User talk:Grondolf

Discussion European countries

Hey, if you want to clean up pages such as that about Swedes, Dutch, etc., please spend the time to verify all the numbers and definitions for nationality for each of those. It takes quite some time to do and I can therefore not do it for every single country in Europe. --Johanneswilm (talk) 00:54, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ethnicity, percentages and numbers across Wikipedia articles

From article "Ethnic group"

An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy.

Yes, the definition is very vague. It is therefore seldom applicable to modern European countries.--Johanneswilm (talk) 03:20, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Is ethnicity subjective?

If we base it on cultural, national or religious grounds then it is up to the individual to identify to any ethnic group. However, if we base it on ancestry, then it is not up to the individual.

Well, no. In the end, everybody originates in Africa. If you claim anything else, it's just because you only partially trace your routes back. The few countries that claim they track people's ethnicity are the US -- who base their numbers on what people believe about themselves -- and Australia -- which uses the country where someone lived immediately before moving to Australia. There is no gigantic genetic chart of the entire world's population which would be needed if you were serious about tracing people back according to their ancestors at some certain point (say, year 0, according to the Christian calendar)--Johanneswilm (talk) 03:21, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just to show you how impossible it would be to trace biological heritage with geographic origin. As already mentioned -- if we all trace our ancestors origin back far enough, we all end up in Africa. So instead we would have to use a certain moment which we define as the zero moment in history which we use to define what ethnic "origin" we have. So basically we would have to know where all our ancestors were during this exact moment. Lets take a look at the USA, where people always are very much into saying what their ethnic origin is. The first Europeans came to the Americas in 1492, so would have to use that year or an earlier one if it is important to prove whether or not you have Indian ethnic genes. So basically we are operating with a minimum of 518 years. Say the average generation has kids at age 25, that means we go at least 20 generations back. That means that we have to track down where 2^20 = 1,048,576 ancestors were physically on the 1st of January 1492 at 00:00. If you can track that down, then yes, you do know what your biological geo-origins are at a level where it's starting to be relevant for people living in the United States. So I don't think it's a good idea to start trying to do that same operation for some 82 million people currently living in Germany. --Johanneswilm (talk) 06:40, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ethnicity in European countries

Germany

Most European countries don't keep track of ethnicity, yet for almost every one of them there is a section in the information box called Ethnicity that lists the percentages of people who belong to each ethnic group. If we look at Germany for example we can see that it says:

91.5% German, 2.4% Turkish, 6.1% other

For another country where the CIA WFB numbers were used, the figures corresponded 1:1 to the country's own figures of foreign citizens living there. The CIA WFB has to use either very rough estimates or the numbers the country's own institutions count, as there is no separate count of people by the CIA WFB. Also, their criteria for who belongs to what ethnic group are not specified anywhere on that page. I have not researched it enough in this case, but I"m sure if you looked at the numbers of the Statistisches Bundesamt, you would be able to find 91.5% German citizens living in Germany or some such thing.--Johanneswilm (talk) 03:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that if we take racial, cultural and religious grounds, in that 91.5% there is a significant part who is actually Turkish. A group of naturalized Turkish people in Germany will identify more with Turkish people in Turkey than Germans with European ancestry, even if this weren't true for each individual, the percentages for Ethnicity is not real since the country doesn't keep track of it.

That may be your personal assumption. It can however not be proven what X% of the country feel like being or identify with if you don't ask them. People may feel very many different things at different stages in their life, and your assumptions may for example be correct of recent immigrants from the Turkish countryside to a village in Bavaria and false for people with technically the same background in another village in Schleswig-Holstein. My whole re-checking this was that someone was trying to move Norwegians with Pakistani background to Pakistanis in Norway and had obvious racist motivations behind this. I agree that the percentage is not real, as mentioned above.--Johanneswilm (talk) 03:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Germany#Demographics one can see that the figures in the section Ethnicity of the article Germany in fact refer to citizenship.

