confuse it with municipal arrondisements but those normally go as "Lyon IX" for "Lyon 9th arrondisement" right?Chris5897 17:59, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

All of the other language wikipedias I've been to for a commune I just started editing (and moved) had the format Commune (Department). I moved the Commune I'm editing before discovering this WikiProject. I'll leave it the way I changed it too (as this doesn't break any links), and maintains cross-pedia consistency. --Formerly the IP-Address 24.22.227.53 (talk) 00:42, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Since I prefer consistency within English wikipedia over consistency with other wikipedias, I'll ask for the article Pierres (Eure-et-Loir) to be moved back to its old name. Markussep Talk 13:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Categorisation

I notice that communes are currently located in "Communes of D", and those categories tend to belong to the categories "Cities, towns and villages in France" and "D" (and possibly a "Towns in R") where D is the department and R is the region. See Category:Communes of Morbihan for an example.

I'd like to suggest that we formalise this structure, and also add these categories to Category:French Communes by Département, moving all the "Communes of D" type articles to that article, and leaving only "Towns in R" in the "Cities, towns and villages in France".

We should also attempt to define some distinction between a town and a commune. I believe that "commune" is really only useful as an administrative structure, and that we should be using "town" and "city" wherever possible, to make it accessible to non-French people.

Comments please. Stevage 10:21, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Can you please clarify... You mean to remove Category:Communes of DépartementX from all articles about towns and cities and add, where necessary, a Category:Towns in RegionR to these articles? — Donama 13:38, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Stevage: I do not really see the point of your suggestion, or maybe I do not understand exactly what you mean. For instance in "moving all the "Communes of D" type articles to that article": which article are you refering to? Maybe you can have a look at the categorisation of communes in the Commons and tell us what you think about it. Thanks. olivier 18:17, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I was certainly vague.

Suggestion 1:

Category:Cities, towns and villages in France (suggest renaming to "of France")

Suggestion 2 (unrelated to above):

Category:Cities, towns and villages in France (suggest renaming to "of France")

  • Category:Préfectures of regions of France (naming open to discussion)

Suggestion 3 (compatible with above):

Category:Cities, towns and villages in France

  • Category:Préfectures of départements of France (naming open to discussion)

Suggestion 4 (replacing 2 and 3, and integrating 1)

Category:Cities, towns and villages in France


The disadvantage with 4 is that the category page for departmental prefectures would not show regional prefectures directly - you'd have to go into the subpage. It's more of a limitation of the way categories work in the MediaWiki software.

One last refinement, suggestion 5:

Category:Cities, towns and villages in France

[edit] Préfectures

Ok, I have created a {{template:Préfectures of régions of France}} and added it to all the relevant préfecture articles.

v • d • e
Flag of France Préfectures of régions of France
Metropolitan France
Overseas regions


How would people feel about doing something similar for préfectures of départements for each region? In other words, creating navigational boxes as follows:

I have now created the first of these as follows:

v • d • e
Flag of France Department prefectures of Rhône-Alpes

It's implemented in the respective articles. Comments welcome! Stevage 13:40, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

And now, based on a common parent {{Template:Préfectures of départements}}: Stevage 08:13, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

v • d • e
Flag of France Department prefectures of Île-de-France (region)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 17:04, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject France

A proposal has been made for the above WikiProject at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals#France. STTW (talk) 20:50, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Categorisation by arrondissement?

I notice that categorisation of communes is at départment level, and no lower, but some of these categories are becoming rather large (see Calvados, for example). What would people think about categorising by arrondissement? Alai 06:30, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 21:32, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject France

Suggestions/remarks are requested how best we can integrate WikiProject French communes into WikiProject France. Kindly answer on the WikiProject France talk page. STTW (talk) 19:38, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anglicisation

Hello. There's been a massive 'Angicisation' campaign under way since late December 2006, and I was told by User:NYArtsnWords that I can find many of the parties involved in the concerned articles here. My main concern is with the quality of these 'Anglicisations' - many were a word-for-word translation (replacing, for example, "département" with "department") that, without the proper added context or explanation (extra description), creates a phrase with ambiguous meaning - the most common definition of some English words used to 'translate' from French is not the same as their French counterparts.

To any and all who may have issue with this transformation: please leave a comment here. Suggestions to a real and constructive improvement to the language of such articles would be welcome too. THEPROMENADER 14:30, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Communes of the Seine-et-Marne department

Hello. I've tried to create stubs for communes of the Seine-et-Marne department. I've gathered the common sections of existing articles to propose a structure. After having created (or completed) all communes beginning by A, I wonder if all this empty paragraphs are useful. Any advices, before I go further? — M-le-mot-dit (d) 18:32, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Navigation templates for french municipalities

Hi everybody. I'm proud to advise you that i've created, on it.wp, the 1st nav template (Alpes Maritimes) for french municipalities (by departments): it:Template:Dipartimento Alpi Marittime.

I hope it could be useful for the navigators in these version ;-)

By now (18-1-2008), there are 11 templates.

