[WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

[Matt Brown]

On 4/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> I did not raise this issue to bash Americans. Nor would I have a
> complaint if a state in the US were disambig'ed with a terristory in
> Pakistan. But for a mere state in the US to be considered somehow
> "equal" in importance, interest, searchability as a *country* just
> seems wrong. I'm really having trouble putting into words exactly why
> I feel that way, so I'll leave it for a bit and come back to it.

>From my point of view, it's not expressing that [[Georgia (U.S.
state)]] and [[Georgia (country)]] are equal.  Rather, it's saying
that neither SO OVERWHELMS THE OTHER that it deserves the primary
topic.

The very fact that there is disagreement among sensible contributors
says that neither page should be primary.  One page should occupy the
primary name only when there is broad consensus that it should.

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.

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
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.

-Matt