Talk:Nosy Be

Not a typical region
Nosy Be is an odd case in our regional hierarchy. In my experience planning a trip to Madagascar: Businesses located in Hell-Ville can obviously be listed in that article, but I'm thinking that the many resorts located on beaches around the island should be listed in the main Nosy Be article, despite the fact that it's a region article. Does that sound right? Note that I don't think it makes sense to divide Nosy Be into sub-regions (beyond having individual articles for the separate small islands) since it's so rural, and since the vast majority of resorts are clustered along the western coast. Does anyone have alternate suggestions for organizing this area? Is there a similar example that I could model this article after? -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 01:51, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Nosy Be is used to refer to both the island of Nosy Be, as well as the region that includes smaller islands around Nosy Be. As such I've listed a few of those islands as "Other destinations" in this region article.
 * The island of Nosy Be has just one major town (Hell-Ville), but many of the tourist accommodations are located outside of Hell-Ville on the beaches that surround the island.


 * A large, sparse rural area can be placed at town/city-level as a single entity if the amount of content justifies this. Rural Montgomery County, Thousand Islands, Prince Edward County follow this pattern. Another option is to create "#Nearby" as a section or subsection (usually before "Go next" and the list of places with actual articles). This avoids creating individual venue listings in region-level articles, something we usually try to avoid as it attracts spammy or duplicate entries. K7L (talk) 04:56, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I understand. Using the city template for the island might make sense, but the small town of Hell-Ville is located on the southern part of the island, and not really a "next" destination.  Alternately, trying to shoehorn the accommodations around the island into a "Nearby" section of the Hell-Ville article also strikes me as problematic - putting 20+ resorts into a "Nearby" section of the town article doesn't seem like a logical solution given that some of those resorts will be a 30 minute drive outside of a town you could walk across in ten minutes.  Am I misunderstanding?  Would there be any harm in having business listings in a region article, aside from the danger of someone trying to spam listings in both the Nosy Be & Hell-Ville articles? -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 02:05, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I'll go on record as saying that having listings in a regional article is OK as long as there's an italicized message at the beginning of the relevant sections with wording something like this: "For listings in Hell-Ville, go to the Hell-Ville article. The following are listings for places outside of Hell-Ville." Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:03, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Putting listings in a region article threatens to cause confusion for future authors, even if it's clear in this one case. It's better to remain consistent and keep listings only in bottom-level articles. Pursuant to that, I see two options:
 * Merge Hell-Ville with Nosy Be, creating a single article for the entire island.
 * Define the Nosy Be article as "rural Nosy Be", or something similar, which is what was done with Rural Montgomery County.
 * -- Powers (talk) 20:07, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * If you think this kind of exception threatens to cause confusion, then what about absolutely necessary exceptions like Niue? Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:58, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Niue is a bottom-level article. I'm tempted to say the same for Montserrat as nothing under it covers a populated area. K7L (talk) 17:20, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * What I'm struggling with is that perhaps one-third of the businesses relevant to travelers will be found in the town of Hell-Ville, while everything else is in the rural parts of the island, so "Hell-Ville" and "everything else" seems like a logical split. However, since Hell-Ville is contained within the larger island, we either have a "Nosy Be" article that both contains individual listings AND is the parent region for Hell-Ville (with the disclaimer that Ikan mentioned above to avoid duplicate listings), or we create some arbitrary region for "rural Nosy Be" and have two children for the main "Nosy Be" article.  The latter seems like a bad idea to me since I don't see how such a split is useful to travelers - we're basically just adding one more click in the geographic hierarchy in order to have a bottom-level article with business listings, with the intermediate article seemingly offering no value on its own.  As noted previously, I still think the most logical solution for this specific case is a region article that allows listings for businesses not located in Hell-Ville (something that the WV:Region article template seemingly allows via the "Almost always, individual listings...do *not* belong in a region or sub-region page" language), but if there is an example of the same situation being handled differently elsewhere then it would better to follow existing precedent. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 18:15, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I think Rural Montgomery County is the best precedent we have. The "almost always" wording you cite is to allow listings that apply to an entire region, like restaurant chains or visitors bureaus, to be listed in Region articles. Powers (talk) 19:11, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Rural Montgomery County seems like a good comparison for a large rural area without any article-worthy population centers, but in this case we have a large rural area that contains a medium-sized town with significant tourist infrastructure. Unless we fold Hell-Ville into Nosy Be (which would eventually need to be undone as the articles grow and the content expands) I'm not sure that it applies to this specific use-case. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 19:25, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you're missing my point. Rural Montgomery County only covers the county outside of the major population centers, which are covered in other bottom-level articles.  Powers (talk) 01:56, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Perhaps I'm not understanding. I thought you were suggesting we either fold the town back into the Nosy Be article, or that we have separate articles for "rural Nosy Be" and "Hell-Ville", which would both then need to exist under a shared parent article such as "Nosy Be (island)".  I'm not sure either suggestion is ideal (as discussed above), but maybe I'm not understanding the proposal correctly. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 02:31, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know that we need a parent article separate from Antsiranana Province; they could both exist under that article. Then there's no "extra click".  Powers (talk) 00:56, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think that solution is ideal for an island - we wouldn't (for example) create "Rural Oahu" and "Honolulu" but not have an "Oahu" article. In this case, Nosy Be is possibly the largest tourist attraction in Madagascar in terms of the number of tourists that visit it.  That said, at this point there have been numerous suggestions made about how to handle this particular case without any one seeming to be agreeable to everyone, so unless anyone is willing to give a bit of ground I'm going to be a poor sport and leave it to the next person who wants to write about Nosy Be to figure out how to do it - as happens a lot on this site, the discussion about what solution to implement has sucked away my desire to actually implement anything at all. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 01:16, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you were looking for when you started the discussion then. Is there something about the way the discussion has gone that saps your desire? Powers (talk) 02:04, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * First, I admit fully that it's unreasonable for me to be annoyed at where this discussion has ended up. Second, it's beyond ridiculous that in a project that has existed for more than a decade that someone can ask for advice on where to put content about a destination, and four days later we're nowhere near a solution and there isn't any agreeable way to start adding content.  Sorry for the rant, I'm moving on. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 03:33, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Since there's no agreement, why not just put the content in and then let others argue about where it should be moved, if anywhere? Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:53, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know how to make this less "ridiculous". I don't know what we could change. Please help us. Powers (talk) 14:22, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay about about this? Three articles, one for the outlying islands, one for the island outside of the main town, and one for Hell-Ville alone.  We would need an overview article, then, but there will be plenty for it to cover as far as traveling between the islands, right?  Powers (talk) 18:44, 16 November 2014 (UTC)