Talk:Finland Proper

Cities/Municipalities

We don't distinguish between cities and municipalities to the degree of giving them separate sections/lists. I removed the following because they are red links anyway: Aura, Kimitoön, Koski Tl, Kustavi, Lieto, Marttila, Masku, Mynämäki, Nousiainen, Oripää, Pyhäranta, Pöytyä, Rusko, Sauvo, Taivassalo, Tarvasjoki, Vehmaa. Texugo (talk) 16:04, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Some of these are now in Loimaa, which was created to include all the Loimaa region. I now found that the inland municipalities of Masku, Mynämäki and Rusko perhaps would be best included in that article, which then should change names (Inland of Finland Proper? Turku inland?). Lieto, Sauvo and Paimio should perhaps join Kaarina, also changing names, to handle the coast east of Turku (no idea what name would suit).

The municipalities affected now all redlink, and they are mostly genuine countryside. Paimio regards itself a town, and Lieto, Rusko and Masku have quite some residential areas, mostly with commuters to Turku. Most do have some industry, but the attractions for tourists are the old churches, local history museums, agritourism and adventure tourism (including canoeing and horseback riding). Some of these are really nice, but attracting few visitors to Turku, not competing with Turku's own attractions and thus better handled separately, in the interest of those riding their bikes through the region, or choosing to drive their car along minor roads. —The preceding comment was added by LPfi (talk • contribs)

I vaguely remember I've suggested creating articles for rural areas (articles comprising several rural municipalites, pretty much like Rural Montgomery County) that aren't covered by city articles. For each Finnish province maybe 2-5 of them would be needed, and names of the municipalities would be redirected to those rural area articles. ϒpsilon (talk) 11:07, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

I suppose that would be like Loimaa now. I just noticed the Finland Proper inland was not properly covered yet (and "Loimaa" does not suite an area covering Rusko). Also Vakka-Suomi should be created, but that does not cover Rusko either. --LPfi (talk) 12:36, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, official regions do not always correlate that well with density of attractions. We could call the rural article where Rusko would be located "Western Finland Proper" or something like that, include everything on or near highway 8, and make Vakka-Suomi a redirect to it. --ϒpsilon (talk) 14:28, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Does Rusko, Masku, Mietoinen and Mynämäki and Vahto differ from the Loimaa region municipalities in some relevant way? "Around highway 8" might be a relevant criterion, but I suppose the region is of more interest for those driving the small roads than those passing along the highway. I thought the municipalities along the coast (mostly Vakka-Suomi) form a more natural group, while Loimaa, Rusko etc. could be joined as Inland Finland Proper. I am not sure about Mynämäki, while mostly an inland municipality not in Vakka-Suomi, it does have coast (and then there is Raisio, which should be included somewhere for completeness; from a tourist standpoint it mostly is a suburb to Turku, with few attractions, but until now we only include Turku in Turku). --LPfi (talk) 12:27, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

I now did the move to Inland of Finland Proper. Vakka-Suomi still lacks article. Raisio is not handled anywhere. Paimio and Sauvo could perhaps be included here, although they are at the (south) coast and might be better treated together with Kaarina, if we had a good name for those. I adjusted some wordings, but did not search for and add listings, neither did I a good job at adjusting Get in, Get around & al, but I think the page now can work as base for further work on the added municipalities. --LPfi (talk) 09:13, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@Ypsilon: On removing the Municipalities section with only the Lieto redirect, I again started thinking about how to get this region to conform to our geographical hierarchy. I laid out what we have in a copy of this article: User:LPfi/Finland Proper.

By moving some cities away from Archipelago Sea to "Turku with suburbs" I think I got something nearly sensible. I did not follow any formal subdivisions.

The Archipelago Sea still gets quite a few "cities", even though I moved the individual islands (such as Själö and Jurmo) to Other destinations – but with this arrangement they fit the 7+2 rule, I don't think we need more entries here, and bottom-level regions are allowed to have more entries.

The names need tuning. "Turku with suburbs" or "The east" are clumsy to say the least.

The two be regions I have problems with are Inland of Finland Proper and Vakka-Suomi.

• I see little use in subdividing the former to transform it from a "rural area" to a region: there are too few things to have as listings (at least that I know of, but I made some effort to find them for the Loimaa region) for it to be worthwhile. Even with thrice as many they are not going to overwhelm the article.
• The latter region has only a few (former) municipalities and at least Taivassalo and Kustavi should have a few attractions making them possible articles. Here the problem is that I don't know the region. Are Laitila, Pyhäranta and Vehmaa viable articles? Is there some natural subdivision?

