Talk:South Asia

message: Is Afghanistan in South Asia or in Central Asia (or possibly in the Middle East)? This silly little question has attracted a surprising amount of wiki controversy over the years. I think the current, stable, version of the Afghanistan article gets things right: in the very first sentence it says the country is located at the crossroads of the two regions, and then never comes back to this question again. The other two linked articles devote some more screen space to the issue, and at least one of the two does an alright job of it.
I'm not interested in pursuing any changes here. I've just combed through the talk archives of Afghanistan, South Asia, Cental Asia and the Indian subcontinent articles, and compiled a catalogue of all relevant discussions I've been able to find. The list is as follows (I've excluded the numerous short unanswered edit-request threads, though I've left a few of those for flavour; bld indicates the thread was either particularly extensive or featured a lot of sources):
*2005: Feb, Mar, July, Aug (A B)
*2006: Oct +ff
*2007: Jan (A, B), Sep, Oct, Nov (A,  B), Dec
*2008: Jan and Feb, May
*2009: Mar;
*2010: May
*2012: Apr (A +ff, B, C), July
*2013: Dec +ff
*2014: Feb, May, May-Nov
*2015: Mar (A, B, C), Nov (A, B +ff)
*2016: Jan, Feb, Dec
*2017: Apr, Dec
*2018: Jan (A and B), May
*2019: July, Sep, Oct
*2020: Apr (A B, C), May (A, B), Aug (A, B), Sep
*2021: Jan, June, Oct (A, B)
*2022: Feb, Apr, May (A, B)
I can draw three conclusions from all the stuff above:
#This is an obvious point but it doesn't come up in the discussions nearly as often as it should. A region can be variously delimited based on a wide range of possible criteria and from the perspectives of disparate fields of academic knowledge and personal experience. Depending on the criterion used and the perspective taken, the entire country may fall within either of the regions, or parts of it may fall within one region and parts within another. In either case, the inclusion can be (and very often is) of a fuzzy type.
#A large number of sources have been presented in some of the discussions. A lot of them include Afghanistan in South Asia. A lot include Afghanistan in Central Asia. A lot of sources talk of South Asia without including Afghanistan. A lot talk of Central Asia without including the country. Very, very few sources have been presented that have gone beyond passing mentions to explicitly discuss the country's inclusion in this or that region; there's next to nothing there that could form the basis of non-OR metastatements of the type "Most/some definitions of region X include/exclude Afghanistan".
#This last point is impossible to miss in the discussions: despite #1 and #2 above, for each of the two regions there is a large set of editors who are absolutely adamant that the country's inclusion in this region is the position that's obvious, natural, common, and supported by the majority of sources, and who vehemently oppose its inclusion in the other region as a fringe viewpoint divorced from reality and largely absent from the sources. This has been a major driving force of the past discussions and is the reason why many of them make for such a sad reading. – Uanfala (talk) 19:29, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Past discussions

message: 185.13.106.113 (talk) 14:42, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Edit requests must contain content. EphemeralPerpetuals (they/them)talk 14:56, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 14 January 2024