Gdynia/Talk

With Communist style I wanted to point out the massif military style of the harbor compared to the quaint fishing village it used to be.

I have been there and it immediately struck me as in the category of the Moscow style buildings ,and the harbor of Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad?. In East Berlin they call it Moscow /Manhattans?. It is totally out of place and strikingly different from the rest of the landscape.

As I found recently out it was build with American, French money to spite. Instead of Communist style it could be described as Moscow/Manhattan? style and to me that tells everything.

How do you call that style ?

To the communists, they were all over Europe, German was almost taken over after 1920. France was almost communist etc.

H. Jonat

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This article illustrates a bit of a problem we sometimes have in writing articles: we sometimes write under the title X when really what we are writing about is the history of X, or the physiology of X, or the axiomatization of X, etc., and we generally forget that this is only one part of the entire subject. In this case, Helga had written about the history of Gdynia, entirely in the past tense, as if there were not a modern city of Gdynia: [1]. So, that's why I moved the article into a section called "History of Gdynia."

Does it really have a history of thousands of years? Very interesting.

Also, Helga, you say, "As I found recently out it was build with American, French money to spite." Where did you find this out? Who says? The Americans certainly spent a lot of money building and rebuilding Europe, to be sure, but if we're going to say "it is believed," we'd better say who believes it. Just you? --Larry Sanger

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To Larry , I read this on internet a while ago. Will try to find it again. Also found, that Seattle is now sister city. --- Gdingen was in 1920 (Treaty of Versailles and Polish Corridor) given to Poland and then renamed Gdynia. I wrote about Gdingen, which since 1920 is Gdynia, just like Gdanzk was Danzig till 1945 and became Gdanzk then . wikipedians are combining articles , because they want to show current official political names. H. Jonat

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The name change needs to be stated explicitly in the article, then...

Done. Also, I removed this:

The U.S. financially aided the Polish military build-up.

until we can find some confirmation.

I totally understand the source of the confusion. I think the history of Gdingen certainly belongs on Gdingen, and the history of Gdynia belongs on Gdynia. (We don't have the history of Gaul? on history of France, eh?) --LMS

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Was Gdynia part of Danzig Free State? If so we should state it explicitly. --rmhermen

Done:-) WojPob

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I'm not sure I agree with your analogy that Gdingen:Gydnia as Gaul:France. If Gdingen is like most of the other German/Polish? cities described on the wikipedia, it has had a long history that includes possibly being part of various governmental entities, possibly even a free Hansa city ( I am just talking off the top of my head now). At any rate, we're talking about one city whose name didn't really change, we just use a different language for it. London would still be London if we called it Londres! With Gaul and France, we're talking about two very different societies and cultures -- The Gauls were Celts (pretty sure on that), and had their own society before the Romans took over. The resulting Gallo-Roman society did have some influence on the Franks (and other Germanic peoples in between), but there really isn't a direct connection in the same way (even though we talk about Gallic flair, etc.). I therefore suggest that we keep the page with its current name, but have a page for Gdingen that automatically redirects to Gydnia. That way, people can see a coherent history by looking under either name. JHK

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Well, I'm not going to try to argue with you about the issue :-) (what you say sounds very plausible), but I would say, anyway, that the Gdingen should at least include some semantic information, to the effect that it is the name of the city now usually called by its Polish name. Simply redirecting articles that aren't just, e.g., misspellings is missing an opportunity to give people specific information on the topic they were looking for (then we can send them elsewhere for more detailed info). Similarly, we can certainly imagine a Londonium? article (or whatever it was called) that gave a little information about the ancient name, followed by a link to a history of London page. Would that be a better analogy? --LMS

Definitely a better analogy, although still not sure I agree. :-) It just seems we're in a rut of pages of city x in the good old day vs same city x bad new days. I think that a holistic approach is more interesting and more valuable -- for instance, I think Londinium should be a headed section on the London page, but have a link that takes you there. It's a bit more extreme (no one would confuse an ancient city with the modern), but it ensures that, in cases like Danzig/Gdansk? and Gdingen/Gydnia?, people see that the cities have continued to live and their unique cultures have continued to evolve. As an historian, I'm all for as much connection as possible -- only a few things just flat out stop existing. JHK