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Length etc.

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Is this article too long?

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As of writing this article has well over 200 entries, making it one of the longest "tallest building" articles on Wikipedia. Lists like these are meant to capture the tallest buildings, not as a repository for every high-rise in a city - there are other sources for that, such as SkyscraperPage. I think the entries below 50 metres (164 ft) should be removed from the list. LivinAWestLife (talk) 01:11, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree; 100-200 buildings seems reasonable for a "tallest" list; beyond that it's just starting to become a list of buildings generally. Which could be a thing, but there are probably external web sites that do a better job at that. This article is also around 450K, which is unusually large, in a way that doesn't seem justified by the topic. Cutting off at 50 meters seems like a good solution. -- Beland (talk) 02:51, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Split?

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Additionally, I am in favor of a split for this article, possibly as a way to mitigate its length. Having the page be dedicated to the entire metro area without one for the city specifically is unusual, and unlike Salford and Manchester, Coventry isn't even in the same built-up area as Birmingham is. I would propose to split Coventry's buildings from those in the Birmingham built up area, and rename the title "List of tallest buildings in Birmingham". LivinAWestLife (talk) 01:14, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Often there are province-wide lists for tall structures where the big city is excluded due to length, and it has its own list. That maps pretty well to how people think about these things; we also need something that has pretty clear and stable borders. Maybe for the UK the equivalent size is Regions of England or the current Counties of England? -- Beland (talk) 03:26, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Responses

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My thoughts on this, avoiding Wiki jargon.

Firstly, in light of the comments above I have made some amendments to this page, including the headings and section ordering, to help synergise it with other similar pages and improve the overall UX.

However, I think it is important to recognise that the content of each "List of tallest buildings" page is made bespoke in order to capture the relevant data for each place. What constitutes a tall building in Rome, Sacramento or Birmingham does not necessarily constitute a tall building in Dubai, New York or Hong Kong. This is reflected in the variable height parameters for each page. Similarly, the bounded morphologies of cities vary significantly between each other: as a basic example, all but the largest US cities tend to have a built-up downtown cluster and relatively few outlying BUAs; in Europe the opposite is often true. This is reflected in the geopolitical boundaries drawn around each place, which will always be distinct to each region and/or nation and must be guided by the available evidence.

Referring specifically to Birmingham, a city-region I know well, and the comparison LivinAWestLife makes with Manchester: the West Midlands metropolitan county is the equivalent of Greater Manchester in almost every respect, with one exception being that the West Midlands has a protected green space running through it and Greater Manchester, to the best of my knowledge, does not. The BUA is not the salient factor here. For example, Liverpool's City Region incorporates The Wirral, which is a geographically separated peninsula in the county of Cheshire. Coventry forms part of the Birmingham Metro Area and this is clearly supported by the evidence. I think we should be careful not to overlay "idealised" city templates onto these pages. Ultimately, it is about providing useful and accurate information for each area, which this page delivers.

In terms of the cut-off for building heights, in the absence of any prescribed standard, I feel this point is being driven more by personal preference than by convention. For Birmingham and its Metro, taller buildings and structures are scattered across the urban landscape and many of its landmark buildings – which may be of importance – fall within the 35-50 metre range. I think it is a weak rationale to suggest that a tranche of good quality and potentially interesting content should be discarded simply because it is of no personal interest or takes a few extra moments to scroll through. Remember, the content of this page has high importance regionally (for Birmingham and the West Midlands, see above). While the height of a church in Bromsgrove in relation to one in Birmingham may be of little interest globally, it is of interest to some – believe it or not I am in receipt of an email to prove it!

Still, noting the overall length of the page, I have made some adjustments to condense the volume of information. Again though, I do not agree with the wholesale removal of any of the current sections: 'Existing' is existing; 'Approved' is approved, 'Proposed' is proposed, 'Unbuilt' is unbuilt; and 'Demolished' is demolished. These are standard sections for the city listings pages so I do not really understand the discussion around this. The reason I created a separate list entitled 'Emergent' is because I felt it was important to clearly delineate between the proposals that have been formally submitted to the relevant local authority, and schemes which are in the public domain but may only be at the pre-application or masterplanning stage. I was motivation to do this because other UK pages, notably London and Manchester, were listing these sorts of schemes without noting the distinctions and indeed, in some cases, without including any supporting evidence at all. I suggest that rather than homing in on listings which have been diligently referenced, time would be better served focusing on the pages where this remains a problem.

The argument that selected schemes should be discarded from this section because they may not come to fruition is also, in my view, a tenuous one – a construction project can stall or alter at any point in the process, right up until its completion. Ultimately, emergent schemes are not a "future event" because they already exist in the public domain and are therefore relevant and potentially important in context. Moreover, the majority of these listings are pre-apps, meaning they have already entered the "formal" planning process, albeit at a preparatory stage. When these apps do not progress, I typically transfer the details to the "Tallest unbuilt" section. Hence, this pre-planning information is still required for the page. Again, I would argue that clearly signposted listings, supported by evidence, are the key to managing this process effectively.

With this being said, I do agree that the term "Emergent" is a non-standard one that is open to interpretation and could be misconstrued. I have replaced this subhead with the term "Planned" and clarified its meaning in the accompanying subtext.

More generally, I write this response as the principle editor of the page over the past few years, having devoted a significant amount of time to developing it. If you want to see the difference, check out the state of the page in 2020! Of course, Wiki is a community-based project founded on discussion and input and I do not expect any degree of exclusivity over the page. All I ask, respectfully, is that any further observations are fair and considered.

