Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries

Category:Flag template shorthands has an RFC

Category:Flag template shorthands has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you.

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:51, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

History guideline rethink

The guideline on the main project page here for the length of the history section on country pages lacks realism. It says that the history section should consist of 4-6 paragraphs. This is patently unrealistic, as not even featured country pages achieve this. In this context, a more realistic guideline would be worth discussing - one that reflects the best summaries of featured country articles to date, perhaps based on a word count, rather than paragraphs, which at best is a vague content measure. Below are the featured country pages by rough history section word count:

• Australia - 1,900 words
• Bulgaria - 2,300 words
• Cameroon - 1,300 words
• Canada - 2,800 words
• Germany - 2,700 words
• India - 2,250 words
• Japan - 1,500 words
• Madagascar - 3,150 words
• Nauru - 1,300 words
• Rwanda - 1,150 words

That averages out at about 2,000 words per featured article, and only Rwanda, at 1,150 words, makes it down to six paragraphs. Based on the above, which are this project's best examples of featured articles, I struggle to see how '4-6 paragraphs' is a constructive or even relevant target to have in the guideline. A rule of thumb more like '1,500-2,000 words' seems more viable. Iskandar323 (talk) 16:33, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Clearly it can be achieved, and is thus realistic. It needs to be even shorter in the lead! Looking at current article states is not the best guide, for example see Australia at last FAR, rather than the current iteration. Perhaps not 4-6, but there is no need to endorse much higher bloat. CMD (talk) 01:03, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for sharing that - it's insightful. A few further observations there - Australia has a bit of an easy run of it from having a very binary prehistory/modern history setup, but even then it was still at 7 paragraphs and about 1,000 words. I seriously doubt that 4 paragraphs have ever been hashed out at a FAR level (though I may be wrong), as too brief a history tends to skip key details. The Australia FAR nom version was notably sparse on the indigenous prehistory - something that has now been built upon, not unfairly or disproportionately I think, in the current version (if anything, the pages is still a little light on the 'current affairs' that the guideline also says should be squeezed into this, but that's an aside). Overall, I think this still supports ditching the paragraph-determined approach, or at least the current minimum. If '1,500-2,000 words' is too much, perhaps '1,000-1,500 words' instead? That would align with Australia's qualifying FAR version, as well as the current Cameroon, Japan, Nauru and Rwanda pages, as well as Canada's FAR version (1,300 words). (Bulgaria, Germany and Madagascar never had less than about 2,000 words of history, while India had 500 words, but that seems like an outlier.) Iskandar323 (talk) 05:20, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Well, we could get rid of the current events bit, a bit of an odd inclusion. I wouldn't object to shifting from paragraph based to word count based along 1000-1500/2000 as suggested. I would also suggest removing the "complexity" part. It's worth keeping in mind that the reason for an explicit mention for length of history sections is due to the tendency for such sections to balloon. Other sections should also be similarly restricted, but they tend to be less of an issue. CMD (talk) 05:52, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

So the impetus for discussing this is, yes, precisely to try to close in on a more realistic guideline that can be more practically advocated for on country pages to argue against history section bloat. At the moment, the current guideline is strict to the point of detachment from the realities of our content (only one featured article manages it): it needs to be a guideline that the editors of country pages can actually rally behind and reasonably achieve, not a pie-in-sky abstract target. I also agree with cutting emphasis on current affairs and complexity - they just confuse it really. So, how does the democracy work here? Hold a vote? Iskandar323 (talk) 08:21, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

@Moxy:, thoughts on shifting to a word count metric (1000-1500 or 1000-2000) and removing advice to include current affairs for history sections? CMD (talk) 08:45, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Seems logical. Moxy- 11:11, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

@CMD, @Moxy: upper limit as 1500 or 2000, or ambiguously 1500/2000? Iskandar323 (talk) 11:25, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

I prefer 1500, at 2000 that's recommending perhaps one-fifth of the article, which seems a bit much. CMD (talk) 12:12, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Category talk:Regions of Europe with multiple official languages

Please see my comments on this talk page, thanks. Titus Gold (talk) 14:01, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Appropriate category for constituent/autonomous countries

There doesn't seem to be an appropriate category for constituent countries of sovereign states, which are typically autonomous/semi-autonomous e.g Scotland, Wales, Greenland, Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten. (I made Category:Constituent country, but this seems about to be deleted.)

