Talk:Micronesia

Caroline islands
The Caroline Islands are a widely scattered archipelago consisting of about 500 small coral islands, north of New Guinea and east of the Philippines. The Carolines consist of two republics: the Federated States of Micronesia, consisting of approximately 600 islands on the eastern side of the chain with Kosrae being the most eastern; and Palau consisting of 250 islands on the western side.

500 = 600 + 250?

 PizzaMan  ♨♨♨  13:27, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree this looks bad. It gets worse if you look at Palau, which says it has 340 islands, and that claim is supported by the government yearbook, p 3. I'm not so sure the figure for Federated States of Micronesia is accurate; the figure in the Wikipedia article is very specific at 607, and perhaps the sources I find online are just repeating this. The figure of 500 for the Caroline Islands is given in many places, including sources which predate Wikipedia. Oxford Reference is one source I found which gives a higher number: 680, which isn't enough to make the arithmetic fit.


 * It could be that either FSM or Palau have some islands which are not part of the Carolines, but I don't see any evidence for this. I think the problem is that counting islands depends on what one considers an island. Is a barren rock jutting out of the ocean just off shore an island? What about a sandbank which is only exposed at low tide? An atoll often has many cays; do you count one atoll or each cay?


 * The problem here is synthesis: we are combining figures from different sources, and when they all appear in the same paragraph we get this effect of the figures not adding up.- gadfium 22:32, 30 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The Great Soviet Encyclopedia says the Carolines have 936 islands or clusters which seems to be in accord with the country numbers. I suspect this work is not considered reliable on political matters, but it might be all right for geography. There probably are better sources yet to be uncovered.- gadfium 22:43, 30 May 2021 (UTC)


 * If the Soviet Encyclopedia is mathematically consistent, I'd say it'll do as a source.  PizzaMan  ♨♨♨  23:54, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Total island count
From the above discussion, it seems there are 500-936 in the Caroline Islands. Adding 16 in the Gilbert Islands, 15 in the Mariana Islands, and 1,156 in the Marshall Islands, this gives a count of about 2000. I've replaced "thousands" in the opening paragraph just now with "about 2000". Mebden (talk) 13:28, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

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Ogasawara?
I sometimes hear Ogasawara (and on occasions some of the southern Izu Islands) being described as Micronesian. Is there any grounds to this? And should they be included in this article? - Nintentoad125 (talk) 21:36, 28 January 2024 (UTC)