Talk:Baden-Württemberg

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Baden-Württemberg or Baden-Wuerttemberg[edit]

Does this have to be "Wuerttemberg" instead of "Württemberg"? Yes, I've read the naming conventions, but:

  • is "ue" the commonly used spelling? Or rather "Wurttemberg"? I'm German, and live in BaWü, so I don't know.
  • the naming conv says not to use non-Latin characters. "ü" is Latin... so?

I'd like to move it to the proper spelling, but don't want to commit a big faux-pas on my first day on WikiTravel. --(WT-en) Jae 08:52, 19 Jan 2005 (EST)

Have a read of Project:Foreign-language names before moving. Google indicates that "Baden-Wurttemberg" is a more common English name but "Baden-Wuerttemberg" is a common alternative. I would move the article (but not this talk page) to "Baden-Wurttemberg", and add a redirect from Baden-Württemberg then mention all 3 spellings in the first line of the article. This means all the Google possibilities are covered as the article is presented under all 3 titles, though only sits on the most popular English one. Unfortunately ü is not standard English. -- (WT-en) Huttite 03:25, 20 Jan 2005 (EST)
'Wuerttemberg' is definitely wrong, but whether ü is OK or not is in flux right now. Let's hold off on this for a moment. (WT-en) Jpatokal 04:00, 20 Jan 2005 (EST)
Wuerttemberg is definitely more correct than Wurttemberg (which is incorrect but widely used). Umlauts are correctly transcribed using e: ä=ae, ü=ue, ö=oe
For our purposes, "incorrect but widely used" is kind of a contradiction in terms. We standardize on "English names" because (despite not being the correct names used by the people who actually live there) they're widely used by our audience. "Vienna" is a bad transliteration of "Wien", "Florence" is a butchering of "Firenze", and how did we get "Munich" out of "München"? But those are the spellings that anglophones use, so we do as well. If Wurttemburg is more widely used than Wuerttemburg, it should be used instead. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 07:45, 7 July 2006 (EDT)
Interesting to see that our São Paulo article is not called by the more common anglicisation of Sao Paulo. --W. Franke-mailtalk 15:06, 25 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Splitting into further sub-regions?[edit]

There is a bunch of orphaned pages which need to be de-orphaned. The following lists were deleted under the 7±2 rule, but if there are no objections, I will turn them into sub regions in a few days. -- (WT-en) Tim (writeme!) 08:53, 4 August 2007 (EDT)

Here are the different regions for each Regierungsbezirk:

Freiburg (Regierungsbezirk)

Karlsruhe (Regierungsbezirk)

Tuebingen (Regierungsbezirk)

Stuttgart (Regierungsbezirk)

I removed this lists without considering that this will create orphaned articles. I'll create region articles, but naming them "xxx (region)" not "xxx (Regierungsbezirk)". Feel free to change this if you do not like it, I am not sure what is better. --(WT-en) Flip666 writeme! • 09:18, 4 August 2007 (EDT)
Sounds good to me. Thanks -- (WT-en) Tim (writeme!) 06:14, 7 August 2007 (EDT)


--ludwigshafen is not in baden-württemberg !!!!!!! so BASF is in rheinland-pfalz

I do not like the current political regions we have set up, I think we can better use tourist regions for this state. Stuttgart Region doesn't ring any bells with most visitors, so I suggest the following sub-regions:

I'd like to hear some input before I implement these regions.

--(WT-en) globe-trotter 18:43, 12 August 2010 (EDT)

I see a problem that both Black Forest and Lake Constance already exist as regions extending far beyond Baden-Württemberg, further do the suggested regions cover all of the state? We need to set up regions for the regional hierarchy without gaps or overlaps. But apart from that, I agree that we should avoid the political regions, if possible, --(WT-en) ClausHansen 19:00, 12 August 2010 (EDT)
This way we can cover the whole state:

The Black Forest article does not extend beyond its purpose. The Lake Constance region does extend into Austria and Switzerland, so we could create the two articles I just proposed. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 19:24, 12 August 2010 (EDT)

That looks fine. I think it is important to define these new regions, ideally by a map but until we have that by explanation eg with reference to counties or other, --(WT-en) ClausHansen 01:40, 13 August 2010 (EDT)


  • Southern Odenwald
  • Region Heilbronn-Franken
  • Region Stuttgart
  • Southern Upper Rhine Plain (Oberrheinische Tiefebene)
  • Black Forest (Schwarzwald)
  • Swabian Jura (Swabian Alps) (Schwäbische Alb)
  • Westallgäu (district Ravensburg) or Upper Swabia–Lake Constance
  • Lake Constance (Bodensee) or Upper Swabia–Lake Constance

