On 4/10/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
Just ask yourself: if Georgia (US state) was not, in fact, a US state, but an Australian state, or a British county, or ... whatever ... would we have had all those arguments? I suspect it would indeed have been "obvious beyond words" if the grand ol' US of A wasn't involved.
You're still trying to argue based on taxonomic importance, which is NOT what Wikipedia's naming conventions are supposed to be about.
In other words, you think that Wikipedia's naming conventions should recognise a natural order of primacy, and the MOST IMPORTANT user of a name by that order should get the name, and the others should have to be disambiguated. You think that a nation should automatically have primacy over a subdivision of another nation, simply by fact of the one being a nation and the other one a state in a larger nation.
That's not the way our naming conventions work (except in a few specific areas where we've decided that consistency is good). Instead, something gets the primary article if it overwhelms other meanings of the word, and we disambiguate at the primary spot if nothing overwhelms.
Yes, this IS english-speaker-centric, but the very fact of writing an encylopedia in English is already deciding to do that.
-Matt