Is there room for an appropriate category for these countries? If so, what would it be? Titus Gold (talk) 14:06, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Templates for currency and per capita calculations in demographic lists

There are a lot of list articles with tables full of demographic data based on GDP and so on, and they generally converted currency figures to US dollars as a standard for comparability, and for column sorting.

I noticed that editors at List of cities by GDP were doing their own currency conversions to calculate US dollar values from other currencies, and also doing their own per-capita GDP calculations in the table rows, but this is error-prone both for calculation mistakes, as well as pulling the wrong currency conversion factor, or in the case of different editors using conversion factors from different sources, which makes values in different table rows incomparable. Templates {{To USD}} and {{To USD round}} are available for converting a GDP or other currency figure into US dollars, and these should be used rather than editors pulling their own figures and doing the conversion themselves. When I searched around for a template for per capita calculations, I was surprised to see that there wasn't one.

So I created template {{Per capita}}. Please use it, and if you find any problems with it or if there's anything that isn't clear in the documentation, please raise a discussion at Template talk:Per capita. Same thing, if you have an enhancement to propose. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:50, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Perfect. ......thank you. Moxy- 23:13, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

United States

We have a mass of new editors ( yes perhaps a puppet but I think it's best we know who they are ). The article has been overwhelmed (Edits in the past 30 days 438) with mass copy pasting, addition of subpar sources and changes of neutral to non-neutral content. This has caused mass edit warning, multiple ongoing talks with walls of text, lots of POVs with very few sources. Just need more eyes on these new editors and perhaps some guidance. The article has grown by 1/8 in 5 months with edits related more to WP:Main article fixation over WP:Summary. Will also bring this up in wiki chat. Let's refrain from blocks and put our efforts into education of the editors. Moxy- 02:49, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Wondering if locking the page up till the 7 ongoing talks (with related edit wars) is over is best. Moxy- 20:04, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Proposed refactoring of geographic feature notability

We are discussing a proposal to refactor the guidelines for geographic feature notability. Please feel free to join in the discussion of this proposal. — hike395 (talk) 03:52, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Czech Republic RM

For the interested: Talk:Czech_Republic#Closure_of_"Rename_to_Czechia"_discussion Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:03, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Moxy- 02:51, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Mali government maps

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa#Mali_government_maps. —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 19:05, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Links being WP:UNDUE?

Hello, I recently started an RfC on Serbia about adding a "see also" note to the section on law and criminal justice to link to Crime in Serbia. Unfortunately it has not had any further input from uninvolved editors so I thought I would seek opinions and information here. The editor who disagreed with the addition is saying that the link is WP:UNDUE and "makes it looks like Serbia has more crime than other countries". I disagree, because the article is relevant to the context of law and criminal justice, readers should have easy access to it as MOS:BUILD advocates. The full discussion is on Talk:Serbia. TylerBurden (talk) 01:48, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Images in Albania article

Since 2018, there has been a tacit agreement at Albania to have a dual image illustrating the use of minority languages (Greek and Macedonian) in the country [1]. Today, 6 years after he first tried to remove the Greek language sign [2], Ktrimi991 (talk · contribs) has decided to try again, this time keeping only the Macedonian language sign, and removing the Greek language sign [3]. The ostensible reason is to avoid "breaking the text" (by which he means image sandwiching) [4], even though his edit does not resolve the image sandwiching one bit. I tried to resolve the issue, to no avail [5]. I opened a talkpage thread [6], from which it is apparent that the claims of image sandwiching are just an excuse to remove the Greek language sign. I find it very POV to leave in one of the minority language signs but to remove the other. Any help in resolving this would be greatly appreciated. In general, this articles suffers from a lot of POV activity, and the more eyes on it the better. Khirurg (talk) 18:06, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Article has image problems all over mainly image sandwiching and centered images that causes the whole article to have horizontal scrolling for many. Drop many images and any galleries WP:COUNTRYGALLERIE...as for language sign(s)...no room... dialects map should be bigger. Moxy- 04:00, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

@Moxy: I asked another editor to take a look at the pics in the article and remove/move some if need be, but they have not responded. I could do it myself but I am not sure which excatly. Can you make some improvements there, because it looks to me the article is hard to navigate on the phone because of having misplaced or redundant pics? Ktrimi991 (talk) 10:18, 7 June 2023 (UTC)