Further to my own appeal, I would like to highlight the template "Infobox skyline" that LivinAWestLife has created for the List of tallest buildings pages. While I think the principle is an excellent one, I find an issue with the template format in three respects: firstly, there is a critical concern with the building tallies (e.g. Taller than 50 metres, Taller than 100 metres, Taller than 150 metres, etc.) because the taller buildings appear to be double-counted – i.e. 150m+ buildings are also counted as 100m+ buildings, and so on. This is a confusion I feel needs to be addressed. Secondly, I personally think it would be sensible for the tallies to be reordered so they read high-to-low (i.e. 150m, 100m, 50m), mirroring the format of the listings. Lastly, my personal preference would be for the template image to fill the space to the border rather than 'floating' in white space, although I understand if this is based on a standard Wiki template. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 19:40, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To add to my points on your talk page, I should mention you yourself state that choosing 35 metres was a choice of personal preference. It is really unreasonable that this page as measured in kilobye size (currently sitting at 416 KB) is one and a half times longer than the one for, say, New York City (263 KB). Both this page and the title is too long.
Thank you for changing "emergent" to "planned" however, I do think that is clearer.
Addressing the infobox: it would be much more unintuitive if buildings in a higher height range did not include the ones in the lower ones. To find out how many buildings a city has over a given height, one only has to look. If we use a 50-100 m range as you propose instead, then the viewer would have to add the numbers up. Finding the number of buildings above a given height is also trivial when looking at the main table (I should note every single tall building page besides this one puts all their buildings in the same table - because they have lists of a reasonable length).
As for the high-to-low or low-to-high order, I don't have a strong preference either way.
If you want the image to be more space-filling, you can do so by writing it as a file and then specifying the image size, for example:
| image = [[File:Detroit_International_Riverfront_from_the_Detroit_River,_Windsor,_Ontario,_2025-07-27.jpg|270px]] LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:13, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If my unilateral edits were contetentious then it should reasonable that I would meet more opposition when cleaning these pages, but Seattle is the only page where someone had an issue with it. For context, he had an issue too when I tried to extend the short lead, which was also about five years out of date. Another difference was that in none of those cases was the article indutibly long, so I didn't have to remove any content. LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:17, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, this is worth mentioning: it was you who unilaterally changed the article title from the reasonably-lengthed "List of tallest buildings and structures in Birmingham" to the current one. It was you who unilaterally changed the height cutoff from the 50 metres to 35 metres when the existing list then was already quite long. All of this can be seen by checking the last version of the page in 2020 before you started to edit it. And for the past four years you have made over 90% of edits to the page. Everything you are accusing me of is behaviour you have demonstrated yourself. On Wikipedia, articles are not owned. LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:41, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I have edited this page to help improve it; guilty as charged. This is the point of Wikipedia, is it not?
However, the edits I have made affect this page and this page only. They are intended to benefit those with an interest in the urban fabric of the Birmingham city-region. Fundamentally, the page fits the template of others of its type – the only significant difference is its detail and rigour.
Conversely, what you have done is embark on a personal "project" which affects tens if not hundreds of Wiki pages. Your explicitly stated goal is to treat Wiki as your own free-to-view skyscraper platform because the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) site is a subscription service and the SkyscraperPage.com Forum is poorly designed. As you are surely aware, this is not Wikipedia's raison d'etre and is a clear breach of its community guidelines.
Moreover, having commenced your project to great fanfare but with little-to-no WP:CON, you are now getting stroppy with editors who are refusing to fall into line – including me. In my case, you have laboured diffuse arguments across several pages in attempt to enforce your POV and your tone has become increasingly WP:UNCIVIL. The is not reasonable behaviour and I would ask you to desist.
Fishing around in the gloop, I gather you have taken issue with the following: metropolitan boundaries, comparative city sizes, unclustered skylines, arbitrary building height cut-offs, lengths of lists, lengths of page titles, churches-as-structures, people disagreeing with you. Am I missing anything?
For avoidance of doubt, I will repost the reply I gave to you on my Talk Page, which was written before your posts above, but sets out my position, which is unchanged:
"The Birmingham page, like London and others, is entitled "Tall buildings and structures...". Churches are structures, the last time I checked. You do not get to decide this – the convention is already in place.
Regarding other regional UK city pages, I would suggest that the omission of lower height buildings is due to a lack of time or interest on the part of other editors, or a lack of readily transferable data. Neither is an issue here. If a 47-metre building appears prominently next to a 53-metre building on the Birmingham skyline, which it does, it makes no sense to include one but exclude the other. By the same token, a 47-metre building in West Bromwich is undoubtedly a "tall building" in its urban environment. Parts of Sandwell are as close to Birmingham as Salford is to Manchester, by the way.
Again, you are not in a position to dictate how the urban morphology of every city-region is represented by comparing it to NYC or wherever else. While Birmingham, West Midlands (County) and the Birmingham Metro Area all have separate, verifiable Wiki pages, there can be no argument about this. None whatsoever.
Equally, the content of the page listings are appropriate for Wiki: you have clearly misunderstand WP:DIRECTORY so I suggest you revisit the clauses. In terms of WP:SIZE, the Greater Manchester (Note, not Manchester) page includes a single list with more than 200 separate descriptive entries, far in excess of the NYC page or, indeed, any single list on the Birmingham Metro page. Am I to assume you are intending to apply WP:SIZE to the GM page by setting a minimum height limit of, say, 75-metres? Hmm?
To be clear, I am not refusing to consider a "change" to any page. I am refusing to accept your WP:RECKLESS proposal to delete huge chunks of relevant information on the Birmingham Metro page as part of a misguided formalisation process; one in which you continually refuse to heed any advice or acknowledge any concerns, including those I originally set out on the Birmingham Metro page and reiterated on the Infobox template page. This is WP:IMADEIT writ large and with your WP:REVERT of my template edit you have demonstrated your methods in practice.
I repeat: it is completely unreasonable to make substantial changes an entire genre of pages without proper WP:CON with the regular contributors to those pages. The Wiki community guidelines could not be clearer on this.
I would encourage you to take a step backwards and consider your approach."
Given the nature of your "project" as described above, I suspect further engagement around any of these issues will prove futile. I suggest, therefore, we WP:DISENGAGE per Wiki's protocol, for the time being.
If after this time you are still determined to delete chunks of this page, we will need to WP:SEEKHELP through a formal dispute resolution. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 11:02, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I see no issue with continuing our conversation solely on here.
Should I remind you that I have never attempted to remove any content from this page, only ask politely in this talk page, and all I have done is to revert a single (I repeat, single) edit you have made to the infobox which I explained my rationale? In response you proceed to accuse me and to try to throw every Wikipedia policy to have in an attempt to justify your arguments.
There are no regular contributors to this page other than yourself. It is not unreasonable to think you have an interest in maintaining this page and its contents. In contrast, after I edit the various tall building pages and making improvements such as tidying the image sizes, adding coordinates, adding sources to every building, I keep a light touch and I am not opposed to editors changing the content of what I have wrote if it needs and improvement or is detrimental to the wiki.
You have misunderstood WP:CON as well as all the other Wikipedia policies you tried to cite. These pages are for collecting and viewing a city's skyscrapers and other tall structures. What about making them easier and more informative is controversial? If the other two websites where this can be done have their own glaring problems, that is simply a rationale for making these Wikipedia lists better. If CTBUH was perfect it wouldn't preclude improving these articles regardless, providing more context than a directory would have. That's basically the same thing you have done as well, the fact of the matter is only that the list is too long.
Many editors on Wikipedia have specific interests and thus like to edit articles of that subject.
To reiterate, I have never violated WP:CON since I have never unilaterally deleted chunks of this article. I merely suggested that it could be shortened. I started a discussion on the talk page as was usual procedure. If this is your reaction to any opposition you meet on this cite, I am worried about your further conduct as an editor in other pages. I repeat, once again, the only tangible thing I have done is revert a single edit you have made to the infobox. LivinAWestLife (talk) 15:29, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 2 October 2025

