South Africa split

Not sure about this one. Seems there are nine provinces, and possibly three cities that fall outside of this?

Eastern Cape
Free State
Gauteng
KwaZulu-Natal
Limpopo
Mpumalanga
Northern Cape
North West
Western Cape

Bloemfontein
Capetown
Pretoria

Do they really have that many breweries in the regions to justify this discussion?

Note: again I don’t know anything about their beer scene, so maybe I’m wrong.

Well, my stance is that every country should be split soon rather than later, especially if they have developing scenes. It’s easy to split right now with few breweries as they can be added correctly in the future when new ones pop up.

Also, we have zero African countries split right now, so we should probably look at doing a couple if they have developing scenes.

Also apparently they do, they have 228, which is more than some that have already been split. And 98 closed breweries. Though I heard the country just cancelled alcohol to try to clear out the hospitals for COVID patients

Still didn’t answer my question if most of these regions have brewers :wink: It may be that they are mostly in 1-2 big cities. I have also same question about some other countries (China for example).

I hope you do realize that every split adds more admin work and is especially problematic for the countries we don’t have active local admin, because no one will constantly keep up with the scenes and fix things (meaning we will have a lot of bad data) after the initial split.

Now that I have said the negative, I will add the positive: SA seems to have kind of craft beer boom (a lot of new breweries in the recent years, except 2020, but that is understandable). So there is at least a case to be considered.

Over 600 breweries on the yellow site. That’s more than most countries we’ve split so far.

Not sure how adding regions means we’ll have more inaccurate data than before? Are you assuming every brewery added will be added under the wrong region? Even if that actually happened it’s not the most major of issues, assuming at least the brewery and beers exist.

These are good. There are breweries in each province. But again, I don’t see why this is relevant.
The 3 capital cities are each within one of those provinces, no need to add them as well.

https://www.gov.za/about-sa/south-africas-provinces

Ok, cool ya I wasn’t sure about whether we should treat those capital cities as distinct like Mexico City or Washington D.C.

Ya @martjoobolut I understand it’s lots of work. I’ve been pitching in as well by manually switching over places. Have done France, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico already. Will do more next week. I’ve offered to admin as well so I can help do Latin American stuff especially that I know better. If people don’t want to help the split they won’t. If they do, they do, from how I perceive it.

And how many are actually existing breweries (I assume you excluded already homebrews)? Considering untappd’s quality it may be still about 300 :smiley:

Well if there is no region, it can’t be wrong?! Also having a lot of wrong regions makes regions untrustworthy and useless. It makes region stats useless for users, because most people who want regions here want to tick those specific regions. They seek them out when traveling, and trade for them. IMHO that’s the point of doing the region splits in the first place.

Sure, more complexity means more inaccuracy, but the site is always a moving target. I know it’s not that accurate whenever I’m in Latin America, and do as much as I can to alert people and fix that stuff.

Ok I see your point now (and yes it did exclude homebrew btw). But I don’t foresee that being that big of an issue going forward. Scrolling down the list of South African breweries, I see that almost every one of them has a city already from which we can ascertain the province with a simple Google search.

What would actually be useful for admins is a list of newly added breweries to verify, much like we do with beers. At least that way all breweries being added will at some point pass an admin’s eyes who, hopefully, would at least perform a cursory search on the address to check it’s legit.

Of course it’d be useful if we had local admins for it but I’m sure there are people among us happy to help outside of our home territory, I know I am at least. And if it gets to the point where it’s becoming a lot of work we can assume that means the country then has a lot of raters, from which you’d think we could bring someone in to the admin team.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, plenty of users still posting corrections for admins to take care of in these forums. There’s decent people in the community who want the best for the site and care about the integrity. Errors will get taken care of I’m sure.

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Note that I already said that I don’t argue against splitting, I just want @solidfunk to do a bit more research before proposing these splits.
I will ask the third time: do most of these regions have active breweries? (this question goes for the other countries you proposed to split also).

I already answered for South Africa and the answer is yes, each province has at least 1.

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Thanks, I didn’t notice. Then I have no argument against splitting it.

@LazyPyro : could you look into this for some other countries like China and India?
I assume that it will not be a problem for Thai (if we go with 6 regions) and South Korea.

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Yeah I’m on it. Posting in their respective threads.

But in summary:
South Africa and South Korea both well covered.
India absolutely isn’t (more info in that thread).
Thailand should be ok as long as we use the 6 big regions, the provinces are too numerous in my opinion.

China I’ll have a look into a bit later as it’s massive and there’s a mixture of English and Chinese used for province names on other sites so I need Google translate a lot…

EDIT: China is all good. Breweries in every province.

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For the last 20 years Canada has lacked breweries in 2 regions, but we still had it split, so I’m not sure why that’s an argument against splitting @martjoobolut . It may be an argument against prioritizing, but given that countries with growing beer scenes will eventually fill up, what does it matter if a couple are empty right now?

We also have empty countries.

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That’s 2 out of 13. Not 6 or 10 out of 13. I have already stated my opinion, why I don’t think every country needs split.
You can of course disagree with that, it is an opinion and I don’t take it personally :slight_smile:
And just to be clear: I appreciate the work you and @LazyPyro have done here and the answers you have given.

What I really want is some discussion this time around before we do these splits (what are the criterias we used to determine what to split? why some country are split, and the others aren’t? was there any research or was it just random?). Last time it seemed quite random to many people, and I agree that not including for example Austria in the big split was oversight. Hence I’m trying to have some discussion here :slight_smile:

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I’ve no skin in this game, and haven’t been directly involved in any of this really, but as an observer the only rationale behind which countries were split was down to which were proposed, everyone had the chance to voice their opinion, and after the dust settled the movers and shakers (hats off to @solidfunk here) put the proposals forward to the powers that be. Nothing sinister as far as I can see

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