Category talk:Middle East

Just a note, Afghanistan is not in the Middle East. Crimson 03:33, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Afghanistan is NOT in the MIddle-East!
Someone already pointed out that Afghanistan is NOT in the MIddle-East back in 2006! There should be a way to re-categorize such articles without having to go through them one by one.


 * It might or might not be, depending on what definition of "Middle East" you use. See this map for details. Tempodivalse [talk]  17:46, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Turkey
Afaik we've never counted Turkey as part of the Middle East news region. Perhaps there's some project history I'm missing, there; a particular weakness of the wiki platform is its inability to reconstruct what was in a category at a past point in time. --Pi zero (talk) 22:53, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
 * We haven't? Well, if we aren't then where is Turkey? Our map clearly displays Turkey. Joking aside, it has been a point of contention (over at Wikipedia). I never really understood why given history, but I think it was political edit-warring. After Turkey joined NATO and was contemplating joining the EU, there were massive amounts of edits removing Turkey from the Middle East on Wikipedia. Some tried to conflate it with notions of "Near East" and "Far East" but Turkey was always kept in Middle East. This "push" seems to have stopped under Erdogan as he consolidates power. Whether or not what I just said is true or not, I think we can put Turkey in the Middle East simply from their activities. Turkey is heavily involved in everything that occurs in the Middle East. From flotillas to Palestine to fighting ISIS in Syria (and using it as a pretense to also fight Kurds all the way into Iraq) Turkey is Middle East. And historically, didn't the Ottomans create the Middle East? --SVTCobra 23:59, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Historically, Turkey was the heart of the . You can thank  for that.  There's a cultural tie, there; however, my (close, though flawed) memory was that when I arrived here Turkey was classified in our hierarchy as part of Asia, period.  Looking at the history of our Turkey, it appears I was not personally responsible for any of its shifts between regions, though I have been personally responsible for going through and normalizing inclusion of articles about countries in particular regions, which had come out kind of random.  I see at User:Pi zero/Categories I've got places to flag out for correction articles that belong to Turkey but not Asia, to Turkey but not Europe, or to Turkey and Middle East &mdash; that last being laborious because it isn't always wrong: an article doesn't go under Middle East because it's under Turkey, but many articles under Turkey are also under some country such as Syria that does belong to the Middle East region.  I see that, in fact, our Category:Turkey was created as only in Europe but almost immediately added to both Asia and Middle East, all that in December 2004; remained in all three until Jaunary 2010 when brianmc removed it from Europe; then in February 2010 Rana added it back into Europe and removed it from Middle East, which is how it's been ever since.  I think I knew all that when I started on my squaring-away of such things as tracked on my /Categories page, and figured, well, let's at least be consistent. We don't really have control of the image.  Images have always been a weak spot in the wiki concept, I've felt, because they often contain information that could be described by wiki markup but the image cannot be controlled by wiki markup. --Pi zero (talk) 00:28, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, the images which Commons updates are debatable. But checking the history here, I see maps which were not updated "after a change of opinion" such as this File:LocationMiddleEast.png. Interesting about the Asia only thing. We did see our share of Marxist 'opinionators' who flooded us with NPOV complaints, the scars of which are still seen todsay. Perhaps Turkey was given to them in a hostage situation. --SVTCobra 01:15, 29 August 2019 (UTC)