Commons:Categories for discussion/2010/03/Category:Animals of the Belgian coast

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Category:Animals of the Belgian coast

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This category contains animal imagery from the Belgian part of the North Sea. Some of the files are from "Belgian coastal waters" and others are from the "Belgian continental shelf". This means saying the content of this category is from the "Belgian coast" is inaccurate. The Belgian part is troublesome too, as do territorial waters include the EEZ?

IMO the best thing to do would be to move the content to Category:Animals of the North Sea - the fact the animals were in the North Sea is what matters, not that they were in the Belgian portion of it.--Nilfanion (talk) 13:34, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed this cat is wrong. All animals in it were caught (and photographed) by myself at sea. Location is for all BPNS (Belgian part of the North Sea), few of them occur coastal sensu strictu. Using Europe is dodgy too as many of those species do not occur e.g. in the Mediterranean or even Atlantic. The original cats were change over and over again by some uninformed Israeli gang (some have been blocked recently, some pages protected). I'd prefer Animals of Belgium, as that's were they were found (BPNS would do too). Category:Animals of the Belgian coast could stay AFAIMC for strictly coastal and beach finds. The fact that they were in the Belgian part of the North Sea is important IMO as it generates a per country species list. Lycaon (talk) 14:32, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
 Question I find it odd that you are now moving images that were in this category into Category:Animals of Belgium. Surely as sea creatures they cannot be correctly described as being "Belgium"?.
I understand your comment that they were in the Belgian part of the North Sea (tho it makes it very strange that you are now relocating them in other categories) but a higher level cat as proposed by Nilfanion seems quite sensible. --Herby talk thyme 15:55, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not relocating, I'm putting them where they always were before the Israeli(s) passed by :-((. Lycaon (talk) 16:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Reviewing - I see edit warring on a number of images on this topic. Sad when folk don't just communicate about stuff. However this is a wiki. Maybe "Why are they not Animals of the Belgian coast?" is the question to ask? --Herby talk thyme 16:49, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Because, as Lycaon states above, these animals were neither stricly coastal or beach finds. Please note that Lycaon offers Category:Animals of the Belgian part of the North Sea as alternative. So far this category does not exist and the most fitting existing category seemed to be Category:Animals of Belgium. I am no biologist but some of my friends are and locations of finds are quite important for them. And I guess that a category spanning the entire North Sea would be too wide. --AFBorchert (talk) 21:38, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A quick comment for now as I am going out but will return to this. We need to be rather careful with language here. In English the phrase Lycaon offers has connotations of control/ownership. Indeed his behaviour also indicates that. What matters here is to ensure that images can be found be people as easily as possible (within the limitations of Commons systems). As a non marine biologist I would not think of looking for images of marine life in a category that implied land living organisms. --Herby talk thyme 07:51, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hm... Category:Animals of the Belgian part of the North Sea could be a member of Category:Animals of the North Sea and of Category:Animals of Belgium. Thereby you would find them through both paths. I am not sure which is the best approach in the general case, how seas and oceans are divided best and how far such divisions should be maintained in the category system. But at least the suggested name Belgian part of the North Sea seems to be a well-defined geographical region. --AFBorchert (talk) 22:23, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
 Comment The North Sea part is definitely unambiguous and should be added, whether that's by use of the BPNS or more directly: The fauna of the N Sea may differ between the northern and southern limits but its much more relevant than the EEZs biologically.
I understand the rationale here for wanting these pictures in a (sub)category for by country listing, but my concern is that is it really accurate to say that almost halfway between Ostend and Harwich is part of Belgium? The EEZ of a nation is distinct from the territory of the nation. For example, I wouldn't put File:Silverpit northwest perspective.jpg in (a subcategory of) Category:United Kingdom, but its in the British part of the North Sea...--Nilfanion (talk) 22:37, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Animals of the North Sea has less than a dozen files, so why do we need a Belgian category in the first place? If there's no acceptable definition of North Sea animals in the general vicinity of Belgium, I suggest just moving all the images to the main category. –Juliancolton | Talk 12:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that should be the overarching cat but the North Sea covers quite a spread of climate from south to north and might well need some splitting. I looked at Category:Marine life as I feel it should have that as a high level cat somehow. That is somewhere I would start looking maybe. --Herby talk thyme 14:18, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

 Comment Category:Animals of the Belgian part of the North Sea (BPNS) has now been created, so Category:Animals of the Belgian coast should be deleted after all content moved into the new cat. However, I'm not really happy with the BPNS category either for two reasons:

  1. The BPNS is part of the North Sea, it is not part of Belgium. The coast of Belgium is part of Belgium, and arguably out to the 12 mile limit is too, but I would not call the EEZ of a nation part of its territory, so saying an animal from the EEZ is from the nation is wrong.
  2. And in any case, as marine animals, why should these animals be included in by country listings at all? If you combine those two statements, you have marine animals which possibly shouldn't be in country categories, in a category for a nation that they were never were located in in the first place...--Nilfanion (talk) 10:16, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Exclusive economic zones of the North Sea

The North Sea is divided into exclusive economic zones according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Convention on the Continental Shelf and additional agreements. No part of the North Sea belongs to international waters and thereby every point of the North Sea can be associated with a sovereign state. These territorial waters are also used for the Marine Spatial Planning Initiative by UNESCO which assigns planning responsibilities according these divisions (see here for Belgium). To perform this planning, marine research is important. To quote from the referenced MSPI page for Belgium:

The main drivers for spatial planning in Belgium came from the demand for offshore wind energy and international requirements for the protection and conservation of ecologically and biologically valuable areas.
Marine spatial planning in Belgium aims at achieving both economic and ecological objectives, including the development of offshore wind farms, the delimitation of marine protected areas, a policy plan for sustainable sand and gravel extraction, the mapping of marine habitats, protection of wrecks valuable for biodiversity, and the management of land-based activities affecting the marine environment. Together, these objectives provided the basis for a Master Plan.

Given all this, it still seems appropriate for me to have a category system for the North Sea (among possible others) that follows these exclusive economic zones and where individual categories are sorted below the North Sea and below appropriate by-country subcategories. All this would follow international law and would also make sense to marine biologists (otherwise it wouldn't have been suggested by Lycaon). --AFBorchert (talk) 16:43, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The point is the EEZ is not territorial waters, that's only the bit out to the 12 mile limit. It is not the sovereign territory of that nation, there is merely jurisdictional control, the name EEZ reflects this (exclusive economic rights). Points within the EEZ can be associated with the nation, but are not part of that nation. The sub-categorisation, and the justification for it (the by-country listing), implies that the EEZ contained within Belgium, which it isn't. And you haven't addressed the other point which is why should marine animals be associated with a specific nation anyway?
I am somewhat concerned about the broader picture here - not a problem in an area with settled jurisdictions: An extreme example would be Russia and the North Pole, but more seriously there a lot more disputes in EEZs than in territory generally.--Nilfanion (talk) 20:56, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Already deleted. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:57, 6 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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