On Saturday 13 July 2002 12:01 pm, tarquin wrote:
Someone just created "Shikoku, Japan" -- AFAIK there is no other "shikoku". There may be a need for "Shikoku, Japan" to exist, should another writer link to it, but the article should be on "Shikoku".
This person also made [[Shikoku]] into a redirect to [[Shikoku, Japan]]. Although this may need to be changed because Shikoku is also the name of a breed of Japanese dog. That's one of the reasons why the city naming conventions were developed -- you can't expect a user to know all uses of a non-disambiguated term so having a system for naming similar things is useful. So long as it is consistant within the country in question.
In general, like Lars said, phrases such as "Paris, France" are poor style. If the context is not already clear from the article -- "French composer, born in Paris" for instance -- it is better to write "Paris, in France" or even "Paris (France)".
I've never seen "Paris in France" used a noun before. And the chances of [[Paris (France)]] being linked to without using pipes is about nil. This perhaps isn't a good example because [[Paris]] redirects to [[Paris, France]] since the city in France is far and away the most widely used meaning of simply [[Paris]].
Also, when a person visits [[Paris, France]] the disambiguation block at the top of the article makes it very clear that [[Paris]] redirects to that article (a link to other uses is provided there too). I don't expect contributors to start using pipes to link directly to the most famous city by the name "Paris". Thus the redirect priority the French city has over [[Paris]]. The software handles this fine in "pages the link here"
City disambiguation wasn't really made for the most famous examples anyway -- it was made for the thousands of other less well known cities that have naming conflicts. We shouldn't expect a contributor to know that there are at least 20 places called Richmond in North America alone. All they need to know is that the one they are writing about is in California, so following the city naming convention for the United States, that article should be titled [[Richmond, California]].
The trouble is, that new contributors tend to first follow famous examples before looking into [[wikipedia:naming conventions]] (usually looking at and contributing for cities in their own country first). So the most famous examples have to be disambiguated too. W can't have naming conventions without at least some kind of logical consistency for naming similar types of things. Redirects can take care of the oddities like Paris so as not to break any links.
--maveric149
Daniel Mayer wrote:
The trouble is, that new contributors tend to first follow famous examples before looking into [[wikipedia:naming conventions]] (usually looking at and contributing for cities in their own country first). So the most famous examples have to be disambiguated too. W can't have naming conventions without at least some kind of logical consistency for naming similar types of things. Redirects can take care of the oddities like Paris so as not to break any links.
Consistency of formatting is the number one most important thing to maintain. If some of the links are [[Fred Nerk City]] and some of them are [[Fred Nerk City, Swaziland]] and some of them are [[Fred Nerk City (Swaziland]] then it's just plain confusing. Sure there may be only one Fred Nerk City in the world but like Mav said we can't expect everyone to know that... It's like the Years templates - there isn't really any likelihood that there'll need to be specific articles for 536BC AND 537BC but the articles were made anyway because the standard year template allowed for links to them.
Now that we have the format in place for cities whenever we see a city entry that's just under the name we need to move it to [[City, Country]] to keep the consistency going. The redirect will take care of anyone who is just looking for the city name if there is only one place by that name.
Daniel Mayer wrote:
On Saturday 13 July 2002 12:01 pm, tarquin wrote:
In general, like Lars said, phrases such as "Paris, France" are poor style. If the context is not already clear from the article -- "French composer, born in Paris" for instance -- it is better to write "Paris, in France" or even "Paris (France)".
I've never seen "Paris in France" used a noun before. And the chances of [[Paris (France)]] being linked to without using pipes is about nil. This perhaps isn't a good example because [[Paris]] redirects to [[Paris, France]] since the city in France is far and away the most widely used meaning of simply [[Paris]].
That's because "Paris in France" isn't a noun. "Paris" is a noun, "in France" is an adjective phrase. I think we are in the throes of culture shock here. "Paris, France" seems normal to Americans because that's the nomenclature system you are accustomed to for US cities. I don't know if it's the case, but to me it seems that that Americans are used to considering the "city, state" expression as a complete name. Like Lars said, to Europeans it feels very bizarre.
Something like "Paris in France" or "Paris (France)" indeed wouldn't be seen, it's a bad example. The context of the article should make it clear. In both France and the UK, places have their county or departement specified in parentheses: "Courgenard (Sarthe)", for example, or "Southampton (Hampshire)"
I guess we're stuck with the "," style for cities now it's prevalent, but let's not say it's for consistency: true consistency would be "( )" for ALL disambiguation pages.
Also, when a person visits [[Paris, France]] the disambiguation block at the top of the article makes it very clear that [[Paris]] redirects to that article (a link to other uses is provided there too).
As I said, why waste the "Paris" page on a redirect?
The trouble is, that new contributors tend to first follow famous examples before looking into [[wikipedia:naming conventions]]
perhaps it would help if the naming conventions weren't such a mess. I spent ages there looking for information when I first started writing, as I was anxious to follow the established conventions -- hence my recent suggestions to refactor that area -- which I'm still mulling over.
tarquin
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