Talk:Germans

New World Map Image, New Zealand

Hi, i think we need a new world map image since there are actually more than 10,000 people of German descent in New Zealand- the real figure according to the New Zealand government is some 200,000.

"Medieval history" section needs an edit

First paragraph, last two lines. "By the early 9th century AD, large parts of Europe were united under the rule of the Frankish leader Charlemagne, who expanded the Frankish empire in several directions including east of the Rhine, consolidating power over the Saxons and Frisians, and establishing the Carolingian Empire. Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo I in 800."

Pope Leo I died in 461 CE, and did not crown Charlemagne. It should be Pope Leo III. HumanEater44 (talk) 14:24, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

 Done @HumanEater44: Thank you. Rsk6400 (talk) 07:38, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

So odd most of this article is about country history - not what is normally covered GA =Canadians or even Americans...scope all backwards. Moxy🍁 08:53, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

I think I wrote most of that medieval section, but I agree. I worked on that because that is where I could help, and it needed help, but I think in the end the article lacks much of interest in other sections. I think the editing dynamic has been difficult and unwelcoming for most editors, because there have been so many efforts to make this article all about German speakers and/or ethnic Germans in the US. But I hope that problem might also reduce if the article gets expended with more appropriate material.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:14, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Phrasing

I do believe the first half of the sentence in the article should be rephrased. My previous edit was undone, but if I may I'd like to explain my edit and add it back since the current phrasing is too cluttered. Firekong1 (talk) 17:53, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Herodotus ...

He mentions "Germani" in his Histories (as well as Danes and Sagartians). This pre-dates Caesar's writings. 2603:6080:21F0:7B30:3CBA:F893:1523:AF91 (talk) 17:59, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Histories 1,125,4 mentions Γερμάνιοι (Germanioi) among Persian (sic) tribes. Doesn't seem relevant here. Rsk6400 (talk) 07:34, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

The subject of the article is ethnicity, not citizenship

This article is about Germans as ethnicity not about citizens of Germany. Therefore the "infofox ethnicity" is directluy appropriate. Therefore thw worldwede map where germanl leve today is more than appropriate, Just like in Italians or Bulgarians. And vice versa: a picture of Reichstag has nothing to do with ethnicity, but relevant to the state. --Altenmann >talk 21:43, 25 March 2025 (UTC) P.S. The lede clearly says "Estimates on the total number of Germans in the world range from 100 to 150 million, most of whom live in Germany.[8]" --And the subject "Germans as citisens of Germany" is covered in Germany#Demographics, specifically in Demographics of Germany. Altenmann >talk 21:47, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

As was stated here and the Wikipedia Reddit discussion about it "Briefly put, most Germans don’t consider people who‘s ancestors emigrated generations ago as German in any way.". So a group like German Americans are not considered Germans by the German population. That said there's many studies that use normal academic views on this. Moxy🍁 23:25, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

This is not what this article says. It says about 100-150mln Germans worldwide. What is more, "many studies" say that ethnicity is to a major degree a self-identification, therefore German Americans don't care what an abstract "German population" or Reddit think and happily celebrate Oktoberfest, and the idea that German Americans are somehow no true Germans is insulting. --Altenmann >talk 00:12, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree with you but this is the problem you're having here. Moxy🍁 00:14, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't see a "problem" here; I have a disagreement to be resolved. My opinion is supported by the whole article text, and the lede and infobox are supposed to be article summary. --Altenmann >talk 00:18, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

WP:RFC Moxy🍁 00:20, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

When English speaking people around the world say "Germans" they are not normally referring to Austrians or Americans, at least in the 21st century. If we have to be worried about insulting people, the potential for being offended goes in several directions here.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:29, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

@Altenmann: WP follows reliable sources. Period. Rsk6400 (talk) 05:46, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

They are saying we should follow the sources here already. Not sure why Germans are still struggling to resolve issues of race here on Wikipedia dispite all the sources. Moxy🍁 06:56, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Could you clarify what you mean? Who are they? Which sources? What is the connection to race here? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:32, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

"WP follows reliable sources" -correct. Please read the lede: it speaks about germans as an ethnic group, not as citizens of Germany. And I am pretty much sure the article like this one does follow reliable sources. --Altenmann >talk 15:26, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

