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Depressing that most items are about sport rather than news. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 5.71.101.204 (talk • contribs) 11:19, 28 February 2016‎

There's an excellent tutorial for writing your own articles at WN:WRITE. --Pi zero (talk) 12:17, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

News regions

It's taken ten years or so for me to develop a proper appreciation for our region categories. Over the years sadly my own tampering has somewhat degraded things because of my I imperfect understanding: our region categories are not continents. They're news regions, which is not the same thing. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is not in the Asia region, it's in the middle east. I was (iirc) responsible for Egypt being treated as partly in Africa and partly in the middle east, Turkey as partly in Asia and partly in Europe; but those may be unnecessary complications exactly because we don't have to adhere slavishly to conventional continental boundaries for our regions. Russia, after all, we classify as part of the Europe region, which in the continental sense is I believe true of Russia proper, but certainly isn't continentally true of the Russian Federation which is mostly on the Asian continent. User:SVTCobra --Pi zero (talk) 22:01, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

I am not trying to undo any of that. I am trying to clarify. Also, there are reasons why countries will/should appear in more than one region (but only Turkey can appear in three in my estimation). Our regions can, and should, be overlapping or exclusionary in my opinion. I could think of other regions which would be beneficial such as Category:South Asia aka the Indian subcontinent but I don't have the confidence I could see those changes through at this time (and we shouldn't half-ass it). There is the whole five or seven continent thing, but I am going with seven as it seem prevailing in the minds of non-geologists. But, yes, we are doing news regions and they need not conform to what other projects are doing, as long as we observe something close to reality. Category:Caribbean is one that overlaps and excludes, for example. If and when I get to countries, I would include Russia in Europe and Asia. I would include Egypt in Africa and Middle East. I would include Turkey in Europe and Middle East and Asia. But (focusing on the latter), I would not include all of those regions in every story about Turkey. Some level of human judgement should be exercised, if for no other reason than to fight the so sadly mis-named artificially intelligent computers. Cheers, --SVTCobra 22:37, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm kind of reassured by your remarks. A few miscellaneous thoughts.

• I have thought about adding Russia to Asia, but it'd be a really major operation that one would have to be very confident of before undertaking it.
• We could probably do with verbal explanations of what we have and have not included in each news region.

• It looks as if our definition of Central America is probably the traditional subcontinent plus the West Indies.
• We've chosen to put the Caribbean under North America, likewise the Gulf of Mexico. Those make sense to me.

• I'm not too sure about the Indian subcontinent, but Southeast Asia comes to mind as at least worth considering.

--Pi zero (talk) 22:48, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

OK, there are too many moving parts in this conversation (for me at least). So let's take Russia. If I add Russia to the region Category:Asia without doing anything else, I don't think it will break anything. Over time, it could be possible to sort articles in Category:Russia for those which are Asia related and those which are Europe related. Even if we don't sort the archive (and it would be Europe most of the time), what would it hurt? Cheers, --SVTCobra 23:18, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

'many moving parts' is, indeed, a good description of why we move so slowly on this stuff.

Re Russia. We have, hitherto (and afaik), put all articles in a geocat into all parents of that geocat, the intent being that if one modifies a DPL by changing, say, "France" to "Europe" one will not lose anything that was previously included in the DPL. So any article about Turkey goes into both Europe and Asia, e.g. Following that treatment, if Russia goes into Asia, everything about Russia goes into Asia... which I wonder about. --Pi zero (talk) 23:45, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

I haven't done anything structural. Just some updates to "Intro" and {{subst}} some stuff. But yes, I know and remember our geo-cat usage. If I was caught jay-walking in London, I'd be in Category:London, Category:England, Category:United Kingdom, Category:Europe, and probably Category:United States because I was an American tourist. I see your point. But, I do not think if I write an article about the relations between China, North Korea and Russia, I need to include it in Category:Europe. It should just be Category:Asia. I am not an expert on DPLs but why would they be broken? P.S. Sorry for being slow in responding, I'm also debating a stupid request for deletion over at Wikipedia. --SVTCobra 00:22, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

