On 4/11/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The very fact that there is disagreement among
sensible contributors
says that neither page should be primary.
There, I disagree. If the sensible contributors are not representative
of whatever they should be reperesentative of, then their disagreement
isn't useful.
One page should occupy the primary name only when
there is broad consensus that it should.
Hmmm...well I haven't had much experience determining such things for
big important pages like these, but my experience with smaller ones
has mostly been that one person makes a sensible argument, doesn't get
much response, and just moves it. :)
I'm very glad, by the way, that the existance of
the "City, State"
convention among Americans means that we avoid many disambiguation
battles over their names.
Oh, good point. That's an area which is definitely in dynamic tension
though - should names be as simple as possible (eg, taking just the
name of the suburb or city or whatever, if there is no ambiguity), or
as consistent as possible (*all* suburbs in a given country should be
disambigged) etc.
I agree that one should read [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering
systemic bias]] and its subpages, and think about it. (BTW, don't you
hate all those TLAs you have to look up?) However, I think in this
Kind of, but they're easier to remember than getting the
capitalisation right, and for some reason I find
"Wikipedia:WikiProject" particularly difficult. Too bad we don't have
consistent semishortcuts of the form "wp:countering systemic bias"
(all lower case, wp: on the front). Or even an actual wikiproject:
namespace.
case a disambiguation page is the correct thing to
counter systemic
bias; assuming what someone wants when they link or search to
[[Georgia]] is a strong bias in itself, when both the state and the
country are commonly referred to by different populations without
qualifiers.
Perhaps what irks me is that there are 200 countries on the planet. 1
of them definitely refers to Georgia, the state, without qualifiers.
Some small number may also do so. Then there's probably a large number
of people who would qualify the state, or explain the country. And to
people who hadn't heard of either, no one is going to assume that "My
Aunt was born in Georgia" would be a US state. And at the other end,
there must be several dozen (not necessarily English-speaking) for
whom Georgia is definitely a country and nothing else.
I understand the comments about populations, economics etc, but I'm
not sure it's totally relevant. Hopefully I'll come up with some good
counter examples or something.
Lastly...is there any chance we could place hit counters on Georgia
(country) and Georgia (state) just for the amusement factor? Even if
we had to do it the 1997 way with little digits ticking over? Actually
ideally what you want is the number of clicks on the Georgia (country)
link out of [[Georgia]], and the same for the state. Then you're
counting the number of people who hit Wikipedia on the disambig page,
then tell you what they were really looking for.
Steve