The opening paragraph which gives the definition does not mention ethnicity at all, which is a pandora's box of a word, but primarily "the natives or inhabitants of Germany". Nobody is saying it is purely about citizenship, or not about ethnicity at all, but the lead is not a source you should be citing in this discussion because IIRC it was written by the same editors you are apparently disagreeing with. At the moment the term ethnicity is mainly being mentioned to give historical background, from periods before there was a country called Germany. When the country came into being there was a slightly older idea about German ethnicity that influenced events, but it was changing and unclear already in that time. The discussion in the article about this history seems to still be creating misunderstandings, and possibly needs to be reduced. Instead of the medieval roots of German-ness it might be better to emphasize the beginnings of Germany as a modern country. Critical problems which confronted the self-conception of Germans were for example the status of "Germans" living in the Hapsburg empire, and the status of Jews living within Germany. In 21st century English there is no longer any serious proposal that Austrians are Germans, or that Jewish Germans are not real Germans. Indeed these are critically important points, that the article needs to be very clear about.

Let's go back to basics: many words have several meanings. On WP the article which gets the main term tends to reflect the most common way that a word is used in careful writing. When we are being careful, diaspora "Germans" are normally not just called "Germans". When two strangers meet and one says they are "German" then with no other information we know this means they are almost certainly a German citizen, not someone from Russia or the Midwest. If you look in the archives of this talk page you will see there have been various discussions about various types of sources as well. I don't think there is much doubt about this. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:00, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, disagreed. But I am not going to comment on your personal selective reading of the article and sources cited. although I surely could. I started RFC for a broader community to speak. --Altenmann >talk 16:14, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

If I was misunderstanding something there is nothing stopping you from explaining the correct information. Refusing to respond makes it look like the RFC was started in order to avoid proper discussion.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:12, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

RFC: Should the article include the Infobox ethnic group

Does {{Infobox ethnic group}} belong to this article? (The nom was rewritten to address the expressed neutrality concern). --Altenmann >talk 19:19, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

P.S. You may see it in this version] of the article. --Altenmann >talk 02:47, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Please note that I notified Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Germany and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Ethnic_groups of this discussion. Rsk6400 (talk) 13:37, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

!Votes

• Strongly disagree. This article is not about diaspora Germans. There are several other articles about the diaspora. You are also misreading the opening lines of this article, which define the topic. Furthermore, even on a diaspora article, these types of infobox maps are often in effect WP:SYNTH and WP:OR, because they combine many different types of "apple and pear" information. They all use different definitions of what constitutes a "German", and are sometimes based on extremely rough estimations. I am strongly opposed to infoboxes which become a back-door way to introduce original research and low quality blogging.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:07, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• Support more Germans that claim ethnicity or heritage outside the country than there is inside. Germans have a proud heritage all over the world having one of the largest populations of Europeans in the world. Ethnic Germans are not only in Germany as defined by multiple sources in the article. There is an article about citizenship and this is not 1939.Moxy🍁 16:32, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• Which sources? (As you were asked previously.) This article is about people from Germany. That's what Germans are, because indeed it is not 1939. We are in the 21st century, not the 19th century.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:29, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  Almost everyone that I read about.... except for all the history stuff that's unrelated to this topic. Even the very first one talks about heritage. The article should simply elaborate on what's in the lead as of right now after you read the lead it's all about country history and citizenship.Moxy🍁 23:39, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• You are not giving a source, nor even making it clear what you think they say about American Germans. The opening, which I think I might have written, indicates that this article is primarily about the natives or inhabitants of Germany. This has been the case for some time, and it was based on a lot of discussion of sources and different possible approaches. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:53, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• Yes The article content shows that the article is about Gernmans as an ethnicity, not as citizens of Germany alone. Therefore it is reasonable to place {{Infobox ethnic group}} with worldwide map of Germans, just like in Italians of Armenians. --Altenmann >talk 15:45, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• The article is currently about the natives or inhabitants of Germany. Also see WP:OTHERSTUFF. You've not even explained what data you are using, and you are avoiding all talk page discussion about such concrete quality issues. (There are many different things it could mean. Perhaps it even shows German citizens. You don't seem to care what the data is about as long as the article does not look like other articles!)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:41, 27 March 2025 (UTC)
  • about the natives or inhabitants of Germany - False. Show me where it speaks a bout Turks and "others", who soon will be the majority of inhabitants of Germany (irony/exaggeration, but now there are nearly 30% of non-Germans, not counting illegals.) --Altenmann >talk 05:53, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

