Talk:Lists of twin towns and sister cities

Inconsistent formatting

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)

Illogical lies

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)

General Discussion

This is a good idea for a page but it needs a lot of work on the links, and checking that it doesn't duplicate elsewhere. The twin town information ought to be on each town's own entry, of course, but a list is still very useful. seglea 18:51, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It should be on each town as you say - but not only isn't it, most of these towns haven't even got entries as you can see from the swathes of red links. Somebody more technically inclined than me might like to find a way of automatically putting the twin information on each town's page (?) is this possible? btljs 19:33, 23 Dec 2003 (GMT)

That's the sort of thing a robot does nicely, but I'm afraid I don't have the skills either. Try putting a request on the Wikipedia:Village Pump. An easier task for a robot would be to go through the page making reciprocal lists, i.e. add all the France etc twins from the UK into the France etc section & vice versa. BTW a few of the red links may there really - they may just be formatted differently, e.g. have ", England" after them seglea 20:01, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Hmm...there are some Canadian towns with this same concept, but they aren't called "twin towns" or "Sister cities." They are actually called "twin cities," but the Twin Cities article is something else. Off the top of my head I can only think of two (Richmond Hill, Ontario is a twin city of Lakeland, Florida, and Uxbridge, Ontario is a twin of somewhere in Germany)...should a list of those be added somewhere, and if so, where? Adam Bishop 20:05, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, the twin town/twin city thing is a muddle and may have to be a dismabig page in the end. But if these are twin towns in the sense of the list, just create a Canada section and put them in. Probably not worth dividing by provinces till some more turn up. Note that there is one already in the list, the other way round - Nice in France links to Laval. What makes me think that's got a PQ address? seglea 20:26, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I too was going to point out the lack of double-endedness in the lists: given that every twinning has 2 ends, it is impossible for one country to have more entries in this list than the rest put together, but the UK manages this so far. I'll write a perl script to sort out the current content when I get round to it, but people adding new towns after that should be told to put both ends in. As for adding it to each town's page, that's not so easily automated, as it would need human assistance to put it in an appropriate place, see if it was already there, etc.

On an unrelated note, is there any good reason to list UK towns by ceremonial county, given that most people wouldn't even know what one of those was? It may even be more sensible to divide by region, to avoid so many underpopulated subheadings taking up space. - IMSoP 14:58, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The UK counties thing is a mess, and it affects a lot of UK pages. I'm not sure about the position in the rest of the UK, but in England the trouble is that the only subdivision that most people who live in the country really understand is the ceremonial counties (though no-one ever uses that name for them): if you ask me where a town is, I'll tell you what county it's in. But the current local government units don't correspond to those counties. Some of the current real local government subdivisions are too small to be useful, and anyway a lot of people would never have heard of many of the smaller ones. The UK government regions wouldn't be a bad subdivision, but unless you're a bureaucrat of some sort, you've probably never heard of them, and you certainly wouldn't be able to guess reliably which region a town elsewhere in the country was in.

More to the point, perhaps, is that given the number of towns and villages in the UK with twins, if we begin to collect a good number of them, county subheadings of some sort are the only ones that will work. seglea 16:19, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I think the counties problem goes further than you're suggesting, seglea, since there are also traditional counties - which aren't the same as either the administrative or ceremonial ones. And if we go with the ceremonial ones, Bristol has to be under its own heading, which I don't think anyone would be expecting. Oh, I've just discovered Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (places) - I haven't got time to wade through all that, so I guess I'll just have to leave it be for now. - IMSoP 12:59, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

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Just to let you know that I've started writing a perl script that will make sure both ends of each twinning are listed as they should be. It's taken me longer than I expexted to deal with all the different formatting conventions people have used already, but I got there in the end. Putting all that data into a new structure will probably be done in the next couple of days. I'd request that nobody makes any major formatting changes to the list in the meantime - IMSoP 01:01, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

sounds very good. Do you want to specify a format to be used in future? seglea 02:43, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Well, once the script's finished, it should convert all the existing information into a consistent format of some kind, which may be enough to lead by example. I was probably going to use the form:

• Town - Twin1, Country1 (any extra info such as dates); Twin2, Country2 (any extra info such as dates)

If you don't think this is the best style to standardise on, let me know, because it's far from set in stone.

