Make [Great Britain] just plain old [Britain] again

Question

Currently we have two tags:

1. britain (95 Questions tagged)
2. great-britain (15 Questions tagged)

Furthermore, britain has a usage excerpt and a summary while great-britain does not.

As the two tags are essentially for the same purpose, to avoid redundancy, I propose that we should do something about it.

We could take either one of the following approaches:

1. Nuke great-britain (The tag, not the country)
2. Make great-britain a synonym of britain.

I prefer the second approach personally. Thoughts?

EDIT: It has been two days but a clear consensus on the matter has not presented itself yet. I am not sure If I am the one who gets to break the tie. Let's wait till monday and see if community decides by then. Still nothing visible, closest we have gotten is 1,1,0. I assume a little more wait until one proposal gets at least 3x votes than the closest one ought to do the trick to reflect the community consensus properly. Alternatively, I'd like any of our mods to weigh in on when should we accept the current highest voted proposal.

Answer 1

I've actually been working on a proposal to reogranise the British tags. It's a somewhat complicated topic though, and sure to generate many conflicting opinions. The two main issues as I see them are:

1. Britain is an ambiguous term that can mean Great Britain the island, or the United Kingdom, or the Kingdom of Great Britain.

2. Great Britain is ambiguous term that can mean either the island or the kingdom.

The purpose of tags is to sort questions into useful categories.. This means that tags should strike a balance between specificity and generality, and ideally be relatively unambiguous and intuitive to use. While editing the excerpts can help, the reality is that most people don't bother reading them. Case in point, right now britain contains questions including the Kingdom of Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the island of Great Britain.

So, my proposal is:

• create a new tag british-isles: This has the great advantage of being an unambiguously geographical and well understood term, unlike great-britain which is both an island and a kingdom. The British Isles taken as a whole is also reasonably sized for a general regional tag, since we already have ireland, scotland, wales, and england for more specific questions. _{If people are adamantly opposed to grouping Ireland together with the UK, an alternative is british-islands which exclude Ireland. But in my opinion this is unnecessarily specific.}

• make britain a "synonym" of united-kingdom: Because Britain is an ambiguous term with conflicting definitions, it is better to avoid it altogether. I believe the redirect is appropriate because Britain is a common abbreviation for the UK, and many¹ existing² questions³ use the tag that way anyway. We can include usage notes in the tag redirecting people to british-isles or another appropriate tag.

The second question is what to do with great-britain. We could maintain it as a separate tag for the Kingdom of Great Britain, which is, in theory, the existing usage. In practice, it is frequently misused in confusion with united-kingdom - see below for examples. Evidently this tag is non intuitive for our users, and I would further argue that it is unnecessarily fragmentary. Therefore, my proposal is to:

• declare united-kingdom the appropriate tag for the Kingdom of Great Britain: They are the same polity with an unbroken continuity, separated only by a cosmetic name change. Hence, practically speaking, there's no real benefit to treating them separately. In fact, most of our users don't: many¹ existing² questions³ tagged great-britain are actually about the UK, and vice versa. Since the Kingdom of Great Britain almost completely overlaps with the 18th century, I propose we simply tag such questions 18th-century and united-kingdom.
• make great-britain a synonym for united-kingdom or british-isles

Answer 2

Background

As I understand it, the function of tags is to allow questions about particular topics or events to be found quickly. As such, we should probably be careful of removing tags which help to find information. The numbers of questions may be relatively small now, but they will hopefully grow as the site grows.

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In this case, the problem is not a straightforward one, and is complicated by history, geography and politics. The language matters to a lot of people (note the history of nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales!) The following diagram will give some illustration of what I mean:

And even that does not capture the full complexity! I hope that I don't tread on too may toes in what follows. If I do, I can only apologise and hope that I have only trodden lightly!

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I think there are logically two ways to look at this if we are going to decide what tags are likely to be needed to capture this complexity: top-down or bottom-up.

I'm going to try a bottom-up approach.

In its modern sense, "Britain" is a rather nebulous, often ill-defined term. However, when that term is used the component parts that go to make up the whole will probably be some, or all, of the following:

• england
• ireland
• scotland
• Wales
• The Isle of Man
• The Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, etc.)

When James VI and I succeeded to the throne of England on the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, he had three separate and distinct crowns: the crown of England, the crown of Scotland and the crown of Ireland. The term Great Britain was actually first used during the reign of James VI & I as a kind of shorthand to refer to the (then still separate) Kingdoms of England and Scotland.

