14 Regions would be ideal for Scotland on a beer site; may not be enough for a few Scottish ‘traditionalists or nationalists’, but they look good to me (and I’ve lived in Scotland).
As a UK-based rater I was looking forward to the challenge of 32 regions! However, I did previously say that this seemed a bit out of sync with other regionalised countries, and unfair for non-UK based people.
Based on that, the 14 regions proposed above seem about right to me. Very happy to go with this and looking forward to it going live (pretty please!).
Also that previous list for danish regions maybe isn’t the right one. Danes are now saying five regions there is good. (If you check the forum post there in the Danish section).
So anyway, seems now like Netherlands and Spain are the most ready to go, in the sense that people at least agree on what’s up. France, Scotland not so much…
I don’t really care which countries go next. Just trying to get people to agree on splits. Europe is pretty messy I guess in some ways. Most of Latin America, when we get there, should be much easier at least.
Nice to see some progress made on Belgium as well as a handful of others! Based on the most popular countries amongst raters, that brings us here:
That’s updated from earlier to remove Belgium and add Spain. If we were to add regions for Scotland, the Netherlands, and Denmark, then that would add Mexico, Norway, and Japan to the bottom of the list
No one’s seemed to mention Poland’s regions yet, but the regions here are pretty simple. They should be the voivodeships with their official English-language names:
Agree on Poland. Ukraine and Russia should be pretty easy too (so long as you take internationally accepted borders for Russia… not whatever country they try to annex).
That list of unuique raters makes very little sense to use for splitting though.
That many users have tried beers from one brewery is not useful for determining if splitting it into many regions.
For instance Scotland has a brewery with very widespread distribution, but rather few breweries. That makes the need for splitting these few brewers over 32 countries minimal.
I’d rather go with the countries with lots of breweries, fewer provinces, well established provinces to split into and preferrably larger surface.
Prio list from me:
France
Spain
Italy
Mexico
Brazil
Czechia
Switzerland
China
Netherlands
Poland
South Africa
Japan
Argentina
Russia
Austria
Sweden
Ukraine
Chile
New Zealand
India
Portugal
Norway
Denmark
Also, in order for the split to be maintainable, it should be done according to official boundaries, not historical.
My concern with that list is it takes less into account whether a country has many active raters who would like to see their country split.
You have Mexico in 4th - it currently only takes a resident of Mexico 8 rates to make the top 50 list for the country.
You have Denmark much further back in 23rd - it currently takes a resident of Denmark 3789 rates to make the top 50 list for the country so you can see the difference.
Really? It makes far more sense for a fairly clear reason: it affects the most users. The point of adding features is to improve the experience for users of the website. Breweries and regional subdivisions of countries don’t rate beers on RateBeer; users do.
It makes little sense to arbitrarily choose which countries get regions based on how few subdivisions they have (not sure how that matters; every brewery and place would need a region applied to it, regardless of how many subdivisions exist) or whether they are “well-established” (every country, be it Scotland or Senegal, defines their own subregions themselves; none of them are more or less ‘well-established’ than any other one).
At any rate, every single country that exists on RateBeer should be divided into regions anyway, especially considering how easily the divisions for Australia and Belgium have gone.
