On 28 Nov 2008, at 18:26, phoebe ayers wrote: > Just reiterating the perspective of someone not from the UK or Ireland > here.. the situation is most certainly that obscure if one is learning > about it for the first time.
Fortunately, we have the Wikipedia. ;-) > (I have ten years of college under my belt, and I could no more name > the counties of Ireland than fly, let alone know which state they > belonged to; There are 32 counties in Ireland (island), 6 of which belong to the UK and 26 of which belong to Ireland (state). > nor can I tell you how and why the partition came about -- > information that I would expect to find in a general article when I > type in "ireland"). The general articles on a topic are *not* for > people who already know all about that topic. And so you might, if "Ireland" were not an ambiguous term. The problem is some editors from Northern Ireland hate the fact that the Irish state calls itself Ireland. So the articles get more and more complicated. See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ireland_disambiguation_task_force/cross-usage_table for a summary. Our present activity is to try to get the article nomenclature sorted out so that things can be put into the right places. > I would wager that even when most educated adults in the US think of > the concept of "Ireland", they think of things like leprechauns and > Guinness, not the political divisions (except perhaps in a headline- > in-the-news way). Blame US education? > And if such cultural and historical information (Ray brought up a > good point about the history of the island) is what I am looking > for, then how precisely am I supposed to know to click on the > "Ireland (island)" article? I would expect the disambiguation page to be well-written. > I see a disambiguation title like that and I think about geology -- > how was the actual island formed, and so on. Since that's not > (entirely) the case, I find it confusing. The dab page doesn't have to be just a list of links. > And just as a point of order, you (Michael) seem to be unwilling to > consider any ideas other than the one you first presented, which > isn't really much of a debate or compromise on the subject. Why even > bring it up if you don't want input? I'm endeavouring to summarize what the arguments have been. There are some proposals that are really non-starters. Others seem to be good but over on at the RM we have a core of resistence to change. Input could be usefully given there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ireland#Proposed_move_to_Ireland_.28island.29 It's a lot to read, I know. A number of us believe that the proposed compromise is the only one that has a chance of lasting long-term. I invite you to read that talk article (it's in three parts now) and try to support the proposed compromise. Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
