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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jtdirl (talk | contribs) at 01:59, 16 December 2002 (some additional info). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The page was so long that people were having difficulty editing it: a lot of talk has been moved to Talk:Ireland (archive) - some of it is still relevant to the discussion, but as I say, the page was too big for people to edit

Two additional factual points: The Republic of Ireland's 1937 constitution mentions two entities - the 32 county 'national territory' island and the 26 county 'state.' It refers to Éire or in english 'Ireland' but doesn't define which (if either or both) means which entity.

'Irish music/language' etc is complex, because alongside two states, Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland, there are unionists/nationalists, both in each state (though unionists predominantly in Northern Ireland). Each defines the other's culture as alien and in general not part of their heritage; 'gaelic games' (nationalist), (Lambeg drum) unionist, Irish language/music (nationalist) Arts/sports, etc from both communities probably belongs on the page of Ireland, but subject to the qualification of which community sees them as their heritage.

Yes it is complicated, Scipius, but whether it is South Africa, Israel, or the two Irish states, Wikipidia needs to be able to accurately explain those complex differences. My county is bedevilled by foreigners trying to treat its complex problems though simplistic analysis. A one page 'Ireland' would simply add to that problem. Wikipidia and Ireland deserve better, especially in the light of the Good Friday Agreement, which attempts to recognise, accept and validate that complexity, not pretend it does not exist. PLEASE SCIPIUS DO NOT DO WHAT YOU ARE PROPOSING. (from an Irish Nationalist from the Republic of Ireland on the island of Ireland) JTD

I understand you would like to use more accurate terms, but, in the interest of usability, we don't always do that. If this was an encyclopedia dealing with only Ireland (the Irish Gaelic Misplaced Pages will likely be that way) or if Ireland was an isolated and unique case then there would be no problem. Of course we would disambiguate along your viewpoint. But Ireland is not unique in being a culture divided politically and historically across multiple modern nation-states and I don't see why it should be an exception to other cases. By using the common English name for the country we also avoid the appearance of giving in to local political sentiments, but we can explain the full situation separately. Given your feelings and the number of great articles you've written, perhaps it would be best to write an overall article on the Irish Question (or whatever you want to call it) and link to it from the disamb-top of the current article? That would make it clear we do recognise the issue, but make a concession solely based on usability and convention.-Scipius 18:19 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

So--what is the conclusion, here? That only Scipius defends the view that the article titled "Ireland" should contain only information about the Republic of Ireland? If that's correct, I think we should make the "Ireland" article a unified treatment of the history, culture, etc., of the whole island. We should also have an article called Republic of Ireland that addresses topics that are importantly unique to the South. I would like to see Irish traditional music linked from an article, titled Ireland, which treats all wonderful and troubled aspects of the island civilization known as Ireland. I would prefer not to see it linked from island of Ireland or Republic of Ireland. --Larry Sanger

The current article most certainly does contain information on the island (roughly equivalent to the pre-template version that nobody was offended by), it's just that it now focuses on the country. Why would it be a problem to link to Irish music from an article on the Republic? You could simply have it link from and to both the Republic and NI. You appear to argue we should strictly topics along political lines, but are you prepared to make this general policy or not, because it will entail a lot of work and it's a reversal of what we've done up till now. -Scipius 18:19 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

I think I agree with everything Larry said. For the record, I honestly have no feelings on the subject of how the island should be split up politically, except in that I always support the smallest possible unit of government (I think the counties should be the largest unit of political organization) and if I linked to Ireland, I would expect an article on the island, the culture of the Irish people (music, poetry, literature) and a history of the island that would mention that after whenever, the island was split between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. After reading the above, I honestly don't have any idea who's on which side, or even what the sides are, but that's what I think it should be. Potly, yours Tokerboy

I've always been for an article on the island at Ireland, and one on the Republic at Republic of Ireland. I'll move the pages around as required later (when I feel up to it), and pad out the article on the island some. --Camembert

sounds good to me. Or Eire for the republic (with redirect from Republic of Ireland -- Tarquin 17:51 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

In conclusion, I remain of the opinion we should have the article "Ireland" deal primarily with the Republic. Primarily because this is what we do with other cases, notably China. I am somewhat disappointed that no-one besides myself appears to address this issue: If we disambiguate Ireland along strict political lines, then should we also do this for China, or for topics like Greece and Germany, where the current state does not match all our references to it?

