Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 June 23

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June 23

Why do some globes or maps divide Oceania as if they get special EEZ extensions? Why doesn't say Maldives get a polygon?

Or Indonesia, British not Pacific Ocean territories, the African Indian Ocean bunch etc? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:09, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Can you show us an example? --Khajidha (talk) 16:16, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Not the OP, but I imagine a map like this one showing the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. --Amble (talk) 16:31, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Ummm.. for the simple and obvious reason of letting you know which tiny freaking dots go with what name. --Khajidha (talk) 16:43, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Oh, and the Maldives often does get such a polygonal indicator. See [1] --Khajidha (talk) 17:11, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

I'd very much doubt any such maps are intended to show EEZ boundaries. A better idea of EEZ boundaries can be found here: https://www.marineregions.org/eezmapper.php. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:32, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Why don't I see them color coding the dots and names instead and rarely if ever see them draw curved shapes or EEZs around the countries and territories with a line or arrow going to or from the name? Some of the specific polygons seem like common conventions, who made them? Why don't I ever see the Asian and Australian borders on general non-hydroboundrical maps except for that one? Why does Australia get so much? They don't get this much for anything in real life do they? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:45, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Many of the dots are so small that color coding would be useless. I would say that the reason this is so prominent in maps of Oceania is 1) the sheer number of islands, 2) the proximity of the islands to each other, and 3) the complexity of the jurisdictions involved. Without these outlines, islands from different countries/territories might seem more closely associated to each other than they would to other islands from other countries/territories. In other parts of the world there may be fewer islands, the islands may be further apart, or islands from different countries/territories might be more separated. --Khajidha (talk) 17:54, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Also, using color coding alone to convey information is fairly deprecated nowadays, due to concerns about making the information accessible to people with visual disabilities. --Khajidha (talk) 17:57, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

The Seychelles are far from the Maldives, so there's not much risk of confusing those two, the Comoros are even farther away, BIOT is so tiny it's not included on some maps, and all the other Indian Ocean states either consist of a single island or are dominated by a single island, so there's no much risk of confusing the Maldives with them. Nyttend backup (talk) 13:27, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

And the ones I sometimes see in the Antilles are close enough to land to probably be real sea boundaries as the splitting isn't as complicated as the part with the polygons either. I wonder where the many Oceanic archipelago splits that are common conventions come from, did some Pacific island nations agree on them? Perhaps even when there was still a chance of undiscovered islets? If they did then who gets any newly discovered islands between the territorial waters of different countries would be predecided by mutual agreement. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:51, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

You are massively overthinking this. These lines are pretty much drawn as the simplest shape that will include all the islands of a polity. They have nothing to do with the water. It's just a way of saying "any dots of land in here belong to (country)".--Khajidha (talk) 00:11, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

I'd always thought that those continuous lines represented an archipelago's maritime boundaries (but I suppose that's far too neat) or boundaries between islands or archipelagos. Cf. some maps of the North American Great Lakes, where the lines represent international boundaries and/or boundaries between states or provinces. Cf. also lines around the island groups of Jersey and Guernsey or between them and France. —— Shakescene (talk)