Make exceptions for small countries were locations are often mislabelled (Scotland, Wales, etc.)#95

Looking at the site’s destination guides for countries like Scotland and Wales, they commonly seem to have issues where the locations for Places often use cities and often their local equivalent of states. The list for Scotland below shows that some Places will be “East Lothian, Scotland”, while others are “Edinburgh, Scotland”. This would be the equivalent of chopping and changing between “Los Angeles, USA” and “California, USA”.

Additionally, some of the council areas’ (“state”) destination guides are themselves inconsistent. The Outer Hebrides and Shetland are two separate council areas, all Places in the Hebrides one have the location set as “Outer Hebrides, Scotland”, while the Shetland locations are an assortment of town names. Since Scotland has 32 council areas in total and these are not that big geographically, my suggestion would be to simplify the country’s guides and limit them to these areas. All Places will have their location as one of these, thus eliminating having to verify town names, etc.

Every major city in the country corresponds to its own council area, meaning that cities like Dundee and Perth would not get lost in a guide using a different name. Since the areas themselves are reasonably sized, visitors could use the guides in the same way one would do so for a small US state like Delaware. Wales is similar in that AO has a Gwynedd guide (state equivalent) and a Llandudno one (town equivalent).

In order to bring consistency to smaller countries such as these, whose first-level subdivisions are well-defined and not that numerous (unlike England’s many more and more loosely-defined counties, or the very few Northern Irish counties that don’t share a name with the major cities), I think exceptions should be made to limit the total number of destination guides and streamline the process.

Other countries that might benefit from this could be Belize, with six districts and where AO currently states that a very-offshore blue hole in the sea corresponds to Belize City; or others that might be suggested in this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_Scotland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_principal_areas

A couple other countries this might work for are Taiwan (where AO currently struggles between Districts and Townships), which could use the 22 divisions outlined here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Taiwan#Current_system

Equatorial Guinea might be another, the “Malabo” destination has Places 12 miles apart from each other. With a Bioko Norte province guide, this would make more sense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_Equatorial_Guinea

Thanks for documenting these all here. Particularly interesting to learn about the council areas and how that grouping for destination guides may be more useful to people than cities.

Right now, these exceptions have to be changed manually (similar to how we’ve done it for NYC boroughs have to be fixed manually so having this list here is helpful for editors. We are definitely interested in having more consistent desitnation guides and will rely on this info as we consider restructuring how geographical data is stored in our database.

I’ve looked at other countries that might suit this system where the guides are simplified by not using towns/cities but subdivisions instead:

Kyrgyzstan (9 regions)

Israel (6 districts)

And most Central American countries, such as Belize (6), Costa Rica (7) and El Salvador (14)