This is the reason why I feel this discussion belongs at WikiProject Countries and not here. Everyone seems to consider only Ireland and not the larger picture, which will involve a significant restructuring of the WikiProject and many other pages and links on Misplaced Pages. Can someone please explain why Ireland alone should be broken up and not China or the others? -Scipius 18:19 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

The fact that you are apparently alone in your opinion, Scipius--unless your recent remarks have convinced anyone to change their views (they haven't mine)--means that we should change the page so that "Ireland" treats of Ireland, rather than of the Republic of Ireland. --Larry Sanger

Not necessarily. What is your position on the questions I asked you? - Scipius 20:45 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

Of course not necessarily. I'm not aware of having an obligation to reply to your questions, before I state my own personal opinion, or for that matter even before we (Wikipedians interested in the issue) decide the issue. If you really want my opinion on a list of questions, for some reason (it shouldn't be because I am making the decision--that is something done by all of us together), then could you please do me the favor of actually listing out the questions? Basically, everything above has become extremely messy. If you can explain precisely what you think needs addressing, that would be a great help.

I think you haven't really taken adequate account of what others have said. I think there has to be a point at which debate is over and a decision is made. The fact that you are adamant in your opinion, and that you are so bold as to attempt to reply to everyone, should not, ultimately, have any bearing on what decision is taken. --Larry Sanger

So Scipius, will a page on 'United Kingdom' only refer to England, Korea refer to South Korea, South America only cover Brazil? From memory, most encyclopedias I've ever consulted if they do Ireland's history & politics, stop at 1922 and say 'See Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland' for post 1922, when Ireland de facto became two states, which it has been for 80 years. NO-ONE agrees with you. Not one single person. Furthermore the China article is irrelevant. The PRC and the ROC are rival claimants to authority over Taiwan and the mainland. Ireland has two, mutually accepting, legitimate states. There is no comparison. The issue of 'Ireland' has clearly been decided by the users of Wikipidia. They have over-ruled you. If the rules you constantly refer to don't work in this case, then they, not Ireland, need to be changed. Issue closed. Case closed. Not lets get back to work. JTD

You'll see that I have gone to the Talk:China page (I hadn't noticed the dispute until now) and added my comments. I agree, the cases are very similar, and I think it's just as obvious that China should be about China, the whole kit and kaboodle, as that Ireland should be about Ireland, not just part of it. --Larry Sanger

I brought this issue up on Wikien-l. See http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2002-December/000235.html --Larry Sanger

Thanks Larry, that was exactly my main issue: how are we going to treat other cases? Given that we've now established a connection, shall we move this discussion to Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Countries, where we can tackle both Ireland and China in general terms, as well as discuss other cases? E.g., this could go beyond these two similar cases and spread into cases like Germany or Greece. Perhaps you could repost your mailinglist post there. What do you say? -Scipius 22:40 Dec 8, 2002 (UTC)

I'm not really interested in debating about general policies. Please carry on without me on the WikiProjects page, and let's just change the Ireland and China articles. No offense but I've always, from the very beginning, been suspicious of WikiProjects. Not to say that it's not useful (the tables and a common look and feel, I must admit, is kind of neat and has clear value), I just don't want to encourage the creation of a lot of rules that tend to be taken WAY too seriously (as in this case). Besides, I would like to have a few professional geographers on board before I start taking relevant WikiProjects really really seriously. --Larry Sanger

One Very Final Point: I've looked at the page on the History of Ireland and much of it is complete garbage - dates wrong, facts wrong, numbers wrong, interpretation way off. When I get a chance I'll do a major re-write there. (I'm supposed to be writing 2 books of my own, but all this Wikipidia work is distracting me!!!) JTD

So, let's move this...please don't wait for me to do it, I'm lazy.  :-) --Larry Sanger

OK, I've moved this page here, and moved the old "Island of Ireland" page to Ireland. At a glance, it seems some of the subpages also need renaming: I've moved Geography of Ireland to Geography of the Republic of Ireland, for instance. Hopefully, I'll be able to do some more work on these pages when I have time - right now, I have none. --Camembert

I believ i heard somewhere that teh offical name of Ireland is Ireland not Republic of Ireland. I'll look at the source where i found that info when i get home. -fnzy

The official name of the state as given in the constitution is indeed "Éire", the English equivalent of which is "Ireland" - however, there's a problem here because "Ireland" is also used for the name of the island on which the state is located, so it is necessary for us to give the modern-day state a more precise name (at least, this is how most people see it, though there is some disagreement on the matter). The above disucssion, plus the archived discussion on Talk:Ireland (archive) covers this. --Camembert

