Portal talk:Oceania

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[edit] Thoughts on this portal

  • Reason for the portal: I think the original impetus for this portal comes from the organization of Portal:Browse and Portal:Geography which group geographical portals by continent/area, and which group the Australian and New Zealand portals together into Oceania. In practice, any portal which included Australia and New Zealand with the Pacific Islands would be dominated by those two countries, so I'm proposing a portal which deals with the Pacific Islands only. It may be more appropriate to call it Portal:Pacific Islands.
    This idea has been modified in discussion below. Australia and New Zealand will be nominally included, but not given as much attention as the other states and territories of Oceania.-gadfium 18:32, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Scope: the portal should cover the countries/territories listed in Oceania, with the exceptions of Australia and New Zealand. The portal should link to the portals for those countries. The portal should include Hawaii until such time as a separate Portal:Hawaii is set up (which I think is only a matter of time). I'm inclined to say that Norfolk Island should not be covered by the portal, because it shares no cultural history with the Pacific Islands (it should be covered by the Australia portal), but my gut level feeling is that Pitcairn Island should be covered, although it also shares no cultural history. The Galapagos Islands should not be covered, but Easter Island should be.
    This idea has been modified in discussion below. My current thinking is to include Norfolk, and nominally Australia and New Zealand.-gadfium 18:32, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Selected articles: should rotate monthly, with every second selection being one of the countries/territories making up the Pacific Islands, and those rotating between the areas of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia as listed in Oceania#Countries_and_territories_of_Oceania. The alternate selections should cover culture, history, economy, biography etc articles with an attempt to cover many different nations around the Pacific. A queue should be set up so the selections update automatically each month.
    This idea has been modified with discussion below. There will be a daily rotation of the individual countries/territories of Oceania, and a monthly selected article.-gadfium 18:32, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Selected pictures: should also rotate monthly, but I have given no thought to what suitable pictures exist.
    This idea is being given low priority initially.-gadfium 18:32, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
  • In the news: we need to line up several people who will attempt to keep the section up to date for various areas of the Pacific. I suggest that ITN should feed articles into Current events in Australia and New Zealand, which should be renamed Current events in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, since I suspect most Australians and many New Zealanders do not think of themselves as part of "Oceania".
  • Did You Know: May not be worth having initially. Such a section needs to be driven by a community who ferret out new articles, and it may take a while to develop such a community.
  • Requests section: This would be most valuable. Similar to the "Things you can do" section of Portal:New Zealand.
  • Start date:would getting something organised by the beginning of March be realistic?