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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. There's currently no consensus on where to move the page, with a valid point being raised that moving the page would drastically decrease its scope from the far larger Birmingham metro area to the smaller Birmingham city. I think this is more of a matter for a split discussion and attempting to move it is the wrong forum for such a drastic cut to the article's content. Once the article is split, the hypothetical List of tallest buildings and structures in West Midlands can be nominated for deletion if it's non-notable. (closed by non-admin page mover) ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 09:16, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

List of tallest buildings and structures in the Birmingham Metropolitan Area, West Midlands → List of tallest buildings and structures in BirminghamList of tallest buildings and structures in Birmingham – This is by far the longest title for a tallest buildings page, and runs afoul of WP:CONCISE and WP:TITLECON, given that the closest comparable city, Manchester, is titled tallest in "Greater Manchetser", and other lists have the form of "List of tallest buildings (and structures) in [city]". For example, the Leeds page is "tallest buildings and structures in Leeds", and not "in the Leeds metropolitan area, West Yorkshire", and does not include Bradford. This double naming is analagous to a tautology and fails to be precise and natural, as it is unlikely anyone looking up this list will type in such a long title.

This page was unilaterally moved by an editor in 2021 without prior discussion, and since then he has expanded the scope of the article without seeking any consensus to cover tall buildings across the entire metropolitan county of West Midlands. This was how the article looked like before. The height cutoff has also been lowered to 50 metres to 35 without discussion, necessitating the inclusion of more buildings. As a result this list is now one of the longest "tallest buildings" lists on Wikipedia, lengthier than the article for New York City. The article is also visually messy with two columns showing separate ranks. The current height cutoff of 35 metres would include every single high-rise and church in the whole county, which is unreasonably for a major city like Birmingham, and does not fulfill WP:DIRECTORY or WP:SIZE. I have politely pointed out that this article might be too long and suggested to change the height cutoff to 50 m as before.

In addition, it is unusual for "tall building" articles cover the entire metropolitan area; we have separate pages for New York City and Jersey City; for Miami and Sunny Isles Beach, and for Toronto and Mississauga. As stated previously, Leeds' page does not cover Bradford's, and Glasgow's only covers the city of Glasgow. There are exceptions for only when most of an area's tallest buildings are located outside of its main city, as for Washington D.C. and Paris. In addition, this page covers Coventry, which is not part of the same urban area and is geographically and culturally distinct from Birmingham.

I propose a move back to the original name and a possible WP:SPLIT into List of tallest buildings and structures in Coventry and List of tallest buildings and structures in the Black Country, so as to not remove a lot of content on this page. The issue of the article's length has been previously brought up by User:Pigsonthewing and others in the talk page.

As there is one primary editor for the page for the preceding four years, I understand that this editor is motivated to prevent a change to the height limit, or a reversion of his changes, including such a move. I would like to seek consensus for more editors on if this move is appropriate.

I should add I no longer wish to separate buildings and structures on this list from a prior talk page discussion I started.

LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:06, 2 October 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. WhatADrag07 (talk) 19:59, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support List of tallest buildings and structures in the Birmingham Metropolitan Area either way the city is primary but I'm not sure given the scope that "Metropolitan Area" should be removed as it appears to cover areas outside Birmingham such as Rugby. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:27, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I would be fine if the article's scope is maintained. However I question how precise the definition of Metropolitan Area is here - it seems to have come from a survey done by the ESPON in 2001. From the 2011 census onwards, urban areas were used instead. (I don't think the UK government did a similar grouping for 2021).
    The article's title before 2021 was originally just Birmingham, and the article itself only covered buildings in Birmingham proper. The change to the current article's scope was entirely done by BlueandWhiteStripes, who did so without any prior discussion. The scope of the page as it had existed in 2020 would suggest the earlier editors of this page had a consensus to include buildings in Birmingham only. City boundaries are much less ambiguous. That's why I am proposing the article be split up so we have one that covers mainly Birmingham and one for other areas in the West Midlands. No other UK "tallest buildings" page other than Manchester's does this (and Manchester has a strong rationale for doing so, as their skyline is spread across the two cities). LivinAWestLife (talk) 23:53, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I proposed, politely, that we should WP:DISENGAGE, but instead you chose to escalate. So be it.
Firstly, your rationale is flawed; deeply so. You state the closest comparative city to Birmingham in terms of size is Greater Manchester. This is incorrect. The City of Birmingham is considerably larger than the City of Manchester. The closest comparison – and it is a very close comparison – are the Metropolitan counties of the West Midlands and Greater Manchester.
Therefore, we can make a reasonable comparison between the two Wikipedia pages, yes? Let's take a look:
List of tallest buildings and structures in Greater Manchester
  • This page covers the buildings and structures in all ten metropolitan boroughs of Greater Manchester.
  • It currently consists of nine separate lists with a total of 451 detailed entries.
  • The Birmingham Metro page, to which you have taken particular exception, covers the buildings and structures in the six metropolitan boroughs of the West Midlands.
  • It currently contains eleven separate lists with a total of 580 entries, of which only around 400 are detailed.
Hence, unless you are proposing to split the Greater Manchester tall buildings page into three or more distinct urban regions to suit your WP:SIZE requirements, you are contradicting your own rationale. Hell, maybe you should go ahead and split the London page into the City of London and its 32 boroughs. I actually live in one which has some grass between it and the City of London, so maybe our community is "geographically and culturally distinct" for the purposes of the tall buildings page.
I am sorry, but this is total nonsense.
Over and above this, the Birmingham Metro has three further considerations of which you are either genuinely ignorant, or about which you are being deliberately obtuse.
The first is that when you exit the Greater Manchester authority you soon find yourself in an another metro region: either Merseyside, to the West, or one of the two Yorkshire metros across the Peak District. Hence, Greater Manchester's hinterland is relatively constrained. This is not the case for the West Midlands, which is surrounded by reasonably-sized settlements such as Redditch, Bromsgrove, Tamworth, Warwick, Nuneaton, and others which make up the wider Birmingham Metropolitan Area. I included the parts of those authorities that fall within the Metro Area because I felt it may be interesting and informative to some – giving particular thought to the people who live there.
The total number of additional entries for these authorities, however, number no more than a couple of dozen, and I have made the distinctions clear using a colour-coding mechanism. Is this really such a big deal?
The second issue, of course, is that the world contains more than one city called Birmingham. When I began editing the page in 2020, the distinction between Birmingham and Birmingham, Alabama was made primarily by disambiguation, which was obviously not ideal. Thus, it seemed a sensible approach to rename this page to incorporate the Metro Area, without creating further confusion by naming it "Tallest Buildings and Structures in the West Midlands" – which, in case you are unaware, is the name of both the Metropolitan County and the Region. Then to automatically redirect "Tallest Buildings and Structures in Birmingham" to it, which I did. Thus, there is no need for anyone to type the full page title to reach the page.
Lastly, much of the Birmingham Metro Area, particularly the Black Country region in which I was born, is composed of a constellation of towns and parishes knitted together into an urban fabric. A building in any one of these places which exceeds 35-metres (circa 12-storeys) will be a landmark tall building on that skyline. Just because the building in question is not a 400-metre glass edifice does not make it irrelevant; certainly not in the local context. See, by way of example, the brief description of the three tower blocks in Merry Hill, Wolverhampton
This was my rationale for developing the page in the way that I have, and the very fact that nobody else routinely contributed to the page meant I felt able to make these edits without WP:CON. For the benefit of the Wiki community, I stick to editing what I know well. Please do not make baseless accusations about my motivations as an editor. This is the second time I have had to pull you up on WP:UNCIVIL. I will not ask you again.
With regards to your cherry picking distinct metro areas (e.g. New York City/Jersey City), I can just as readily cite metro areas where the greater region has been consolidated. For example, the City of Sydney and the metropolitan region of Greater Western Sydney. Sydney's tallest buildings page includes buildings in Parramatta, a city 25km to the West of Sydney CBD with a completely separate skyline. I know this because I used to live there. Another example, which is especially pertinent to this discussion, are the Zonas of Rio de Janeiro. I note you have created one of your little maps for Zona Centro and excluded the rest of the city from it. Anyone who has lived in Rio, as I have, knows that the greatest concentration of tall buildings is located in Zona Sul, strung around the beaches from Botafogo to Ipanema, and extending on to Zona Barra da Tijuca via a very big, very green and very non-urbanised mountain. This is why your map does not even include the majority of tall buildings in the city.
You see, this is what I have been trying to impress upon you from the get-go. You cannot force the idealised template you created for New York City onto each and every tall buildings page in order to meet your "cleaning up" agenda. Not only are you compromising the integrity of multiple pages, but you are wasting people's time by continuing to escalate your barely Civil POV-pushing; and doing so from an increasingly compromised position.
You informed me curtly that on Wikipedia, articles are not owned. Neither, I might retort, are sets of templated pages. Given the manner in which you engaged on my talk page, it is becoming clear that you are pursuing a personal vendetta against me because I had the temerity to question your pagewashing – rightly, as it turns out. Once again, I would urge you to desist.BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 22:12, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I will acknowledge that I was not aware the Manchester page was this long as well. I am not one to target a particular page unfairly or hold a vendetta. If that page is unnecessarily long too, and it appears it is so, I would agree in that case as in here that it needs to be cut short. On Wikipedia, we have notability guidelines to determine what should be included in an article. This applies to lists as well. My point about using Manchester was that its title was the rather more succint "Greater Manchester", instead of the clunky "Birmingham Metropolitan Area, West Midlands". Either "West Midlands" or "Birmingham Metropolitan Area" would be more preferable, ideally the former since it is more used, but I maintain the best option would be to return the article to its former name and scope under "Birmingham", and create a separate article for its suburbs. In any case, the table in the Manchester article (and other British cities) are structured much more clearly and sensibly, making information easier to parse.
Since this discussion has really only started in the past two days, it might be rather early to suggest that I WP:DISENGAGE, when neither party has done anything to suggest they are tired of this dispute.
Any editor may propose a page move. It is not a personal attack. In fact it may have caused you less anger if I had done so in the first place. Page move requests are a way to seek consensus. Should consensus find that your position is correct, then the page will rightly stay as it is. If not, there is no reason for keeping a title that editors have found to be unsatisfactory.
You also mention that you have included towns outside of the West Midlands county - such as Redditch and Bromsgrove. I can find nowhere that states the UK has a well-defined definition of "metro area" (as opposed to the US) with the exception of this, which was done once for the 2001 census. As you'll notice, for the 2011 census, the British government switched to defining urban areas instead, where Birmingham and Coventry are separate. Meanwhile, Greater Manchester remains under that more recent definition. Perhaps just as importantly, the main "skyline" of Manchester includes Salford since their city centers border each other, and their skyscrapers are less than a mile apart, while Birmingham's skyline is comfortably located within the city. Hence there is a page for "Greater Paris" and not Courbevoie, Puteaux, and Nanterre separately.
Furthermore, there is no distinction or confusion caused by calling this page "Birmingham" to differentiate it from the city in Alabama. Wikipedia's page for the main city is at Birmingham, not "Birmingham, England", hence clearly Birmingham is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC over its Alabamian counterpart, and there is no need to distinguish it further here. We also have the simple see also template at the top for any lost visitors.
