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Etymology and development of the word - Needs refs!
History
Ancient
Middle ages
Early modern era
Modern era
Nations
Countries of the world
See also
External links - This needs to be kept under control
Important todos
Finish more sections
Improve
Write section with an account of how the modern word came into use, with its different and ambiguous uses.
Expand and improve the "see also" section
Categorize the article!
Things not to do
Do not go into detailed examples of how the concepts explained in this article relate to real-life controversial situations. These are best left to articles about individual countries or events.
Do not seek narrowly to define the word country without first considering the range of dictionary definitions such as OED and Chambers (British); Macquarie (Australian); Webster (American).
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.
Please put the
{{politics}}
template, this is part of politics. Thank you.
136.158.44.248 (
talk) 12:35, 13 June 2022 (UTC)reply
Not done for now: This is a contentious edit, or this has already been discussed, so you'll need to discuss first with other editors. If there is an existing discussion on the talk page please contribute to that section. If there is no existing discussion you may explain why this edit should be made in this section, or start a new section on this talk page. (@
136.158.44.248)
lettherebedarklight,
晚安,
おやすみなさい 12:30, 19 June 2022 (UTC)reply
Very confusing definition
Political entities like the Soverign Military Order of Malta is not a country, as there is no permanent population.
Noal Cheilei (
talk) 00:34, 11 July 2022 (UTC)reply
Not seeing a proposed edit here. A person is a political entity and certainly unless royalty, is not a country.
Shajure (
talk) 13:04, 11 July 2022 (UTC)reply
Reversion
Shajure, do you take issue with the content of any of my contributions to this article? Based on your edit description, it seems that you reverted my contributions simply because you didn't like how "complex" my additions were.
Thebiguglyalien (
talk) 17:47, 21 July 2022 (UTC)reply
Yes.
Removal of the special-purpose see-also section. Easily fixed.
Removal of the Sovereignty status section. Too complex to undo alone. This is a key to some intense (archive available for interested editors) squabbles. It needs to stay.
It looked like some sources were removed, but the edit was big & too complex to be sure.
Who knows? The edit was large and one edit description could not possibly cover it.
Smaller edits with edit descriptions might make most of it a keeper. Or not. Can't tell.
I would encourage you to keep in mind that every other editor might agree with your changes, and I might be the only one who could not follow where you were going. You don't need to convince me, just reach
wp:consensus. :)
Shajure (
talk) 21:39, 21 July 2022 (UTC)reply
I went through and restored some of my edits with more incremental changes so they can be more closely examined. Is this a better way to do rewrites of sections in the future? Some of it felt kind of redundant while I was doing it, but I don't know. The change I didn't restore is the removal of "country symbols". I think that section is beyond the scope of the article, as it seems to be more related to the national identity of a territory rather than the polity itself (maybe better suited to the
nation article), though I could see the section being useful if it instead had sourced information about identifiers of the country itself.
Thebiguglyalien (
talk) 22:10, 21 July 2022 (UTC)reply
"polity" - is every use of country as covered in the article a polity? I think not but I am not undoing it immediately.
"
names" - link out, why? I can't see it as overlinking as it is not common usage.
list of country-naming words out - why? The names are referred to by so many different words, I can't immediately see this as excessive.
"The degree of autonomy of non-sovereign countries varies widely." out, why? Wars are fought over this. Right now. A key point, I can't immediately support its removal but I am not immediately reverting it. **edit to add... later I found more associated text and sources that seem to be missing, and did in fact manually revert.**
"many" removed - there are many examples that are not treated separately. You'll need a source that says all are... and there simply isn't one.
Restored a chunk of content that appears to have been removed... though again... I can't be sure, it wasn't explained, if so.
On further review I am not confident that any of that is an improvement. If it is not, I am sure someone else will come along and revert it.
Shajure (
talk) 22:51, 21 July 2022 (UTC)reply
Countries are polities according to this article, as specified in the article's first sentence. I have no issue with a link to toponymy, but its inclusion was forced and made the prose less readable (maybe it could be a see also link). Listing seven different words to describe country names does feel excessive to me, though I can see the argument for keeping them. I replaced the "degree of autonomy" statement with "Some countries, such as Taiwan and Sahrawi, have disputed sovereignty status" which I felt was preferable in tone and gave examples of two major cases. I believe that "some" is preferable to "many" if there's no source that gives the proportion. Your restoration duplicated content that I never removed; it seems the only thing you actually restored was the claim that there are 206 sovereign states, even though the associated source does not support that claim.
Thebiguglyalien (
talk) 23:21, 21 July 2022 (UTC)reply
Please be wary of making large edits after the ongoing POV-push/disruption by a variety of IP addresses. It takes wayyy too much time to remove the sown confusion without throwing out good edits.
Shajure (
talk) 15:30, 29 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Please be aware of the ongoing issues.
Shajure (
talk) 00:08, 12 September 2022 (UTC)reply
Wales - never a country
Please give reference to when Wales was a country.
41.243.30.10 (
talk) 19:21, 3 February 2023 (UTC)reply
Please give reference to when Wales was a country.
Francis Hannaway (
talk) 19:29, 3 February 2023 (UTC)reply
It is a definite Wikipedia weakness when people can vote to change a legal definition. I would imagine that only Welsh editors voted. Whatever next?
Francis Hannaway (
talk) 10:41, 4 February 2023 (UTC)reply
Is there a legal definition? —
Tamfang (
talk) 23:48, 20 April 2023 (UTC)reply
There is no legal definition—there's barely even a universal definition—of what is and what isn't a country.
OhDidgeridoo (
talk) 14:25, 30 August 2023 (UTC)reply
Good Article - help welcome
I am going to attempt to get this article to GA status (given
The wub's generous prize offer
here) and would welcome collaborative efforts from anyone else interested.
—Ganesha811 (
talk) 22:28, 6 February 2023 (UTC)reply
To do:
Eliminate low-quality sources, replace with high-quality sources
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.
To reinstate "Often, a country is presumed to be identical with a collection of citizens. Sometimes, people say that a country is a project, or an idea, or an ideal. Occasionally, philosophers entertain more metaphysically ambitious pictures, suggesting that a country is an organic entity with its own independent life and character, or that a country is an autonomous agent, just like you or me. Such claims are rarely explained or defended, however, and it is not clear how they should be assessed. We attribute so many different kinds of properties to countries, speaking as though a country can feature wheat fields waving or be girt by sea, can have a founding date and be democratic and free, can be English speaking, culturally diverse, war torn or Islamic.". It's within {{
blockquote}} and taken directly from a published source, but Treetoes023 had altered its text regardless.
85.215.201.79 (
talk) 06:23, 11 February 2023 (UTC)reply
I am confused as to why articles about countries do not contain maps. There is usually a map showing the location in the world, but no actual map of the country itself. This seems very weird to me. What is the reasoning here?
77.158.245.187 (
talk) 03:17, 12 February 2023 (UTC)reply
Do you have some examples? Most country articles contain multiple maps.
CMD (
talk) 03:25, 12 February 2023 (UTC)reply