-gadfium 13:51, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I would like to see this project grow, however i think that a softer approach to the rules might ensure better success through participation. excluding Norfolk and Pitcairn Islands? ""Norfolk Island was first settled by East Polynesian seafarers, probably from the Kermadec Islands north of New Zealand. They arrived in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and survived for several generations before disappearing. Their main village site has been excavated at Emily Bay, and they also left behind stone tools, rats, and banana trees as evidence of their sojourn. The final fate of these early settlers remains a mystery."" and ""Pitcairn Island — the second largest — is inhabited, in the southern Pacific Ocean, the only remaining British colony in the Pacific. The islands are best known for being the home of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who accompanied them, an event retold in numerous books and films. "" indicates shared culture. Arbitrary boundaries can be hard to agree on, so please be careful with that. Geography versus cultural and political concepts may be divisive, but I can see you are genuine in your willingness to give so thats good. East Timor is possibly a case in point, I havent checked though. I need to learn lots more before i can be more useful to you, but i am happy to give occassionally. I see the Pacific Rim as another step in the hierarchy upwards. Also, I've seen articles on genetic paths from NZ back through the Pacific to Taiwan, with very close cultural parallels, between the indigenous inhabitants at both ends, and along the way. [1] I'll be watching and helping from time to time, there are many articles still to be created and edited int his part of the planet. moza 10:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
At this stage, I'm just throwing out ideas, and certainly mean no offence to anyone. We do need to establish exactly which areas the portal will cover. I didn't know about early Polynesian settlement of Norfolk Island, but I do think we should decide whether it is covered by the Australian or the Oceania portal. I have never been there, but I understand that it is culturally Australian, not Polynesian.
I know you dont mean offence, I'm just trying to alert the page to my idea that softer might be better. There seems to be a lot of knee jerking on wiki, and my idea was to outsmart that. moza 00:43, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
With Pitcairn, while there were Tahitians amongst the original settlers, again I believe that the current culture is not at all Polynesian. However, I propose that we do cover this island group, largely because no other portal is likely to do so.
I read the entire wiki article on Pitcairn, and a lot more. The residents are nearly all descendants of the mutiny, and that means significant Tahitian blood and customs. I think we should include it, as it is strongly connected to NZ, although being under British rule. The entire Picairn population migrated to Norfolk Island at one stage. Norfolk Is is like Australia and NZ, partially in both categories, but mostly in the Australalian. Its not long ago that Kiwis didnt need passports to travel to Norfolk Is and Australia. It became a channel for some Pacific Islanders to enter Australia via NZ, without passports. Can the shared border areas be in both portals? moza 00:43, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
Easter Island was certainly settled by Polynesians, although I don't know what the current culture there is - I believe it's probably unique. It might also be covered by Portal:Latin America and by a potential future Portal:Chile, but I'm sure we can come to an amicable arrangement with them.-gadfium 19:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  • I will need to take some time to study some of the existing portals, but I think this is basically a good concept. There's nothing wrong, in my opinion, with a hierarchy of portals: Australia and New Zealand could retain portals of their own, portals could also be created gradually for other Pacific nations individually, and this could serve as a kind of super-portal covering the Pacific. It could feature a different Pacific nation each day, rotated among all the pacific countries in alphabetical order - provided that an editor willing to attend to that could be found. David Cannon 07:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
    • Daily rotation of articles is something I hadn't thought of. There are 27 country articles listed at Oceania with the exceptions I noted above; we could easily extend this to 31 articles by including Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and perhaps Pacific Ocean as the 31st article. This would be easy to automate; it would take a few hours work to write up each article on a suitably named subpage, and mediawiki would display the page according to the metavariable {{CURRENTDAY}}.
    • I think we would still want to have selected articles and maybe pictures rotating monthly, since there are many articles on the Wikipedia which will be of interest and topical we want to show to readers who may come across this portal.-gadfium 07:48, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  • I think the ideas are good. For my two cents worth, Norfolk Island is closely associated with Australia. It is part of the Division of Cannberra in Australia for example [2]. Pitcairn is part of Oceania given its association with Tahiti and the Mutiny on the Bounty. Capitalistroadster 10:17, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Agree per Capitalistroadster Siva1979Talk to me 19:41, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I'd be against excluding Australia and New Zealand from this portal. Whilst it's true the wealth of coverage lays with those two countries, they by no means need dominate this portal. The initial idea for a Portal:Oceania originated in discussions over hierarchical arrangement of portals. Country portals were to be made subportals of regional portals, which would themselves be subportals of Portal:Geography. Thus, in that reasoning, Portal:Oceania would exist as a link between Portal:Geography and the portals for countries in the region. These at present are Portal:Australia and Portal:New Zealand. I don't think other Oceanian nations could sustain individual portals (though I've noticed our coverage of Papua New Guinea and Fiji (and also Norfolk Island to a much lesser extent) greatly improving). If Portal:Oceania in the context I hope for doesn't do the nations aside Aus and NZ justice, I'd support Portal:Pacific Islands as subportal covering them exclusively.--cj | talk 14:50, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

What if we nominally cover Australia and New Zealand, and add them to the daily rotation, but decide not to include them in the selected articles section, and only cover them in ITN for the most important news, e.g. national elections. In this case, we should probably add Norfolk Island to the daily rotation. I'll do that immediately, with Norfolk in its alphabetical place, but with Australia and New Zealand at the end (so they might not appear in February).
If a Portal:Hawaii is later formed (and I think that the only other subportal likely to be viable in the near future [other than city portals]), we'll continue our overall coverage of Hawaii, but again make selected articles on Hawaii ineligible.-gadfium 18:32, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
I've decided that Australia and New Zealand may as well be alphabetical along with everything else. This does mean that Wake Island, the last territory in Oceania alphabetically, will miss out on February except in leap years.-gadfium 20:53, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
Wake Island has no indigenous inhabitants, and about 200 contractors are there presumably to run the emergency airstrip. I wouldn't have thought that would require 200 people, what are the rest doing? At any rate, I don't think this qualifies for inclusion in the daily rotation. That leaves us with a very neat 28 states and territories, one per day of the shortest month.-gadfium 22:20, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] West Papua and East Timor

