Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Country subdivisions

Naming of concrete entities
see: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Subnational entities/Naming

Please see List of FIPS region codes for a long list of about 3500 subnational entities, a substantial number of which are now linked to the corresponding Wikipedia articles. Names on this page are in a canonical format of
 * name-in-local-language entity-type-in-English, country ,

where the country name is in English, except where the entity type is untranslatable (for example, as on oblast), in which case the native word is used,
 * name-in-local-language entity-type-in-local-language, country ,

or the native usage is totally different, in which case the format is
 * name-and-in-local-language-and-style, country

-- The Anome 19:55, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)


 * PS, regularizing the links for this page is likely to result in something marvellous happening... -- The Anome 14:27, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Naming of entity types
Currently except for China, all(?) pages (see: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Subnational entities/Naming) use plural like Provinces of Afghanistan. Some people say this is not in line with the wikipedia rule to use singular for article titles. China use singular like Province of China.

But this can be misleading, because "Province of Something" can mean the following:
 * a concrete entity like the Province of Utrecht
 * an entity-type (thus a set of entitities with known number of entries) like a Province of China

On the other hand, pluralisation can not be done for all entity-types, because there might be a type with only one entry (member).
 * e.g. Shennongjia Forestry Area is the only county-level forestry area of China. Hong Kong was the only special administrative region of China from 1997 to 1999.

Alternative could be to use singular and put in brackets the governing area like "Autonomous region (China)"

Tobias Conradi 05:28, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Suggestion and pointer
Hi all:

"Subnational entity"
Since say a company (or other organiz/sation) might be a "subnational entity", how about using "subnational division" instead...? I realise this amendment would affect (1) article disambiguation (e.g. Amt (subnational entity)); (2) categories such as Category:Subnational entities; and (3) a number of templates using the phrase; but I'd aim to work my through these. Thanks in advance for your thoughts, David Kernow (talk) 06:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC)


 * using the word subnational at all seems bad. Some subnational entities in fact are national entities. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 11:58, 22 September 2006 (UTC)


 * What kind of "entities" do you have in mind...? Thanks, David (talk) 23:47, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Subnational entity
Suggestion re this template here; again, your thoughts welcome. Regards, David Kernow (talk) 06:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Former Ethnic townships of the People's Republic of China
Where I find list of Former Ethnic townships of the People's Republic of China?--Kaiyr (talk) 08:05, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Ethnic villages of the People's Republic of China
How many Ethnic villages of the People's Republic of China?--Kaiyr (talk) 20:12, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Subregions of Portugal
In 1998, there was a referendum on regionalization in Portugal (about the creation of new administrative regions) which was rejected in 1998. Neither were any EU statistical regions approved, nor they were recognized by the people who had the word according to the 1998 referendum. Therefore, the NUTS regions (apart from Azores and Madeira which are autonomous regions and apart from Algarve, which matches the Faro District) should not be considered as Portuguese subregions, since they were only created and redrawn for statistical purposes.

I'd suggest that some sort of compromise could be made concerning to some particular regions, specially concerning to Ribatejo, since the NUTS II classification was made only for statistical purposes (and were redrawn, for those purposes, namely not to let some parts of the former NUTS II region of Lisboa e Vale do Tejo (Ribatejo and the North side of Estremadura) to be affected in relation to the allocation EU funds.

Besides that everyone in Portugal calls the territory roughly corresponding to the {Santarém District) as Ribatejo, not Alentejo (apart from Ponte de Sôr, which is in another district and sometimes is considered to be in Ribatejo though most of the times is considered to be in Alentejo. There are plenty of sites that show that Alentejo doesn't include Ribatejo, like the following ones:, , (published by the Portuguese Government itself), , etc. (note: I only indicated maps published after the redrawing of the NUTS II region in 2011).

The other regions are also commonly called by their traditional names, but in a broader sense there are indeed the North, Center, Alentejo (this one not with the borders defined by NUTS II) and Algarve regions, along with the Metropolitan area of Lisbon, which corresponds to the NUTS II region of Lisbon. I don't disagree, at all, that the NUTS II and NUTS III are included in the location of the places, though I'd prefer that the proper context would be provided and the traditional regions would be added to the description (preferably those established in 1936), with an explanation that those regions are not administrative (since their administrative functions were later transfered to the districts), but they're historical and cultural regions, with their designations being broadly used in Portugal (unlike many of the NUTS regions). Thanks a lot the attention of the users who may wish to participate in this discussion. Greetings! Viet-hoian1 (talk) 21:21, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Indian reservations
Does Guatemala, Honduras, French Guiana, Suriname, El Salvador has Indian reservations like this?: Lands inhabited by indigenous peoples--Kaiyr (talk) 17:08, 17 September 2017 (UTC)
 * A bit late but not in Guatemala or Honduras, and probably not in El Salvador either. Simon Burchell (talk) 11:21, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Lists of Surnames
Kelutral has been posting top tens of surnames sourced from forebears.io into many regional articles, such as here. While there may be good material for country based surname articles (Surnames in Fooland), this is in my opinion no more than statistical gumph, not encyclopaedically relevant or appropriate in region articles. Thoughts? Kevin McE (talk) 12:36, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree completely. Simon Burchell (talk) 11:22, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I have started the process of removing all of these per Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_257. Not to mention that these lists are utterly trivial and don't belong there anyway. &mdash;Xezbeth (talk) 14:21, 7 February 2019 (UTC)