Pedelecs (talk) 19:01, 17 October 2012 (CEST)


Now four sub-regions with 3 extra regions --Traveler100 (talk) 19:35, 24 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]


Nothing happened for a long time. I would suggest a mixture of geographical and political regions:

  • Lake Constance (Bodensee) with the districts Konstanz and Bodenseekreis
  • Upper Swabia (Oberschwaben) north from Lake Constance to Danube river
  • Swabian Mountains (Schwäbische Alb) north of Danube river with districts Rottweil, Zollernalb, Tübingen, Reutlingen, parts of Göppingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis, Heidenheim, Ostalbkreis
  • Stuttgart region with the districts Böblingen, Esslingen, Stuttgart, Ludwigsburg, Rems-Murr-Kreis, parts of Göppingen
  • Heilbronn-Franken (with the districts Heilbronn, Hohenlohekreis, Main-Tauber-Kreis, Schwäbisch Hall)
  • Black Forest (Schwarzwald) all the southwest part with the districts of Karlsruhe and Enzkreis
  • Rhein-Neckar region - with disticts of Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, Neckar-Odenwald-Kreis and Heidelberg/Mannheim

Or the simple way

--Uhkabu (talk) 21:23, 19 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

After some more research in official tourist pages (e.g. http://www.tourism-bw.com/) I suggest a similar division. Until there is not enough input for the northern region I would suggest to keep this as one region. And the problem with Lake Constance could be solved with a "Lake Constance Region". A map would help a lot.

--Uhkabu (talk) 21:12, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Baden-Wuerttemberg regions suggestion

I added a simple map for the suggestion above. --Uhkabu (talk) 13:57, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I reverted your change only for the time being, because no one seems to have noticed or contributed much to this conversation. Please let me have a look at this first. Texugo (talk) 20:16, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
OK, this seems fairly reasonable to me, so I have reverted by reversion above. Please don't forget to adjust all the breadcrumbs/IsPartOf/categories accordingly though! Thanks! Texugo (talk) 20:24, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Uhm, and what do we achieve by that? Do we have too much information in the Baden-Württemberg article that needs to be split out? Do we benefit from extra content added to the regional articles? Most are stubs at best, Black Forest is an article on the mountain range rather than region anyway, and what does the article on Lake Constance Region add vs the one Lake Constance? I think we are just creating an artificial level of subdivision that doesn't ad anything. Let us focus on expanding content in this main article and see whether we are reaching the point when we really start having too much region-specific content to keep it all in one article. PrinceGloria (talk) 21:19, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, at least the conversation is back on ;-) What is the alternative to region articles? Put all in the Baden-Württemberg article? In my opinion travellers need an overview of the area/region they travel to, Baden-Württemberg seems for me as a native to big. But I agree an empty page is useless, so that's what we have to work on! And the governmental districts (Stuttgart, Tübingen, Karlsruhe, Freiburg) are really artificial and have nothing to do with the tourist way of seeing BW, so thats why nobody can add information (including me). As I said before, the official tourist site http://www.tourism-bw.com/ has similar divisions! But if anyone has a just great idea, I'm curious. --Uhkabu (talk) 15:05, 18 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
There are 56 city articles under this, so we definitely need regions of some kind, so let's not wipe them out til we decide on new ones, or we'll have to put the giant list of all 56 cities in the article here. User:Uhkabu, if we use the suggestion in the map above, would you be able to write about those regions? Texugo (talk) 12:27, 24 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, actually, I can see that most of them are already written about to some degree. I'd support a move to that scheme instead of the current administrative one. I would absolutely not support making this a direct parent to the 56 articles. That would be at least 20 cities longer than the next fullest region anywhere on the site. Texugo (talk) 12:35, 24 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the travel regions, they absolutely make sense instead of the administrative ones. Globe-trotter (talk)

Let's go then[edit]

If we all agree on that, let's go then. I've already started. What still needs to be done:

