Template:Population Germany/doc

Purpose and use of the template
The template "Population Germany" is used by the infoboxes Infobox German location and Infobox German district to retrieve population data for subdivisions of Germany from a central database. The template can also be used outside those infoboxes. The template uses codes for the subdivisions that have been defined by the federal statistics office of Germany (see this link for codes). There is a separate database for each federal state of Germany. The databases are updated regularly, see below.

Parameters
The template is called as follows:


 * the population of a city, town or municipality:, result:  (for Merseburg)
 * the population of a district:, result:  (for Saalekreis)
 * the population of a region (Regierungsbezirk):, result:  (for Cologne region)
 * the population of a state:, result:  (for Saxony-Anhalt)
 * the date for which the population data apply:, result:  (for Saxony-Anhalt), or  , result:  (for Fritzlar, Hesse)
 * the reference for the population:, result:  (for Saxony-Anhalt)

Note: the template Population Germany does not accept codes in which the numbers are grouped, e.g. 15 0 88 220. Use the template replace for this:
 * = {{Population Germany|key=15 0 88 220}} =.

Updating the database
The data are copied from German Wikipedia. This link shows changes to the database templates in German Wikipedia in the last 30 days. If there is a significant change, that hasn't been implemented in English Wikipedia yet (see the table below, and compare with the dates in German Wikipedia), you can update the files at English Wikipedia. Open the German file (e.g. Saarland), and copy the part between the first line with "STAND" in it and the last line with a municipality code in it (in this case "Tholey") to the corresponding part in the English file (in this case Metadata Population DE-SL). If you don't feel confident editing templates, just leave a note at Template talk:Infobox German place. Several experienced editors watch that talk page.