Add more subregion tags #244
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From #242, I take it you'd like to have tags for every subregion in the United Nations geoscheme? I feel like some of the subregions in this geoscheme, like Southern Africa or Eastern Asia, include too few countries for a tag to really be useful. Some of the tags in the deck are already quite small: 10 notes for I do agree that some parts of the world, especially Africa, could benefit from a couple of extra tags, though. Perhaps we should combine some of the subregions (e.g. Western and Northern Africa) or find an alternate geoscheme? |
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Having few notes to include in a tag doesn't means the tag is not helpful. We need to make tag precise and complete. If people think a tag contains too few notes, they just need to select multiple tags. |
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If users end up having to always select multiple tags then the deck becomes a little less easy to use. Sure, smaller tags bring more flexibility, but does this flexibility really matter? Wouldn't people always combine the same tags anyway (e.g. Southern, Middle and Eastern Africa)? |
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Learning several subregions of Africa is easier than learning the whole Africa. Same for others. |
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See my earlier comment:
I'm only arguing that the subregions in the UN geoscheme are too small and that we should combine them. I think that splitting Africa into two subregions would suffice, for instance. |
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If subregions tags are merged, how do people know where a country actually belongs to? They just know that it belongs to one of several subregions. |
What you're talking about is learning to associate each country with its subregion. For instance, you see Zimbabwe and you have to guess Southern Africa, or you see Southern Africa and you have to list all the countries it contains (expert level 😄). I don't think tags are the answer. If you create a filtered deck for Southern Africa, you learn facts about the countries it contains -- you don't train your brain to associate these countries with Southern Africa. It would make more sense to add a new Subregion field and a new Country - Subregion template, or even to just create a completely separate deck. |
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Talking about fields, I'd like to say that seas and oceans can be put into a new deck because the note type doesn't fit them (calling a river as a country). They can be created into a separate deck. In fact, it can be a huge deck for waters: https://www.memrise.com/course/28784/rivers-lakes-and-seas/ What I'd like to see is that people can select subregions and memorize them one by one with the help of custom study. It makes the memorization easier. Having smaller subregions combined doesn't affect achieving this goal, but people don't know which country belongs to which subregion specifically. How to enable memorizing countries according subregions and no need to memorize subregions. is what I intend to do. Combining subregions is acceptable, but the flaw is that people don't know specifically. |
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Does anyone else have an opinion about whether or not to add tags for subregions as per the United Nations geoscheme? For reference, the deck already contains the following subregion tags: Here are some options:
As per my previous comments, my preference goes to option 3, but I don't mind options 2, 4 and 5 as well. My main problem with option 1 is that the UN geoscheme defines no less than 22 regions, and I don't think that adding 22 tags is a good idea:
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I fully agree with option 3. 1 would indeed add too many tags. The UN geoschemes are sometimes rather unnatural or lumped-together*. Their main value over more "natural" subdivisions (with which they often, but, as noted, not always, coincide), is that they partition the countries of the world, allowing one to easily order one's studying by geographical area. However, ordering study by region is probably not the only purpose of the regional tags**, and for the other purposes I can think of, they're not very useful (where they diverge from the "natural" subdivisions). Hence, I'd vote against 4. * For example, relatively few people use the term "Western Asia", instead using the mostly overlapping "Middle East". "Southern Asia" is virtually never used; "South Asia" is, but unlike the UN geoscheme's "Southern Asia" it doesn't include Iran. I'm far less confident here, but I think that few people use "Middle Africa" — there's "Central Africa", but it's not necessarily completely coterminous. ** I've never actually used any of the tags, so I'm not sure what people use the "regional" tags for, but I'd guess that it's something like: A. They live in a specific region (and only want to learn about countries there). B. Conversely, they feel that they have very little knowledge about a given region (that's far away from them and that they hear very little about) and want to learn about it. C. They have a test about a given region. D. They're just fascinated by the given area. To the extent that the UN geoscheme areas are unnatural, combining several of them together is unlikely to make the grouping less artificial, so 2 is also probably not great. Africa does have too few tags, so I'd avoid 5 as well. Tags to addAfricaIMO West Africa and East Africa would definitely make sense as tags — they each have a well-defined territory, contain a large number of states (16 and 20 respectively — more than either North Africa would have made sense, as it's very well-defined, but it contains only 6 sovereign countries. Perhaps we could have a Middle_East+North_Africa tag or a Greater Middle East one? (All these countries do have considerable common heritage, so it wouldn't be a completely artificial grouping.) (It's not necessarily problematic for a country not to have a regional tag other than the continental one (see below), though since Sudan is a North African country, but not a Mediterranean one, unfortunately Central Africa also probably doesn't make sense. There's some debate on its limits (are Angola, São Tomé and Principe, Rwanda and Burundi part of it? (all of these are part of the Economic Community of Central African States, but the latter two are also part of East Africa...)) and even at its most extensive (incl. Rwanda and Burundi) it'd only contain 11 countries. Southern Africa is even more iffy as it has multiple definitions and even at its most extensive (overlapping both Central and East Africa) has only 16 countries. With the non-overlapping definition it has only 5... We could combine Southern and Central Africa, but a grouping containing both South Africa and Chad, but not, say, Kenya would be very weird... My tentative recommendations:
Alternatively, we could have two super-groupings West+Central Africa and East+Southern Africa, but they'd feel slightly unnatural. ElsewhereCentral Asia and South Asia both contain far too few countries, but joining them would also be nonsensical, so there's nothing to be done here. Grouping countries by region, for ordering one's studyThere doesn't have to be an exhaustive set of tags that uniquely cover all the countries, in order to be able to "partition" the countries. For instance, with the existing tags, you can already geographically split Europe with |
I totally agree. As long as there's a way to remove a big chunk of countries from a continent, I think we're good. For this reason, I think adding ... This makes me wonder now whether tags |
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Closing this now as the agreed changes are covered by separate issues. 👍 |
As we can see, a lot of countries don't have subregion tags. I have done this part in my personal project:
https://ethercalc.org/GrimPixel-list-of-countries
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