On 5/21/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
This doesn't really make me any less awestruck, as, again, it's all about political identity from a Western, and primarily an American, cultural perspective.
Note that I am not an American.
Soviet Georgia didn't have similar status in the USSR to the state of Georgia within the US, by the way, as the Soviet government under communism was a very different government from that of the USA during the same years.
In terms of the kind of rough status implicit in any idea of natural hierarchy (which you appear to support), they were both subdivisions of a larger state, with some internal autonomy but no ability to act as a nation in international affairs. In detail, of course, both situations were very different, based on the character of the two nations and their political structure.
There is nothing wrong with heirarchies, putting nations above states in order of importance, as the latter are simply parts of the former.
I disagree when it comes to Wikipedia disambiguation between two well-known entities.
The simplest solution is to make the primary the disambiguation page.
I'm not sure what you mean by this sentence; I can parse it to mean any of several different solutions. My apologies for the misunderstanding.
When it comes to writing for our readers, the correct solution where there are two well-known claimants to the same name is to make the bare name a disambiguation between them. There's no overwhelmingly right choice that most of our readers will be looking for.
For our writers, making the plain name a disambiguation is the best service in this kind of case as well. If someone links to [[Georgia]], they could mean either the nation or the state. Since no mainspace page should link to the disambiguation save the disambiguated pages themselves, this automatically marks them as needing human intervention to disambiguate the link. If one of the alternatives is at the bare name, some of the internal links will be correct, some incorrect, and there is no sure way to tell them apart.
And from the point of which of the three choices will cause the least disruption, it is likely to be equal disambiguation. Putting one above the other in a case like this is, I suspect, likely to cause a greater degree of anger among the "wronged" and cause more internal strife than does the low-level discord created by equal disambiguation.
-Matt