This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the British Isles article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

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The term British Isles The term British Isles is a contentious issue. In order to better facilitate discussion of this issue, without swamping other matters, there is a specific talk page for matters relating to the name of this article. Your cooperation with keeping name-related matters on that page would be appreciated by other editors. Also, please remember that article talk pages are provided only to facilitate improvements to the article. Editors uncertain about the use of talk pages should read WP:TALK and WP:NOT#FORUM. Inflammatory messages, personal attacks, and debate and discussion not specifically targetted to specific ways of improving the article may be removed and, in extreme cases, warnings issued to the editor who inserted them.

References The term British Isles is a contentious issue. Academic and other references concerning this controversy can be read here.

	British Isles was one of the Geography and places good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result August 26, 2006 Featured article candidate Not promoted March 5, 2007 Good article nominee Listed October 16, 2008 Good article reassessment Delisted July 5, 2010 Peer review Reviewed Current status: Delisted good article

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This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: Kerr, Áine (2 October 2006). "Folens to wipe 'British Isles' off the map in new atlas". The Irish Times. Clarke, Donald (9 January 2016). "Saoirse Ronan being claimed by the UK not 'a compliment'". The Irish Times. Suchet followed these remarks with a patronising tweet featuring a link to the Wikipedia article on the British Isles. We do not know if he read as far as the following paragraph: 'The term British Isles is controversial in Ireland, where there are objections to its usage due to the association of the word British.'

Can we move it to the etymology section? Tikaboo (talk) 18:55, 24 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No. Why would we do that? Wiki-Ed (talk) 20:41, 24 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Tikaboo, @Wiki-Ed: The lead should mention some aspects of the etymology, but I agree that it's currently too much weighted towards etymology, in particular the naming controversy (which has its own article).

As it stands:

• The etymology part of the lead is around 90 words, summarising around 450 words from the main article (1:5).
• The "controversial" aspect of the name takes three-quarters of the lead's etymology content, and just under a quarter of the etymology section in the main article.
• The non-etymology part of the lead is around 100 words, summarising 5000 or so non-etymology words from the main article (1:50).

This suggests that the current lead content gives WP:UNDUE emphasis to the naming controversy, and insufficiently reflects the content of the main article.

Substantially increasing the size of the first half of the lead, and moving some parts of the naming controversy from the lead to the main article, would provide a better-balanced lead to the article. Bazza (talk) 21:43, 24 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No, seeing how many people start jumping up and down about the term "British Isles" it is absolutely necessary. But some tweaking is possible. The Banner talk 00:27, 25 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The lead should be tweaked. The third and fifth sentences of the second paragraph could be removed and placed in later sections, but the main thrust of the paragraph should be retained in the lead. Ghmyrtle (talk) 08:33, 25 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The main problem is that the lead has two paragraphs. Four would be better, with new second and third ones summarising the large number of aspects of the main article which are currently absent; and the fourth (currently second) shortened as @Ghmyrtle suggests. Bazza (talk) 09:50, 25 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ah. I thought something looked off. Someone removed a significant block of information here[1]. The reason we've had four paragraphs for as long as we have is to follow - fairly literally - the MOS guide on leads. In particular we tried to balance (a) four paragraphs, (b) relative emphasis, and (c) prominent controversies. It took a long time to agree relative emphasis and it's clear that those who feel strongly about the controversy still feel strongly because they keep trying to expand the text. It's reasonable to assume that cutting it back would make them unhappy and restart the edit warring. But equally... removing two paragraphs for spurious reasons has changed the balance and it now looks disproportionate.

So, I've restored the version of 2 November. Most of the intermediate edits were by the same person who made the flawed changed in the first place. Given they've already wasted our time with this, I'm not going to waste my time reviewing any of their other edits - if any of them are valid they can restore them manually - and should probably seek consensus first.

I propose that if we're going to review the longstanding consensus version of the text then we should do so with said consensus version in front of us. And I'd also propose that we give people who feel strongly about the controversy time to respond to any proposal to cut back text they have fought to maintain. Wiki-Ed (talk) 12:08, 25 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]