Indonesia is generally considered to be in Southeast Asia. We're using the countries and territories listed in the Oceania article as our brief. Boundaries must be drawn somewhere, and they are of necessity somewhat arbitrary.-gadfium 18:40, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

I was not speaking about all Indonesia but West Papua which population and languages are culturally and linguistically considered as Papuan. Or may be their cousins from Papua New Guinea are not considered being oceanian ? If it's the case you should remove PNG from the list too. Nevers

Yes, West Papua is culturally and linguistically part of Melanesia, and would certainly be considered part of the portal if it was an independent country. On reflection, I think we should accept In The News items covering it, and I'd be happy to make Western New Guinea a selected article at some point, and to consider other articles about the area similarly.-gadfium 21:37, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Hawai'i, French polynesia, Tokelau... are not independant too, so, that's not the point. West Papua could belong to a future Southeast Asia portal as well (or may it already exists???). But I persist to think that West Papua has its full place too in a portal dedicated to Oceania. Don't make a fuss with "double or triple entries" (I don't know if it's the right expression in good english... anyway) that's the case for all oceanian countries and territories .Nevers

The issue of West Papua is an interesting one. As Nevers said, ethnically, culturally and linguistically West Papua is part of Melanesia, which is in turn part of Oceania. There is a significant West Papuan Secessionist movement which considers itself a separate cultural group to Indonesia, and there are (or at least there were a few years ago when I was living in Papua New Guina) thoughts of a unified island of New Guinea, although this is probably many many years away.
A similar question may be asked about East Timor, although it is ethnically and linguistically closer to South-East Asia I believe.TMac 03:59, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I am quite agree with you Tmac and I understand that boundaries are "somewhat arbitrary", but what are the criteria ? First thing to do would be to define them

- Political ? If it means only independant countries, it will seriously reduce the list.

- Members of the Pacific Islands Forum ? Guam, Northern Marianas, Hawai'i are not members. French polynesia, New Caledonia and East Timor are not full members but have the status of "observers".

- Members of the South Pacific Community ? I'm afraid that in this case, you should also include France, UK and USA which would not be very realistic

-Linguistic ? As far as the comparative methods are reliable there are three main language families in the Pacific area (austronesian, aboriginal, papuan). The problem is that Indonesian, Malagasy, and Tagalog are also Austronesian languages.

So in conclusion, if I had to arbitrary choose what is Oceania or not, ( a sort of mix of all these criteria) I would include West Papua and East Timor. Why not make a vote ?

I will add that some of you will probably think, that as a french speaker (I know my english is not really good) a "portal oceania" in an english wikipedia is not my business and i should better do it in the french wikipedia. You are right and if i had more time i would probably do it. The other issue is that i have noticed that when the english wikipedia doing an article or a portal, the other wikipedias generally follow the same model. So I try to be as efficient as i can, "lobbying" :) for West Papua as oceanian territory directly in the english versionNevers

  • I think it's most realistic to admit that boundaries are fuzzy, or leaky (mm, leaky fuzz), and that "all of the above" are in some sense Oceania. West Papua certainly faces two ways, as does Hawaii. Geographical entities just aren't always that clearly defined. I would just let editors follow their instincts and worry too much about trying to make bright-line distinctions, which simply don't exist in the real world. In any event, I think overlapping coverage is a much less serious problem than gaps in coverage. · rodii · 19:05, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Links to other Wikipedias

We should link from the main portal page to all those Wikipedias in languages indigenous to the area. The ones I am aware of are

I'm unsure whether we should link to French language at fr:; it is the main language in several Pacific Island nations.

There is an approved proposal for a Tetum language version of Wikipedia, currently under test at m:test-wp/tet. Once that Wikipedia is setup, we should link to it as well.

Wikipedias in Gilbertese language and Cook Islands Maori are under consideration.

My current feeling is that we should link to the French Wikipedia. What about the Spanish language one at es:? Spanish is presumably the normal language of the 40% of Easter Island inhabitants who originate from Chile, and probably is also spoken by the other Easter Islanders.-gadfium 22:20, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I've probably missed some. Please add them to the list.-gadfium 22:38, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I also added the Chamorro, Bislama and Marshallese editions. Belgian man 15:22, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Daily rotation

Following a suggestion from User:Davidcannon above, I'm planning a daily rotation between the various states which make up Oceania (I'll pad the articles on states with other geographical articles to make up 31). I've started preparing the writeups for these; see Portal:Oceania/Daily article. The writeups are only a draft; feel free to improve them or to swap in better pictures. In particular, I need a picture for Niue. Please try to keep the writeups about the same length as each other; it makes layout of the portal page so much easier.

