Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries/Archive 14/Synth issue worksheet

Per the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries#Assistance requested with SYNTH issue in country demographic articles, all of these articles contain a table of demographic data broken down by county or region, along with a column labeled, "Equivalent country" or "Comparable country", where the GDP (or HDI) of a given region or county is compared with the GDP/HDI of some other country in the world; for example, in the "Sweden" article, the county of "Stockholm" was compared to the GDP of the Dominican Republic, as the two apparently have a similar GDP. However, this country-comparison column is WP:Original research, because no source contains this comparison; it is an invention of the Wikipedia editor who added the column.

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of articles that may need attention for WP:SYNTH issues of this type:

Article list

June 2024

Most or all of these were listed in the previous section and corrected once before; they have recurred in Spring 2024.

1. List of administrative divisions of Vietnam by Human Development Index
2. List of administrative units of Pakistan by Human Development Index
3. List of districts of Botswana by Human Development Index
4. List of federal subjects of Russia by Human Development Index
5. List of Georgian regions by Human Development Index
6. List of German states by Human Development Index
7. List of Indian states by infant mortality rate
8. List of Malaysian states by Human Development Index
9. List of regions of Bangladesh by Human Development Index
10. List of regions of Niger by Human Development Index
11. List of Ukrainian regions by Human Development Index
12. Provinces of Fiji
13. Regions of Thailand

Please check the box after fixing any SYNTH issue.

Methodology

The tables usually involve four columns, of which the fourth is a "comparable country" column. Generally, the fix involves three things:

1. Remove the header cell which contains the term Comparable country (or similar expression like Equivalent country etc.) and the source reference included with it.
2. Certain cells occupy the whole row, that is, they span the whole width of the table. If the table is four columns, you'll find something like | colspan="4" The "4" needs to be changed to "3" (or whatever one less than the previous number of table columns would be).
3. In rows that have an individual cell in the last column (i.e., not a colspan), the cell needs to be removed. Typically it contains a country name template (like {{NAM}}) or a flag (like {{flag|GER}}), sometimes a flag icon (like {{flagicon|FRA}}). It may be preceded by a rowspan (when two adjacent rows have the same country name in the last column), or by a style statement; these need to be taken into account. The last cell in a table is always followed by a new row delimiter (|-, usually by itself, but could have a style attribute), so you can look for a country or flag template, followed by |- on the next line.

If you normally use the source editor, try the Visual Editor, which has tools for removing columns from tables.

Some "comparable" expressions: Comparable country, Comparable countries, Comparable economy, Equivalent country, Country similar in area, Country/Indian state, Country comparison, Countries of comparable size, Comparable entity/-ies.

Find candidates

These are all list articles, so you can search for "List of" along with some of the other strings frequently seen, like, "List of * by Human Development Index", or "List of * by GDP", and so on.

You can also target just list articles that have tables in them, plus the string "comparable country" or "equivalent country" that appears in the header of the column that normally should be deleted, like this (ideally, all of these links should show no search results):

• insource:"Comparable country" insource:"wikitable sortable" intitle:"List of"

• insource:"Equivalent country" insource:"wikitable sortable" intitle:"List of"

• Both country + plural, drop "List of": insource:/Comparable countr[eisy]*/ insource:"wikitable sortable" intitle:"by"

Note that if an "insource" search returns a result for an article, but upon viewing it, there doesn't appear to be such a column, you should investigate further. The article may contain the table embedded within html hidden comment delimiters, those columns should be removed as well. This was the case, for example, in List of Indonesian provinces by GDP, through revision 1105861293‎ of 22 August 2022.

As of 1 September 2022, all three searches above come up empty, so it may be that all articles are repaired, or at least, any that are left don't fit the pattern.