  • Flag of France Here the discussion in french
  • Flag of Germany Here the discussion in german
  • Flag of the Netherlands Here the discussion in dutch

[edit] The Wikipedia Signpost

Bonjour à tous. I remarked here on the tip line for The Wikipedia Signpost about the large number of new articles being created by your project. (The Wikipedia Signpost, if you don't know, is a weekly internal newspaper about happenings in Wikipedia.) I remarked on it because I thought this growth in articles might be of interest to other Wikipedians. I don't know whether they will include this as a news item, but if they do, I think some statistics would be of interest. Does anyone know how many articles have been created as a result of this project? (I think a reasonable estimate would be fine.)--86.149.49.27 (talk) 10:19, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I've hand-crafted copies of 400+ Communes of the Somme department and 100+ Communes of the Pas-de-Calais department from Fr:wiki in the past 3 months or so. Dickie (talk) 13:16, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Project banner question

Wouldn't it be just as functional to use the WikiProject France banner and maybe create a "drop-down" box for the French communes Project, like is done on the Talk:Sydney page for WikiProject Sydney? That way, both projects would be informed of the articles. John Carter (talk) 19:27, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

It would be much better to use a {{WikiProject France|class=stub|Communes=yes}} kind of thing rather than a seperate banner I think ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 16:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Communes being a part of WP:FR, so a separate banner is not needed. Something on the lines of a workgroup as in WP:GER or WP:IND could be used. --STTW (talk) 19:16, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sainte-Marie-sur-Mer

Hi, I would appreciate if someone could check this over for language, thanks. Gustav von Humpelschmumpel (talk) 00:18, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

The language seems fine - but I'd anglisize the 'Évolution démographique' to :'Population movement' & 'Census count starting from 1962 : Population without double counting' and add another heading:
<==Notes==>

See example at Méricourt-sur-Somme Cheers Dickie (talk) 09:00, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Edits made as you suggested- maybe I'll have a\ go at the Pays de Retz article over the weekend. Gustav von Humpelschmumpel (talk) 00:07, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Navigation templates

I saw a post above, but I don't know if any are created in English yet. I created one: Template:Ain communes. Any help would be appreciated --  jj137 (talk) 17:34, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

All of them up to Crottet are done --  jj137 (talk) 03:53, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for your work, but I do not see the benefit of such templates. I think they're redundant with existing lists and categories, and they're simply too big.
What about templates with less communes, limited to a smaller area? Korg (talk) 23:00, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I think they can be effective for easier navigation. If there was a way to make them with a smaller area, that would be great.   jj137 (talk) 02:09, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Maybe by arrondissement? Markussep Talk 11:09, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I've just about completed a database on my PC of communes etc and will be able to generate these templates very quickly and then upload them. I'm happy for people to suggest the actual contents of each template. My thoughts initially were to create one template for each department showing all the communes, as above with Template:Ain communes. Creating one template for each arrondissement, say, would make them smaller, but a lot more numerous and possibly more time-consuming to maintain. Are they redundant? No, I don't think so. Being able to easily navigate directly from one commune to another (in the same department) is better than having to go via an intermediate list. Kiwipete (talk) 10:13, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I have now completed the database of communes and created a few templates (Template:Côtes-d'Armor communes, Template:Creuse communes and Template:Dordogne communes) to see what they look like. I'd like some feedback on content etc before progressing further. Thanks, Kiwipete (talk) 10:22, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Oops, I'm not quite there, yet. I still have to check for disambiguated commune names. Meanwhile, User:Formerly the IP-Address 24.22.227.53 has been working on a format at Template:Vienne communes and I will base my work on that. Kiwipete (talk) 03:05, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Number of communes

As we are getting very close to the 100% mark for the existing commune articles, I am still wondering what is the exact number of communes in France to date. The French and English Wikipedia articles do not agree on this point: 36 782 vs. 36,780. In any case, thanks to the article creators: you have done a great job! olivier (talk) 14:45, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

The difference is in the 214 overseas communes in the French wiki and 212 in the English version - but which are the 2 new/extra ones ????? ;-) Dickie (talk) 19:34, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Assessment

There's two things we need to sort out. Adding the WikiProject French communes work group to the main france template so all of the articles can be tagged as part of the french communes group and creating some sort of register to assess which communes have got infoboxes. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 11:15, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I have just made a basic manual for the infobox template, see Template:French commune/doc. IMO the minimum contents requirements for the infobox are department, arrondissement, canton, coordinates, map (if the right coordinates are given, the map is created by the infobox) and population. We can use the Wikipedia:WikiProject French communes/Status page for progress, if everyone checks every department alphabetically, we could write "checked until Foissiat" in the last column of "Ain" for instance. The overseas communes require some extra attention, maybe from someone who likes to draw maps. If the population number is missing, and French wikipedia doesn't have it either: check INSEE! Markussep Talk 20:58, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
You may also use this link to get the official population: 1999 census
Though the official pop. is the 1999 census, more recent results are there: < 10,000 ant there large towns — M-le-mot-dit (T) 22:35, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Communes (and more) of the Somme

The Somme is finished as far as I’m concerned. In the past 4 months or so, I’ve updated the 4-line stubs of 760 of the 782 communes[1], created all 46 cantons and all 31 communautés, (not to mention tweaking the 4 arrondissements) by grabbing stuff from the French articles, placing them on the map, on a road and sometimes a river, checking co-ords, finding recent demography etc etc.
As examples, check out Tertry, Somme, Canton of Crécy-en-Ponthieu and Communauté de communes du Val de Noye.
There’s been a natural progression of improvements along the way as I’ve heeded the advice of other members of the project. Some earlier commune pages may have to be revisited – but not by me – I’m of to the Pas-de-Calais ! Dickie (talk) 10:43, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

  1. ^ The other 22 had been expanded by other editors

[edit] L'Abergement-Clémenciat

I recently left a note on the talk page of this article about the Italian wiki's good article on this commune. - Presidentman (talk) Random Picture of the Day 15:47, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Good article? The only thing it has more than the English stub article is a graph with historic population figures. Markussep Talk 16:56, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Better to copy the French one - and use quid.fr and some geog.location info! Dickie (talk) 17:53, 10 June 2008 (UTC)