On Friday 21 June 2002 08:50 pm, Karen wrote:
I would think that the best policy is consistency... no, Australian placenames do not repeat from state to state (much). Not to the extent that it would interfere with entries... but at the same time I think that if the policy for other countries is city,state then we should stick to that. I know that whenever I refer to an Australian city in writing an entry I refer to it with that format because I've seen it elsewhere. But then I generally link to them as [[Sydney]], [[New South Wales]] rather than as a single phrase because there IS only one Sydney (and one Melbourne, one Darwin etc)!
Unfortunately, there is a Sydney in Canada, Florida, and Virginia; a Melbourne in Florida, Arkansas, and Iowa; and a Darwin in Minnesota, California, Nevada and Illinois (there are probably several more of each). In all these examples there was only one non-American city and in my search I couldn't find a single additional Australian city by any of these names.
The reuse of city names in the US is just too big an ambiguity issue to ignore and therefore city names in the US should be treated differently than city names for other nations. The general trend for US cities in wikipedia is to name them in the format of [[city, state]] (which is what they are actually specifically referred to within the US and abroad). I agree with and encourage this trend because of the need to differentiate between US cities and to have predictable names for them.
Consistency in city naming should be <i>within</i> a nation and not for all nations in my opinion. But since most other nations don't have internal ambiguity issues that even begin to compare with the United States, I propose that those cities should be in the form [[city, nation]] (as most non-US cities are specifically referred to -- at least according to a sampling on Google and my own experience) or just [[city]] for noted exceptions (there are important consistency and minor ambiguity issues with the [[city]] format though....). There might be some nations other than the US that are exceptions to this proposed naming convention, but these can be explored on a case-by-case basis.
BTW, before we revisit it, [[Melbourne, Florida, United States of America]] and [[Melbourne, Arkansas, United States of America]] are both WAY too tedious and would hardly ever be directly linked to because the long form (even with USA or US) is not really used much at all ("United States of America", USA or US not being needed to disambiguate). Likewise, [[Melbourne, Victoria, Australia]] is probably just as bad ("Victoria" not being needed to disambiguate). In short, "simplify, simplify" - but be internally consistant.
Technical fixes such as redirects are just that -- technical fixes that skirt the main issue (in my experience, users who prefer needlessly long article names are notorious for not providing redirects and if we encourage long names these users will soon outnumber more sane individuals wanting to preserve easy and natural linking).
maveric149