I would like to obtain more consensus from other editors, including other Brummies, on how much they think local context should influence the content of this page. However, appealing to your personal knowledge of a place is not a basis for including any building that may be tall in a "local context". A Chicagoan living in the edge of their city will think their local church is tall. A Londoner in Enfield might think their 20-storey council block is tall. A villager may regard their village hall as tall. That is true but it alone is not enough to warrant an inclusion on a list such as this one. Because the result would be to include hundreds of buildings and make the page impossibly harder to maintain for other editors. Each new building would require a wholesale change of rank in multiple tables. Perhaps not a problem you've encountered as you have made almost every edit to this article in the past five years.
Sydney has no properly defined city limits. The whole urban area is defined as within the city. Parramatta is widely considered within Sydney proper on skyscraper-related information across Wikipedia. Only the CTBUH mistakenly makes it an exception on its main list. This definition is quite unique to Australia, so I am not "cherry-picking" when using an American, Canadian, and British city as an example.
There is no (as you put it) nefarious agenda or any other evil scheme. Also, I did not clean up the page for New York City first. Your language is significantly more uncivil than my own as well as accusing me of bad faith. You have been more than escalatory in your responses, after I opined my thoughts politely on the article title/size and conducted a single revert, and attempted to address you politely. But as this all distracts from the topic at hand I will not entertain this issue further.
I would also question which of my recent edits to tall building pages you would find questionable. There is nothing wrong with standardizing between different lists of the same category in Wikipedia; after all, WP:SKYLIST has existed since the early 2010s as an effort to standardize what was then a growing number of "tallest building" pages. Unless you believe that adding a map of buildings, expanding a page's history, adding coordinates, adding sources, lengthening the history section, creating a summary of a city's local high-rise context in the lead, making a line graph of the skyline's history, finding appropriate images, correcting formatting errors, and providing templates somehow does a diservice to those pages. It makes little sense to accuse me of making these pages better or informative for people who want more information on tall buildngs. That is the whole point of such articles, to tell people about tall buildings in a city. I recognise, however, that there are limits to the article size, and we should not include every local church and chimney tower for being marginally taller than its surroundings.
I indeed make the map for Rio de Janeiro. I created the article, in fact. And this is emblematic of the issue because according to CTBUH, any alternative building database, and perhaps a cursory view on Google Earth, you will know that the buildings in Centro are taller than the ones in Zona Sul. Should you wish to include the shorter high-rises, the page would have to be expanded to hundreds of entries. The vast majority of these shorter buildings don't have their heights listed anywhere. The map is for Centro because that is where most of the tallest buildings are. There are many shorter high-rises along the beach and in the rest of the city. This point is explicitly mentioned in the lead which you have chosen to ignore. Should you wish to see the rest of them taller than 100 m you can click on the GeoGroup template easily visible on the lead.
You bring up the infobox again. I will reiterate that I reverted your edit a single time and later provided justification for doing so. Reverting an edit I disagree with is not owning a page or template. Other people have edited the skyline infobox. LivinAWestLife (talk) 23:44, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You are very wrong. I am extremely tired of this dispute. You clearly enjoy creating problems for people when you don't get your own way but I for one am not prepared to entertain your circular logic.
You talk as though you moderate this community but you do not. When you make statements such as "…it alone is not enough to warrant inclusion on a list such as this one" you are not referring to any prescribed guidelines other than those you have drawn up yourself. That is not working through consensus. That is deploying logical fallacy to undermine and dictate.
Now, some facts:
The tallest building in Rio de Janeiro is located in Botafogo, not Centro, so it does not appear on your map, along with numerous other tall edifices that should do. Imagine creating a map of tall buildings in London and omitting the Shard from it. The entire notion is fundamentally flawed but you simply refuse to accept it. In my view, the map should be amended or deleted.
Fact: I have lived and worked in Western Sydney so do not tell me how Parramatta is "considered". I know exactly how Greater Sydney's boundaries are set and not because I've used Chat GPT or perused CTBUH. Regardless, the Sydney page consolidates the Sydney and Parramatta skylines, so it serves as a suitable rebuttal to your opening argument, from which you are now trying to backtrack.
Fact: You are also splitting hairs over the Greater Manchester page content knowing full well the principle I set out. You cannot make up a set of "rules" one minute then start making exceptions when your rationale falls apart. Any proposed changes to the length or split of the Birmingham Metro page must be similarly proposed on the GM page, or not at all.
Anyone reading these exchanges should note that there are literally hundreds of current and potential Tallest Building pages on Wiki for this individual to edit, many of which are pretty well neglected. That he is choosing to create such division over one of the few pages that has been diligently built by another editor should tell you all you need to know about his motives.
BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 02:44, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have tried to be patient in this discussion, but it is clear you cannot help but let your obstinance show through in your text. Your rhetoric is escalatory and damaging to how discussion is commented on Wikipedia. Your first paragraph already crosses WP:GF by insinuating I "clearly enjoy" causing problems, whatever that means.
You failed to address my points and issues with your unilateral decision, done without any discussion or consensus seeking, to (1) expand the scope of this article to the whole of the West Midlands and more, (2) change the title, and (3) lower the height cutoff. May I suggest the sheer size of the page and confusion about what the two ranking columns means is the reason behind there being very few other editors to this page in the past five years, despite the growth of Birmingham's skyline? Because as it stands the main list is almost impossible to edit even for a professional editor?
I do not moderate this community. What I am trying to do is to seek consensus on opinions regarding the proposed title change. Again, you accuse me in acting of bad faith. Currently we are among the only editors here, so there is no way of determining what the wider community thinks about this consensus. This is WP:NOTCONDUCT while you are accusing me of overriding Wikipedia protocol when I have done no such thing and I am conducting a request through the proper channels–unlike when this article and its scope was unilaterally moved and changed. Regardless, I know that it makes zero sense to use a height cutoff of, say, 100 meters for Hong Kong. As someone born in HK I still think all of those buildings are considered tall. Just because you disagree and I am pointing it out is not me trying to superimpose my opinion on anyone. You also seem to be under the impression that everything not clarified by a strict guideline then it should be allowed. Nowhere does it say we can't make the limit for Dubai 50 m.
Moving on, as the article itself states, the tallest building in Rio de Janeiro is indeed in Botafogo. Clearly, I am aware of that, since I introduced that sentence. If the map were to expand to include it it would show a few dots over at Botafogo, and a huge cluster that us jumbled together in Centro. That would defeat the purpose of the map, which is to show where the tall buildings are relative to each other. This also isn't a rule, you could just make an additional map covering the wider Rio area, as I have considered. Additionally, how is this pertinent to the discussion? Every single other map includes the tallest building in it. Rio is an esception because of the local characteristics of the cities high-rises. As mentioned, the decisions chosen, naturally, depend on the local layout of tall buildings.
Your point about Sydney makes little sense, because on Wikipedia, just "Sydney" is defined as encompassing the Sydney Statistical Division, that is, all of its urban area. The page for Sydney has a succint title, by the way: "List of tallest buildings in Sydney". Perhaps the fact that wanting to make a page for the entire "Birmingham metropolitan area" would necessitate such a longer title should preclude you to have expanded the page in the first place?
It is off topic and distracting to try to disparage my edits elsewhere. Nowhere have I made an intention to introduce a map to this article anytime soon. This move proposal is about changing the name and scope of this article. It would be best to focus on the merits and detriment of that argument.
None of what you have typed, by the way, is an argument against moving the title of the page. Also, to mention Manchester once again - yes, I also have a potential problem with the length of that page. But it is an issue present less egregiously there, and the article is more legible in many other aspects. Manchester at least has a height limit of 50 m, and its page size is 279 kB, far lower than the 430 kB this page currently sits at.
Your last paragraph ignores that I have done just that for over thirty cities across the world. These have made the pages legible and more informative. Again this is a distraction from the topic, but I am responding because you tried to bring it up as an ad hominem attack and WP:BADFAITH. I do live in the UK, so I would want to help edit the tallest building lists. There is no personal bias against you or any vendetta here, and it appears as if you are just looking for one.