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I read the Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (places) page and I think it's one of those situations where people have got too close to the problem to see the wood for the trees. There are 2 functions of putting a county name in a Wikipedia article: 1. To inform; 2. To be searched on. This page uses them in the second sense: i.e. you are looking for a town so you go to the county to find it. The only problem then is when you are using a different model of counties and it is not where you expect it to be. I would, therefore suggest (in keeping with the philosophy of the web as a whole) that more than one way of sorting the information is provided. E.g. A to Z of towns AND towns by county country etc. I don't know if this is at odds with Wikipedia policy on redundancy but that's how you'd do it if you were storing the information in a database - you almost never only present information in one rigid order (one sort fits all).

As for the first use, the discussion sic. is all very interesting but as a user of the 'pedia you want ALL relevant info. So if Godmanchester used to be in one county and now is in another or if there are differences in borders then that is useful information which should be available. There is no right and wrong - only useful and not useful. btljs

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Well, at long last, I got round to finishing my perl-script! The list should now include entries under both halves of any twinning. The only exception is Edinburgh, because I'm not sure where to insert it if we're sorting by ceremonial county (are they England only?).

• Edinburgh - Nice, France

If anyone has any opinions on the layout of the list, it should be trivial to change now that it's consistent. I may make a second script to go through and copy the date information from entry to entry as well, if it seems too hard to do by hand. Also, there may be the odd glitch introduced by the way I processed the data - hopefully, though, no data has actually been lost.

Finally, I'll copy the script I used to User:IMSoP/parse_t_t.pl, in case anyone's curious. Most of it was only necessary due to the massive inconsistency of formatting on the list, and so should never be needed again, but the checks for non-reciprocal listings may need to be re-run at some point in the future. Enjoy! - IMSoP 03:11, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's an excellent public work, many thanks. Are there any rules we need to obey, other than being as consistent as possible with what is already there, in adding new twins to the list? seglea 05:23, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

My hope is that the format I've put it in will be obvious enough to naturally encourage some consistency. And as long as people keep an eye on each other's edits, we shouldn't need to resort to automation again. I don't know if my note about "add[ing] it under both of the countries/towns involved" is clear enough, though, it's somehow a really awkward concept to put into words.

And it's bugging me that I don't know where to put Edinburgh! - IMSoP 16:36, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Well, it seems the closest you get to Ceremonial counties of England in Scotland is Lieutenancy areas of Scotland, in which case Edinburgh comes under Edinburgh; so I've put it in there for now. - IMSoP 01:22, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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There are so many! I'm going to chuck a load here so that I don't muck up the new formatting, then delete them as I enter them (anyone else is welcome to as well) Btljs 22 Mar 2004

• Medway (formerly Chattham), Kent - Valenciennes, France (1955) second oldest apparently; Cadiz, Spain; Ito & Yokosuka, Japan (1982)
• Rochdale - Bielefeld
• Kirklees - Besançon
• Plymouth - Brest, Gdynia, Novorossiysk, San Sebastian and Plymouth Massachusetts
• Darlington - Amiens and Mülheim
• Whitstable - Albertslund (DK), Borken (D), Dainville (F)
• Dartford - Gravelines (very appropriate!)
• Sidcup - Arleux

Playing around on Google, I found a list of Hampshire town-twinnings which somebody could incorporate, at http://www.hants.gov.uk/localpages/twintown.html - IMSoP 17:41, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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Refactoring this and related pages

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)

This sounds like a good strategy - we really do need to merge the twin towns and sister cities pages, they really are the same thing. And the list could get very very long so having a separate concept page makes a lot of sense. seglea 06:13, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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)

