A good old friend of mine just linked me directly to this comment, and with good reason. Somewhere around the years 2005-7 I was involved in a light edit war wi

A good old friend of mine just linked me directly to this comment, and with good reason. Somewhere around the years 2005-7 I was involved in a light edit war with a Dutch gentleman that rewrote this page to wipe away all reference to the Western Hemisphere as a geopolitical term. Rather than taking into account its historical usage, and _current_ usage in various fields, he instead approached the term on purely etymological, and consequently mathematical, basis. Western? Surely the part to the left. Hemisphere? That can only mean exactly half. I spent a good amount of time in the library researching this. Old books with old maps from rare collections, simple google searches, and more casual physical references. None really really backed up the etymological definition. I made a few attempts to edit, but eventually gave up. Mostly, because it seemed so pointless. The information out there (as opposed to online) was so apparently and plentiful, it felt like I was to argue that the sky is blue. So I let it be. A decade later, and the results still stand. A bland, technical page with with a tabulation of the countries Within, Without and Somewhere In Between the two Sets dominating the page.