I plan to have a selected article of the month as well. At this point, I'm not sure if I want to bother with a selected picture.-gadfium 08:26, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me! At least, let's get going with something. We can put a selected picture in later, but for now, the thing is to get the portal up and running. David Cannon 12:12, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

The first draft of the daily rotation list is now complete. I padded out the 28 countries and territories with Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, which I put in order of population, since the last will only appear on seven months of the year. I gave these three entries larger graphics, since the maps are even less useful at 100 pixels.

I need better pictures for Norfolk Island - the picture is of a Norfolk pine, but not one on the island, Tuvalu and Wallis and Futuna.-gadfium 23:59, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

This is a clever idea that they rotate automatically. Is this used on other portals? -- Astrokey44|talk 11:53, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Most mature portals have a queue of articles which change weekly or monthly, using the built in variables in MediaWiki to automatically switch to the new article. As far as I know, having a regular set of articles for the days of the month originated with this portal, and the idea for it was suggested to me by user:Davidcannon.-gadfium 18:06, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Selected articles

Here's a list of articles we could use for our monthly selected article. I'm not insisting that a selected article have a picture; if we have to we'll use the country's flag. A selected article candidate must be of reasonable length. I've tried to make a balance between different areas, topics and types of articles.

  • Pacific Ocean - generic - Selected article for March 2006
  • Culture of Papua New Guinea - culture, Papua New Guinea - Selected article for April 2006
  • Fiji coup of 2000 - history, Fiji - Selected article for May 2006
  • Bora Bora - geography, French Polynesia - Selected article for June 2006
  • James Cook - history, biography, covers much of the Pacific - Selected article for July 2006
  • Wake Island - primarily history, Micronesia - Selected article for August 2006
  • Tom Neale - biography, Cook Islands. - Selected article for September 2006
  • Moai - culture, Easter Island - Selected article for October 2006
  • History of East Timor - history, East Timor - Selected article for November 2006
  • Kava - culture - Selected article for December 2006
  • Bougainville Province - geography, history, Papua New Guinea - Selected article for January 2007
  • Hurricane Ioke - Central Pacific - Selected article for February 2007
  • Western New Guinea - geography, history - Selected article for March 2007
  • Pacific War - history, most of the Pacific - Selected article for April 2007
  • Chinatowns in Oceania - culture, covers many countries in the area.
  • Caroline Island - geography, Kiribati, a featured article.
  • <to be determined>, space articles on Pacific War
  • Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo - Solomon Islands, history, a featured article
  • <to be determined>, space articles on Pacific War
  • <to be determined>, space articles on Pacific War
  • <to be determined>, space articles on Pacific War
  • Battle of the Tenaru - Solomon Islands, history, a featured article

Please add more to the list, comment on the selection, and suggest alternate ordering.-gadfium 23:59, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

The queue can be seen at Portal:Oceania/Selected article.

I won't use Hawaiian language as a selected article while it has cleanup tags on it. The tags are appropriate; the article does badly need cleanup.-gadfium 04:04, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] And we're off...

The portal is up and running. Comments welcomed. Pitching in and helping welcomed even more.

At present, the "Associated Wikimedia" section isn't really working. Only Wikinews and Commons have an Oceania section, and Wikinews redirects that to the Oceania portal. Should we customise the section to only include relevant Wikimedia, or should we drop it entirely as we already link to Wikinews in the Current events section?

Anyone who can help with the "Other languages" section is welcome; I'd like the link to each language to consist of a few words in that language saying "Wikipedia in XXXese".

I'll get a Oceania in 2006 page set up in the next few days to serve as a permanent record of the Current Events section. I expect the Current Events will have more than a couple of items on it at one time, which will pose problems for the left-right column balance. We could change the widths of the columns to improve this situation, or add an extra box to the left-hand column (maybe a DYK), or move the "Other languages" box to the left-hand column (and put it back to a single column). I'd like some feedback on this.

