Category talk:Cities by country

"City"

Definition so broad that it strains the language

The definition, going all the way down to villages, strains the English language. Only in the United States, I suggest, would any village of 200 people ever claim to be a city; however, even there, thousands of villages (e.g. Verlot, Washington) and towns up to a hundred times that population are not technically cities and their residents might think their inclusion in this category was silly.

The Wiktionary definition is plain:

A large settlement, bigger than a town.

The Wikipedia article mentions the U.S. usage but says:

City is primarily used to designate an urban settlement with a large population... ... Outside the United States, "city" implies an entire settlement or metropolitan area ... [with rare exceptions such as City of London].

See Category talk:Cities in New Zealand for detailed objections in respect of one country subcat. I wrote it 10 weeks ago; no written disagreement yet, although at least one of our "place" experts has seen it. Most countries could probably have a similar objection written.

Definition incompatible with other Commons category names

It's worse than a strain of language:

1. It's incompatible with the range of subcats (and therefore the implied meaning of "city") in its "grandparent" Category:Populated places.
2. It's a kind of artificial duplication of Category:Cities and villages by country (which is currently one of its "aunt" categories but on purely semantic grounds should be one of its parent categories).
3. If the word "city" were to have, all over Commons, the definition shown here, then every category with "towns", "villages", or "populated places" in its name should be merged with the corresponding "cities" category. They are not, and they should not be.

Let's fix it

We could move every subcat into Category:Cities and villages by country.

But I suggest we merge this category and Category:Cities and villages by country into a shorter and even more inclusive name, Category:Settlements by country. That matches the Wikipedia category of that name and uses the term that this category itself uses: "a City for categorization purposes may refer to any settlement, ...". (We could invite the caretakers of each country cat to rename it correspondingly if they wish to.)

Robin Patterson 14:32, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Germany?

I wasn't able to find "Citys of Germany"

Indeed, Germany used Category:Cities in Germany until 2006, but is now using Category:Municipalities of Germany only. --Bob. (talk) 23:55, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

See also link to Middle East

Why would you put on this page a see also link to the category Middle East? It doesn't make any sense to put this link here and it is confusing the category system. This category is about countries, not regions, otherwise one would have to put a see also link to every other region in the world. I think this link should be removed. --Mcke (talk) 09:48, 3 November 2009 (UTC)