After just discovering the wikipedia-l mailinglist, I'd immediately like to join in with some remarks on the topic of naming conventions for cities. I've tried to read most of the message posted before, sorry if I've missed anything. I'll not address the point of disambiguating cities, I think that issue is pretty clear.
The major point with naming cities and the like is that there's not one standard in the world, not even in the English-speaking world. Americans tend to name all cities as (city, state) (in the US) and as (city, country) for those outside the US. This is far from common outside the US, where things as San Francisco, CA seem weird. In Europe (as far as I can judge), the extra information (state, province, whatever) is only used when really necessary, which it is in two cases: (1) disambiguation - there are two cities with the same (or almost the same name) in the country (2) the national public cannot be expected to know where the town is located. Other countries will have their own policies, usually depending on the size of the country.
When writing articles on this in Wikipedia, there's two problems we need to take care of:
* ease of use for the reader
* ease of linking for the writer
The ease of use is not really a problem in any case: if the user searches for Paris, France, and finds an article with "Paris is the capital of France, blablabla", he's found the right place; same thing for the user merely searching for Paris.
For the writer, making links should be easy, and he should not have to know about dozens of naming conventions; just a few should be enough. The American linking to Oslo, Norway should get the right page, and so should the the European linking Oslo only. Redirects should do the trick here.
So, at this point, I'd say: what is the problem? The only thing to take care of is that for each article named according to convention A, there's a redirect with convention name B.
However, another issue appears to be consistency. If all articles on cities are named in the same way, this might look more authorative, or the like. However, I think there's no way city articles can ever be made consistent, while satisfying the ease of use and linking too. Consistent would be: city, administrative region, country (because city, state for one country and city, country for another isn't consistent). However, that is rather tedious for both linking and using. And it brings a lot of new problems as well. What should it be: New York, New York, United States of America/United States/USA/US? Same problem for the UK, maybe also for Russia(n Federation), etc. This can all be sorted out, but it'll be too many conventions for me.
Concluding, my proposal is: make sure each city article has appropriate redirects. That's all :-)
regards,
Jeroen Heijmans
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That was a map of France from the CIA World Factbook (guessing, since the name matched exactly and since there were a lot of ??-map.jpg files uploaded already.) I had the file on my computer already because I downloaded the entire factbook back when I was uploading the HTML info in the first place; all I did was drop it down to 256 colors (taking about 100k off the file size) and resend.
kq
>ampersand in its name. How did you reupload it, since it was Taw who uploaded
>it in the first place?
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Recently I was trying to delete a file called "zbuffy" but the screen appeared to be hung up. When I clicked again on zbuffy, the screen I was taken to said that I deleted fr-map.jpg. any ideas what might have happened? I've reuploaded the file, but I'm curious if anyone else has experienced bugginess in the delete file function.
cheers,
kq
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I'm having the same problem, and I have ogg set up in edit-->prefs-->helper applications as MIME type audio/ogg using winamp to open.
kq
You Wrote:
>I'm trying to upload examples of phonemes for the SAMPA page as OGG
>files, but when I test what I've uploaded, my browser (Mozilla 1.0)
>displays the contents of the file as text.
>Does anyone have any advice? I've now tried this from two different
>systems with the same result. The files play fine in my Winamp.
>
>tarquin0
Mozilla has a form-saving function. Haven't used it yet, so I'm not quite
sure how it works. It's a feature that I've often wondered why it did not
exist after having lost my work a few times before (though I don't think
with Wikipedia).
Ian Monroe
http://www.monroe.nu
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Toby Bartels toby(a)math.ucr.edu XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:
> Suppose I'm editing an article and my browser crashes.
> Were my <Preview>s stored anywhere? If so, how can I find them?
>
>
> -- Toby Bartels
> toby(a)math.ucr.edu
>
>
> PS: Is this the correct forum for this, or should I ask on <wikitech-l>?
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>>pages. There are a few specially-set ones; for example the
>>SpecialPages page is set to not follow, because it only links to
>>things we don't want robots in, and "orphans" is no follow because it
>>only links to edit forms.
>
>You mean "Most Wanted" rather than "Orphans", right? Just making sure. :)
Um, yeah, that's what I meant (...now going to check the code...)
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> Is this fixed in the new code? I thought we decided not to allow
> Google to index edit links (along with older versions of articles
> in History, log pages and special pages other than maybe
> RecentChanges)? ...
The new code explicitly sets the robot policy of each page with a meta
tag; the default settings are to index and follow links in all regular
articles (including talk:, user:, wikipedia:, etc.), and to follow
links but not index edit forms, old versions, diffs, and most special
pages. There are a few specially-set ones; for example the
SpecialPages page is set to not follow, because it only links to
things we don't want robots in, and "orphans" is no follow because it
only links to edit forms.
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> Suppose I'm editing an article and my browser crashes.
> Were my <Preview>s stored anywhere? If so, how can I find them?
Nope, they're only stored in your browser. If you're going to make an
edit so extensive that it's likely to take a while a represent
considerable effort, then you probably don't want to use the browser
form anyway--cut and paste the text into a real editor, then paste it
back when you're done.
0