Wikipedia: Islands of the world/Talk

We've left off Hawaii, Oahu, Maui, etc. I'd add them but I have to be off to bed. --KQ

I'm sure we've left off most islands. But it's a work in progress. - Tim

The list of islands by region will differ from any list of islands by country. Hawaii, for example, is under Pacific, separated from its compatriot islands under North America. So long as it is a list by region, this is how it should be done. - Tim

This page concerns me for the simple reason that there are millions of islands in the world... we could never hope to list them all. -- SJK

Is Australia itself regarded as an island (in which case wouldn't it be the largest?), or is it a continental land mass? -- DrBob

: It's generally regarded as a continent (if you read the Wikipedia entry for Australia, you'll see it described as such), though AFAICT such division are basically arbitrary. --Robert Merkel

: According to a very authoritative source (my junior high geography teacher), Australia is both a continent and the world's largest island. I'll see if I can find some even more authoritative sources to back that up... :) --STG

If you look at the island/continent issue from the viewpoint of continental drift, it's easy to tell whether a landmass is an island or a continent. Islands are either seamounts, (Hawaii, Iceland) or they are the landmasses associated with a continental plate except for the largest landmass. The largest landmass on a plate, of course, is designated as the continent for that continental plate. I doubt that this is an official rule, but it is a logical one. If you use it, you can see that Greenland is an island but Australia is a continent. -- Derek Ross

Shouldn't Iceland be listed in Atlantic Ocean instead of Europe?

Also, many islands are neither seamounts (which are associated with mantle hotspots) nor clearly on one continental plates: island arcs form at the edges where two plates are coming together. The Aleutians and Japan, for example, are at the margins between the North American and Pacific plates. The former are generally associated with North America and Asia (though the plate boundary is well to the west of the Aleutians) and the latter with Asia, because we mostly define things by land masses, ignoring encroaching seas. --Vicki Rosenzweig