Using the "Edit" button on the Selected article will at present give you the redirect page. This is an artifact of putting up the portal towards the end of the month, and the March selection being shown when the month is actually February. It should be right at the beginning of next month.-gadfium 05:14, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Anyone who wants to stay involved, please add your name to Wikipedia:Portal/Directory as a maintainer.-gadfium 05:27, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
On the Other languages part, should there be a link to maori wikipedia? as it is a language spoken in Oceania?
BTW: all Wikinews country/area/region/sport etc redirect to a portal. Brian | (Talk) 07:59, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
How did I forget Māori? I made up the list of languages while the portal was going to exclude Australia and New Zealand, but I still had in mind that Māori should be included.
I've added a shortcut for everyone's convenience: P:O-gadfium 08:24, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] In the News

How are we to decide what gets added to ITN? all it be all the news from Current Events in Austraila and New Zealand? or...... Brian | (Talk) 23:38, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Since Australia and New Zealand have their own portals, I would expect that events from those countries would rarely appear on this portal's ITN. Elections and changes of leader would be fine. The Tokelau referendum was properly on both portals, I believe.
We do still need to decide whether our ITN events appear. I see three possibilities:
  1. put them on Current events in Australia and New Zealand (possibly renamed). Because this portal covers 28 countries, there's a potential for quite a lot of ITN stories.
  2. we set up Current events in Oceania. This would have a page per month, same as the Current events in A/NZ.
  3. use the minimal solution of 2006 in Oceania - a single page for the year, same as 2006 in New Zealand, and updated irregularly because it will be valuable in future years, not immediately. We need to set up this page anyway, and add a list of current leaders for each state to it.
I'll ask at Talk:Current events in Australia and New Zealand what people there think. There are a few regulars there who I haven't seen here.-gadfium 00:04, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] East Timor Army strike

Any one reading this got any insight into what's happening in East Timor at present. I'm not sure what to make of [3] and [4].-gadfium 08:20, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be escalating.[5]. Anyone want to write a backgrounder? I don't have much spare time at the moment.-gadfium 08:54, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
And now I see [6]. I know the press sometimes blows things out of proportion, but this looks significant to me.-gadfium 08:59, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] One month sanity check

The portal has been live for a bit over a month. Our selected article has rolled over to the second topic. How are we doing so far? Is the news pane doing an adequate job? I haven't had a lot of other people contributing to the portal in the last month, so I'm posting to a vacuum so far. I've had limited time since the beginning of March to devote to this portal, but I might have more time in the second half of April. What should I concentrate on?-gadfium 06:35, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Australasia again @ Oceania

Someone wants to delete Australasia as a heading from the territories table at Oceania. I'm mentioning it here to get some more eyeballs on the question. Discuss at Talk:Oceania if you're interested. · rodii · 20:07, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] East Timor in Oceania? According to which criteria?

I think we should leave East Timor in Southeast Asia where it does belong geographically anyway. But is it necessary to include it in the Oceania section? If so, then we should include Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philipines who are also linguistically and culturally related to the countries in Oceania. We should ask the East Timorese themselves if they wish to be included or not. Because many East Timorese I know resent being called a " Pacific" or "South Pacific" country because of the negative connotations associated with them, such as the violence and turmoil of the "failed states" of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Did you read the discussion above on this topic? · rodii · 15:59, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I think that East Timor should be in Oceania because these subportals are not How the countries are Geographically (They are to a degree) associated but also cultually and Politically. --Gerrado 19:40, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pacific Islands

Oceania includes all of the Pacific Island excluding the overseas territories. If someone could, maybe include them on the portals? I have part of the list: Fiji

Nauri

Guam

Kiribati

Vanuatu

Solomon Islands

I'm not sure what you are asking here. All these countries are already a part of the portal. The portal showcases a different country each day of the month (with some filler articles at the end of the month); you can see all the countries at Portal:Oceania/Daily_article. Our coverage of news from the region is not as thorough as I'd like it to be, as I have limited time and knowledge, but anyone can add to the Portal:Oceania/Oceania news section.-gadfium 00:26, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Uh, Yeah, sorry I'm new to this sort of thing, never mind. I was getting annoyed about the european portals, you know. There are many countries missing but ok. Don't bother. You probably know better than me. --Gerrado 15:10, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Expanding news coverage

I've decided to start including a greater number of news items from Australia and New Zealand in this portals In the News section. This will help keep the news fresh.-gadfium 05:44, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

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