Talk:List of members of the Commonwealth of Nations by date joined

Hong Kong

Hong Kong was never a Commonwealth member. It was a Crown Colony from 1842 until 1997, and went straight to being a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Members of the Commonwealth must be independent (see the previous, incorrect, inclusion of the Federation of the West Indies). In terms of members, this list is up-to-date, as of February 2006. Bastin8 15:11, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Merge using sortable table?

This can be merged with List of members of the Commonwealth of Nations by name and List of members of the Commonwealth of Nations by continent by using class="sortable" in a table, e.g.:

F	Country	Continent	Year joined	Comments	Ex
	Australia	Australia and Oceania	1931	ratified in 1942
	Botswana	Africa	1966
	Canada	North America	1931
	Cyprus	Europe	1961
	Fiji	Australia and Oceania	1970	left in 1987; rejoined in 1997; suspended in 2000; readmitted in 2001; resuspended in 2006
	Guyana	South America	1966
	Irish Free State	Europe	1931	left in 1949	*
	Lesotho	Africa	1966
	Pakistan	Asia	1947	left in 1972; rejoined 1989; suspended in 1999; readmitted in 2004
	Tanganyika	Africa	1961	merged with Zanzibar to form Tanzania in 1964	*
	Zimbabwe	Africa	1980	suspended in 2002; left in 2003	*

Key
Suspended
Not a member

The table can now be sorted to give the info of the other lists, but retains the maximum info which the other lists don't have. New columns can be added/info split off. Info only has to be updated in one place.

I'll do the grunt work if there is consensus to merge. -- Jeandré, 2007-01-10t11:20z

In principle, agreed. This must be the first time that a featured list/article is deleted. Bastin 12:12, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree - this is an excellent idea. I wonder if the other "lists of x by y" can similarly be merged and deleted? -- ALoan (Talk) 13:46, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

The sortable table is a good idea, but there seems to be a little problem. When I clicked on the "country" tab, it sorted it alphabetically from A-Z but for some reason Lesotho appeared above Australia. Could it be due to the number of flags? Also you might want to colour Fiji's entry red instead of grey since Fiji is still in the Commonwealth but is a suspended member. The lists don't have to be deleted, just moved/redirected to a new article altogether, probably just called List of members of the Commonwealth of Nations. I would bet that the new sortable table list would make featured article status in its own right anyway.72.27.2.68 04:58, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I've made a column for the flags so the country names sort properly.

Has a nation ever been expelled, or do suspended nations stay members forever?

Another problem with the sorting is that it works via JavaScript, so people (or their network admins) who've disabled it can't sort. Hopefully a future version will allow normalization. -- Jeandré, 2007-01-21t04:57z

So what happened to the table? And no nation has ever been expelled per se. South Africa was not invited to continue its membership after it became a republic due to its apartheid policies and simply left (because at the time when a country became a republic it had to apply for permission to remain in the organization). Suspended countries remain members until either the suspension is lifted (for whatever reason) or they decide to leave voluntarily (as Zimbabwe did).72.27.29.152 03:45, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Done. The JavaScript requirement for the sorting means we can't delete the other lists - so they'll all have to stay until there's an upgrade to mediawiki to allow non script sorting. -- Jeandré, 2007-04-07t12:35z