Talk:Administrative divisions of Algeria

Naming
(moved from Talk:Provinces of Algeria) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:14, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

In the English Wikipedia, the pages about Algerian wilayas have been created using the English word provinces. However, in the Maghreb area, the Arabic wilaya and the English province are not synonimous : In Morocco, a wilaya is the administration of a region (governed by a wali), while a province is a subdivision of lower level, governned by a governor. Moreover, while speaking in a foreign lnguage (such as French, for exemple), Algerian keep using the word wilaya.

As I'm currently working on Algeria's locations, can we reach a consensus on a naming convention for Algerian wilayas, daïras (subdivision of wilayas) and communes ? --Revas 15:36, 8 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Wilaya sounds good to me; translating it as "province" sounds odd, although it doesn't contrast with "province" in an Algerian context. - Mustafaa 00:44, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Morocco may be a problem. As subdivisions of Russia are kind of a problem. IIRC all other or quite good to translate and to be used by an english word. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:14, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Can you help to improve Template:Arabic terms for country subdivisions and the corresponding articles? E.g. add words in arabic script if missing, check translations. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:44, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

moved from User_talk:Tobias Conradi
(move here by Tobias Conradi (Talk) 21:42, 9 June 2006 (UTC))

Hi, The problem is that the word province is inacurate and is not used to speak about the Algerians wilayas. Moreover, the terms of Algiers, Oran and Constanine provinces do not refer to current wilayas but to the regions administrated the French Army between 1830 (fall of Algiers) and 1848 (creation of the départements, who are not wilayas...). That is why I first moved the article to wilayas of Algeria. An editor asked me to talk about it before making a decision, that's what I did on the talk page of this article. Can you please answer there and explain your opinion ? It would have been nice to do it before moving the page. Thank you --Revas 21:37, 9 June 2006 (UTC)


 * there are a lot of examples where borders change and provinces/departments etc split. Oran Department has two meanings, so can Oran Province. One can use dab for this by adding the "owner-country", e.g. Oran Province (France) and Oran Province (Algeria). Tobias Conradi (Talk) 21:46, 9 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm the author of the French article about Oran (département) and I didn't knew it had 2 meanings... The main issue is that province is not a word used to speak about Algerian wilayas, even in English. It's the same thing for Spain : the wikipedia article does not speak about regions (Regions of Spain is a red link, maybe we should create a redirect) but Autnomous communities.
 * Why can't we have wilaya in the title of the article, redirect from province and explain in the article that Algerian wilayas are grosso modo similar to most of western provinces ?--Revas 21:56, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
 * We can have wilayah, but this is kind of inconsistent. Look at Category:Subdivisions by country - allmost all use english terms. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 04:04, 10 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with Revas, province just is not the appropriate term when talking about algerian wilayas. The same way you cannot translate french régions province (which has in France a very special meaning) you can't translate wilaya by province. In fact wilaya is already kind of a "translation" (only phonetical) of the original arabic term. Maybe a redirect from Province to Wilaya is a balanced solution. Mrambil