Just to add: saying "you are very wrong" without specifying exactly what it is that is wrong and addressing it is very unhelpful during a discussion. LivinAWestLife (talk) 03:50, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You were very wrong in suggesting neither of us is tired of this dispute; a dispute, let us be clear, that you started. I am extremely tired of it, which is why I sought WP:DISENGAGE. You ignored me. Don't be obtuse.
The fundamental concern here, which goes for this page, Seattle, Rio, Sydney, and wherever else, is that in the past couple of months you have decided, unilaterally, to write the "rules" by which each and every Tall buildings page on Wiki should be governed, without any consideration to national or regional nuances, or any attempt to engage in discussion with the existing contributors to those pages, and are now moving from page to page enforcing your rules and causing arguments with anyone who questions your fiefdom-building. Do not accuse me of being tangential - I have set out my overall concerns very clearly and you chose to ignore them. Then you immediately reverted the single, minor edit I made to your template, while making false overtures to "inclusivity".
Regarding your approach on this page, instead of digesting my perfectly reasonable explanation for the editing decisions I made in the years before you even appeared, you are, in very WP:BADFAITH, attempting to "build consensus" by proposing the very thing you know will cause maximum vexation, while engineering false equivalences between my editing on one moribund page four years ago and your aggressive brand of pagewashing now. Every time I point out the holes in your rationale, you either deflect or degenerate into a bout of pearl clutching.
By way of evidence, let me draw your attention to the comment you make above: Rio is an esception (sic) because of the local characteristics of the cities high-rises. This is exactly the point I have made about this page. In your own words, you reveal that exceptions are fine when they suit your own agenda, but not when they mean not getting your own way.
In general, this page is fine. I would even make the argument that other pages should aspire to the greater detail and rigour provided here, rather than being distilled down to your particular set of requirements. We could have, perhaps, worked together to achieve this, had your initial approach been less condescending and dogmatic.
This page title proposal is a dogwhistle: it is a precursor to you redirecting the page so can apply your new "rules" to it. Do not talk to me about WP:BADFAITH. As I stated previously, you have potentially hundreds of tall buildings pages around the world to edit - and despite muffing the Rio page you insist that local knowledge is not relevant - so why do you continue to pursue an issue over one page for one medium-sized city? The question is a rhetorical one: you know why and I know why. It is your YIMBY attitude manifested in digital: get what you want no matter who or what gets swept aside in the process.
And yes, I am aware you are originally from Hong Kong - I have perused the social channels linked from your Wiki profile and I have seen how you deal with the contributors who disagree with you there, so you can quit your faux politeness. I have also seen you discussing your tactics for this Wikipedia tall buildings takeover, in which you call out and berate an editor on the Seattle Wiki page who disagreed with you, and crow about circumnavigating the disagreement by building a brand new Wiki Seattle Tall Buildings page in your sandbox to simply usurp the existing one. And you have the temerity to accuse me of acting in WP:BADFAITH?
I would never ordinarily go down this route but in light of your continued WP:ICANTHEARYOU, I am afraid there is only one viable option.
BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 13:23, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I will be very clear here. I suggested in this talk page that the list may be too long, and perhaps the height limit can be increased. I also suggested politely to remove Coventry from the list. No one has replied to either of those queries for the past few months, so I put the matter at rest. I only saw that you edited the infobox skyline, thought the 35 m category wasn't necessary, and decided to revert it. Given that you had little activity on the past 6 months I left a kind note on your talk page explaning why, unaware that you were the main editor for the page and why it was so long in the first place. You incited this tiring debate by posting an inflammatory response to my reply on your talk page that immediately made clear you have no intention of discussing matters politely.
Not once have I decided to unilaterally change or remove any content from this page. Just like what you did when you found this page in 2020, I have also started to edit tall building articles that have little activity and in many cases needed a clean-up. In this aspect we are, or were, alike. The difference is I have never wholesale decided to change the scope of any of the tall building pages by, for example, deciding that a city's page should suddenly cover its entire metropolitan area. My changes remain within the existing scope of the article. New York City already had a map template before I touched the article; I only adjusted the map to show labels. All of the additions, such as the map and line graph, are useful for anyone looking to find more information about a city's tall buildings, but if you can make an argument to the contrary there is nothing stopping you from saying it.
Before you bring up Manchester again, I should note that the scope of the Manchester tallest buildings article has always covered Greater Manchester, way back before 2020, and there was strong consensus over there to do so. This is in no way comparable to your wholesale, undiscussed edits and move of the Birmingham article. Frankly this makes the difference clear, since I am going through the appropriate Wikipedia channels in order to obtain consensus for what would be a major change to an article, but you failed to do the same when you changed the page and moved it in 2020/2021. It is incredibly hypocritical.
By the proposal of splitting the page, I have mentioned I want to maintain as much useful information from this page as possible, just that it would be in separate articles instead of being deleted, thus maintaining your work. I need not have done this since there is no page for "Tallest buildings in Greater Tokyo" and whatnot, and more importantly whether the topic of tall buildings in the West Midlands outside of Birmingham and Coventry would be covered under WP:GNG in the first place.
And also, this is manifestly a false equivalence between Rio or local oddities of any other city and what you have done with this page. Do you have a proper explanation of how you would like to see Rio's page changed that is consistent and sensible? Again with the matter of many high-rises not having available heights, which is necessary for such articles. The only "exception" required for Rio is the coordinates of the map. For this page, you have made a whole host of "exceptions" that seemingly detract from the issue.
Incredible use of the word "dogwhistle" here. I could just as well have made a WP:SPLIT proposal directly with exactly the same rationale, and there would be nothing wrong with doing so as split proposals are often made on excessively long pages, but I would wager you would still find an issue with it. The "rules" I made are indeed just a blueprint for myself to use, to help me edit such pages. There were existing "rules" before and no one was (or is) required to follow them to a T either. You will find I have never said every single tall buildings article on the site should look like this, and they are just tools to potentially make them more informative.
Apologies for the linking of bad faith. I was not accusing you of that; rather, you have consistently assumed I was acting in bad faith in violation of WP:AGF. There is a huge difference between trying to improve a series of similar articles and to standardize their format (not content), and "imposing rules" across established articles. It is funny that you should mention greater detail and rigour, since for every tall buildings page I oversaw I have added detail to it instead of removing it. But there are well established limits on how much detail one should include on Wikipedia, one reached via consensus. It is not a place to include every piece of knowledge in existence.
Regardless of all this, even if the scope of this page is appropriate, the title is too long and fails many of the guidelines when it comes to article titles (again itself of which is indicative that a page's scope should be made with consideration of how lengthy its title would be).
This "beratement" you speak of is astounding considering my Reddit comment you presumably base it off does no such thing. I only responded to someone's question about it. Besides the sole editor on the Seattle page (whose page you would find is much shorter here, and I have only tried to expand it, as you did with this page–imagine if someone had prevented you from adding to this article in 2020?), what examples do you have of how I presumably "deal with contributors" who disagree with me? I can assure you that I and others have proceeded to go on an incessant tirade that tries to clumple up flimsy points in long paragraphs to form a fragile argument. Also, you might not be aware of this, but using a Sandbox to help editors test versions of articles that may not be ready for mainspace is common Wikipedia practice. Not to mention, "YIMBY Attitude" or whatever is again an ad hominem, which distracts from your argument. In fact that entire paragraph is just a personal attack and blatantly fails WP:CIVIL.
Having a regular one on one discussion with another editor is not WP:ICANTHEARYOU. If you bothered to look you would find that the first sentence says "Sometimes, editors perpetuate disputes by sticking to a viewpoint long after community consensus has decided that moving on would be more productive. This is disruptive." As far as I am aware, there is no "community consensus" besides yourself, and no such decision has been made. I have not been told otherwise by any individual besides yourself. So ideally, you should stop pretending you represent any viewpoint besides that of your own.LivinAWestLife (talk) 15:14, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This issue is now in dispute resolution and I will be making no further comment. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 16:32, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Relisting comment: consensus is very divided on the name WhatADrag07 (talk) 19:59, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: WikiProject Lists, WikiProject England, WikiProject Birmingham, WikiProject Architecture, WikiProject West Midlands, and WikiProject Skyscrapers have been notified of this discussion. WhatADrag07 (talk) 20:00, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Proposed and planned

