Talk:List of FIPS region codes

source
Note: taken from U.S. Federal Government public domain resource at http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/fips10-4.html.

This list was machine-reformatted from the source HTML cited above, and needs some copyediting to bring up to scratch. -- Anon.


 * Question: Where are the countries of the former Soviet Union? -- The Anome 12:20, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

OK. I've just noticed the change notices. Oh dear, oh dear. A major revamp will have to follow. -- The Anome 11:51, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

It's **baack**, this time with 3354 subnational regions, machine-generated from the latest GNS data. Clearly, more processing is needed before this can be fully interlinked with the existing structures, but the data here is good enough to start to expose to the world as a work-in-progress. More updates soon-- The Anome 19:20, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Context & good luck...
Good luck with transforming links such as into and could we have a bit more context without need to click thru to other pages ... I've started the process. Have fun & thanks for the list. --Tagishsimon (talk)
 * UKA1: London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, United Kingdom
 * UKA1: London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, United Kingdom

There is something wrong with Aireborough is part of Leeds. My guess is that it is many decades since it was a different place --Henrygb 19:36, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * UK00: Aireborough, United Kingdom

Regarding linking to other pages, it's on it's way However, a lot of rather fancy fuzzy pattern-matching is needed to do the necessary work, with manual review to catch the remaining misses. The last take on this got about 2/3 of them: I have a cunning plan to do better this time. To help me, I would greatly appreciate it if people could help translate the following words which denote types of areas into their conventional English names, as used in Wikipedia (I've already done a couple):

Amt Apskritis => County Autonoma => Autonomous Avtonomnyy => Autonomous Aymag => Province Baladiyat => Municipality Binh Bundesland => Federal state Bwrdeistref => Borough ("Bwrdeistref Sirol" = "County Borough") Changwat => Province Comunidad => Community Departamento => Department Departement => Department Distrikt => District Distrito => District Division => Division Dzongkhag => District Estado => State Fylke => County Gemeinde => Municipality Gobolka Gorod # Just appears to mean "town" or "city"... Gouvernorat => Governorate # Let's take a wild guess... Ili iProvense Judetul Kanton => Canton Khett Khoueng Kraj => land, territory Laani Lan Land Megye Mintaqah => Region Mintaqat => Region Muhafazat => Governorate Nakhon Negeri Nomos => Prefecture Oblast' => Oblast Oblast => Oblast    # there does not seem to be any correct translation Oblysy => Oblast Okrug => District Opstina Ostan-e Parroquia Propinsi Provincia => Province Provincie => Province Quang Quarter Raioni => District Raionul => District # Moldova Rajons => District # or possibly county? Rayonu => District Regione => Region Respublika => Republic Sahari Sheng Sirol (County (adjective) see Bwrdeistref, above) Tinh Velayat-e Viloyati Voblasts' => Oblast Wilayah => Province Wilaya => Province Wilayat => Province Wojewodztwo => Voivodship Zupanija

-- The Anome 20:16, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Note to self: OK, see also WikiProject_Subnational_entities/Naming, and also CIA World Factbook Field Listing - Administrative divisions -- The Anome 07:20, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

Progress
OK, I now have a list of the names of about 4100 subnational entities with their proper English region classes (where translatable, a transliteration of the correct local name when not), based on a recently-updated copy of the CIA factbook data. Now to cross-reference this with:
 * 1) the GNS dataset
 * 2) the titles of Wikipedia articles

More to come...

-- The Anome 13:14, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

First pass of the above, done. There are plenty of machine-generated solecisms in the output, but it is more complete and up-to-date than any previous data set here, and entirely machine-generated from the GNS data, CIA factbook data, and a list of Wikipedia articles. -- The Anome 19:45, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

Russia
I fixed the Moscow federal city entry (probably it was mistype). Just a question - we have 89 subentities in Russia, so why there is no entry for Ingushetia in the list? MaxiMaxiMax 04:09, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Naming
Why don't we use one of those: ? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:16, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * *XX:wikipia-article name (easy, and helps the user to navigate in WP)
 * *XX:FIPS name (correct)


 * Which FIPS code would that be? The one in the original FIPS 10-4, or the versions amended by change notices 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9? Or the version that is currently in the official GNS database, which is currently not quite the same as any of the above, but is meant to be the authoritative data, if not the authoritative spec? (Which appears to the current basis for this list). And which of the several alternate names stored in the FIPS database for many of the FIPS 10-4 regions should we use?


