Talk:List of countries by coast/area ratio

Reccomendation to editors of the article:
When you make a change in one field of the table, apart from the need of citing this change, you must also be aware that there are more fields affected by this change.

Unfortunately, WP is not EXCEL, so these changes are not made automatically to all other fields. Please keep this in mind and do the necessary math. More precisely:


 * If you change the Land area, you must also change the Coast/Area Ratio
 * If you change the Land boundary, you must also change both the Total perimeter and the Coast/Perimeter Percentage
 * If you change the Coastline, you must change both the Coast/Area Ratio and the Coast/Perimeter percentage


 * IN ALL CASES: There may be need for reordering the countries. This is something you must also do.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, message me here and I'll do that change for you. N i k o  S il v e r  (T)@(C) 15:58, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Clarification of coastline figures
Data for multi-island countries like Japan seem to exclude interior coastlines. The total perimeter has the same length as the coastline, which is only true if you exclude coastline that is not also a national boundary. This would greatly reduce the coast/area ratios for such archipelagic countries, depending on how many islands they are made up. I would imagine Indonesia's rank would get a big boost if the true coastline is used. Polaron 23:33, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * The data was taken from List of countries by compactness which was in turn taken from the CIA World Factbook. I agree with your comment, but the whole thing is rather complicated: We need to find a credible source that incorporates all countries' coastlines and has measured them with the same map scale. Otherwise the figures will be much more distorted than omitting internal coasts (figures increase exponentially at higher scales). Up to now, this has been impossible. If you can provide such a source, I'll be glad to incorporate all new figures in this list and all relevant lists. Please also refer to Talk:List of countries by length of coastline. (Also, please keep in mind that I am Greek, and proud of my country's coast, as seen in my userpage...)  N i k o S il v e r   (T) @ (C) 20:16, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Montenegro is twice.
Someone should check that. bogdan 22:47, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Right Align?
Would it not be easier to read these numbers if they were right-aligned? That way all the units would line up. --RealGrouchy 18:01, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Norway
The Norway entry is obviously wrong - Norway has a big long land boundary with Sweden, so having the coastline being 97% of the perimeter seems completely off.

Perhaps the "perimeter" measurement is instead the length of the land boundary? Then the percentage would be closer to 50%, which seems more plausible to me. pne (talk) 13:04, 3 July 2008 (UTC) (ADD) The reason the Norwegian coast to land ratio is so high is because of the small crevices in the coastline.