This lot should be fun

Here's a "fun" project for someone who's really really bored - "St. Petersburg has 53 cities-partners" [1] (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:

1. sorting the list alphabetically
2. 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
3. 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)

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)

Table of contents

The table of contents is getting very long now with all the countries and all the counties of UK. Is there a wiki standard for contents tables and contents sub-tables? Should we be subdividing down e.g. continent, country, region/county? It did occur to me that to be strictly consistent, either EVERY country should be divided into its 'regions' or the UK counties should be abandoned and an A to Z list of towns be put in as ti is for every other country. btljs 11:24, 8 June 2004 (UTC)

I've added an entry for Bielany under Warsaw, Poland, since it's a suburb of Warsaw. Likewise, I've added an entry for Marcq-en-Baroeul under Lille, France. Isidore 20:05, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hmm, the extra asterisks got removed from the markup. I suspect this was accidental since the changes were made by two different people and the towns weren't moved to their alphabetical positions. I've restored them. Isidore 11:03, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hm, yes, it is a bit unwieldy, isn't it! Gosh, 68 countries! Perhaps we should use the magic "NOTOC" marker, and build our own more compact ToC. Perhaps just a list of countries at the top of the page, all in a row (yes, it's one more thing to keep up-to-date, but not too hard).

As for regions vs full country lists, I think the UK list would be far less useful if we flattened it - look how many there are just in Hampshire, and it's growing all the time. OTOH, it may be time we did the same to some of the other countries - France and Germany, for now, perhaps. Otherwise, things like suburbs and alternative names are going to get lost amongst the noise. Now, how to divide them - Germany could go into Länder, I guess, and it probably wouldn't be too OTT to use the régions for France. What say ye all? - IMSoP 17:40, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Um, not sure where these links came from

The following were lying around on this page: somebody's suggestion for "see also"s? - IMSoP 17:40, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Divided cities United cities

Links to non-English wikipedia articles

I've added links for Marcq-en-Baroeul, France, and Kreis Steinfurt, Germany, both of which have links in their respective languages [[2]] [[3]]. I'm not sure if and how these links should be represented in the English page. Isidore 20:18, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

OK, I found the English translation for Kreis Steinfurt, but my question remains. Isidore 20:33, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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)

Asian and European Russia

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)

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)

That's fair enough. But I would strongly urge the "vice versa" option ("... all of Russia is classified under Europe"). The great majority of twinnings (and there quite a few more to be added yet) are with communities in European Russia, and given the distribution of population in the Russian Federation that is likely always to remain true. -- Picapica 09:36, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Maybe Russia should just be a top-level heading, rather than being listed under any continent. -- Smjg 09:47, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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)

I've only just noticed that we've had separate entries for Turkey-in-Asia and Turkey-in-Europe under our noses (for some time?). Would welcome any views on the way I've attempted to deal with that. -- Picapica 19:21, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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)

Now done. I'd favour not complicating things unnecessarily with anything else in the way of explanatory (foot)notes, unless there are strong objections. -- Picapica 20:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cities, Town or settlements

Can people suggest some alternate method of formating the list, rather than 'African Cities' etc. as in many countries the term 'city' has some legal or tradiational definition which may not be appropriate within the context...

Equally I'd object to any other specific term (e.g. town, village, etc.) Maybe one could list them as African twins, European twins, etc? --NeilTarrant 16:32, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, the simple solution is to take out the word 'cities' from the list (African cities -> Africa, etc.), which I have done. I agree that the village/town/city question is a thorny one that particularly bedevils UK articles, particularly since the word 'city' has a much tighter definition there than the nearest equivalents in other languages, or even 'city' in some other English-speaking countries.

The very title of the article at present, of course, is 'Twin towns' - because the whole idea of the 'twinning movement', in the UK at least, goes under the name of 'town twinning', even though there are twin cities and many more twin villages.

