Talk:List of countries and dependencies by population/Archive 4
Shouldn't there be a date on this. I mean are these like the correct population figures , this minute right now?
Good point. Fixed. --mav
There are a number of items here that aren't countries. I'm fairly sure that a lot of them shouldn't be listed here: the French overseas departments (St. Pierre et Miquelon, French Guyana, Reunion, Polynesia); the assortment of UK island dependencies (St. Helena, Montserrat, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands)--I'm less sure about the Channel Islands, Man, and Wight; the US territories (Guam, American Somoa, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico); the Netherlands Antilles. (The entry that just says "Virgin Islands" is probably meant to be the US Virgin Islands, by elimination.)
Those are the easy cases--autonomous regions like Greenland, and the odd status of Macau and Hong Kong, are going to be harder. But nobody claims that Bermuda, Montserrat, St. Pierre et Miquelon are independent countries. Vicki Rosenzweig
Good question. The US Census and the CIA Factbook have rather loose definitions in this regard. Is there another more sane method then please point me to the list and I will redo the numbering by deleting the numbers by non-nations. Perhaps we can define a nation based on UN membership? But then we would have to exclude several nations... Hmm... --mav
- Switzerland is not a UN member, so that would look ridiculous. Neither is Taiwan by the way, but that's a more debatable issue (I know...). Maybe the safest is to say "countries and dependent areas". Jeronimo
- I'd start by eliminating the French overseas departments. Colonies, autonomous regions, and the like are trickier, and we might have to do them case-by-case. The only place Puerto Rico counts as a country is in international sports competition--where England, Scotland, and Wales are also separate countries. There are people who want it to be independent, but they don't claim it already is. I don't know whether Greenland or the Faeroe Islands are treated as countries. Taiwan is de facto independent.
- Also, we should try to find out whether the population numbers for the country these territories are loosely part of include that territory: either to add them if they aren't already included (for places like French Guyana) or make sure the people of a territory aren't being listed both as population of dependent area and as part of population of separate nation. Vicki Rosenzweig
I propose something like this:
- France xx,xxx,xxx
- Mainland xx,xxx,xxx
- Guadeloupe xx,xxx
- Martinique xx,xxx
- French Guyana xxx,xxx
- etc.
In this way, we can still get the numbers for the "non-countries", since that is also interesting. Jeronimo
i quite like that idea. - fonzy
It looks like the other country lists don't include dependent areas. So as is, this list is useless when used with the others. I do very much like Jeronimo's suggestion though -- that way this list will be usable with the others and have additional interesting info on dependent areas. I will try to find time to do this during the weekend. --mav 12:18 Aug 15, 2002 (PDT)
- Me likes! Great job - that must have taken a while to do. --mav
No real problems, making it a table was easy (find-and-replace is a nice function), and some cut-n-paste work for the dependent areas. Was kinda surprised to not find all countries though, will look for these now. Jeronimo
Now that the table has noticable table cells, how about having the dependent areas in the same cell as their parent state (using < br > tags to make things line up)? --mav
- Yeah, that would look a lot better. Will tend to it later, have to do some real work now... I'm also working on the other lists (put some data in the density page, working on the area) Jeronimo
I reformatted China's area to show you what I am thinking of. --mav
- Looks OK, except for the dashes, they look ugly now. Also, maybe we need the total at the top or with some emphasis (bold, italic, whatever)? Jeronimo
- Modify away. The hard spaces could go or even the dashes completely. My original though was to bold the total but that would unbalance the article. Italic font would be good. However, unless this list is to be resorted by total population of all areas under the control of any particular nation (not something I would like), I don't think it would be a good idea to move the total to the top of the cell list. It's fine at the bottom and this is a logical place to have it. --mav
- Please check your figures for China. How can the total for China, Hong Kong and "Macau" (and check the spelling of Macao) be less than the population of China alone? --GUllman
The idea of adding together non-"American" territories into the population of the US seems odd. Are American Samoa and Guam, at least, ever included in the population of the US? -- Zoe
- Another thing that could be done is the name of the article could be changed. Kingturtle 03:39 Apr 4, 2003 (UTC)
For the UK, the is a difference between "overseas territory of the UK" (eg Bermuda, chief of state: Queen ELIZABETH II) and "British crown dependency" (eg Jersey, chief of state: Duke of Normandy ELIZABETH II [1]). The first case is similar to oversea territory of France, US, Netherlands... The second case is more like the odd situations of Monaco (dependent of France for defence & foreign policy), Andorra (dependent of France and Spain for defence), Vatican (dependent of Italy for defence), Liechtenstein (dependent of Switzerland for defence)... Ann O'nyme 14:51, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Technically, Queen Elizabeth II is not Duke of Normandy. That Dukedom was under Salic law. See Talk:Salic_law for the explanation. --Jiang
My point here is that the state of Jersey is independent of the UK, although the UK is in charge of defence and foreign affairs. I also comment on the "Duke of Normandy" title on Talk:Salic_law. --Ann O'nyme 22:18, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)
We should have some consistency: If we put Jersey with UK, we should put Niue with NZ.
--Ann O'nyme 02:25, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)