Different criteria to establish issuers

Hello everyone, this topic is to comment on the lack of unique criteria when establishing the different issuers of the catalog. I explain:

CRITERION 1: Establish different issuer under a given country when that country was a colony. Examples:

INDIA
India (Republic)
India - British
India - Portuguese
India - French ...

CAMEROON
Cameroon
French Cameroon

ERITREA
Eritrea
Italian Eritrea

TIMOR-LESTE
Portuguese Timor
Timor-Leste

etc...

CRITERION 2: Do not establish a different issuer under a given country even when that country was a colony. Examples:

ANGOLA, MADAGASCAR, MOZAMBIQUE, COMORO, etc ...

For me and I imagine that for many users it is important that the criterion is always the same, whether it is criterion 1 or 2, but it should always be the same. In my case, I prefer criterion 1, since in many of the cases (Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique ...) the coins have a very different design between the colonial territory and the independent country and, in addition, in many cases the unit monetary is also different.

I await your opinions

This is an important point as it's undoubtably confusing for some users. I'd say that we should aim to keep countries in a single section where possible. The case of India is complicated by the fact that the issues of the different colonial powers and the princely states all coexisted until they were replaced by the issues of India and Pakistan, so perhaps keeping those separate makes sense. I see little purpose in separating Portuguese Timor and Timor-Leste, even if there was a hiatus between the two.

Hello,

The current approach is to split only when when the territory is significantly different between the colony and the new state. For example, British Hong Kong coins are from the same issuer as modern Hong Kong coins. We can define different ruling authorities and different currencies to distinguish the coins from the two periods as needed.
India is split because Portuguese India and the current Republic of India have significantly different territories.

This rule is not consistently applied at the moment. You named a few examples where Numista currently split whereas they should not be split with the logic mentioned above. Another example is Peru, which is currently a single issuer on Numista and should probably be split, as the Viceroyalty of Peru has a significantly different territory from the modern Peru.

We are currently reviewing the definition of what should be an issuer on Numista, and we should probably adjust the list of issuers once the definition is agreed.

Hi, many thanks xavier for this answer and for this website, is amazing...