On Monday 24 June 2002 12:01 pm, Jeroen wrote:

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.

OK, fair enough -- redirects from [[city]] to the the most famous [[city, state]] (USA) or [[city, nation]] (other) is probably in order (so that those that know these redirects exist don't have to use pipes -- [[Oslo, Norway|Oslo]]).

Many cities, such as the mentioned Oslo in Norway, are by far the most widely known city by that name (even for most Americans). And I also know that in Europe this city is mostly known simply as just "Oslo" (in the same way as Los Angeles is simply known as just "Los Angeles" in the US). What is needed, is a way to naturally disambiguate to a reasonable level (following the previously mentioned [[city, state]]/[[city, nation]] setup), preserve easy linking and be consistent within nations. Consistency/disambiguation and ease of linking do conflict, however, but redirects can solve this problem for the most famous (and therefore most likely to be linked) city names.

Proposal:

In cases where there is a famous city and a not so famous city with the same name, redirect priority over the use of the [[city]] format page should be given to the more famous city when there is an obvious choice. For example: there are at least several cities named Moscow in the world but the wikipedia page [[Moscow]] should <i>not</i> be a disambiguation page, but be redirected to [[Moscow, Russia]] (the most famous Moscow by far) and at the bottom of that article should be a few links to other not nearly as well known Moscow's (for those VERY few individuals who actually expect to link to an article about Moscow, Idaho by creating a link to [[Moscow]]).

There will be exceptions when there are two cities of roughly equal fame, such as [[Memphis, Tennessee]] and [[Memphis, Egypt]] where there is a true ambiguity as to which city should have redirect priority over the use of the [[Memphis]] page. In this case, [[Memphis]] would have to be turned into a disambiguation page with [[Memphis, Tennessee]] and [[Memphis, Egypt]] listed (of course, as with the creation of all disambiguation pages, the person making one is bound by honor to fix all the misdirected links to it so that they point directly to the correct city's article -- another good reason to use redirects in most cases and NOT to create disambiguation pages for everything).

<hint> It would be nice to have redirects show up under a heading of: "Pages that are REDIRECTs to this article" (or something similar) in "pages that link here". </hint>

--maveric149