Alright, it's becoming clear that my opinion is not really appreciated, but I'll try one more time. My main issue with the renaming is that it is inconsistent with what we do elsewhere and it has also made many links less usable for the moment. None of you cared to address this issue (other than "I don't give a damn"), until it finally dawned on Larry and he seems content to limit his involvement to just Ireland and China. Unfortunately, this goes beyond just Ireland and China and this is why I feel this needs to be discussed in general terms. Are we going to make exceptions for China and Ireland and leave cases like Germany or Greece alone or what? I am actually quite sympathetic to a more accurate approach, but I would like it clearly established, as it will have consequences for the WikiProject and a great many links to countries and articles. -Scipius 20:07 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

Scipius, this is getting ridiculous. The reason why no-one is taking your opinion seriously is because it is NOT WORTH taking seriously. Now you are acting like a spoiled kid, who if they can't get their own way, takes the football away and goes into a sulk. Stop acting like you were the only one on the planet whose opinion matters. The pages as re-arranged finally made sense. SO PUT THEM BACK. And go off and find some other pages you can screw up. (And before anyone complains, the text I removed to make space here was MY text, which obviously Scipius doesn't play a blind but of notice to!) JTD PS: The great CIA factbook you seem so devoted to is as usual wrong in many of its facts.

Well, I guess I'm finished talking to you. -Scipius 19:54 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

I think you're misrepresenting what's going on, Scipius. I didn't make any new points when I commented about China; I simply applied the commonsense principles people had been using on this page to the analogous issues on that page. If you feel it needs to be discussed in general terms, go ahead, but don't feel put out so much if people fail to care terribly, terribly much about whatever conclusion you arrive at: we'll take one issue at a time, thank you, rather than taking orders from a priori principles that turn out to be not very well thought out. If anything you'd do the WikiProject a service by reporting our findings there. --Larry Sanger

But what if a different conclusion is reached then is agreeable to people here? As mav pointed out in the mailinglist (regretfully, I can't join you there, though I do read the list), do we start disambiguating along strict historic lines? We already do this to an extent and as the history articles get longer it may be a good move for reducing the length of the page, but if we follow your viewpoint we should do this for all countries where the historical sense of the nation does not wholly match the current state, such as Greece or Germany. This is pertinent for the WikiProject, as we will probably have to rewrite certain articles' History sections and adopt this for future articles. Also, there are many links that currently assume there's only one concept of the country and we'll need to go through them all.

One might say, "we'll deal with that when it becomes a problem", but I'd like to have it set clearly somewhat before, as this whole unfortunate experience has shown that people often do not take the simple trouble to look at the larger picture and work to solve that. If however the community has made a decision at a central location then at least we'll be able to point to that, rather than a page that may not seem relevant to others. I've started the topic at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Countries, I hope to see you there. -Scipius 19:54 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Scupius - why did you remove most of the info on this page with the edit summary "Withdrawing template"? I note it was marked as a minor edit, which it most certainly was not. I've put the old version back, because it contains far more information. As for concerns about inconsistency and so forth - the people who care about the WikiProject are the ones who need to sort things out there - it shouldn't be the concern of editors who just want to edit this article (or the China one, or any other) and make it as good and accurate as possible. As for making "many links less usable" - what links are these? It's true that Ireland is a hopeless stub at the moment, but it will be expanded, for sure. --Camembert

I've removed it (and again did so), because this page (and especially the title) is no longer compatible with the template as it is now, nor is it accurate in all regards. For instance, the History section talks about the whole of Ireland and that may have to change. I obviously made a mistake in applying the template to this country and there's been somewhat of a backlash against the project here and as such it's best to remove it all together until the WikiProject is something that's less controversial. It's not a big problem, anyone can edit the current article for accuracy and such (you can probably do better than I did) and we can easily reapply the template at a later date, using whatever information is available by that time. As for usability, it's apparent that that is not the major concern for the moment. Please leave the template off for the moment, it'll be back soon enough. You're right though, it wasn't a minor edit, I was aiming for the "Watch this article" button. Sorry about that. -Scipius 19:54 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Well, I must admit, I'm a little confused. It's true that the history section talks a little about the island pre-Republic, but I think that's useful to give a little historical context to the country. So long as it isn't expanded too much, it should be fine (more on the breakaway of the southern 26 counties which brought the Republic into existence would be good, though). I can see nothing in the rest of the template-version which refers to the island as a whole, and nothing which is inaccurate. So why can't we have it here? You're surely not saying that it can't be here because it doesn't fit in with the WikiProject template, or because the template is under review, are you? That seems very odd to me - the project should serve the articles, not the other way round. If the template is going to change in some way, then fair enough, but why can't we have the old, and most informative, version of the page here in the meantime? --Camembert

