After just discovering the wikipedia-l mailinglist, I'd immediately like to join in with some remarks on the topic of naming conventions for cities. I've tried to read most of the message posted before, sorry if I've missed anything. I'll not address the point of disambiguating cities, I think that issue is pretty clear.

The major point with naming cities and the like is that there's not one standard in the world, not even in the English-speaking world. Americans tend to name all cities as (city, state) (in the US) and as (city, country) for those outside the US. This is far from common outside the US, where things as San Francisco, CA seem weird. In Europe (as far as I can judge), the extra information (state, province, whatever) is only used when really necessary, which it is in two cases: (1) disambiguation - there are two cities with the same (or almost the same name) in the country (2) the national public cannot be expected to know where the town is located. Other countries will have their own policies, usually depending on the size of the country.

When writing articles on this in Wikipedia, there's two problems we need to take care of: * ease of use for the reader * ease of linking for the writer

The ease of use is not really a problem in any case: if the user searches for Paris, France, and finds an article with "Paris is the capital of France, blablabla", he's found the right place; same thing for the user merely searching for Paris.

For the writer, making links should be easy, and he should not have to know about dozens of naming conventions; just a few should be enough. The American linking to Oslo, Norway should get the right page, and so should the the European linking Oslo only. Redirects should do the trick here.

So, at this point, I'd say: what is the problem? The only thing to take care of is that for each article named according to convention A, there's a redirect with convention name B.

However, another issue appears to be consistency. If all articles on cities are named in the same way, this might look more authorative, or the like. However, I think there's no way city articles can ever be made consistent, while satisfying the ease of use and linking too. Consistent would be: city, administrative region, country (because city, state for one country and city, country for another isn't consistent). However, that is rather tedious for both linking and using. And it brings a lot of new problems as well. What should it be: New York, New York, United States of America/United States/USA/US? Same problem for the UK, maybe also for Russia(n Federation), etc. This can all be sorted out, but it'll be too many conventions for me.

Concluding, my proposal is: make sure each city article has appropriate redirects. That's all :-)

regards,

Jeroen Heijmans

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