On Tuesday 25 March 2003 10:22 am, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
... I have no desire to take a side on this issue, except (as mentioned above) I will side with whatever Mav wants.
Ed Poor
Well my personal opinion on this has changed a bit but we did vote on the issue. The results are below:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(city_names)...
Summary: In general there is no special naming convention for cities but when there is a reasonable ambiguity then and /only/ then do we add additional distinguishing information to the title.
The only exceptions are the United States and Canada where nearly every city name is used multiple times within their respective borders /and/ many others are shared between them (there are several Richmonds in Canada and a couple dozen in the United States, for example). So cities in these nations are to be pre-emptively disambiguated because city naming in the United States and Canada is /so/ ambiguous /and/ these cites are very often expressed in the [city/plane name, state/province] format ("Richmond, California" or "Richmond, Ontario").
Another thing that was voted on was the method for disambiguating non-US/Canadian cities when it is needed. I voted for the method that won; the comma convention. I now think this is a very bad choice because the comma convention is only widely used in the US and English-speaking Canada (and to a less extent in other English speaking countries) for disambiguating cities. Many other countries place the nation/sub-national entity in parenthesis and some, especially in continental Europe, use river names.
This is something that IMO we should discuss some more. But tentatively I would suggest that ambiguous city names outside the US and Canada should follow normal disambiguation. That is; if there is an unambiguous alternative name that is often used by English speakers, then we should use that ('Frankfurt (Oder)' for the Frankfurt on the Oder river in the state of Brandenburg - not to be confused with the more famous Frankfurt on the Main river - , for example). But if there is no natural disambigutor then we should use more standard parenthetical disambiguation (Cologne (Germany), - not to be confused with the perfume for men, for example).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma The usual at [[March 18]]