Talk:List of largest empires

Portuguese Empire

In 1815 Brazil was not part of a "Portuguese Empire", because there was a United Kingdom composed by these two countries. It's like to say that Scotland is part of a British Kingdom. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.92.92.78 (talk • contribs) 01:10, January 2, 2011 (UTC)

Roman Empire

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how was the roman empire not contiguous? Chipmunkdavis (talk) 08:59, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Britain? --Jayron32 13:56, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

I thought that, but the list lists areas such as the Russian Empire as contiguous, despite having islands etc. (Alaska in Russia's case) Chipmunkdavis (talk) 17:18, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

True enough. Hey, why not fix it and if someone objects we can work it out. --Jayron32 18:02, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

There's a good argument for describing the Roman Empire as contiguous, since during it's peak it controlled the connecting waters, such as the Mediterranean and the Channel, over which their legions freely passed. For a time, there was an isolated pocket of Roman-ness north of the Black Sea and I suspect that's the only bit that could have been said fairly to be non-contiguous. Of course, this all changed in the later empire. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 11:30, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Changes to figures, stats, empire sizes, etc

This article has been bombarded by numerous small changes to the figures for empire populations, sizes, rankings, etc. Many of these come from IP users, so I requested and obtained semi-protection for a while. It would be great if we could obtain agreement that from now on, all such changes should be discussed first here in the talk page and attempts made to gather evidence for any such changes. No evidence, no changes. There are bound to be lots and lots of errors and disputable facts in the article as-is, since the start point is somewhat arbitrary and there was a great deal of messing about beforehand. However, we can make a start. When semi-protect comes off in a month, I will re-apply if it continues. The aim is to try to take this article away from it's somewhat shaky current status towards being a better article. The alternative already discussed is full deletion which I will support if we can't get anywhere with a more structured approach. Would welcome thoughts from other editors. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 11:34, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

There are several problems with this article. I agree that many of the numbers in the article are disputable and in error. I think that a fundamental problem is that the "reliable sources" we quote simply are not reliable for areas of empires. Historians don't care about these numbers. Why should they? They are reliable on dates and much other data but if they state the size of, for example, the Roman Empire, they don't mean it to more than (at most) one significant digit. I would suggest making clear that all these numbers (at least before about 1850) are very approximate.

Although currently I have no verified source for this, I'm pretty sure the Roman Empire did in fact have quite exact records of the Empire's size. 213.220.106.35 (talk) 20:53, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

There are many other problems with the article, such as when is a kingdom (or any other state) an empire. I think that both the USA and the USSR have genuine arguments both for and against and we could get into endless arguments over whether the Central African Empire or the Assyrian Old Kingdom were really empires. My suggestion would be to merge this article with List of empires, which, interestingly, seems to be shorter than List of largest empires. This wouldn't solve the problems, but the editors there seem to have many of the same problems and there's no benefit to doing the same work twice. Alternatively, if you do nominate this for AfD, I'll vote delete. But I doubt that there would be consensus to get rid of it. Dingo1729 (talk) 22:24, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I would vote delete, too, for the reasons I gave here and which are just as valid now as then. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 01:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Another problem is that already fixed error keep creeping in again. For we've got again a rather questionable map of the Persian empire. Also some authors seem to augment/combine already shaky or not particularly reliable sources which produces an even more questionable outcome. The constant stream of (sometimes questionable) edits make any real quality management really difficult and verarious authors have simply giving up in the past. There have been various AfDs in the past iirc, but they all failed.--Kmhkmh (talk) 01:41, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if we should start with some kind of big simplification, remove everything that sounds like an exact sizing pre-1850 and cut out a lot of the material. Make the article more manageable and give us a starting point to work from? Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 09:07, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

British Empire

Didn't BE reach its peak (in terms of area) in 1921, not 1946? I think the figures should be corrected. The area of BE was 36.6 million km² in 1921, whereas it was 33.1 million km² in 1946, even if we consider Canada, Australia etc. to be not independent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.250.177.223 (talk) 11:20, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Suggest remove "By era" section

I don't think we need to specify "Ancient empires" and whatever, since that much is obvious if you sort on the date column. (we might need a little bit of work on the formatting of years and whatever, and maybe we could shade them according to cutoff dates or something, but otherwise it does the job reasonably well)

This whole section is merely repetition at the moment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.141.22.25 (talk) 21:09, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree with that. I've never liked these multiple copies of the information. Dingo1729 (talk) 21:47, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

So I'm tempted just to delete that entire era section and leave it at that. Shall we introduce an "era" column to the main table, with or without coloring, or just leave it to be sorted by date?

No one else commented for 4 weeks, so I just removed the era section. I re-arranged the maps and I don't think we need an "era" column. The eras are rather arbitrary anyway.Dingo1729 (talk) 03:29, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Title needed

here is the very good exaple of being fanatic for the sake of the occitan. But why the second source can be taken as the best sure source??? Ottoman Empire, had a 5,2 million km2 in 1595? I would like to say that, many empires, like:

• Great Seljuk
• Juan Juan,
• Hunnic,
• Xiong-nu,

these are Turcs Empires.

As a Ottoman Empire, It had 24.534.242 km² in 1595:)

SOURCE: Kinross, Lord Patrick (1977). The Ottoman Centuries. İstanbul: Sander Bibliotheque. ISBN 0 224 01379 8.(English) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.102.177.37 (talk) 19:37, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Table numbering

This table should be numbered so people don't have to actually count their way down. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.220.106.35 (talk) 20:50, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Population

I remember reading this article and you could see empires ranked by population, what happened to that? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.62.20.190 (talk) 18:02, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Just click the grey box next to "Population (million)" in the heading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.141.18.220 (talk) 22:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)