Template talk:Departments of France

Alphabetical ordering

Hi! This list of French departments follows the numerical ordering, which for historical reasons and because of French collation rules, differs from the strict alphabetical ordering. Consequently, except if you are used to the numerical ordering, it's not obvious to find Paris (formerly the Seine department), between Seine-Maritime and Haute-Savoie, which itself follows Savoie... I'm volunteering to sort this list alphabetically. Could a sysop unprotect this template temporarily? Thanks. — Xavier, 18:10, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Please first discus this before changing this template. Multichill (talk) 10:48, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

OK, I started this discussion on the village pump and its French counterpart. Thanks. — Xavier, 12:12, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Ok, great. It seems logical to me but the French people might think otherwise. Multichill (talk) 19:54, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

 Done. — Xavier, 00:36, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I added langswitch templates so the list displays in French if the person is using French of the language of his or her choice. WhisperToMe (talk) 20:20, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion

Please add Category:Categories of France by department when switch = all so that all root categories are taken in the respective category: now, there are only 63 cats manually added out of the 7000. --Foroa (talk) 07:06, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Any problem with that ? --Foroa (talk) 16:28, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

problems

Wrong cats in Category:Lot and Category:Indre. --Foroa (talk) 08:53, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Rhône

Possibly @Verdy p: In the list of Départements ou circonscriptions départementales de France : we find "Rhône (69) : Rhône (department), Métropole de Lyon ·" What is the the problem with this department ? Why not Bordeaux Métropole in Gironde or MEL in Nord ? Henry (Babel talk !) (Francophone ?) 11:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

The Métropole of Lyon is the only one having it and is not part of any other departement, so we need to include it.

The other metropoles don't have the exclusive competence of departments. This is a unique situation in France.

others are EPCI, ans subject to part of their departement(s) in which they are located (the Metropole of Paris is also covered by several departements).

The larger "Rhône" is no longer a department but a "circonscription départementale" with no council, it's only an intermediate structure of France admisnitration at national level, and more or less maps to the prefecture, but the box is not made to cover prefectures, otherwise we would also need maritime prefectures, and more specific prefectures for Paris; the prefectures have also limtied competence because the state has in fact several layers depending on deconcentrated administrative domain, for example for health, primary/secondary education, higher education, defense, police, justice, water bassins management... and each one of these nation-level compentence has its own territorial zoning also independant of prefectoral subdivisions and local departement councils). Rhône is then an exception in the list of departments (and it's still not working as it should).

There are other pending changes elsewhere but they are still not decided. For now all other departments map to the same territory as their prefecture. This may change with newer metropoles, but the expected changes have been stalled (considering the difficulties encountered in Rhone). May be in some future the departments will disappear as local councils, and will be replaced by metropoles and another structure for their surrounding more rural areas. France still needs to manage the transition of status for regions and lot of works are being made in EPCI's (not just metropoles) before they take over the older departments, but the state is not ready to adapt its prefectoral system (lot of legal issues to solve, and too many unsolved trials in courts caused by these changes; notably from rural areas excluded from the developement of metropoles and many protests from departments and between departments to handle their relation within their new region).

The template jsut translates the current "stable" status because we cannot avoid the complexity in Rhone and must make the distinction.

There are other complexities caued by the ongoing desire to merge other layers of local councils between departements and regions (this has partly occured in the overseas, and in Corsica), or caused by the merging of municipalities and conversions of EPCI into municipalities before they merge with other municipalities to integrate a larger EPCI with different status... It's compelx to manage but still this templte must remain simple and correctly represent what are "departments" or working like departments (and this is not the case of all other metropoles ouside Lyon). verdy_p (talk) 12:58, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Loire

{{Edit request}} I have moved Category:Loire to Category:Loire (department), would it be possible to make it so that the template tries "Loire (department)" first then falls back on "Loire". Crouch, Swale (talk) 09:59, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

And Category:Tarn/Category:Tarn (department). Crouch, Swale (talk) 10:27, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

No change needed as long as you don't use the "all=1" parameter (which has a bug for that option, where it forgets to display links for supported synonyms, but intended to be used temporarily and not in specific pages for specific departements: If you remove "all=1", there's no bug, the listed aliases are used as fallbacks).