• Not false. The words in green are literally the opening words of the article, and have been for some time. If I understand correctly, for you being German is a racial thing? This would be different from what makes people Canadian or Australian, but would be kind of like 1939 (to come back to Moxy's reference). So once again where are the sources which explain why "Turks and others" native to Germany can't be Germans? What sources have you really looked at? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:04, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

• Yes, this article is mostly on the ethnic group. For German citizens we have Demographics of Germany, just like how Malawians redirects to Demographics of Malawi etc. Kowal2701 (talk) 20:52, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• Yes, within reason. It's correct that this article is primarily about Germans as an ethno-cultural group, not confined to citizens of a present-day nation-state, but Andrew Lancaster's concerns have some validity. This definitely needs to not be an article into which a bunch of diasporic trivia is injected; very little of that will have pertinence to the subject of the Germans as a people (or closely interrelated group of peoples) through history, and there are other articles for diasporic topics. What needs to not happen here is what happened at Scottish people (AKA Scots); that article has been totally hijacked for diasporic coverage and is a shitshow that provides only skeletal information on the historical development of the nation and the ethno-cultural mixtures that formed it. Needs to be completely rewritten, with 90% more information about the Scots in Scotland and 90% less information about diasporic populations. The only problem Germans has it is hiding the diaspora entirely, and needs a short WP:SUMMARY section that leads to the main articles on those subjects.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:51, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  @SMcCandlish: I should point out that I interpret this discussion in light of the edit war Altenmann has been pursuing. So it is about a SPECIFIC group of edits. No-one has argued against ALL possible infoboxes, nor against all mention of the diaspora, so such general principles are not completely relevant yet. The RFC seems to have been called in order to avoid consensus-building discussion about sources or rationales for the article. IMHO the proposal here is to CHANGE the main topic of this article, and is not consistent with the current article, nor past consensus, nor reliable sources. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:29, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  Hmm. To the extent I've been missing something like that, I would say I oppose changing the main scope of the article to be about diaspora, or to even include anywhere near 20% of the level of diaspora material found at Scottish people (I've left a note on its talk page about necessity for an overhaul). What this article needs to be doing is consistently presenting information on a historical ethno-cultural group (which would likely include the infobox for that), then mention and link to diasporic groups without dwelling on them (e.g. in a short summary section toward the end), and remain focused on the history of the Germans from antiquity to present, with a near total focus on their native presence in Europe. I'm not sure how to make this article more like other ethnic-group articles without some "diaspora-happy" faction trying to use it as a wedge to screw up the article scope, other than to say "Hey, you can't do that."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:56, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Hmm back. This is Lancaster's baseless insinuation about my intent. I never suggested to change the content of the article, less to reclassify it to be about diaspora. Heck, there already is "German diaspora" page. Look, Germans are either ethnicity or citizens of Germany (or Übermenschen in the past). The hatnote "This article is about the people of Germany" is plain false (do you need an explanation why?), but even my change in it was reverted by article owners. --Altenmann >talk 05:21, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  @Altenmann: you should indeed stop treating your personal opinions as self-evident. It is strange that you are telling editors involved in writing and debating the lead in the past (see the archives) that they don't understand it. The focus of this article, and the sourcing, is something you SHOULD consider even if you say you aren't. This article has its own specific sources, and editing concerns. Just looking at other articles is not enough.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:51, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  |Andrew Lancaster, you should indeed stop treating your personal opinions about my brainpowers as self-evident. Your WP:BLUDGEONing is disruptive. --Altenmann >talk 05:57, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  I did not mention your brainpower. Do not mischaracterise my posts!--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:41, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) @SMcCandlish: So how indeed do we avoid that obvious danger if we accept the WP:OTHERSTUFF principle you are accepting? In general these types of articles have a problem on Wikipedia, and part of the reason seems to be the widespread acceptance that we have to make articles which imitate other articles in violation of the WP:OTHERSTUFF principle. The style of these articles is however clearly based on internet traditions such as eupedia. If we aren't strict about avoiding such things then the internet, being largely American, has an obsession with trying to forcefully categorize Europeans in into old language and blood-based "ethnicities" which fit within American ideas about their heritage. The only way to break this circle is to take our bearings from WP core content policies and NOT accept arguments such as "this article obviously needs to look like the Armenians article". Such rationales clearly shouldn't be acceptable to begin with. Note that in the edit warring it has already been asserted in edit summaries that for example a picture of the German parliament is "irrelevant to ethnic article" [1]. If we accept this, it is a slippery slope. IMHO people need to give their sources, and explain what data they are using and why. Surely the posts during this RFC make it clear that personal emotions (for example the bizarre idea that Americans are being insulted) are the real basis for at least some of the votes.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:41, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Articles on categorically similar subjects having comparable scopes and organization is generally how we do things. WP:OTHERSTUFF pertains to deletion arguments (e.g. "We should keep the article on this band because we kept the article on some other band", or "We should delete the article on this company because we deleted the article on another company in the same market segement". I'm obviously not making any such sort of argument. I share your concerns about diasporic "German heritage" folks trying to invade this article, as they've already done at several similar ones like Scottish people and British people, which are heading in trainwreck directions. Irish people is much, much better, and it relegates both "Irish identity" and "Irish diaspora" to concise sections at the end. All these articles should follow essentially that pattern. I've said as much in several additional comments here, so I don't know what further to do.

