Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Leaders by year/Archive 4

Not by Year by Decade or Century?
Is it possible to view the leaders yearly? I would like to see the 20th century for example and have a list of leaders? This could be expanded so that there could be a timeline charting the leaders of every nation over the years (mammoth task maybe, but i think the data is already up here). Thanks - I appreciate the hard

Obscure country names
I am tempted to begin adding the Kings of Ryukyu to the lists of state leaders by year, but I thought I should check here first on formatting; it would be a real pain to have to go back over them to change the formatting if I did it 'wrong' or just differently the first time.

Now, I believe someone asked this before at some point, about how to list Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia etc as sub-sections of "England" which did not exist at the time. The same question thus applies to the sub-kingdoms of Okinawa (Hokuzan, Chūzan, and Nanzan) which are later united into the Ryūkyū Kingdom, and I suppose as well to any number of Southeast Asian and South Asian countries which the average reader cannot be expected to recognize or know about.

My question is this: do we list these kingdoms as subsections of geo-political terms the reader is more likely to recognize (e.g. Okinawa), or do we just list them straight, as is, and assume that anyone interested either (a) knows about it, or (b) will click the link? Similarly, for something like the Ayutthaya Kingdom, do we leave that as is, or do we put (Siam) or (Thailand) after it in parentheses? Another example, just for the sake of writing far more than I needed to, would be Champa. We could list Champa and Annam separately, with no notation, or we could list both under a "Vietnam" heading, despite that there was no Vietnam at the time, or we could put Vietnam in parentheses next to both names, just to help explain where we're talking about.

All of this may be explained on the main project page, but I just wanted to be sure. Thank you. LordAmeth 17:31, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Personally I believe they should just be listed as they are. If a political unit which did not exist at the time is stated on the lists, this could lead to confusion about whether that unit did exist at the time or not, by the reader.  If the reader does not recognise the kingdom we should ensure that the links are adequate. Davewild 22:44, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. I'm planning on getting around to having articles for Hokuzan and Nanzan at some point soon, but I'm not sure if many (or any) of their kings are significant enough to be named in my sources. Thanks for the opinion there. I probably won't be getting around to this for a bit anyway, so maybe more people will chime in... LordAmeth 23:05, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Turkey completed!
Hi there! I don't know whether the project is still running but I wanted to let you know that I updated the articles by adding all Turkish presidents and primes. Now the project covers the complete Republican history of Turkey (1923-present). I checked and saw that the Ottoman Empire entries end in 1922, that means, now we have a complete chain. Now, initially I didn't know which continent to put Turkey into, but since the Ottoman Empire was in Europe, since the Turkish entries of the early Republican period (meaning 1920s) were in Europe, since Europe of today covers Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaycan, etc., meaning all the members of the Conseil, and finally since Middle East was not among the options for all years, I though the best was to go on with Europe. Hope that helps! Okan 00:48, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Americas
I just wanted to point out that while many years have an "Americas" continental heading, those for the years 1801-1815 do not, and instead have headings for "North America and the Caribbean" and "South America". I'm not sure what other years later (or earlier) might do this as well, but there needs to be a standard. Thought I should let people know so they can decide something, and fix it. LordAmeth 16:10, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Comments & Notes
It would seem that there is no real standard on comments and notes regarding the beginning or end of states, or other such information (e.g. succession disputes). What shall we do for a standard? LordAmeth 17:07, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Sometimes this information is italicized, and placed in various orientations relative to the leader names and state names.
 * Sometimes footnotes are used.
 * Sometimes this information is omitted entirely for some states while included for other states with similar or equivalent situations.

Dashes add clarity
On September 13, 2004, user Anárion changed the date range hyphens to en dashes, at least in List of state leaders in 2004. This was a significant improvement, but there is another one that would also help. I wish these articles used space em dash space ( — ) rather than space hyphen space ( - ) to separate offices from officials. Thus the entry
 * * United States
 * **President - George W. Bush, President of the United States (2001–present)

would be
 * * United States
 * **President — George W. Bush, President of the United States (2001–present)

This would result in more professional, encyclopedia-like articles. It could be a big undertaking to make these changes for these many articles, but perhaps the process could be automated. The same automated routine for fixing the em dashes could also change any stray date range hyphens (with or without surrounding spaces) to en dashes without surrounding spaces. Anomalocaris 06:45, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Error???
There is a potential flaw in this list. Some countries list the head of government, not the head of state. Other countries list both. Should this list only have the head of state? Or if the head of government is listed then a notation like: Prime Minister: J.A.Andersson (head of government) Chergles 23:31, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * If both a head of state and government exist in a country, they should both be included. matt91486 02:54, 10 October 2007 (UTC)