Wikipedia:WikiProject National geography

The Problem
Almost all of our country articles are based on the CIA World Factbook, a public domain document. We have taken the information and created separate subpages for each of the sections, such as our History of…, Geography of…, Demographics of…, etc. pages. In most cases, these articles mimic the information give in the Factbook, and can be found in various formats throughout the Internet.

Personally, I would like to see us going beyond cutting and pasting standard information, easily available anywhere, and create new information that is unique to Wikipedia. I am inspired by the infoboxes created for each country, and especially by the in-depth work done by people like Mav on his geographic articles about various regions in the United States. That is a more in-depth, encyclopedic approach, far preferable to listing bare statistics in a dry format that exists elsewhere.

The Beginnings of a Solution
I'd like to start resolving this with the country geography pages, such as Geography of Gabon. I believe that the basic information can be placed in a Geo-infobox of our design, leaving room for more in-depth text about the specific geography of each country. That can also be formatted in an appropriate manner, with links to further subtopics.

Geography of Ireland and Geography of India are two Featured Articles that should be emulated.

Getting Started
To get started, I propose that we devise a geography infobox for each country. It will contain such information as:
 * Area
 * Coordinates
 * Coastline
 * Highest point
 * Lowest point
 * % Arable land
 * % Forests
 * Natural resources
 * Geographic subregions
 * etc.

Each article will also contain an outlined overview of the country's geography, written as an encyclopedic essay.

Interested participants

 * Danny
 * TTLightningRod
 * Mark
 * Neutralitytalk: This has been a project of mine for a while and I'm pleased we finally have a formal Wikiproject for it. I've been working on geography of Côte d'Ivoire
 * Ambi
 * 500LL
 * ContrillionAU (talk) 09:48, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * User:Eiman 2001

What Next?
Let's plan the infobox and create an outline for what should appear in the essay. I propose we begin with Gabon, a small country that has recently been a blip on my radar screen.

See also: Status