Talk:List of countries and territories by land and maritime borders/Archive 1

This talk page was the talk page for Talk:List of countries by number of neighbouring countries. The page was merged to List of countries and territories by land and maritime borders on 2010-02-11.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia does not border Israel, but I don't know how to edit the table so I'm not going to fix it.

Fixed --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:39, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Morocco / Western Sahara

There's an issue with the Morocco entry, I think. It borders Western Sahara, Algeria & Spain (if Spain still has a couple of towns on the African continent). If it "owns" Western Sahara, it cannot border it, but it would then border with Mauritania. We give it a score of 4.

Algeria is noted as bordering with Western Sahara. Mauritania is noted as bordering Morocco, based on Morocco's occupation of WS. Something else to sort out. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:39, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorted. The list now accedes to Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara, but mentions each instance of the occupation in the lines for Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:56, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Croatian neighbours

Croatia has 6 neighbours, instead of 5 as it is in the article. Montenegro is missing. MR.CRO95 (talk) 20:37, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

France

are St. pierre and miquelon, and new caledonia taken into acount, when totaling neigbours. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.53.37.241 (talk) 13:27, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

If we want to get cute we could say that France borders the U.S. at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. ☆ CieloEstrellado 08:29, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Saint Pierre and Miquelon does not have a land border with any other country. Same for New Caledonia. --Mathew5000 (talk) 23:58, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Guantanamo Bay

Cuba is currently listed as bordering one country (the USA) and the USA as bordering three countries. These should be changed to 0 and 2 respectively. The USA has military bases in various countries around the world, and the boundaries of the military base are not considered a "border". --Mathew5000 (talk) 00:04, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is a leased Cuban territory, not a USA territory. Luis wiki (talk) 13:16, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Disagree - the US clearly has de facto sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay, much like Britain does over its two sovereign base areas in Cyprus. Its offically leased but the elase is indefinite and cannot be unilaterally terminated by Cuba. Thus comparing Guantanamo Bay's status to say the US base at Avieano, Italy is simply misleading. 141.166.230.9 (talk) 19:22, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Japan

Why is Japan currently listed as having three neighbouring countries (N. Korea, S. Korea, and Russia)? According to the intro of the article, only land borders are supposed to counted. --Mathew5000 (talk) 00:06, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

The proposed merger

It appears to be some time since the merger proposal was made for this page and the List of land border lengths. That article in my opinion appears to present the data in a far more accurate and useable way (with a sortable table now) than this one. So does anyone have any objections if this article was simply redirected to the land borders page, or we change the land borders name to include number of neighbours and land border lengths? BritishWatcher (talk) 16:04, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

UK & Cyprus

I have corrected the erroneous entries for the UK and Cyprus. The UK has only one land border, with the ROI. Neither Gibraltar nor the British bases on Cyprus are part of the UK. Best, AlasdairGreen27 (talk) 15:16, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

True enough, but the SBAs are still British territory, not Cypriot territory, so Cyprus does have an external border. If we're going to work it like this, let's have separate entries for Gibraltar and Akrotiri/Dhekelia. Pfainuk talk 17:43, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Indeed, except that this purports to be a List of countries by number of neighbouring countries. The SBAs are not countries. Nor is Gibraltar. As a general point, the list is a dog's breakfast, without any sourcing or the merest hint of the criteria it uses to define 'country' or 'border'. Probably none, I guess, like all too many areas of Wikipedia. AlasdairGreen27 (talk) 19:03, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Congo

Why is Congo with 5 neighbours in the middle of the countries with 4 neighbours? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.230.186.8 (talk) 19:20, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. Greyhood (talk) 20:41, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Changing this page to land+maritime boundaries

Would anyone object if I converted this list to include all bordering countries—that is, include land and maritime boundaries? After all, countries that border each other in the ocean are still "neighbouring". Doing this would also resolve the problem of having the two articles serving the same purpose. List of land border lengths could then perhaps be renamed to List of countries by land borders or something more general. If I were to do this I would overhaul the page—for each country I would list how many land boundaries it has, how many maritime boundaries, and how many total unique neighbouring countries. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 01:13, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I think that in principle, this is a good idea, but do you have sources for maritime boundaries?sephia karta | di mi 11:54, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Of course: a list can be found in the reference and external links section of List of countries by maritime boundaries. The primary source is the 5 volume International Maritime Boundaries. It is a mammoth work buckling my desk. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 12:05, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't know we had that page. So basically you want to keep separate articles for land and maritime boundaries, and restructure this article to comprise both? I guess with resortable tables and all we could also put all the data into one bad ass table, and just keep one article. I don't know whether it would fit though. sephia karta | di mi 12:25, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, your summary of my proposal is what I was meaning. But what you say about redundancy is true. It does get a bit complicated with maritime boundaries, since often two states will share multiple but separate maritime boundaries. It might be better to reserve the details of the multiple maritime ones for a page specifically about maritime boundaries, whereas on the article that lists land and maritime boundaries just indicate that the two states share maritime boundaries without getting into the details. If we were to include length of boundaries for both land and maritime, it would start to make the table big. I'm in the process of working on this in user space but won't make any changes to this article for the time being. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 22:21, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm looking forward to what you come up with. :-) Btw, there are also pairs of countries with multiple land boundaries, e.g. Russia and China, Switzerland and Austria and the Ukraine and Romania. sephia karta | dimmi 17:37, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

See immediately below for what I came up with. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 20:56, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Proposed merge February 2010

Following up from the section immediately above, I've now created List of countries and territories by land and maritime borders and I now propose that this list be merged into it. The new list I created contains the information in this list and more. The new list is a sortable table so you can rank them by number of land borders, number of maritime boundaries, or total number of borders. (I decided creating the new page separately and proposing a merge would be a better solution than just overhauling the page, since it will give users a change to see what I was proposing. The name I used is more representative of the content, since it includes borders for countries and non-sovereign territories.) — Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 04:25, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Looks good, but I have three suggestions:

1. Remove the bolding from the table headers where they are explaining something. For example, in the top cell of the rightmost column, debold the text "(Territories without full sovereignty[1] in italics) (L) = share only land borders; (M) = share only maritime boundaries; blank = share land borders and maritime boundaries". Alternatively, place the notes into <small></small> tags.
2. Move the notes in the headers of the middle three columns into a footnote to make those columns narrow, which widens the rightmost column, for:
3. Wrap the flags rather than stacking them. There is more empty space than content in most rows, and the table becomes too overwhelming. In many spots I can only see 4 rows at a time on my 1024x768 screen.

Otherwise I am for the redirect to the new title. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 04:36, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

No. 1, will do. #2, I tried that but it didn't make a difference on my screen. It seems to be screen dependent, but the change could be made. #3, I avoided wrapping in the fourth column because it makes it much more confusing in determining which are land borders and which are maritime. If the flag, name, (sovereign country), and (L)/(M) are all on separate lines due to wrapping, it's not really making things easier for the reader. I tried wrapping and it was much worse and didn't save room anyway. Wrapping could be done in the first column, but it wouldn't make a difference since the fourth column is always longer anyway. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 05:01, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

• I will go ahead and merge this and will archive this talk page on the talk page there. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 10:57, 11 February 2010 (UTC)