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I copied the below from Wikipedia:Closure requests because the request has been completed, but discussion was continuing. The original request was to close the RFC at Talk:List of tallest buildings and structures in the Birmingham Metropolitan Area, West Midlands/Archive 1#RFC on approved, proposed, and emergent structures. -- Beland (talk) 03:56, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Only 3 comments, but I'm one of them. -- Beland (talk) 21:30, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland: I don't think this discussion needs a formal closure. Unless I'm misreading that, it's pretty obvious that all three people there agree on removing "proposed" and "emergent" buildings. Ed [talk] [OMT] 20:07, 4 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I have removed those sections. Hopefully no one will complain. -- Beland (talk) 03:16, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@The ed17: My removal was reverted by BlueandWhiteStripes here: Special:diff/1315200670. -- Beland (talk) 19:53, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland: Perhaps more discussion is needed then (or a new RfC?). I personally wouldn't be confident in assigning a a definitive consensus to the 2024 RfC with three participants. Ed [talk] [OMT] 21:02, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi both. I reverted the edit – apologies, I didn't realise it was an admin concern. Still, I find the suggestion of WP:CRYSTALBALL confusing because there are tens if not hundreds of Skyscraper pages founded on the same template – i.e. with lists of approved, proposed and planned buildings – with a longstanding edict to separate out these lists as required.
The individual entries on this page are far more uniformly and rigorously cited than most, so it would be good to understand why this particular page is being targeted when others are not. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 21:59, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what you mean by "admin concern"; both admins and non-admins can close RFC discussions. That procedure is just a way to bring an objective eye to summarize the outcome. I became involved in editing this page simply because it showed up on a list of pages that violated the manual of style, and after fixing those problems I noticed it needed further cleanup.

