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Old comments

We've left off Hawaii, Oahu, Maui, etc. I'd add them but I have to be off to bed. --KQ

I'm sure we've left off most islands. But it's a work in progress. - Tim

The list of islands by region will differ from any list of islands by country. Hawaii, for example, is under Pacific, separated from its compatriot islands under North America. So long as it is a list by region, this is how it should be done. - Tim

This page concerns me for the simple reason that there are millions of islands in the world... we could never hope to list them all. -- SJK

Is Australia itself regarded as an island (in which case wouldn't it be the largest?), or is it a continental land mass? -- DrBob

It's generally regarded as a continent (if you read the Wikipedia entry for Australia, you'll see it described as such), though AFAICT such division are basically arbitrary. -- Robert Merkel
According to a very authoritative source (my junior high geography teacher), Australia is both a continent and the world's largest island. I'll see if I can find some even more authoritative sources to back that up... :) -- Stephen Gilbert
If you look at the island/continent issue from the viewpoint of continental drift, it's easy to tell whether a landmass is an island or a continent. Islands are either seamounts, (Hawaii, Iceland) or they are the landmasses associated with a continental plate except for the largest landmass. The largest landmass on a plate, of course, is designated as the continent for that continental plate. I doubt that this is an official rule, but it is a logical one. If you use it, you can see that Greenland is an island but Australia is a continent. -- Derek Ross
Shouldn't Iceland be listed in Atlantic Ocean instead of Europe? Also, many islands are neither seamounts (which are associated with mantle hotspots) nor clearly on one continental plates: island arcs form at the edges where two plates are coming together. The Aleutians and Japan, for example, are at the margins between the North American and Pacific plates. The former are generally associated with North America and Asia (though the plate boundary is well to the west of the Aleutians) and the latter with Asia, because we mostly define things by land masses, ignoring encroaching seas. -- Vicki Rosenzweig
How about a page for fictional islands? eg

-- Anon

Sounds great to me! Just be careful to only include fictional islands that you can say more than a line about. -- maveric149
When I clicked on this link I expected to read an article on the "Islands of the world". However, this entry isn't an acticle, it is just a list. How about a name change to List of islands? That way it is OK to have the plural title (thus avoiding violation of the anti-pluralization wikipedia naming convention for articles) and the title makes clear that the content in it is just a list. -- maveric149
Moved. -- mav 12:41 Aug 8, 2002 (PDT)
What kind of an article other than a list would one make about "Islands of the world"? A travel guide? -- Brion VIBBER

Should we really be listing artificial islands here? I'm thinking of Sealand which is no different phyically than thousands of other off-shore rigs. -- mav

What order are the islands within regions in, please? -- isis 30 Aug 2002


This page can become a monster of a page if it isn't split. Only in Sweden for example there are hundreds of islands. I propose a separate listing for each nation and each ocean. These can be linked from this page and from the page of each nation. I try this idea by moving the islands of Sweden (my home country) to a separate page ( Islands of Sweden). Is this the right way to do it? Feb 2003 /RN

I now read that only Sweden has 221800 islands also counting islets. (Source SCB) I now know that we HAVE to split this article. /RN

Thinking of it from the reader's point of view, it's helpful to have a single list of more important islands, including ones like Gotland, and to leave the less important ones, such as Brommo, to the List of Obscure Islands of Sweden. :-) The choice has to be a little subjective, but for instance Gotland is easy to justify because it comes up in many contexts (history, vacation spots, etc), some not obviously connected to Sweden. Stan Shebs 17:19 Feb 10, 2003 (UTC)

The size of this list will not be too bad as long as it contains islands that would have an article of their on in Wikipedia anyway? Surely, no one would be expecting 221800 obscure Swedish isles to be listed in Wikipedia. I'm guessing that a handfull of them warrants an article. -- Egil 05:35 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Ok. I see your point. I guess then that at least all inhabited islands are justified to be on the list and then all uninhabited islands of interest. RN

Madagascar should be Indian Ocean, Kerguelen should be Southern Ocean, and no doubt others should be reclassified too. PML.

A downside of the breakup is that if you have a vague idea of the name, you can't just scan the page. At some point there should be an alphabetical list too, but it can wait until we have category tags to help construct/maintain. Stan 14:00, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

An long A-Z list of island names would be nice indeed. I created the category List of islands by name. Brz7

I added the name Walters Shoals, a former island just south of Madagascar. Somebody thought it was unnamed, and it isn't. Well, I assume the entry refers to Walters Shoals.

99.9.112.31 ( talk) 02:12, 21 March 2011 (UTC)NotWillDecker reply

New Discussion

A discussion has been started at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries/Lists of countries which could affect the inclusion criteria and title of this and other lists of countries. Editors are invited to participate. Pfainuk talk 13:37, 17 December 2008 (UTC) reply

Technical problems?

When I click on "Asia" in order to see a list of islands in Asia, I just get the List of Islands page coming right back at me. Bad spelling is the reason. Kdammers ( talk) 10:13, 30 July 2010 (UTC) reply

Page move

I suggest we move this to Lists of islands. Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 21:03, 23 December 2015 (UTC) reply

 Done, thanks to User:Beland. Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 02:48, 13 July 2016 (UTC) reply

There are some things here that ought to be OBVIOUS and simple to find !!

There are some things here that ought to be OBVIOUS and simple to find !!

List of islands by size
List of islands by population
Why is it that in the Wikipedia, so many listings like this leave off the most obvious things?
These are far more important that things like List of islands of El Salvador. You might as well have List of islands of San Marino. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.121.195.165 ( talk) 05:09, 20 June 2018 (UTC) reply

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