Don't rely on the numbers given on Wikipedia. always go back to the original source.--Johanneswilm (talk) 03:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Germany has been accepting immigrants since the 1960s, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationality_law one can see that it doesn't take much to become a German citizen. During the past few decades many different ethnic groups have been arriving to Germany, they and their descendants have obtained citizenship. Therefore one can't equate citizenship to ethnicity but this is what is done across many articles.

Well, the genetic material that is linked on Norwegians, shows that there have been people migrating back and forth through Europe for at least the past 1000 years at an ever increasing pace. Who lives in Germany and is German has therefore always been changing. There is nothing new to that. Secondly, I hope you are aware that obtaining the German citizenship is one of the hardest thing to do in the world. In very many other countries you obtain the country's citizenship simply by being born there. Much harder for Germany. --Johanneswilm (talk) 03:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Spain

87.8% Spanish, 12.2% other (Romanian, Moroccan, Germans, Ecuadorian, British) (2010) See discussion page.

Sweden

81.9% Swedes[1][d] ~5% Finns[2] ~13% other (2009)[3][4] d. ^ As of 2008, 18% of the population had foreign origins (13% if excluding Finns and 9% if also excluding other Scandinavians), with 14% foreign-born and another 4% born in Sweden of two foreign-born parents.[11]

Clarified in small print but very misleading, after all the section is called Ethnic Groups. The article Swedes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedes) refers to the ethnic group but the figure provided is for citizens.

True, there is no such thing as a group of "ethnic Swedes" scientifically -- not in biologic terms, not in clearly defined cultural terms and not in language. What "ethnic Swedes" means in reality in daily usage is "anyone who speaks Swedish without an accent, looks like a nazi definition of an Aryan (most importantly: white skin color) and carries a Swedish passport). That means that if I as a Danish/German were to go there, learn the language perfectly and switch citizenship then people would see me as an ethnic Swede as long as I just don't tell them where I grew up, whereas if my skin color was black, then I'd never be one. That people living in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany carry more or less the same genes has been throughly proven. --Johanneswilm (talk) 03:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The text about Swedes should simply be fact-checked the way I already fact-checked numerous other articles -- by checking what the official definition of a Swede is the way the state of Sweden defines it, and then to check whether all the numbers given there correspond to that definition. --Johanneswilm (talk) 03:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Italy

The article Italians is about the Italian ethnic group. Even though in the article Italy it doesn't have an ethnicity section in the infobox, it says this about the percentage of immigrants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy#Migration): "These figures include more than half a million children born in Italy to foreign nationals—second generation immigrants are becoming an important element in the demographic picture—but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian nationality; this applied to 53,696 people in 2008 "

All the ones that have acquired Italian nationality in previous years are being excluded as well from the 7.1% figure on which the number in the article Italians is based.

Portugal

96.87% Portuguese and 3.13% legal immigrants (Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, Ukrainians, Angolans, etc.) (2007) Same problem as before, Portugal doesn't keep track of ethnicity and that refers to citizens with Portuguese nationality. Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_nationality_law and considering when immigration to Portugal started, that figure probably isn't right. At best it's a good guess.

Netherlands

In the article Dutch people it says there are 15,186,600 ethnic Dutch in the Netherlands without citation. Yet in the article Netherlands it cites an estimation from the CIA factbook that there are 80% Dutch people from a population of 16,648,800 which would be 13,319,040.

I will add more countries in the future. There is also an inconsistency across articles about the peoples of each country.

Swedish people (redirects to Swedes): about ethnic Italians

French people : not about ethnic French

German people (redirects to Germans): not about ethnic Germans

Italian people : about ethnic Italians

and so on.

Conclusion

As said, all the ethnic articles are to be removed, unless the country defines being an X using another definition than citizenship. You can additionally however create an article called "ethnic X" and then make it very clear on that page who uses that category or used to use that category, how being an "ethnic X" is defined exactly by that user, and whether or not the state in question sees it the same way. --Johanneswilm (talk) 03:32, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree this is what should be done. It was stupid to use data about citizenship as ethnicity, even the CIA fact book is wrong.--Grondolf (talk) 07:54, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]