Talk:Region
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[edit] Cleanup tag
What sort of cleanup does this article need? It seems not a great article, but more in need of further work rather than cleanup, unless I'm missing something... what did the cleanup tagger have in mind? Pfly 19:34, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
- Chiefly the intro needs cleanup. It is currently like a dictionary entry - and of course Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Another issue, besides cleaning up the intro, is the relationship between region and subregion. One would expect a subregion to be a subdivision of a region, rather than a region being a subdivision of a subdivision (country) of a subregion! I have already suggested the best solution to this is to rename the subregion article. Nurg 23:30, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Ok, I see the problem better now. What the region and subregion pages need is less focus on listing existing regions but on describing the concept of region, its history of use, ideas on how a particular region becomes recognized as a region, etc. One of the things that I've noticed is the focus on using political units as regional building blocks -- on the region and subregion pages as well as most of the pages about specific regions. For example, Midwestern United States is defined as a group of states, with some states maybe or maybe not being Midwestern. It seems to be a given that regions in the United States are made up of groups of states. Somewhere I suggested that Texas could be seen as a region in the same sense as New England or the Midwest. The Texas region need not correspond perfectly to the political Texas. It may have more to do with the "cultural region" of Texas than the state. But I was told Texas cannot be a region: regions are made of multiple states.
Anyway, this little story is to illustrate the idea that while I can accept there being a wikipedia guideline/policy of making pages about regions of the United States based on a multiple state criterion, I think the word "region" can and often is used in a much broader way. So the page "region" could be, at least in part, about this kind of exploration of the term.
Also, Nurg, I see the weirdness about subregions being described as larger than regions. It seems to me this is the kind of weirdness that can happen when terms that are actually quite vague and general get defined, described, and used in wikipedia in limited ways. The subregion page seems to describe global "subregions", based on a multiple nation criterion, much as the United States region pages use a multiple state method. Both are just one of many many ways the words are used. The weirdness results for focusing on just one usage and not on others, I think.
Anyway, I'll try to find some time to see what I can do! Pfly 01:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] A Plan
Continue to add sections specific to different branches of geography and describe their differing uses of regions. Clean up the Political regions section, make it less a bunch of lists. Get rid of the Geographic region section (all regions are "geographic"), but try to salvage whatever text is worthwhile. Better "see also" list, better categorization. Pfly 23:57, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