 * A plea: PLEASE DON'T ATTEMPT TO FIX THE FIPS ENCODINGS THEMSELVES BY HAND -- that's what computer programs are for. Instead, can we all please keep on filling in the slots with links to articles, redirects or stubs: this will enable a "correct" version to be finally manufactured, from all the data sources, and this list. -- Karada 14:51, 1 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Which FIPS code would that be?
 * I was talking about names not codes. there are names on the website. of course allways ammended versions.
 * PLEASE DON'T ATTEMPT TO FIX THE FIPS ENCODINGS THEMSELVES BY HAND
 * why do you shout?
 * that's what computer programs are for
 * who's program?
 * all the rest I do not understand what you mean. what do you want to be manufactured? What is the relation to "Naming"? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 02:40, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Missing
UKH5: probably Leicestershire County, United Kingdom? -- Picapica 11:57, 16 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes. Except that "Leicestershire County, United Kingdom" is a horrible usage, as is "Barking and Dagenham London Borough".  I'd like to see this replaced by the correct usage of "County of Leicestershire", "London Borough of Barking and Dagenham" etc, except I'm scared to make this correction because of the above warnings.  Morwen - Talk 10:03, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This is a US coding system, so the chances of them understanding UK naming conventions is slim. In any case, isn't the correct non-tautological name "County of Leicester"? ;) Owain (talk) 10:20, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, if you look at the actual list you'll see an absence of "Georgia State" and suchforth, and Ireland has "County X". I'm more worried about the autogeneration of the list.  Morwen - Talk 10:45, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * exactly because it is a US coding system - why bother too much with UK naming conventions? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 02:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

UK list
since Morwen's edit the list is not near alphabetic as before, what might be in turn harder to read. All(?) other countries have the name (without descriptor) in front, except for Ireland, where the descriptor is constantly "county". The removed subsections are actually mentioned in the FIPS standard and maybe can help the reader to understand the order of the entries. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 02:04, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Afghanistan/ diacritics in general
I made an error in the edit summary  -fips uses diacritics. they just didn't exist in the basic list. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 02:11, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

New Zealand
The primary source is useless with respect to New Zealand:

In other words, the list is ridiculous not only because it is 16 years out of date, but because the 40 or so largest places in New Zealand at the time have been left off it. Try finding Wellington (the capital) or Auckland (the largest city).
 * The entities the list refers to are counties that were abolished in 1989.
 * Counties were only a small part of the local government structure, by far the majority of the population lived outside county boundaries in boroughs and cities. Boroughs and cities were not subordinate to counties, the county stopped where the borough began. In some cases the borough or city was an enclave, surrounded by a county, but for many of the biggest cities this was not the case.

Ben Arnold 23:26, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

splitting the list
i don't like splitting the list. was nice to have one central page. surveillance was easier. editing was not that difficult, because one could do it by section. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 20:13, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Update needed
As this FIPS standard has been withdrawn, the article needs to be updated to refer to the standard in the past tense and the superseding standard needs to be referenced. &mdash;Danorton (talk) 18:40, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Region codes in older versions of FIPS 10
On Eric Muller's site it has all the region codes from the various versions of FIPS 10-4 as well as one 10-3 revision. Does anyone have access to older versions of the standard, like e.g. 10-2, to see if there were region codes assigned in that version as well? In the codes for the Thai provinces it has one strange numbering which hints to a FIPS region code dating from nearly the beginning of the FIPS 10 standard. However there seem to be no online resources of these old standards to verify my guessing. andy (talk) 17:09, 21 December 2009 (UTC)