Talk:North Yemen

Merger proposal

Currently, there are three separate articles on North Yemen, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen and the Yemen Arab Republic. Their first sentences all say that they're about a country or state, and the latter two both say that the country/state is also known as "North Yemen". That makes little sense, and it wasn't like that until recently.

The page for North Yemen was created as a redirect to Yemen Arab Republic. This was then replaced by an article about the term "North Yemen" used to designate both the Arab Republic and the Mutawakkilite Kingdom. That's basically what it said from 2005 to 2020, when it was replaced by a disambiguation page for the Arab Republic and the Mutawakkilite Kingdom. A couple of months later, that was replaced by an article again, but now not about the term "North Yemen" but about "a sovereign state". The entire text was copied verbatim from the article on the Arab Republic. Little content has been added since, and the article is still mostly just a copy of the one about the Arab Republic.

I see three options for rectifying this situation, in the order of my preference:

1. Everything could be merged under "North Yemen", with "Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen" and "Yemen Arab Republic" redirecting there. The main argument for this is that this was one and the same state, just with different systems of government. For instance, the US State Department writes "the former Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, since 1962 called the Yemen Arab Republic", treating this as a mere name change.
2. If the two periods with different systems of government deserve their own articles (currently, their length speaks against that), these articles should say that they're about periods or systems of government, not countries/states. That's what articles in similar cases do: Third Hellenic Republic, French Fifth Republic, Second Syrian Republic.
3. If (contrary to how I and the US State Department see it) the Mutawakkilite Kingdom and the Arab Republic are viewed as two different states, the article on North Yemen shouldn't claim to be about a country; it should be reverted to one of its earlier incarnations, either as a disambiguation page for the other two or as an article about the term "North Yemen".

(Of course, for the options that keep all three articles, most of the duplication should be removed.)

@Jonel, AjaxSmack, Finnusertop, and PyroFloe: You may be interested in this dicussion as you each made one of the changes referred to above. Joriki (talk) 21:19, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

I have restored this article to a disambiguation given your finding that the entire text was copied. If there is cause for such duplication that would lead to restoration of this split, or any other resolution which involves shifting text between various articles, it needs to be done with attribution per Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia (preferably with a talkpage template if it is extensive, but at the very least in relevant edit summaries). If there is a merge under the title "North Yemen", please use the original article and then move it to this title, to avoid WP:CUTPASTE issues. CMD (talk) 07:45, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, User:Joriki. I think that User:Chipmunkdavis's bold restoration of the disambiguation page solves the issue of the duplicated CNP article.

I oppose a single North Yemen article for the 1918–1990 because "North" only applies to the 1967–1990 period at best. (Before that, it was simply "Yemen".) I prefer (naturally) the WP:CONCEPTDAB that I created way back because it addresses the period the term was used and the fact that it was never used officially, while still clearly linking to the two state articles. The practice of having different articles for radically different regimes in a state's history is pretty standard at Wikipedia (cf. Kingdom of Iraq/Iraqi Republic (1958–1968), both with "...was a state...") and is even more appropriate here since both North Yemeni regimes existed simultaneously during the civil war from 1962 to 1970, hardly a "mere name change". —  AjaxSmack  01:20, 30 October 2022 (UTC)