Category talk:Former provinces of Thailand

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copy from User_talk:Tobias Conradi

I don't think it makes sense to have substubs, which de facto are nothing else but redirects to the present day province of Cambodia, or the district which is the successor of the former province. At the beginning of the 20th century these provinces were more-or-less just the "capital" town, the surrounding territory was only sparsly populated, not like the modern day provinces - as described in Monthon or Provinces of Thailand these provinces ceased to exist during the conversion into the modern administrative units. Thus IMHO all which would be said in Siamreap Province or Loam Sak Province is nothing but the history section of the present day entity. Only if that section would get too long it IMHO makes sense to split it into two articles. andy 22:32, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like to see on one view what happened to XY Province. Redirect do not do this. And I like the category:Former provinces of Thailand, which gives a quick overview of not anymore existing provinces. IMO it enriches WP. Whether historic provinces of Thailand would be a better title I don't know. What I would like to see one day is templates for these entities, stating creating time, population, area, etc. similiar to current entities. There are also country pages for former countries. IMO the same for subdivisions is nice. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:45, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To compare with Germany - it makes sense to have articles of the no longer existing districts, e.g. Monschau (district). However it does not make sense to have a article Aachen (district) and a Aachen (district, before 1975), just because the boundary has changed, as the former is the direct successor of the second. Similar things happened with these former provinces (at that time Mueang, not yet changwat), some became entities of the neighbour countries, other got reduced to Amphoe or even Tambon. A category of substub articles does not make sense IMHO, the goal of wikipedia is not to have millions of one-sentence articles - a simple list with some description would serve the goal better. I even started to create such a list at User:Ahoerstemeier/Former Thai provinces, but as it is very difficult to find english language texts which list all Mueang, and clearly list which Mueang were directly subordinate of the capital Bangkok, and which other were under supervision of another Mueang. Areas are impossible to find as the boundaries weren't fixed in a modern style; complete census data only starts after the reorganization of the provinces was completed. I have no problem if someone really finds a lot of information of the Siamese times of Siamreap and then writes a separate article because it'd make the article on the present day province unreadable long, my problem is to create substubs without real contents beyond what a redirect would do and without much hope for enlargement in the foreseeable future, just to have more articles, or to fill a category. BTW: a redirect can be member in a category as well... andy 23:03, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The "Aachen (district, before 1975)" thing was as a problem in my mind allready. I still have no answer that I would like. Maybe my rule here is: name change or/and ownership change (country change). I will stop creating new articles. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:19, 21 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]