Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-18014300-20170207141903

Over at Wikipedia, common names for countries, such as China, France, Japan, etc. are merged with articles on those countries current regimes. For example, the article at China is also the article for the People's Republic of China. Meanwhile, there are separate articles for predecessor states, even if they were all China.

I think we should have clarification whether this should also be the case for our articles on countries. The reason is because that seems to be the cast at the moment, given that China is also the article for the People's Republic of China, and France, its current incarnation, the French Fifth Republic.

However, I found it awkward while writing the article on Granada War to refer to the Crown of Castile or the Crown of Aragon yet link to the current Kingdom of Spain. It's far more awkward I think in a case such as France, where Kingdom of France would lead to an article on the Republic of France. I wasn't sure if I should have created articles on the Crown of Castile and Crown of Aragon and/or the Kingdom of Aragon (which is slightly different b/c it excludes Barcelona) or not.

In Wikipedia, this issue is avoided because there are separate articles on the different regimes throughout a country's history. It has not been established if this should be our policy as well. We have an article devoted specifically to the Ming dynasty, yet this is not the case for the Kingdom of France.

My question is then, shall we adhere to Wikipedia's policy as well? (i.e. articles on the country/civilization in general is also the article on its current regime at the same time + separate articles for former regimes of the country/civilization.)

Or rather, shall we instead have all just single articles for countries without having separate articles for past incarnations of it? I think if this is the case, perhaps we should be clear that our article on China for example isn't presenting itself as primarily an article on the People's Republic of China, and rather on the Chinese civilization as a whole for all its history. The same goes for France, India, etc.

An issue that may arise from this second approach though is that some past states and regimes don't necessarily correspond exactly with modern sovereign states. For example, the Ayyubid dynasty, at the time officially named the Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, the state founded by Saladin and ruled from Cairo was technically "Egypt", but in the role it served as the main enemy against the Crusaders in the Levant, isn't commonly seen as such in our eyes. He didn't particularly see himself as Egyptian (being an ethnic Kurd from a Turkic state), and nowadays, he is a major symbol for Arab nationalism.

What are your thoughts? What is or should be our policy on this matter? Personally, I'm leaning on the second approach because I think that since our focus is on Assassin's Creed not real-life, we shouldn't have too many divided articles on real-life governments and countries, instead consolidating those for conciseness, in the same way that Wikipedia doesn't have separate articles for everything about Assassin's Creed. For former regimes without exact modern-day counterparts like the Ayyubid Sultanate or the Emirate of Granada, they should have their own articles.

However, going by this second approach, I think that we should make it more clear that an article on China doesn't concern the People's Republic of China by default, but its civilization as a whole. At the same time, however, we already have an article on the Ming dynasty, and I'm not sure if the content we can include in it would be large enough that its deserves its own article. Perhaps our policy should be case-by-case then? Depending on whether information about a particular regime is extensive enough to warrant its own article? <ac_metadata title="Policy on Country Articles"> </ac_metadata>