The edit summary on the revert of section removal was:

"Approved" is a standard subsection (London, Manc, Sydney, etc) – please refer to the guideline: "The proposed table includes both approved buildings and proposals that are yet to pass the approval stage... or any other stages in the planning process (e.g. "pre-planning") if they can be distinguished." I answered your query in Talk: see "Responses"

I was confused by this until I figured out I accidentally removed part of the "Approved" section. Given that we had an RFC where 3 editors agreed to remove the "proposed" and "emergent" (now "planned") sections, and I don't think a single editor should override that, I more carefully removed those again.

It took me a while to figure out what you meant by "guideline", but I finally found that text on Wikipedia:WikiProject Skyscrapers/Tallest building lists. Given that we had local consensus that "proposed" and "planned" ran afoul of WP:CRYSTAL, I would suggest seeking consensus to change that guideline, and if achieved, remove these sections from all tallest-building lists. -- Beland (talk) 03:56, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not involved in this RfC, but I would keep proposed and planned buildings as long as they were in a single table and not too long (as per London). Before I made any edits to WP:SKYLIST, the standard to include proposed buildings has always existed, and has been standard convention since these lists were a thing. Since many proposals receive significant coverage by local newspapers and other sources, I don’t think they count as WP:CRYSTALBALL. They don’t take up much space, and such a change could be discussed over at WikiProject Skyscrapers first. LivinAWestLife (talk) 15:58, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The "proposed" and "planned" sections have been added back again with no new reason given. Since there's some sentiment that the guideline should be uniform across lists, I've started an RFC at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Skyscrapers/Tallest building lists#RFC on proposed buildings. @Markbassett and Safrolic: as participants in the previous RFC, you may want to weigh in again. -- Beland (talk) 16:47, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've replied on the RfC now with some of the points I made above. I left an entry on the talk page of Wiki:WikiProject Skyscrapers as well, since this could affect hundreds of lists. LivinAWestLife (talk) 22:42, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Potential split discussion

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Following on from the close mentioing a split discussion being a more appropiate avenue than a requested move, I wanted to ask the RFC participants @LivinAWestLife @Beland @Ed @Andrewa @Rupples @Crouch, Swale @Ham II if they think a Split discussion would be a good idea and if so what they think the split should now this Articles title isn't moved (just to note the reason I didn't ping Moo Deng Appreciation Society is they said in their Epitaph they were leaving so I was not sure they would want me to ping them if anyone feels they should be pinged and does it then fair enough.) GothicGolem29 (talk) 21:53, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My position is unchanged; I support either: 1.) splitting into List of tallest buildings and structures in Birmingham and List of tallest buildings and structures in West Midlands (which would exclude Birmingham and link to the other list) or 2.) just moving to List of tallest buildings and structures in West Midlands, whichever has more support from other editors, as long as the number of entries is below 200 on any given list. -- Beland (talk) 22:33, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The article not only includes buildings and structures in the Birmingham Metropolitan Area but also a supposed Metropolitan Hinterland per the map created by User:Blueandwhitestripes. It also includes buildings and structures with a minimum height of 35 metres when the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat suggests a minimum height of 50 metres for a tall building.[1] A discussion on inclusion criteria may be beneficial prior to discussion of a split. Rupples (talk) 22:55, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I support raising the minimum height to 50 meters; doing so is necessary to get under the 200 item limit I'm advocating for Birmingham. It would not eliminate all buildings outside Birmingham, and there would still be buildings outside West Midlands (county). Perhaps the natural scope would then be West Midlands (region). Even at 50 meters, there would still be enough to need a separate list for Birmingham proper, I think, so it doesn't matter to me whether the split or truncation or discussion thereof happens first. If the list is not split, an even higher cutoff would be needed to keep it a reasonable size. -- Beland (talk) 00:04, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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