On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, Robert wrote:
> However, the [City, State] convention works fine - it's quite
> sufficient to disambiguate between Australian cities and
> any from elsewhere, AFAICT, and it's not hard to identify that
> the cities are Australian. If somebody really wants to
> change the entries, go ahead.
Opps! Sorry, I seemed to have given the wrong impression: I wasn't advocating
moving Australian city articles to the [[city, state]] format, but was just
asking if Australians reused city names as often as Americans and only
<i>if</i> they did, then the [[city, state]] format would need to be used --
which you indicate isn't the case.
So then, why don't we just take the path of least resistance and use whatever
format is the dominant one? Oh drat, I just checked and found out that that
path is to not disambiguate at all.....
If city names in Australia are unique within that country (or any country for
that matter) why not simply have [[Perth]] or [[Sydney]] live at [[Perth,
Australia]] or [[Sydney, Australia]] giving these notable examples redirect
priority over their one word names (only since they are the most famous
cities by those names -- in the same way as [[Los Angles]] redirects to [[Los
Angeles, California]])? Side note: It would be nice for the existance of
redirects to be made more obvious -- at least in "pages that link here".
Again, either way, we should name city articles consistently within
countries. However, [[Sydney, New South Wales]] sounds like an unnecessary
amount of information to my American ears and I would wager that most
netcitizens wouldn't know which Australian state Sydney is in (and therefore
wouldn't be likely to either link to or search for it by that name -- What
netcitizens search for on Google and how Google ranks pages is also important
to consider). So the format of [[city, country]] would appear to be the best
choice for Australia after all.
But then what I think is worthless if the Aussies disagree. Please take the
above as a somewhat well-reasoned suggestion. :-)
maveric149