When the base module was first written, the "all=1" option was incorrectly managed and the initial code does not allw listing multiple different links for the same entity (as they were when a template-only version was used), I'm about to rewrite the base template functionality to restore the all=1 option as it worked (because it was not understood correctly by the initial writer of that module). That code was structured in a very strange way (using stupid recusion and various state variables with incorrect scoping), it cannot be fixed without restructuring it deeply so this require changes to be made in a sandbox version that can be tested.

My goal is to restore the initial functionalities of the initial template-only version. It was only tested for countries of Europe (and now it has a problem in Europe too for the recent change in Northern Macedonia), and is not easy to adapt for complex cases (and there was no test case developed). There are also strange dependencies, variable names were incorrectly chosen, it was not enough generalized.

Later I'll add the possibility of setting the "the=true" option also on aliases (for now it's only handled on the first name listed in data modules but not on other aliases, so this complicates the maintenance). The reasons of this module were: reducing the complexity of templates, being faster, handle internationalization, generalize the local-specific sorting, and then derive more boxes. In fine It should work for building navboxes enumerating items in all kinds of known lists with limited closed sets of items (not more than about 200 items), not just countries. verdy_p (talk) 13:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Crouch, Swale (talk) 10:44, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Corse

{{Edit request}} Haute-Corse and Corse-du-Sud had been merged last year. Please change this. SpinnerLaserz (talk) 19:26, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

@SpinnerLaserz: They appear to be two separate pages. MorganKevinJ^(talk) 01:25, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

@SpinnerLaserz and Morgankevinj: What is the name of the successor of these départements? Does it have a Commons category? Does it have a Wikidata item? Adding the new département makes no harm, as non-existent pages are not displayed, but without these basic data it’s impossible. At least a top category should exist with a Wikidata item so that migration of lower categories can be begun, and a basic infobox can be shown. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 15:52, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

I know a lot of time has passed but according to en:Haute-Corse, and en:Corse-du-Sud, while it combined to make Corsica, both departments remain in use so I think this should be left alone. Actually, more complicated, it seems as though Corsica was a separate department from 1811 until 1975 when it split into the two departments here. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:13, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Alpes-de-Haute-Provence alternatives

{{edit request}} Please add Nord-de-Provence and Basses-Alpes as alternatives for Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Per en:Alpes-de-Haute-Provence#History, the department was originally called Nord-de-Provence in 1790 until some unknown date to be Haute-Provence and then again at an unknown date to Basses-Alpes. It wasn't until 1970 that it was renamed Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. A number of categories like Category:1907 in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence are redirect to various names so it would be helpful if the template reflected all these names. I don't know France enough but it may be a good idea to split this into date-based templates if there's a lot of variation in names. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:10, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Basses-Alpes is indeed the former name of the department.

"Nord-de-Provence" and "Haute-Provence" are not, as far as I know. The claimed on english wikipedia is not sourced (I'm removing it). fr:Liste des départements français de 1790 has Basses-Alpes with no source for this name either, but it can be verified from the existence of the book La Révolution dans les Basses-Alpes that Basses-Alpes was used during the Revolutionary era. If you need a primary source, here is a letter dated 15 prairial an II (3 june 1794).

Anyway, what is the use of alternatives in this template? (If all former names should be listed then there are many more than just Basses-Alpes). GrandEscogriffe (talk) 16:19, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

 Not done Stale. Please relist if this is still an issue. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 06:06, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Former departments

Would it better to have all the former departments into a separate former department category or categories based on time? I think it'd be better to make a separate former template so that it can be used for the time periods in which those departments existed. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:05, 8 April 2021 (UTC)