The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Spartaz ^Humbug! 11:03, 10 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of countries in 1707[edit]

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These articles are, in my opinion, misconceived. This is truly a case for discussion - I'm not necessarily saying all of these should be deleted, and I'm at a loss as to what to do with these and seek advice.

First of all, Category:Lists of countries by year was created in 2007, and remains almost unpopulated. And if were populated, it would contain hundreds and hundreds of articles, many of which would repeat the same information. This doesn't seem right to me, and would constitute a maintenance nightmare.

Better might be a series of articles "List of countries 1700-1750", "...1750-1799", etc. Then you could start with the original list and only specify changes that occurred in 1701, 1702, etc. This would be a lot more managable. But for this, we might as well start from scratch. However, a series of merges may be in order. Herostratus (talk) 00:41, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The articles are consideration are these:

It would be possible to treat these differently.

400 is quite separate, chronologically, from the others, and may stand alone, perhaps.
1707 and 1708 and 1783 and 1801 are very incomplete and some flags may be wrong.
1901 and later are more complete and probably more accurate. The question is, do we need articles for 1901 and 1902 and 1903 and...? Perhaps a merge is in order.

I'm willing to do a certain amount of the work of merging or whatever if this seems the way to go. Herostratus (talk) 00:41, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. There is already a much larger bunch of List of sovereign states in nnnn (see Category:Lists of sovereign states by year), by individual year until the 1950s, then by decade. IMO, these should be consolidated into decades at the least, and probably longer periods the further back you go. Clarityfiend (talk) 01:23, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In AfD terms, the simple answer is to redirect all "list of countries in xxxx" to the corresponding "list of sovereign states in xxxx". I wouldn't be too inflexible about doing it precisely by decade; the world wars, in particular, would complicate things a great deal. Need to find a system that carves world history at the joints.—S Marshall T/C 02:37, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all If the intent is to establish what nations existed in any given year, it's been done so much better with the series in Lists of state leaders by year, one of the showpieces of what can be done on Wikipedia. For each of these, there's an existing article. The first named article is redundant to List of state leaders in 1707. Mandsford 02:07, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all and incubate something - I do see some value in the concept of countries by year but the format is just woefully inadequate. No matter what "countries by xxxx date" we may try to come up with will be flawed, as there are periods of turmoil and relatively stable periods, but when you look at the details there are some changes almost every year, so no coarse or fine tuning of the date variable will adequately represent the countries in a given period with a minimum of unnecessary duplication. What I think might work is some kind of sortable table with all countries, with some sort of starting date and end date (when applicable) because it would avoid duplication and still convey some sort of timeline. Separate tables for non-sovereign entities could be made as well. Then for the WP:FLAGCRUFT people, there could be separate list articles for flag history issues.--70.80.234.196 (talk) 02:12, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect/Delete all - Most of these years are covered in a List of sovereign states in X article and the ones that aren't are too incomplete to be useful. As for the List of sovereign states in X pages themselves, they need to be consolidated into decades (or something), cleaned up, sourced, and expanded. But that's a reeeeally big task. Orange Tuesday (talk) 04:32, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Most of these are redundant to Category:Lists of sovereign states by year (the one for 400 is part of that category, the others aren't). The ones from 1901 onward definitely need to go. The ones before that (1707, 1708, 1783, 1801) can be renamed. I agree with 70.80 (who, unfortunately, didn't sign a name) that these articles are flagcruft and that the state leaders by year project is far more complete and accomplishes the same thing. Mandsford 13:57, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.