User:DJ Clayworth/UKFAQ

This page gives the answers to some questions that come up repeatedly with the relation to the United Kingdom page. The answers given here represent the consensus of the Wikipedia community, arrived at after an enormous amount of discussion.

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should not be called countries.
The four constituent parts of the United Kingdom are usually and officially referred to as countries. Organisations that do so include the UK Government and the United Nations see page 4, and many other similar references can be found.

What the four constituent countries are not is sovereign states. They do not have separate foreign policies or embassies, nor to they have total sovereignty over their areas. Many lists of countries do not include England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland because they are using country as shorthand for sovereign state. The word country is defined in some places as synonymous with sovereign state, but that is not the usage in the UK.

The United Kingdom is also a country, and also a sovereign state.

You should not use 'Britain' and 'British' to mean the United Kingdom
The terms Britain and Great Britain are sometimes used to refer to the United Kingdom, but they are not technically correct. Feel free to change any usages of those terms when they should mean United Kingdom (except in direct quotes).

The term British is best described by direct quote from the Ninth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names. [British] is the adjectival form of Britain, but the word is also frequently employed as the adjectival form of United Kingdom; thus "British government" is used at least as frequently as "United Kingdom government" and "British Citizen" is actually the correct official term for a citizen of the United Kingdom.

It is perfectly valid within Wikipedia to use the term British when describing the United Kingdom. While some may dislike the use of the term, it is no less correct - and no more likely to change - than the use of "American" as the adjectival form of the United States. See British Isles (terminology) for more information.