Talk:Q48801

Founded twice?

@Silverstein: What do you mean by setting a second inception (P571)? 62 etc (talk) 07:45, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Silverstein: And now you gave the second (unsourced) claim preferred rank. How does that make sense? 62 etc (talk) 08:56, 18 July 2020 (UTC) (Och om du känner dig obekväm med att skriva på engelska, så förstår jag oftast norsk.)

@Sextvåetc:So I tried to resolve the conflict by assigning "preferred rank" to the newest value.

The "Municipality of Tjeldsund" is a particularly complicated case, and it seems I'm not the only one who's not quite sure how to handle it. The problem is that historically there are really two rather different municipalities which "just happen" to have been assigned the same name. On 1st of January 2020, "Old Tjeldsund" in the county of Nordland was merged with the larger municipality of Skånland (twice the population) in the county of Troms. The reason they agreed on the name of the smaller of the two, Tjeldsund, as the common name for the new merged entity is that that was the only name that was meaningful to both former municipalities, since "Tjeldsund" also (i.e. originally) is the name of the strait which runs through the whole region ("sund" = "strait").

To further complicate matters (and confuse the issue completely), on the same date (1 Jan 2020) the county of Troms, to which Skånland belonged, was also merged, NOT with the county to the south, Nordland, to which "Old Tjeldsund" belonged, but with the county to the north, Finnmark, to form the new county of "Troms and Finnmark", to which "New Tjeldsund" now belongs!

So as you can see, there are actually several reasons why it really doesn't make sense to regard the newly formed, current municipality of Tjeldsund as simply the successor to "Old Tjeldsund". So maybe the best solution would be to have two different entities in Wikimedia, i.e. an additional one for the historical municipality of "Old Tjeldsund"?

--Silverstein (talk) 10:12, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I see your point. Yes, I know there is at least one municipality in southern Norway with two entities here in Wikidata. (Do not remember its name now, but I think it was somewhere in Viken.) The problem can be that different Wikipedias can have different ideas about if there really is a "new" and "old" municipality or not. In such cases the (Wikidata-supported) infobox will say something else than the text. We had a discussion on Swedish Village pump about how we should handle such cases, but the discussion diverted and failed to come to any conclusions. I know there is some kind of tool to duplicate an item, if that is what we need.

We also have some cases of "divorce-municipalities". (Municipalities who were merged in the 1960s and thereafter split again in the 1970s.) I think the idea we should follow in those cases, is to handle them as two different entities. I have edited some of them, but not (yet) made any serious attempts to split them.

@Einar Myre, Jeblad: to get more input. 62 etc (talk) 11:40, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

If we only keep one item, the inception (P571) should be only the earliest; other dates can be added as significant event (P793). However, if these are to be considered two different municipalities, it may be best to give them separate items. Currently, we generally follow the articles in nowp, which means that municipalities are considered the same if they have the same name before and after the merge, except for these: Asker (Q56869)/Asker Municipality (Q80593157), Lindesnes (Q489038)/Lindesnes Municipality (Q80571266), Ullensvang Municipality (Q484077)/Ullensvang Municipality (Q80678654), Øygarden Municipality (Q317321)/Øygarden Municipality (Q63644915). Einar Myre (talk) 12:12, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Einar Myre:It didn't occur to me to compare the case of Tjeldsund with these other four (Asker, Lindesnes, Ullensvang and Øygarden) before I asked the question above, "maybe the best solution would be ..."

Now that I've done the comparison, it becomes quite obvious that there's no reason to treat Tjeldsund any differently. Not only do the exact same arguments apply in all 5 cases, there's even an additional argument in the case of Tjeldsund for differentiating between the former and the current municipality: The other 4 municipalities all joined with all fellow municipalities of their former county (or most of them in the case of Akershus, where there were a couple of exceptions) to become part of their respective successor counties, as nothing but a logical consequence of their former counties having ceased to exist. Tjeldsund, by contrast, and unlike all fellow municipalities of Nordland, went the extra step of leaving its former county, which did NOT cease to exist, in order to become the smaller part of a new municipality in a new county, so that, in a manner of speaking, "only the name" of Tjeldsund was salvaged!

The mere fact that nobody, as yet, has bothered to write an article about "Old Tjeldsund" on nowp is no reason for Wikimedia to uphold the obvious inconsistency. There should definitely be two separate Tjeldsund entities, one former, one current, and at some point maybe, just maybe, somebody at nowp might wake up and take care of the "Old Tjeldsund" article.

--Silverstein (talk) 16:31, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Silverstein, Einar Myre: Well, you could compare Tjeldsund with what has happend to many kommunes during the years. Kommunereforms much larger than that of 2020 were done both in the 1960s and 1970s. If we have to have a new item for Tjeldsund because of these changes, then we should have two (or more) items also for many of those in the 1960s and 1970s. An example is Narvik, before and after it was merged with Ankenes 1974. The areal growth of Narvik then was much much bigger that that of Tjeldsund now. The very charateristics of the kommune changed, from an urban town to a rural municipality. And cases comparable to Narkvik can be found in many many places. If we have two articles in at least one project, we have to have two items, but otherwise I have strong doubts. Many kommunes changed their names during the late 1800s, but they still have only one item. 62 etc (talk) 07:08, 19 July 2020 (UTC)