Cool Cat wrote:
If we are going to treat Kurdistan as a geographic
region, we should not tag
cities and other settlements at all with Kurdistan since we categorize
cities by country not geographic region.
In the _general_ case I disagree with this, there's no reason why cities
can't be categorized under both country-specific categories and
geographic categories. We could for example have [[Category:Cities in
the United States]] and [[Category:Cities in the Pacific Ocean]] and
have Honolulu be categorized under both of them (though this would
probably be done by categorizing it as [[Category:Cities in Hawaii]] and
then making it a subcategory of both). There may already be a system
like this, I don't know.
In this specific case, though, as you point out there are no
authoritative or widely-accepted borders for Kurdistan. So in this case
I don't believe a geographic category is wise. A Kurdistan category
should probably be limited to broader issues such as articles about the
effort to create/suppress such a country.
We do not even categorize cities by
continent let alone a controversial and tiny (in comparison to continents)
geographic region like Kurdistan.
But there's no reason why we couldn't. Since cities are already
categorized by country or province and most countries or provinces are
located entirely on one continent it'd be quite easy to set up a
parallel continent-based category tree by subcategorizing those.
We also have "geographic region" categories for many old, extinct
countries such as [[Category:Babylonia]].
A list would be better than a category [[List of
cities allegedly in
Kurdistan]] or something along the line (name I chose is probably not
perfect).
This would be better because each entry could provide the sources and
support for that particular city's inclusion or exclusion.
The scheme proposed by Neil Harris is fine for
countries but Kurdistan is
not a country as I stated above.
Some of the categories look okay to me, but a lot of them don't make
sense without the sort of unity that a real country has. Wouldn't
"Government of Kurdistan" include the governments of Turkey, Iraq and
Iran, and possibly others? That would be hard to make sense of.