Great Britain

It is indeed. (This keeps happening with islands -- Taiwan and Ireland are perennial messes, too.) I've cleaned up some of the easy stuff, and I think the Olympics stuff will get cleaned up now. 

That leaves the Government Jurisdiction and Military Combatant data to be cleaned up, I think. The government data should be repointed to The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; lots of the military stuff should probably go to The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Correctly attributing to which country could be tricky.  A quick synopsis from the history books:

Seperate Kingdoms of Scotland, England (Wales was part of England until ~1542, then part of England and Wales) until 1707.  The Kingdom of Ireland is separate until 1801.

The Scotland & England joined to form Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707.

Then with the Kingdom of Ireland to form United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801

The creation of the Republic of Ireland in 1921 then gave United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 

This is can of worms isn't it because most countries in the world are affested by it. I looked at the USA yesterday (big) and Tonga (very small) and they are in similar turmoil. Britain has overlapping history and litterature with Ireland, in which they are historically enmeshed. If you start a 'Mega Base' for for the 'British Isles', you can then work down to 'Bases' for Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (where you can include national sports, literature, painting, government, beer etc.). From there you can work down to England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (Channel islands ?) while Republic of Ireland misses a beat. From there you work down to the counties of each country, which contain their towns and an enormous spread of more local commercial cultural, beers and other information. That way the country base begins to draw on huge areas of Wikipedia information which is still really dispersed. 

Does that make sense ? Then yoy start to look at the USA ! 

@sprocketonline: too true. Sticking them all on the UK would at least be better, since it's probably the successor state to the various ones involved (and, at least in the US, people tend to think of the American Revolution as having been fought against the British, and don't really worry about whether it was really the same country then as it is now), and it's also at least a country, and not just a really big landform. People even pickier than I could garden them back to the appropriate kingdom.

@dsinclair: I guess I'm not following you. I had thought that you were commenting on the fact that the topic for the island of Great Britain also had information pertaining to various countries that have been on or have controlled the island, which is also a mess.  But you're obviously talking about some other mess -- can you be more specific?

@jeff - A coarse grained split is a great start and would probably get 80% of the bad assertations.

Has there been any action on the "mini-split" tool? I think it would be perfect for this sort of gardening.  https://bugs.freebase.com/browse/CLI-7606