Talk:African national parks

The UNESCO World Heritage List includes many African parks and several countries not currently listed here. Cameroon and Democratic Republic of the Congo are examples. Someone could mine that list to improve this one. (WT-en) Pashley 21:30, 25 April 2006 (EDT)

Capitalization within title

As "national park" by itself wouldn't normally be capitalized because the term is not itself a proper name, would there be any objection to renaming this article African national parks? Is so, why? I plan on making the change quite soon if no objection is stated. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:11, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

No objections raised. Done. Nurg (talk) 10:13, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Red links

This article has a lot of red links — way too many, and I don't know whether the national parks the red links are for should have articles or not. Would everyone be okay with taking out the links that are broken? Selfie City (talk) 00:39, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

I suppose any national park is worth an article, they are destinations more or less by definition. I'd agree Namibia and Zambia seem to have too many red links. For them the most important ones should be chosen, and more added only when those are created (and probably a National parks of Namibia etc. should be created at some point). For the other countries the number of redlinks is moderate, and redlinks just mean there is work to do. --LPfi (talk) 10:21, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Yes. Rail travel in Africa was a somewhat similar (although much worse) situation and that was redirected to Africa#By train. Also, how does the definition of a national park in these countries compare? Sometimes, parks are intended for tourists while in others they are more intended to protect flora and fauna. Of course, the two overlap, but you get what I mean. Selfie City (talk) 16:19, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

I do not know the terms in the domestic languages, but I've understood a national park is specifically intended to also cater for visitors. There are nature reserves for where protection is the only motive (or the one that counts in decisions). Anyway, where half the parks have articles, I have no reason to doubt also the others are interesting destinations – with the overall lack of coverage in most of Africa, I suppose parks with articles are truly outstanding. --LPfi (talk) 17:36, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

That is quite likely, since Africa has plenty of great scenery, although I've never been there. Anyway, I've got it in my projects list now. Selfie City (talk) 17:42, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

So I've done some work. I have removed the red links with no descriptions in Namibia and some of the red links in the Zambia one. Selfie City (talk) 21:50, 19 August 2018 (UTC)

African national parks should probably be broken up into regional areas matching Africa - General overview of African national parks with a representative number of important parks with sub regional pages with a more complete list -- as far as red links go - just means there is no article and would probably be nice to create articles for them and indicates to me African articles might need more attention? Time for an Expedition? - don't like red links then take out the brackets :) -- I put in wikidata ids for those markers missing them (quite a few) and adding text as time permits. Also have been doing same for markers in African Regions. Just a thought - Cheers! -- Matroc (talk) 06:58, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Réunion NP

I added the park, but was the scope of the article only covering the parks from countries that are on the mainland, or are French departments like Réunion also within the scope? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:32, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

This article smells of ethnocentrism

Rant begins...

Okay, so I'm aware: the title is harsh, but it is. I do apologise if this was not the creator's intent, but the creator was going off stereotypes, "fascinated" by African wildlife and nature but Africa is not one country – it really does sadden me that many do treat it as one which is why I've found this whole article problematic since I first encountered it.

Now why does that matter? Because this article essentially goes off those stereotypes, ignoring that there is no single parks authority that manages these parks. Why? Back to my original point; this article treats Africa as one country. Ask yourself, would you ever support articles like Asian national parks or an Oceanian national parks? Anyone reading this will say no to that – so why Africa then? I will add that the French Wikivoyage has an article on fr:Parcs nationaux d'Océanie (translates to National parks of Oceania), which has swathes of redlinks and doesn't help travellers.

What more, this article isn't even complete. Right now, this article only has parks between Ethiopia and South Africa, plus Nigerian national parks that were created during the first expedition just over a year ago which I added. Other than that, there's lone parks sitting in the Niger, Central African Republic and the Réunion sections, but that's about it. Even within those that are mentioned, many of them are redlinks. I know I've rambled on a lot, so I'll end it there.

End of rant.

--SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 11:48, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

I don't agree. I could have started an article on European national parks, only that I happen to know the Nordic ones so much better than the rest that it didn't make sense. Of course the article isn't complete. If it were, it should be split up by country (or whatever). People might have heard about Serengeti without remembering in what country it was, and might remember the spelling wrong, so they wouldn't find it by a search. Or people might want to have a look for parks they don't know about, without having a clear picture about what is found in different parts of Africa. An article like this makes sense for such use cases. Of course, we should cover the most important parks from all of the continent, not just the east (+Nigeria with surroundings), but that a common problem with wikis.

The article is now just a list. For countries with several parks listed, it would make sense to give a general description also for the country in general, that's eight countries at the moment. We should probably at least have a link to Kenya#Safaris, South Africa#See and similar country article sections where they exist. These sections would need a lot of improvement and in many cases a separate article should be created. But I don't think that is about ethnocentrism; it is about our lack of editors with the needed knowledge.

–LPfi (talk) 12:59, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Coming back to this, are there any objections to splitting off some content into their own articles? Some like ZA's national parks could definitely warrant a topic article of its own. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:00, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

But that leaves a question on what to do for places with only one or two national parks. For some, such as Réunion, the park can be mentioned in a French national parks article, but that doesn't solve the issue for others (like Lesotho). SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:05, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

They could warrant articles of their own, but don't remove the most interesting countries. Instead, write a summary here. If that summary is about as long as some five-parks-without-running-text country sections, that'd probably be enough to have people click the link to the article proper. The summary can be written before the article, it would still be useful. In the long run, countries with one or two parks – or without any – could get such a summary too. Anyway, at this stage I think one should concentrate on adding real content; tweaking the format can be done later. –LPfi (talk) 13:26, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

At least, can we move this to National parks in Africa? There is no one national parks department that manages all national parks in the continent. This would bring it in line with National parks in Australia, which also has no one universal national parks department managing all parks. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:22, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I leave that judgement to native speakers. –LPfi (talk) 11:28, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

99 Markers

This article has more than 99 destination listings so the number 99 appears many times in the listings and the map. This could best be solved by creating country level national parks topics as is done for most countries on other continents. See National parks. Mrkstvns (talk) 01:40, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Right, or at least regional ones. There's no really good reason to have a single article for such an exceedingly vast continent. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:59, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I've mentioned my concerns with this article above at #This article smells of ethnocentrism and this would be a great time to split this article up. It's not even complete for heaven's sake. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 03:07, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Anyway, I split off South African national parks since there was enough content in this article to warrant its own article. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 03:17, 21 July 2024 (UTC)