It's what's called an invariant: If an article is included by a DPL, and you change the DPL by replacing some geocat with another geocat that the first one belongs to, the article will still be included. --Pi zero (talk) 00:56, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
I wanted to open this topic again as I saw you removed the Koreas from Category:Asia. I had gotten the distinct impression from our discussion, each country belongs in a top-level region (and only one?), which wouldn't be the case with a sub-region such as Category:Korean Peninsula. The other case of this is Category:Caribbean which is also not top-level but subordinate to Category:North America

As we also covered, it is important that we remember we are talking news regions which can vary from what geographers and geologists say. I find it hard to justify a sub-region being only two countries. If Category:Iberian Peninsula were to be created, should we move Portugal and Spain out of Category:Europe? I think no. I also we should consider elevating Category:Caribbean to top-level because it has so many countries, small as they may be.

On a related note, we should probably move England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales out of Category:Europe and Category:European Union as they are part of Category:United Kingdom.

As a side note, above, we were both talking as if Russia was only in Category:Europe and debating its inclusion in Category:Asia. Turns out, Russia has been part of both top-level categories since 2014. Cheers, --SVTCobra 14:16, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: Indeed, we're now getting into the really difficult questions; religious leaders and military personnel are just warm-up exercise by comparison. Some thoughts.

• The Korean Peninsula is a peculiar case because until WWII it was, if I understand rightly, a single country.
• The Iberian Peninsula is indeed an interesting case. It's more geographical than political, and that gets into other similar conundra to do with geographical regions versus political regions versus news-organizational regions.
• Political groupings that come to mind are ASEAN and EU; articles about members often don't relate to the whole.
• You mention Caribbean, which is indeed a major grouping. Probably our prime example of a subregion. (Which reminds me, I'd like to compose a usage note explaining more clearly what area it describes.)
• There was, I think, historically some disagreement over whether the UK should be treated as a political alliance or a subregion. I suspect some Wikinewsies who live in Scotland were inclined to treat it as more of an independent country. We may have the, er, fun of figuring out how to handle categorization if Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK. (I s'pose I'd try to draw inspiration by looking back at how we handled the secession of South Sudan.)
• Verily, the status of Russia is a messy thing. (Never get involved in a land war in Asia, but apparently categorization there is also hazardous.) I forget what was going on with the question in 2014, and I don't think that's been at all consistently followed in categorizing Russia articles during most of the time since then.

--Pi zero (talk) 15:07, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

When I ran through the countries, I did notice ASEAN. And it made me wonder to what level do we put countries in the organizations to which they belong? Do we categorize for membership in OPEC, NATO, G7, G20, WTO? The list goes on and on. Categorizing UN members seems silly.

ASEAN bothered me initially because I thought it was just a free-trade zone or something, but then I saw they have diplomatic missions in other countries. Is the cooperation approaching levels near EU? I don't rightly know. Anyway, Wikipedia says there are ten full members and two observers. We currently have eleven in the category. I'll try and spot the discrepancy, but should observers be in or out for our purposes? --SVTCobra 15:58, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Agreed, categorizing members of the UN would be unhelpful. (Although iirc we've go an article somewhere that lists how every country voted on something-or-other, and the article is categorized in each of those countries; but that's about the particular article.) For ASEAN, I would think observers would be included, as it's an is-related-to sort of thing. --Pi zero (talk) 16:07, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

You'd have to go back to 1910 for an independent and unified Korea. But Korea is far from unique. Until 1947, Pakistan was ostensibly part of India, though neither existed as a nation-state at any time prior. Do we have a category for former parts of Yugoslavia? But why not, the split was far more recent. And what about former Soviet republics? I don't know, but Category:Korean Peninsula and the Korea disambiguation page almost feel like we have a pro-reunification bias. --SVTCobra 16:18, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Yugoslavia. --Pi zero (talk) 16:22, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Soviet Union. --Pi zero (talk) 16:26, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes, but we don't put countries in there and drop them from the top-level region. --SVTCobra 16:30, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

No, we don't. Amongst the cases we've named there are a range of different ways they're handled. Yugoslavia lists the former members, rather than using categorization to identify them. Soviet Union doesn't even do that. And categorization of categories sometimes does and sometimes doesn't imply categorization of articles. --Pi zero (talk) 16:39, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

(Perhaps the Korean case feels different to me because the connection seems more cultural than Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union.) --Pi zero (talk) 16:41, 3 September 2019 (UTC)