User talk:Jack ma

Hello, Welcome ! Jack ma (talk) 07:25, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Charente and -Maritime

Hi, if you consider that the centre of mainland France is somewhere near Saint-Amand-Montrond, in the Cher department (according to French wikipedia), the location of the departments Charente and Charente-Maritime is more accurately described as "western France" than "southwestern France". I would call Biarritz, Pau and Bordeaux southwest, not La Rochelle (Charente-Maritime). Markussep ^Talk 17:48, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. The problem is that there are other factors than pure geometry. According to what you say, Dordogne or Gironde would be "west", too. Traditionally, Charente and Charente-Maritime have always been in what we call "South-west": the daily Sud-Ouest covers both departments, also names of companies, or contents of books can proove it. The "boundary" is just at the north of these 2 departments: above, West begins (or "Centre-West"): Poitou, Pays-de-la Loire, Brittany... People who live in Charente, like me, know it. It has also a matter to do with "hydrological basins", climates, vegetation, architecture, and human factors... Most of other French people just don't know that fact either: this is a (little) problem with Wikipedia: sometimes articles local to an area are made by people not really knowing this area (Charentes). Because it is not much known, probably. Google give you 975,000 answers with "Charente + sud-ouest" and 500,000 with "Charente +ouest -sud". The other "difficulty" is that this boundary "south-west/west" is in the middle of the administrative region "Poitou-Charentes" (Poitou is Centre-West, Charentes is South-West), but that's it! I hope that these 70,000 pages (or more) can be changed at once by a robot. Otherwise, we have to rely on luck, and time... Thanks anyway. Jack ma (talk) 13:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]