  I don't think a "banish an ethnicity infobox" polarization approach is the answer. It doesn't matter whether people who would mangle the scope of this article want that infobox here if there are other reasons for other editors, who are not in that camp, to find the infobox appropriate. Slippery slope arguments are usually fallacious, absent convincing evidence that step A inexorably leads ultimately to outcome Z. Prevention of trainwrecking of the scope of this piece doesn't really have anything intrinsically to do with a template, but about editorial intent and what is appropriate for the readership. Eventually, it might be best to address this narrow-scope-vs.-diasporic-excess issue in a more generalized RfC, perhaps at WP:Village pump, since it is clearly affecting multiple articles (probably way more than the one's I've just looked at Italians (to which Italian people redirects), and to my shock/relief, it's not that bad, though the diaspora material could be compressed some without harm. Chinese people also doesn't have the problem, but weirdly is barely above stub level, which should probably be rectified.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:20, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  A wider discussion might be more productive. I see it w African history articles as well where they focus more on the slave trade rather than the actual states and societies. But we should be wary of any discussion descending into anti-Americanism Kowal2701 (talk) 10:47, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Well yes (to both of you). Putting it in my terms I do not think this is really about an infobox or map, or it shouldn't be, so this RFC is not a useful one. No one was arguing against all infoboxes or mentions of ethnicity or language or whatever. The problem is that the specific infobox and connected aspects of what are being pushed right now about changing the basic focus of the article. But as you will see in the archives here (1) there has been an RFC about this and (2) recent rounds of disagreement are come from drive-by editors who are not interested in working on the article as a whole, or discussing the bigger issues and sourcing questions. Their focus is entirely on superficial aspects, and so I can to some extent understand that this article does not fit their expectations, and this frustrates them. But we are talking past each other. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:14, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Germans are defined as native speakers of the German language. That should be the focus. German Americans are not German, they’re Americans of German descent, an afterthought for this article, like Plastic Paddy Kowal2701 (talk) 08:17, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Well, there is no "the German language". There are dozens of forms of German, usually classified as dialects in a continuum these days, including multiple standardized forms of German language. Even the dominant Standard High German is actually a close dialect continuum within Germany, that serves more or less as a Dachsprache across the country and to some extent internationally with other speakers of forms of German. But Standard High German is standardized differently in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, so is not "a language", but something of a tightly bound and similarly codified dialect cluster combined with somewhat differing social registers and areas of usage. Luxembourgish is also a standardized form of German, and diverges more from SHG.

