Talk:North Solomon Islands

Melanesia: Papua New Guinea / Solomon Islands Low‑importance

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Merge Bougainville into this article?

I propose merging Bougainville into this article. The two articles currently cover almost exactly the same ground.

Either that, or we rewrite Bougainville to cover Bougainville island only, and rewrite North Solomons to cover the island group/province only. Wantok 06:49, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It took quite some puzzling, for the original text I elaborated on with data from Cath. Enc. & WorldStatesmen erroneously confounded the three overlapping but non-identical entities, for which I have created a new dab page North Solomons: the (original set of) German Solomon Islands, covered by this page as well as the missions, including several major islands, each already having their own page (I elaborated historically on Choiseul, the others should get a similar treatment); only the part that was not ceded to Britain, in 1899, became the modern North Solomons Province within independent Papua New Guinea, but is covered by the article on its common nickname: Bougainville, after its largest island (the only other significant one is is Buka); the Republic of North Solomons -till further notice reabsorbed by PNG- is the main subject of History of Bougainville. None of these would fit in either of the other two, we'ld be confounding time and space hopelessly. Fastifex 10:27, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. You're quite right - my merge proposal was wrongly targeted - I'll remove it. Here are the things that are still niggling at me:
- North Solomons Province are currently covered by (redirected to) Bougainville. This seems unfair to Buka Island, Carteret Islands, Green Island, etc. Though it's perhaps OK given that 'Bougainville' is an unofficial name for the whole province. However, it does mean that the Bougainville article is dealing with both the whole province and the specific island.
- We currently have the history of the islands covered to varying extents on three pages: History of Bougainville, History section of Bougainville, and North Solomon Islands. The first is fine, as the long detailed article; but there seems a bit of duplication between the last two. Which may also be fine, but perhaps there's room for some editing here. Perhaps North Solomon Islands just needs to be a bit clearer about the distinction between pre-1900 broader group and the post-1900 political separation; and to point to Bougainville for post-1900 history of the PNG province. I'll make some edits along these lines.
- Perhaps one approach would be to have physical geography and ecology of the area (and perhaps traditional culture, languages, etc - things not directly relating to modern political processes) dealt with in North Solomon Islands, and politics and colonial history split, so the existing description of pre-1900 colonial division remains in North Solomon Islands, but post-1900 history/politics is primarily on the specific island pages: Bougainville, Choiseul, etc.

Wantok 02:20, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]