We don't know what the template will look like once this is all resolved. Take a look at the links to the various "Main article:" sections, they all still have "of Ireland". Furthermore, the template article contained information about the whole of Irleand that was far more extensive than the Ireland article. This gives the impression the Republic article is our main article, something which all of you disagree with, especially since you've renamed the pages. Since you're unfortunately not interested in joining the WikiProject, I also thought this would be a better way for you all to add what you feel is important (since the template article was mostly a combination of my writing and the CIA's) and we can then work the new template around that. I realise this page is less usable, but then, so is Ireland. If you're truly interested in quality, perhaps it would have been better to rename only after you'd written a good overall "Ireland" article. I hope this will spur you on and rest assured, the template will be back in its full glory soon enough. -Scipius 21:39 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

This gives the impression the Republic article is our main article, something which all of you disagree with - well, I don't disagree that the Republic article is the main article about the Republic! I never really had any concnerns with the content of this page before (ie in the template version which you have removed) and I still don't - the problem was with the title, not the content. It's accurate, and covers everything that needs to be covered. So I guess I still don't understand the problem. But, I don't have enough time to look closely at this right now, so I'm just going to leave it, and hopefully other people will get on with it. I'll still do up the Ireland page if nobody else does sooner (I don't think that the fact that Ireland is currently weak should have any bearing on what is on this page, by the way). Good luck to everybody else. --Camembert

I'm utterly confused now. Which version are we sticking with, and who decides? One minute we have a high quality version, the next minute a shortened version full of dodgy figures, that loses all the contributions that everyone has made. I know Scipius disagrees with the decision that was taken, but what has that to do with the template? In any case, 'Ireland' in some areas does act as an all-island unit (religion, for example, is organised on a 32 county basis!). Having some element of 'all-the island' is no problem, once you make it clear that the politically since 1920/2 Ireland is made up of two states and that historically both states have evolved separately since then.

I know Ireland is a confusing case, but surely the basic unit that we should focus on is the state as it currently exists (The Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland), with background info that explains the contextual relationships that exist, which in these cases are (1) between the North and South states; (2) between the island as a unit (culturally, religiously etc), (3) between the various Irelands and Great Britain, given the length and complexity of the relationship there. The existing template can be adapted to do this. There is no need to take it all out and replace it with a dodgy list of statistics that will give readers little more than a headache (not to mention infuriate Irish people with their glaring inaccuracies. If these are from some CIA yearbook, and that's the level of knowledge the CIA possesses about the rest of the world, God Help America!!!) (PS - Sorry for being a tad rude earlier, Scipius. Didn't mean to get personal, but thought your behaviour completely unacceptable and wrong in re-doing the pages the way you did!) JTD

Well, I'm sorry, but if you state that you do not value my opinion, then why bother asking for it now? I think I've been friendly towards you, but if this is not at least somewhat reciprocated, then my interest in discussing things with you has ended. -Scipius 21:39 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Scipius, I do value your opinion, and admire the work you have done on Misplaced Pages. Again I apologise for being rude. Maybe the problem is we both take Misplaced Pages very seriously (which it deserves to be) and want to see things done correctly. I've had a stressful week (bad flu, demands from my publisher for completed chapters of my books, death of a friend last week, etc) so I been a bit sharper than I normally am with everyone. We disagree on how the Republic of Ireland page should be, but we both think it important to get it right. So I'll make a suggestion. While some of the 'old' page was applicable to the island of Ireland, other bits were applicable to the Republic (eg, religion, some of the links, etc.) While you re-do the template, could you transfer back those bits of the old version that are relevant to the new page. But as I said, I DO value your opinion, even if I disagree with it. I have spent far more time than I ever expected adding in references, definitions and explanations on Irish affairs and your interest in Ireland is most welcome. JTD

Apologies accepted of course, you can read my reply to your e-mail for more. As for the template, it all depends on what the outcome for the WikiProject will be. Tell you what, I'll put the table back in, as that strictly contains only uncontroversial info on the Republic. The rest can wait until all is resolved. -Scipius 22:52 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

Scipius, thanks for the change. I've added in some additional information specifically defined as referring to the ROI and contextualised it as such, as well as some external links to Dáil Éireann and the main political parties. It should make the page useful to readers in its current formats. JTD