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/cr…
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_.28islan…
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