  All that aside, I wholeheartedly agree with "German Americans are not German, they’re Americans of German descent, an afterthought for this article, like Plastic Paddy." I've elaborated on this point in the subsection below.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:07, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

• Obviously yes. Why is this even a discussion? wound theology◈ 04:00, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Well, actually read what people are writing instead of just chiming in with off-the-cuff emotion and assumption, and you'll see.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:07, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Discussion

• Comment I had to start a formal RFC, because the discussion in the previous section makes no sense. --Altenmann >talk 15:49, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• re Andrew Lancaster's !vote: Straw man. I said nothing about "diaspora". Most larger ethnicities have large diasporas and hence separate articles on diasporas. If a map faithfully represents the numbers cited from reliable sources, nothing wrong with visualization. As for OR and blogging, we have policies about it, don't we? --Altenmann >talk 16:19, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• re Andrew Lancaster's !vote: Some part of it does make sense, but it equally applies to all maps in articles about ethnicities (heck, to all infographic maps), and the only solution is tighter control of the sources. But we already do this, right?... right?... or... er... maybe someone else?. --Altenmann >talk 16:29, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• P.S. A telling comparison would be Austrians.... But I have no idea what it is telling:-) --Altenmann >talk 16:51, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  @Altenmann this RFC nom is just your POV and not neutral Kowal2701 (talk) 17:50, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  You are welcome to rephrase it in what you think would be neutral form. I just tried to explain the reasoning for my request. --Altenmann >talk 17:58, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  Hard to do while making the !votes make sense. Just something like Does {{Infobox ethnic group}}, fit the scope of this article? nom was rewritten so support votes are for the Infobox and then move the current nom down to a !vote? Kowal2701 (talk) 18:09, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  @Kowal2701: but I find this whole RFC very confused. The edit war before this RFC is clearly NOT about the infobox as such, nor about whether ethnicity and diasporas can be discussed and illustrated in the article. The real disagreement is surely with the primacy that these aspects of the topic are being given, and the lack of proper sourcing and talk page agreements about major changes to the article. The illustration and data at the top of the article would focus on the fact that Germans supposedly mainly live outside of Germany (and this is clearly for example what Moxy, who called for this RFC, wants the article to say/imply, given that otherwise it would supposedly offend Americans and all that). The edit summaries inserting these maps have said that the German parliament is not even relevant to this article, which is clearly going against previous RFCs about the article topic (as well as common sense, and reliable sources). See the archives. I think turning this all into a discussion about an infobox is a Trojan Horse. Data about Germans outside Germany can be added into the article. The question should be whether German citizenship is going to be pushed OUT of the article in favour of making it mainly about Germans who don't live in Germany.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:32, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  If the dispute continues after this where the articles being restructured/rewritten then we can have another RfC on the wider question, but adding an infobox is minor and doesn’t deserve this much heat. FWIW I wholeheartedly agree with SMC. Perhaps the closer could also say there’s no consensus for rescoping/rewriting the article, which looks like the case Kowal2701 (talk) 08:14, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  This type of conflict is one of the reasons educated Germans are leaving Germany in droves. Moxy🍁 18:08, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

  What??? You're linking to an article which says, for example, educated Germans can earn more in neighbouring countries. I don't see how you can connect such inter-European movements with any concern that people of German descent in the mid west aren't being seen as true Germans in a WP article. Freedom of movement between European countries is relatively new, but already quite complex and significant. It does not mean that Austrians should now be called Germans again, which is what editors keep pushing for here on WP. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:47, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• COMMENT the problem with the article is more severe than I initially thought. From the very beginning the page owners drive an agenda that "true" Germans "are the natives or inhabitants of Germany" neatly squeezing in their own judgement: "or sometimes more broadly any people who are of German descent", implying that "only sometimes" Germans outside Germany are Germans. Nothing of the kind is said in both cited sources (i.e., there is no hierarchy between meanings 1. and 2. in the dicdefs there), but Lancaster is WP:BLUDGEONing this discussion with his favorite truncated interpretation of the term. It looks I have to start a RFC for every sentence of the lede. Or not. Battles with page owners is bad for my mental health. --Altenmann >talk 06:12, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  Or you could have just brought your sources and proposals to the talk page to begin with. How was the data in your map defined for example? You don't seem to care. No one is saying that ethnicity or Germans outside of Germany are not relevant to the article. Previous RFCs from before my time (see the archive) gave guidance that the article should remain broad and include those topics, but not be dominated by them alone. The approach you prefer was controversial for this article already a long time ago. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:38, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  In any case you now seem to accept that you have been working against the previously stable version of this article, so that's progress.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:39, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

  the page owners ? I left a comment on Altenmann's talk page[2]. Rsk6400 (talk) 07:39, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

• For the purposes of this article, the Germans are a classical through modern people speaking a dialect continuum classified as German in a narrow sense (not broadly Germanic), and who are most concentrated in what today is the nation-state of Germany, but also with substantial overlap into Switzerland, Austria, the micro-states Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, and even a bit into France, Italy, and Poland (also the Low Countries a little, but there's substantial debate about how to classify some of the Germanic languages there; most of them are clearly of the Low Franconian branch and are not "German" in any useful sense). In short, the Germans, broadly, are native speakers of High German (including Upper and Central) and Low German. They also have substantial diasporas in various parts of the world, but that's simply an afterthought. It's emphatically not central to the subject, even if it need very passing inclusion that refers readers the other articles about that.

