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Editors of the 'Region' template,
Wikipedia ought to take a more consistent approach to the naming conventions used for the regions of the African continent. Officially, they are Northern, Western, Eastern, Southern, and Central, and should be recognized accordingly.
Redirects are a useful way of accounting for 'popular' terms, but any work that purports to have encyclopedic worth needs to take a more rigorous approach. Take the use of 'America', for example, while most people do associate this with 'The United States of America', it is inaccurate on grounds of denotation, hence Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for it. Another good example is the distinction between 'South Africa', the country, and 'Southern Africa', the region.
Now aside from the official name of a Wikipedia page itself, users will always be at the utmost liberty to use any term they so choose and according to their personal style: Western Africa of West Africa, for instance, but Wikipedia should, at least, retain the best term for its official page designation.
I hope that this clarifies the rationale for making the names of the African regions more consistent... Lucidity 07:46, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hello! To rectify the apparent imbalance in the categorising of various continents and subregions in this template (e.g., Europe/Asia, yet Americas), I've reorganised it to consolidate Europe and Asia into Eurasia. Another way to do this is to separate out as follows:
I'm fine with either or, but a melange of the two doesn't make sense. Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony 12:07, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
This is a highly contraversial ethnic region with undefined borders. Basicaly it can occupy the entier galaxy r could be the size of a pea. Borders are determined by the artistic nature of the person drawing. Article displays the flag as well as other goodies of the proposed kurdish nation.
I hence believe its presence is inaproporate on this template. Put the kurdistan article in contrast with other articles and you will see what I mean. --Cool CatTalk|@ 18:06, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
Today I created the article Congo (region) mainly because I felt that it was missing from Template:Regions of the world. Only afterwards did I discover that Congo already exists, but that this article seems to restrict itself to dealing solely with the two Congos, and not the wider, vaguer subregion. What is the preferred option now: should Congo me merged with Congo (region) and redirect to Congo (disambiguation) instead? Please have your say here. Thanks.
And a related issue: I would argue that the UN designation Middle Africa - which currently redirects to Central Africa - is the least ambiguous name for the region, as listed at Template:Africa, just like Southern Africa is used to effectively disambiguate from South Africa. Please respond here. Thanks! // Big Adamsky • BA's talk page 10:40, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Moreover, I'm unsure why Southern Asia was recently created distinct from South Asia – usage differentiating the two is unclear at best and this can only promote confusion. (This is different, however, from North America/Northern America or South Africa/Southern Africa ... where usage is generally distinct with cited examples.) Is there a reason why one article cannot deal with notions of both? One should redirect to the other and, without, objection, I will do this. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 15:29, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Similarly, I'm of the very strong belief that – unless there's sufficient reason otherwise – all sub/regional articles (e.g., for continents) should be entitled at "cardinal directionern foo", not merely "cardinal direction foo" for consistency. Thoughts? E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 14:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Currently the template has [[Southwest Asia|Western Asia]]. Is that correct? From reading the above I'm guessing the display text is set according to one preference/standard and the page name is set according to some other preference/standard. Can anyone clarify? Ewlyahoocom 13:09, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
I've been looking at the template:region and the template:continent and they seem similar enough that with a few additions to the region template, the continent template would become redundant and could be discontinued. The inspiring thought came when I saw Antarctica was a featured article and thought the other continents should be as well, and while browsing over Africa saw three geographic tables which just screamed "clean me up!" Xaxafrad 04:07, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
Isnt it superflouous to link to Latin America twice from the North AND South America regions? Is Central America "good" enough to have it's own category, or should it be deleted from one of the Americas? Geographically, I would place it in North, but culturally, in South. Any other thoughts? Xaxafrad 05:10, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I have created a redesign at Template:Regions_of_the_world/Temp as an attempt to solve the UN/not-UN debate and also to make the template a bit easier to use. The location pictures have had been sacrificed for space but most people know where Africa is anyway. Thoughts? Comments? Andeggs 16:11, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
I replaced Northern America with North America. It doesn't make sense for this template to lack a link to North America, and the term "Northern America" is by comparison quite obscure. I am aware that including Central America and North America causes some overlap of coverage, but it would be even worse to leave out the article at North America. I believe that including North, Central, and South America on the template is the best configuration, with the fewest faults. --Yath 06:28, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
I have no major problem with this template except the tacit assertion that these are THE regions of the world rather than just one classification among many. An encyclopedia, as wikipedia is supposed to be, has the potential to come across as authoritative and objective, and care should be taken, I think, to make sure readers know something like a list of regions of the world is a generalized classification scheme with a specific point of view, and that other equally valid systems exist.
What I mean is, this template's system is a fine system of (relatively large) regions from the point of view of Political geography. Of course there are other branches of geography (see Template:Geography topics). From the viewpoint of Cultural geography one might argue for different regions. I suspect most of the criticisms about this template relate to people approaching it from a political or a cultural point of view, as these are perhaps the two most common ways people think about the world and its regions. Some other common ways of thinking about the world and its regions include the viewpoints of Economic geography (example region, "NAFTA"), Environmental geography ("Amazon rainforest"), Biogeography ("ecoregions"), Geomorphology ("Appalachian Mountains"), Climatology ("the Horse latitudes"), and so on. And each of these points of view will result in radically different "regions of the world". Pfly 07:14, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Hy (first post here) I have been improving the articles Western Europe and Eastern Europe and I've been watching at this particular template. I'm afraid that many of the regions which are slowly appearing are slowly spoiling the whole template. I mean Latin Europe is at most a cultural region and not a geographical one. Then we have Latin America. Now we have Slavic Europe. How much longer until we have Celtic Europe, Germanic Europe, etc (and all the conflict that will appear?). If we add to that all the other cultures (on all the other continents) I predict a very bad time for this template. IMHO we should only keep the geographical regions and simply remove all the cultural ones. Hey, I like to be honest. Flamarande 12:43, 9 October 2007 (UTC)