The Kingdom of Great Britain was created by the union of the crowns of Scotland and England. The name was defined in the first sections of the Union with Scotland Act 1706 and the Union with England Act 1707.

So, for example, the 1706 Act states:

"That the two Kingdoms of England and Scotland shall upon the First day of May which shall be in the year One thousand seven hundred and seven and for ever after be united into one Kingdom by the name of Great Britain"

Which left two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland.

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On a side-note, Wales had been conquered and occupied by Edward I in the 13th century, and was effectively a colony of England until it was formally annexed through the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 & 1542, which made it a part of the Kingdom of England. This is also why there is no "Welsh" component in the union flag:

and may also explain why we have relatively few questions explicitly about Wales so far, and don't (yet) have a tag for it.

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In 1800, the Union with Ireland Act united the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. The act states that:

"the said kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland shall, upon the first day of January which shall be in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and one, and for ever after, be united into one kingdom, by the name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland"

The name was amended to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland when southern Ireland became independent of the UK from 1922.

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So, what I suggest is the following:

On the basis of the history set out above, I think it makes sense to retain the great-britain to refer explicitly to events involving the Kingdom of Great Britain, and to create a usage excerpt and summary to reflect that. The britain tag really does not mean the same thing.

The tag united-kingdom should be used to refer to the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (from 1800 - 1922) and/or the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (from 1922 - ). The usage excerpt and summary for the tag should be updated to reflect that.

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Which still leaves us with a couple of problems. The first of these may be illustrated by a couple of examples. How should we tag questions that are explicitly about Roman Britain (distinct from the rest of the Roman Empire), or about post-Roman Britain before the emergence of an entity that was recognisably "England"?

It is in situations like this where the less-precise term britain may be useful. However, it is probably better to use the unambiguous british-isles, with an appropriate usage excerpt and summary to make it clear that the function of the tag is a "catch-all". We can then maintain britain as a synonym for british-isles.

A quick glance at the list of questions tagged britain shows a number that should probably be re-tagged as either great-britain, (e.g. Why were British ships not of the same quality as French and Spanish ships until the latter part of the 18th century?) or united-kingdom (e.g. How did the Crimean war change British society?)

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The other problem is Ireland. We currently have ireland and republic-of-ireland. The former states that:

The questions may refer to both the island itself and Ireland as a country.

While the latter currently has only 4 tagged questions.

It may be that we should consider having three tags:

• ireland: for questions referring to the island of Ireland or the Kingdom of Ireland until 1800
• republic-of-ireland: for questions about the Independent republic of Ireland from 1922
• northern-ireland: (probably with the tag synonym "Ulster") for questions about Northern Ireland after 1922.

Answer 3

These terms have formal definitions. Britain is distinct from Great Britain. Combining them would be like making "USA" = "Alabama".

Answer 4

I think that the following tags would be appropiate:

British Isles (geography)

British Islands (geography)

Ireland (island)

Ireland (republic)

Ireland (Kingdom or KIngdom of Ireland)

Irish kingdoms/medieval Ireland

Great Britain (Island)

Great Britain (kingdom 1707-1800)

England (Kingdom 927-1707)

England

Scotland

Scotland (Kingdom 843-1707)

United Kingdom (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland/Northern Ireland 1801-present)

Wales

Welsh kingdoms/medieval Wale

I think that they would be almost all the needed tags.

Answer 5

I'm mildly against this.

Technically at least they could be two different things. Britain is an island, Great Britain is a polity.

Although it excludes Northern Ireland, Great Britain comprises somewhat more than the island of Britain. It includes the Isle of Wight, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands, Anglesey, and so on.

While negligible in size, the culture of these places is very strong, and diverse both with regard to other and to Britain (England, Scotland and Wales are obviously hetrogenous too, but that's another story).

So, a question could be about Great Britain, but not Britain. Moreover, any question can't be about Great Britain if it deals with events before the 18th century; the Romans, Saxons, Normans etc settled Britain, and Great Britain didn't exist yet.

Division should be:

• British Isles: the whole shebang. British and Irish Isles should be a synonym.

• united-kingdom for the currently existing country, 1801 onwards. This implies Northern Ireland, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, and others which aren't counted e.g. in GB-only general election results. If before 1922, this means Ireland too.

• great-britain for questions about British history 1707 onward. People should specify Northern Ireland or Ireland if their question relates to that too, because that's not included in the tag.

• britain is the island. This should be reserved for ancient history questions, or where it's intended as a geographical term.