Clearly you were not involved in the creation of Usenet newsgroups in the uk.* hierarchy in the mid-1990s as I was! I remember the original proposal for uk.local.northwest, being a newsgroup intended to cover northwest England. There was an immediate and vociferous reaction from our Caledonian brethren who pointed out, accurately, that northwest England is just about in the middle of the island and by no stretch of the imagination is the "northwest" of the UK. We eventually ended up creating uk.local.nw-england. Wales is, indeed, very much in the southwestern quadrant of the island of Great Britain, and I would urge you not to be mislead by the maps on the BBC tv weather forecasts, which because of perspective make Scotland look considerably smaller than it is.   (talk)