  1. Move destinations from old regions to new - one needs to both fix the breadcrumb ("IsPartOf") at the bottom of the article AND make sure destination is linked to from the new regional article. It is also good to check the lead and fix it wherever necessary
  2. Turn Lake Constance into a region of Baden-Württemberg - currently it only links to one destination in Austria and one in Switzerland, both of which have their own regions in their countries. The experiment with this "extraregion" failed, so we can use (and perhaps rename) this article to collect all the destinations from the former Freiburg (region) and Tübingen (region
  3. Adjust the articles on other regions to match what they now are - descriptions, understand etc. E.g. it would be good to state in the articles on mountain ranges that they cover the AREA surrounding the range, not just the range itself. Same for Bodensee - Ravensburg is not quite on the lake.
  4. Make a new regionmap! It would be good for the borders to actually follow the administrative borders of Kreise, so that we would have no problems placing all current an future destinations in an article.
  5. Fix categories - User:Texugo, do you have the necessary powers?
  6. Meticulously go through "What links here" for every article, especially the old regions, and fix any references that have become incorrect

PrinceGloria (talk) 04:42, 28 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Lake Constance Region -> Bodensee, or Bodensee Region?[edit]

We've had a bit of a private discussion with Texugo regarding Lake Constance and Lake Constance Region. The coexistence of them both can be quite confusing for the readers. I believe if we keep Lake Constance as a separate article, we need to rename the Lake Constance Region somehow. Lake Constance Region (Baden-Württemberg, Germany) does not seem like a good idea obviously.

I would propose to call this region Bodensee or Bodensee Region. While this is the German name for Lake Constance universally used in all three countries around the lake, the reference to the surrounding lands as Bodensee or Bodensee-something is pretty much uniquely German - the Swiss and Austrians have their own names for those regions, which generally do not reference Bodensee in their names. OTOH, even Oberschwaben is actually quite often called Oberschwaben-Bodensee for touristic purposes, even though Ravensburg is quite away from the lake. If we choose to use that name, we obviously need to explain in the lead that the name is universal to the German world, but this article only covers the part in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Any opposition, alternative proposals? PrinceGloria (talk) 04:37, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think Bodensee Region would be a good method to differentiate from the international Lake Constance article. Agree the Bodensee fits for the German region even in on the English site. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:20, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It seems a good solution. Texugo (talk) 11:46, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for weighing in guys. I guess there isn't that much interest in B-W, so I take it we have reached a consensus and will plunge forward to implement it. In case this is premature, reverting this should not be a problem. PrinceGloria (talk) 22:54, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Looks good. You moved the page, I changed the link in the Region section and fixed the breadcrumbs and categories, so I think this part of the change is complete. Texugo (talk) 00:58, 30 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Well actually, not quite. We still need a map, but at least this map with one mislabelled region is better than none. Texugo (talk) 01:03, 30 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm working on a quick and dirty map to illustrate the regions and cities. Should have it up in the next couple of days. -Shaundd (talk) 22:11, 30 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
BTW - there are ten cities listed right now, should I place all ten or will one be removed? -Shaundd (talk) 22:26, 30 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Shaundd ! --W. Frankemailtalk 22:30, 30 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Map[edit]

Shaundd, thank you for taking the time to prepare a map for BW! In reply to your comments, I am quite afraid we do need to keep those 10 cities, I cannot think of one of them to be removed - frankly, I'd gladly add more :)

I would be mindful in following the borders of Kreise to indicate where our regions begin and end - the regions themselves are quite universally understood (perhaps except for Northern BW, where we didn't want to open a jigsaw puzzle box), but it is important to note where we put the exact borders, as the region, as you already noticed, is full of small towns and villages of note, and where to put them is actually important.

I would use the map with division into Kreise as guidance, and let me offer a few pointers:

  • Bodensee Region is formed of Kreise Konstanz, Bodenseekreis, Sigmaringen, Ravensburg and Biberach
  • Stuttgart Region is Stuttgart and the four surrounding Kreise - Boeblingen, Esslingen, Ludwigsburg and Rems-Murr-Kreis
  • Northern Baden-Württemberg is Karlsruhe (city) and Karlsruhe (Landkreis), Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, which surrounds Mannheim and Heidelberg, Heilbronn city and Heilbronn Landkreis, Neckar-Odenwald-Kreis, Hochenlohekreis, Main-Tauber-Kreis and Schwabisch Hall.

Do take a moment to follow the tricky border of the two Kreise of Karlsruhe - the Landkreise surrounds the city from both north (larger part) and south.

The other two regions will result from the puzzle - just note that Tubignen, Tuttlingen and Zollernalbkreis go to Swabian Mountains.

The airports are in:

  • Stuttgart
  • Baden-Baden
  • Friedrichshafen
  • Basel (in Switzerland, just at the southwestern tip of BW, this airport also serves Freiburg and is important to put on the map)

Would be good to put main railway lines on the map, as getting around is a bit of a pain if you don't know which towns are connected with which. I can't find a good, simple map to help you, but you can try this one (huge file) - at least all of the green lines should be rendered. I guess the blue ones are not necesary either, except the one at the bottom running from Friedrichshafen to Basel.