--LPfi (talk) 14:19, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Now when there is an official thing called rural articles, let's use it and don't convert articles to regions. The Inland of Finland proper is be a good example and could probably also be used in other parts of Finland too. Even if there right now aren't any listings for a particular set of municipalities, it should not be too difficult to find at least a couple of things to add if we dig through the Wikipedia articles and Commons categories for the municipalities (former and current), and maybe Finnish Wikimatkat could be helpful too. If there's a decent number of listings, the municipality can get its own article just as normal.

As the Archipelago Sea has its own article, which is de facto the bottom level article, I would add just the most important couple of islands (7+-2?) at the Finland Proper level.

For the names, "Greater Turku" could be an alternative, and "Paimio to Salo" is the best I can come up with as an alternative to "East". I've seen variants of these used on WV for areas around cities and regions.

Laitila's got a lemonade factory/brewery at least, and together with the surrounding couple of municipalities there really must be enough content for a rural Vakka-Suomi article. --Ypsilon (talk) 16:09, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

I first thought I would try to make Finland Proper a lowest level region, but then we end up with the version at my user subpage, where we have the five quasi-regions, one of which is described in a bottom level rural area article and one in a region article, which would have to be transformed into an extraregion or park, and we would have nowhere to put islands if they become too many (the ferries call at a few dozens, all of which probably could have an article).

As a region should not be only partly split into regions, the Inland of article as rural area becomes a problem. It would need to be split up or combined with a few other articles into a lowest level region. With a Vakka-Suomi countryside and a Paimio to Salo (Sauvo, Paimio, ...)? Then we have this new Mainland Finland Proper or whatever, Archipelago Sea and Greater Turku as regions. Would that make sense?

--LPfi (talk) 17:05, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

So here is the one-region version and the three-region version. Was this what you meant? --LPfi (talk) 17:24, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Not quite satisfied with the "Mainland Finland Proper": as it includes coast, it includes islands. It also spans quite a distance and different places, so is suboptimal also in other than name. But the division gets 4+9+9 city or rural area articles, which seems quite good, and the subregions can be described sensibly. --LPfi (talk) 17:29, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

I prefer the one level region; we could do it like in Finnish Lapland with subheadings and then the cities, rurals, national parks below them. As there are many articles below Finland Proper, I think it helps the reader to have them organized a little bit. If we create entire articles for intermediate regions we'd have to come up with some content for them too.

The exception would be the Archipelago Sea that has many articles below it (I guess the threshold for places to get their own article is lower as places are pretty far apart for everyone without a helicopter). Archipelago Sea would be listed like a rural region in the Finland Proper article, but actually subdivided, just like a huge city. The region is otherwise a bit different place from anywhere else in Finland (ie. there's much the islands have in common which places on the mainland don't) so there's also a need for an intermediate article. Ypsilon (talk) 18:15, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

I see. Now both versions are in fact quasi-regionalized (ignore the redlinks you do not want to turn blue). Do you prefer the one with 3 quasi-regions or with 5 quasi-regions? Sauvo and Paimio can of course be merged also in the 3-region version, likewise other redlinks – I just thought that "towns" (stad) should be able to support an article. Am I on the right path or should something be done radically differently? I do have a problem with Enontekiö in Lapland, and bluelinks on different levels here, but we can ignore that for a while. --LPfi (talk) 18:55, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

IMO the one with five would be better. It would give the reader a quicker overview where in Finland Proper a place is. I agree a city should generally be big enough for an article on its own. And as for the bluelinks on different levels, this would just be an issue for the Archipelago Sea. Maybe most places breadcrumbed under Archipelago Sea shouldn't be mentioned here, though I'd still keep Pargas and Kimito listed as they're considerably bigger than other localties there. --Ypsilon (talk) 19:25, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Also Inland of Finland Proper is bluelinked, and unless it is put under some heading, it is at intermediate level. For the Archipelago Sea, cities are not the thing out there, so making it appear it is mostly about the town of Pargas is misleading. At present there are 7+2 items under that heading, so I think they all can stay (and Kimito is definitely not a city, so the selection would be odd). A little text about each quasi-region would probably make the list easier to grasp, without making it shorter. --LPfi (talk) 20:14, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Starts looking good, I took the liberty of making some edits to your sandbox with comments. Headings look better than bulleted points. --Ypsilon (talk) 04:48, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

[outdent]
Good. I thought about using headings, but did not get to it. I added some descriptions. Somero should be moved out of the rural area, yes (and it was listed also separately, but in Salo, should it be moved to the inland?), but in the current setup it is indeed in the inland.

