While browsing through articles on subdivisions of Cologne with the intention of adding translations from German Wikipedia, I noticed that the terms used to translate different levels of subdivision are inconsistent across these pages. The overview article Districts of Cologne translates Stadtbezirk as "(city) district", and Stadtteil very literally as "city part". Articles about individual Stadtbezirke on the other hand, like Lindenthal and Rodenkirchen instead render Stadtbezirk as "borough" and Stadtteil as either "(city) quarter" "city part".
By way of comparison, articles on Berlin, which calls its top-level subdivisions Bezirk and its second-level subdivisions Ortsteil (which meanings do not differ substantially from Stadtbezirk and Stadtteil), uses "borough" for the former and "locality" for the latter.
This is confusing in several different ways:
I would like to propose the following consistent approach for the subdivisions of German cities:
Subjectively, as a binative of English and German, this is what seems most intuitively comprehensible/evocative, but there are also objective reasons speaking for it:
However, I didn't want to charge ahead and make these changes without first inviting comment to see if there might be any good reasons this isn't already what's used across the board. So...what do other editors think? --Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 12:13, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
^Note: "Quarter" is problematic as a generic term, as this could be misinterpreted; "X is a quarter of Cologne" could be taken to mean that X accounts for a literal quarter of Cologne's area/population. Such misinterpretation isn't likely in proper nouns, which is why it makes sense (to my mind) to retain it there for the sake of "authenticity" (for want of a better term).