With regards to motorways, this should be easy, here's a schematic.

The rivers Donau, Neckar and Rhine should be marked on the map as well, obviously.

Hope this helps! PrinceGloria (talk) 07:06, 31 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would support Gloria's helpful comments --W. Frankemailtalk 10:07, 31 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that's very helpful. Thanks very much. Just a couple of questions/comments:
  • The original map uses the Donau River as the dividing line between the Swabian Mountains and the Bodensee, while you suggested using the Kreise above. Which of the two should I use?
  • Is the Get in section going to be updated to include the airports in Baden-Baden and Friedrichshafen? If the guide doesn't reference them then I'd prefer to keep them off the map.
Just to let you know about timing, I'm going to build this map in a few stages since I only get time to work on it periodically. The basic region structure and cities is almost done, so I'm hoping to upload it soon. After that I'll add the roads and railroads and upload it again. Stage three will be the subregions (time permitting and depending on how the subregion articles look) and refreshing the main B-W map based on GIS data. -Shaundd (talk) 20:14, 1 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Please use Kreise, less ambiguous as many cities lie on the actual river and allocating them would be a pain. This is why I'd go with Kreise, the border does not move far
  2. Get in mentions both of those airports, please take a look again
No rush with the map, we are most obliged to you for considering devoting your time to this! PrinceGloria (talk) 20:21, 1 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The first pass at the map is up. Still need to add the roads and railroads, plus I think the font size needs some work. Let me know if there's anything else that needs changing. Cheers. -Shaundd (talk) 06:40, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Looks brilliant, danke schoen! Let me do some bickering or I wouldn't be me:
  1. Karlsruhe landed in the wrong region, we placed it in Northern Baden-Württemberg. I told you it's tricky, as the Karlsruhe Landkreis is actually comprised of two parts, one "above" and one "below" the city of Karlsruhe - you have spliced the Landkreis as well.
  2. Karlsruhe is on the river Rhine (its eastern riverbank). The centre is indeed a bit removed, but it shouldn't look like it is removed from the river on the overview map
  3. Baden-Baden is much closer to the border and to the airport - it is right outside its borders, not so far away.
  4. BTW, do we mark rivers as "Rivername R"? I might have missed that.
  5. I speak German and often mix it up with English inadvertently, so I referred to the river Danube as "Donau". The correct English name is "Danube".
  6. If we show Friedrichshafen Airport, we should also label Friedrichshafen, otherwise it is hard to guess which airport this is.
  7. Actually, I guess with so much free space we may mark more cities that are not necessairly on the list, but we could mention them in passing. My suggestions are Ravensburg and Schwaebisch Hall
  8. You may want to consider a lighter hue of gray for the background, so that Mannheim, Basel and Konstanz labels are easier to make out. I also believe the manual of style asks for darker hues to be used for regions, like the ones you used for Portugal.
Please bear with me, I still believe you did a massively great work! PrinceGloria (talk) 06:49, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
No worries, it's difficult to improve things without feedback. So, a new version of the map is up... I think I’ve addressed most of the issues above with a few comments.
  • For #7, I’m holding off adding new cities (other than Friedrichshafen) until the roads and railroads are added. They’re going to add some clutter to the map so I want to see how that looks first before adding more cities.
  • For #2 and #3, I moved the city markers, although perhaps not as much as you’re expecting. Looking at maps of Karlsruhe, it looks like the city center is 7-8 km from the Rhine, so on a map with this scale it makes sense the city marker would be a little off the river. Google, OpenStreetMap (Mapquest layer) and Bing all show the city off the river as well, at this scale. For Baden-Baden, it looks like it sprawls a bit, but the heart of the town seems to be located several km east of the A5 on Hwy 500 (around where it has a tunnel). This looks to be 10-12 km east of the airport, so again there will be a noticeable gap between the city marker and the airport (and the border).
  • For #4, I’m not sure if there is a standard for how river names are displayed. Looking at a handful of other European maps I see the “R” is dropped, so I’ve dropped it here.
  • For #8, I changed the palette so it’s a bit darker. I’m not aware of any style guideline that says the colours have to be darker, though. There is a standard palette that comes with the map template, but we’ve often desaturated or lightened the colours because the standard palette can become difficult to read and work with once you add all the details to a map.
As always, let me know if you love it, hate it, want changes, etc. :-) -Shaundd (talk) 04:16, 3 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you so much, I obviously love it and your concerns are valid, but I'd still like to discuss two things:
  1. While technically the centre is away from the river, Karlsruhe still IS on the river (and it's an important port!), and this is important for stuff like navigation over water etc. If we could simply portray cities in their full size this would become apparent. If we use little dots to signify them, I believe considerations like that trump the exact geographic centre. I am happy with where Baden-Baden now is tho, just to make sure
  2. I still believe a lighter shade of gray in the background could make the labels more readable.
Thank you for considering those. PrinceGloria (talk) 04:26, 3 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
We sometimes portray cities at approximately their full size, and I'd like to see it done more often as we start working on these lower-level region maps (I experimented with it at the Kootenays map, see Calgary and Kelowna; Peter did it on the Haiti map). I have some data on urban areas -- not sure if includes Karlsruhe -- but I will try to incorporate it with the roads and railroads to see how it looks. At the very least, I imagine Stuttgart is much larger than it's current dot.
The gray background is tricky since there's both white and black text on top of it. I did lighten it by 16 points, but if I lighten it too much more, the white text will be much less visible. -Shaundd (talk) 04:51, 3 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Re: gray - then why don't we use black and gray text instead of black and white? Somehow other articles appear to use lighter gray background, but that might be just my eyes.
Re: cities - please do so, does make sense. You don't need any extra data - the cities of BW, and indeed most of the cities of Germany, are contained within their Kreis (if they are a Kreisfreie Stadt). Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, BB, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Heilbronn and Mannheim all are, so you can go by their boundaries from the map as originally in the article. Just don't confuse them with Landkreise with the same name - the cities are usually indicated with abbreviations only on said map.
PrinceGloria (talk) 04:57, 3 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

