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.