Eventually, I believe, this article needs to be split in two: 1) a general article about the concept of 'town twinning' (which, amongst other things, would explain that it applies not just to 'towns' as such); and 2) a straightforward list - the two pages linked to each other, of course. Not a huge task in itself, although for me it's just an item on my "would-like-to-do" list. I think of it every time I revisit this page, though. -- Picapica 19:10, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I've been meaning to do the reorganisation for ages now: see #Refactoring this and related pages above. It's probably about time I ran another consistency-checking bot, too... Mañana, mañana... Good call on the continent names, by the way; for some reason, that didn't even occur to me (or, presumably, to whoever split this by continent in the first place)! - IMSoP 23:35, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Split it up a bit?

I suggest to keep it to a more readable+managable size that we split give the German and UK twins each a page of their own, such as with the French twins. -- Joolz 01:05, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ooh! Who did that? I'm not sure that's a good idea at all. Sure, it would be good to make the page a bit more manageable, but it 's just going to make it even more unlikely that people will add twinnings "properly" (i.e. list both "ends" of the twinning). It also seems a bit odd, in general to have one page with "most things" on, and a handful of others with specific sections.

Meanwhile, it seems the page is currently suffering from an annoying software bug that occasionally causes content to be duplicated during edits, making it even longer; of course, this is also a point in favour of splitting the page, so this wouldn't be so likely or such a headache.

I preferred the idea of arranging more countries than just the UK by some subsidiary unit, such as French régions. Perhaps we could split the whole thing by continent (and maybe Europe into "East" and "West" or something?), but then "transclude" them back onto the one page aftewards? - IMSoP 16:25, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hello, just returning your message. It may take a good amount of research, but we could not only revise the France twins, but give the German and the UK twins their own pages. For all of them, we could split them up by sub-national entity. JB82 22:59, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Like I say, the main problem with splitting anything out from this page (even if we were consistent and split by continent, or spun out those with more than X listings) is that by their nature, twinnings have two "ends", and should be listed in two places: if you add "Briancon - Rosenheim", it is illogical for there to be no listing for "Rosenheim - Briancon". It's hard enough to convince people to do this with the two listings just a couple of sections away; if they have to view a whole different page for each end, it's just never going to happen.

Ultimately, the only solution would seem to be to create a fully-fledged bot that could automatically and regularly make the lists consistent. That's a lot of work, far more than the perl-scripts I've been writing, which require a lot of hand-holding and manual checking and cleanup both before and after; but maybe it is kind of necessary.

I've also toyed with the idea of an "add a set of twins" script, but such development tools shouldn't really appear within the encyclopedia page, so I fear people just wouldn't know it existed.

A final thought is that the page could be "split and not split" using the Template mechanism - some of the sections can also be viewed as their own page, but are also "transcluded" to become part of the main list. If all the parts were available on some other page (e.g. by continent) this would still overcome the readability issue to an extent. Whether it would do anything to encourage consistency, though, I'm not sure. - IMSoP 23:45, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Time for another Perl script!

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)

Canadian Clean Up

I cleaned up the Canada section so that the cities preceded provinces, and everything lined nicely. I also added Barrie and Zweibrucken to the list, the former being my own hometown. This is my first Wiki edit ever, so sorry if anything is wrong.

Someone has duplicated Africa, Asia, Europe and North America

Should we just revert or try to integrated the two sections? --Anubis1975 10:42, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

I have reverted back to 11 July version. I will try and reapply the changes since 11 July. --Anubis1975 08:14, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Scandinavian "friend towns"

Should we list all these? The concept is certainly the same, although some of the towns involved are very small. There are 254 chains, giving perhaps 800-900 entries. http://www.norden.se/vanortskedjor.asp (My point might well be that if we are to list all examples of town twinning, we cannot possibly do it in a single article. And also that it would be a lot of work, but that's no news for anyone.) -- Jao 11:28, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I say, if it's the same concept, it should go in; we've gone too far to turn back now ;). The work could be simplified if someone fancied writing a Perl script or somesuch to do it automagically - at least generating the formatting to copy and paste wouldn't be too hard (but beware that some places may have "translated" names used in English).