Lieto and Masku could indeed be moved to Greater Turku (together with Rusko and Paattinen). Vanhalinna, Zoolandia, Nautelankoski, Riviera, Karevansuo, Suokullan reitti, Linnavuori, probably some stable. Yes, there are enough sights. Is there a good name? Turku countryside? Leaving Sauvo and Kaarina as separate articles, we don't need to deal with the east at this stage. As you say, a few short articles does not matter much.

I merged Raisio into Turku proper, as its sights are no different from those in Turku (a swimming hall, a shopping mall, the river walk, the church, anything else?) and going there is not much different to going to Skanssi.

Then we have the Vakka-Suomi area. Askainen and Lemu would match Kustavi and Taivassalo. Were they part of Vakka-Suomi before the merger? (I don't have my 1960s encyclopædia available at the moment.) We can of course stretch a bit and include them anyway. Also (old) Mynämäki? Did you have some specific thoughts?

--LPfi (talk) 11:05, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Map that I found that could be helpful

Hey, the Wikipedia article for Finland Proper has a map that could be helpful here, where a division not so different from what we're building up right now is displayed.

In our Salo & co. group each city/municipality indeed would get its own article including Somero etc. The red ones plus Sauvo and Paimio.

What's under the Greater Turku heading would correspond to basically the blue area in the map minus Mynämäki, Sauvo and Paimio. Then the Turku countryside would cover places "not that far" from Turku which don't have their own article. It's hard to come up with a good name for it; "Turku suburbs and countryside", "North & northeast of Turku"..?

Inland would correspond to the yellow area.

WP says the official subregion of Vakka Suomi is made up of Uusikaupunki plus Kustavi, Laitila, Mietoinen, Mynämäki, Pyhäranta, Taivassalo and Vehmaa. It'd correspond to the green area in the map, plus Mynämäki. --Ypsilon (talk) 13:27, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Nice. I would still keep Nousiainen and Vahto in "Inland of", and Merimasku, Rymättylä and Velkua in "Archipelago Sea". And probably some areas of northern Salo should be handled in the Inland – but that can be handled when there is something written about them. (The map mostly matching is not a coinsidence: I looked at the divisions when I started working on this, but I found only some of the historic borders, which often are more interesting than the current ones.) --LPfi (talk) 13:59, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Oops. My geography of Finland Proper seems to be seriously lacking. I corrected a few mistakes I made in my comment. Anyway, I suppose there are more cases, where the quasi-region border should be along former municipality borders, not along the current ones. E.g. it makes more sense to have Vahto in the Inland than in Greater Turku, while Rusko would need to be in the latter to have Masku connect to Lieto (via Rusko and Paattinen). I would really need a map from 1950. But I think these are small adjustments, the main thing is to know what quasi-regions to have and see that they can be made to make sense. --LPfi (talk) 14:25, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes, historical borders can be interesting but if the borders aren't somehow visible in the present day they can be confusing too (for readers and contributors who aren't sure in which article to list something). This is less of a problem as we're not making actual regions between Finland Proper and cities in the bottom but still.

Kisko indeed is southeast of Salo itself, on the road from Ingå. --Ypsilon (talk) 14:32, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Old maps... --Ypsilon (talk) 16:37, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

They can be confusing, but is equally confusing when different sources ignore names that are very much alive locally. If somebody in Prostvik asks me how to get to Nagu, I'd answer that you already are there, while Matkahuolto would ask him to take the coach to what on the ground is Kyrkbacken. And it is Prostvik and Kyrkbacken of Nagu, not Prostvik and Kyrkbacken of Pargas. If somebody ask for the latter, I'd say I don't know such a name, but that the church of Pargas is in the old town. And so on. So I am not terribly worried about using names and areas that are not official anymore (but I'd try to be clear about their status in their lowest level articles).

I think the division is ready to get to main space; the fine tuning can be done in the article itself – I don't want anybody to do big changes that would be labourous to merge.

--LPfi (talk) 17:46, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Go ahead. Ypsilon (talk) 17:56, 7 August 2020 (UTC)