An updated map is (finally!) up, with roads, railroads and urban areas for the larger centers. There are still a few small things to add (some minor roads, the scale), and I'm not entirely happy with how everything looks yet, but please let me know of any other changes and I'll incorporate them into the next version. -Shaundd (talk) 04:41, 25 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's FAB! Better than I could ever imagine it could be! I guess BW is lucky to now have the best region map across WV :)
Very quickly what I noticed:
  • It did get cluttery with so many details (nonetheless so informative!) - perhaps you could play with lightness/saturation to make sure the most important stuff (esp. labels) stands out. Labels are really hard to read in some cases right now
  • I would still move to keep the surrounding areas in very light gray with darker gray labels, borders etc. For now, they are very heavy and impact the ability to e.g. read the Konstanz tab. It also looks like Basel, Zurich and Wurzburg are somehow relevant (they are not, they are covered elsewhere).
  • Baden-Baden, Heidelberg and Ulm are also Stadtkreise, they ought to be marked the yellow/orange way that Karlsruhe is
So much nitpicking from me. I remain in awe! PrinceGloria (talk) 07:30, 25 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
No worries about nitpicking.
A new version is up. Baden-Baden, Heidelberg and Ulm are now marked by their urban areas. I've also tried to filter out some of the impact of roads, RRs and borders when they're underneath text to help improve readability. The grey background is a bit lighter than before, but what I found is that if it's any lighter it starts to clash with some of the region colours (i.e., the grey needs a certain level of darkness to make the coloured regions stand out).
I've included Basel, Zurich and Wurzberg because they're major cities close to BW. Normal practice with the region maps is the region shouldn't be drawn in isolation -- it can include major cities or features of neighbouring regions, particularly if they're relevant. All three cities are referenced in Get in / Get around, so they seem relevant. If the map was a bit bigger, I'd also include Frankfurt for the same reason.
Should I start working on the maps for the subregions? -Shaundd (talk) 05:17, 29 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you so much! To nitpick - Friedrichshafen somehow became "Friedrichschafen". As regards maps for subregions, I'd let them mature before they get detailed maps. Meanwhile, there are many regions who lack a proper map - e.g. Brandenburg, Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein have none. PrinceGloria (talk) 05:13, 1 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oops, some clumsy fingers. I'll try to get the spelling corrected in the next couple of days. -Shaundd (talk) 05:52, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Markers to listings[edit]

Not sure for the list of cities adding Wikipedia and Wikidata links is a good idea. Looks over busy and is not needed as the links are available on the article page sidebar. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:07, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata items for dynamic map[edit]

I know we don't want to use dynamic maps for larger regions, but at least the Wikidata ID's can be useful to create mapshapes for the subregions. The tool Wikidata Extractor has been used to create the mapshapes. --Renek78 (talk) 15:57, 29 October 2018 (UTC) Now updated --Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 10:58, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Map
Map of Baden-Württemberg

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