We have got a major problem with the size of this page, though - the bigger it grows, the harder it is to work with, but the more we split it (as UK and France are already split), the harder it is to maintain, because multiple articles have to be editted. I keep considering parsing it all into a database, and generating a consistent form back from that, but I've never got round to it yet, so don't hold your breath... - IMSoP 12:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Thoughts on format and layout

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)

1) I can see that someone reading this list and learning from it that Lisbon is twinned with Budapest and Luanda, for example, might well want to be able to go quickly and directly to the articles on Lisbon, Budapest, or Luanda... but to the country articles on Hugary, etc.?

2) I think it makes the lists a lot harder to read than the original style of

• Lisbon - Bissau, Guinea-Bissau; Brasília, Brazil; Budapest, Hungary; Luanda, Angola; Maputo, Mozambique; Praia, Cape Verde; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [...]

3) I am also dubious about the benefit of hotlinking the years (when mentioned), although they almost always were so linked before (it isn't compulsory always to treat years in this way, especially when such linking serves little if any real purpose!)

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)

While I think I can understand what might have been the reasons why someone thought it a good idea at the time to send the information under the France heading to another page, this proved, as far as I am concerned, a real pain when it first occurred -- because of the complication it added to the process of ensuring that both "ends" of all French twinning links were entered. (In fact, now I come to think of it, it was probably the reason why I stopped adding to the list.)

Now I find that the same treatment has been applied to Germany and the UK! -- making it necessary to keep four articles open (with the extra risk of edict conflicts involved) if trying to maintain method and consistency... :-(

Is this arrangement now a "done deal"? I'd appreciate hearing what other contributors think before I make my mind up about whether to return to adding any more of my twinning links to this article. TIA -- Picapica 17:27, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

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)

Thanks for that, LtP. -- Picapica 21:06, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, for now I'll go on adding towns from my list, but omitting any with twins in the "removed" countries: France, Germany, Japan, UK, USA... -- Picapica 21:34, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

NYC and Sydney

Is Sydney a sister city of NYC? Other sources [4] don't even mention Sydney. (See also New York City).--Just James 21:08, 26 October 2006 (GMT+10:00)

West Bank & Gaza

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)

I think West Bank and Gaza should not be separated but rather be with the Israeli section (but clearly marked "disputed). Wouldn't this minimise ambiguity? --DandanxD 15:52, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

pune and fairbanks

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

Tarragona and Girona

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).

La Crosse, WI

La Crosse, WI is sister cities with:

Epinal, France; Dubna, Russia; Friedberg, Germany; Luoyang, China; Forde, Norway and Bantry, Ireland.

Source: http://www.cityoflacrosse.org/index.asp?nid=566

Appropriate twins

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)

SPLIT UP necessary

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)

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)

DONE! I'll make a nav template for the whole set shortly. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 05:15, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Number of pairs

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)

Naming so as to clarify Central America and the Caribbean

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)

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)

Maybe something based on the United Nations geoscheme? -- Jao (talk) 22:24, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Rename

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 08:15, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

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Lists of Twin towns and sister cities → Lists of twin towns and sister cities — In September 2010 user Mauk111 (talk · contribs) renamed the article with no explanation (added capital "T" letter in "twin" in the title). But there is a bunch of articles with the title "Lists of twin towns and sister cities" (small "t" letter), see: Lists of Twin towns and sister cities#Africa, Lists of Twin towns and sister cities#Africa, etc. So, wiki admins, I ask you to rename this article back according to the standard name for "lists about twin towns and sister cities".85.141.134.18 (talk) 15:34, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• Support - it doesn't seem to be usual to use a capital "T"  — Amakuru (talk) 22:43, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
• Support and moved page as uncontroversial. Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 08:15, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.