  Because the various ethno-culturo-linguistically German realms were mostly united into a single Germany, and it is mostly co-extensive with and is socio-politically a continuation of (aside from a post-WWII division period) the originally unified Germany, the history of Germany as a nation-state is necessarily going to be bound up very tightly with much of the post medieval history in this article (perhaps with some forays into Austrian and Swiss and such where it really seems important), and the German realms that formed Germany (Prussia, Thuringia, Lusatia, Swabia, Bavaria, etc., etc.) are necessarily going to be important to the medieval material.

  But there is no reason to provide more than very shallow WP:SUMMARY coverage depth to other populations just because they speak a Germanic language, nor to diasporic groups (who mostly don't speak any form of German, though English is about half-Germanic); they really have nothing to do with the development of the Germans as a people, nation, or culture, and do not represent "Germanness" from a global encyclopedic perspective, any more than Americans who dress up as green leprechauns on St. Patrick's day are "Irish people". Ethnically, such people are a total melting pot, culturally they have virtually no connection to Germany or its environs (or, in my example, to Ireland), and they are virtually never native speakers of a relevant language/dialect, nor part of the socio-political system of German or other "somewhat-German" countries like Austria and Switzerland (nor of Ireland), and so on.

  All that said, because this is basically a dual-scope article covering both an ethnic nation and a geopolitical nation-state, there will also need to be come coverage of immigrant groups (historical and current). I don't want to hold up British people as a good example, because like Scottish people it has been overrun by Americans (and to be fair, Canadians, Australians, etc.) jamming in oodles of effectively off-topic diasporic blather. But it does seem to reasonably account for non-native (in an early-modern sense onward) population groups.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:54, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

RED LINES. @SMcCandlish: it is good to attempt this summary, but I'll add some rejoinders. I think the last big RFC on the article focus is still in effect being processed in this article and it was in 2020. See Talk:Germans/Archive 8. I entered the subsequent discussions about the lead rewrite it seems. Trying to convert the discussion into a finished piece of work has been awkward and I would like to nominate two examples of "red lines" that unlikely to ever really gain general acceptance:

1. I think in our time (and in recent generations) academics and normal people interacting with each other in English do NOT call German-speakers in Austria, Belgium, France, Luxembourg etc "Germans". Once upon a time "German" was a term which was not tightly connected to a straightforward state (and this is part of what makes this term tricky), but this was long ago, so please never call an Austrian a German! :) This might originally have been a politically influenced change in language, but that is all long ago. It would not only be rude now, but would also confusing.
2. I also think that attempts to make this article say or imply that MOST Germans live outside Germany are not acceptable and will not create a consensus. Similarly, edits which have edsums saying that the government in Berlin is irrelevant to this topic are pretty shocking IMHO. [ADDED: I know this is not your position.]

PROPOSAL. I am guessing a bit but I think the local editors (who don't just drop by and complain every now and then) accept that this article needs work and discussion, but I think we differ from the visitors in believing that consensus about the article body probably needs further careful development FIRST before it is useful to discuss what should be in an infobox. Getting normal talk page discussion about sources etc. has however been difficult. I personally think the diaspora Germans can and should be discussed in a section, but this is really several categories that our visitors mix up and don't care about clarifying when asked to on this talk page. They seem to lump together German citizens living in other countries today, together with people living on other continents who have some ancestors who spoke German more than a century ago. These are interesting but different groups. No one wants to insult them or ignore them, but neither of these groups are the primary topic of this article. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:46, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, could you please explain what you mean by "ethnic nation" ? I can't remember having read the term (or any of its German translations which might be "ethnische Nation" or "Volksnation") anywhere with regard to Germans. Rsk6400 (talk) 17:53, 27 March 2025 (UTC)