Magnus wrote:
For the naming conventions of cities, IMHO the important thing is that the different articles can be
told apart ("Paris, Texas"). That Texas is in the US can be mentioned within the article.
I could not agree more. The whole idea of disambiguation was to <i>differentiate</i> two articles that would otherwise have the exact same name and <i>not</i> to immediately give the average person a geography lesson � this is information overload just for a page title. Geographical and important political information can, and should be stated in the first line of the article. Technical matters such as ease of linking and true disambiguation trump any overly hierarchical naming scheme. Besides, there are already hundreds of cities in wikipedia and probably thousands of links to them and if you really wanted to give a geography lesson you would probably want to list section of continent too.
Our naming conventions state that names should be chosen that have a <i>reasonable minimum</i> of ambiguity. Therefore simply go up only to the level of detail needed to differentiate one item from another in preferably natural and mostly consistent manner (consistancy <i>within</i> a particular country is highly desirable).
For example: Americans are notorious for reusing the same darn name for cities in several to a dozen different states. Therefore, for the United States [[city, state]] is fine. Most other countries don�t have such rampant reuse of city names, so [[city, country]] is fine unless there is a naming conflict (or a noted exception: see below). Australia is a matter to consider and could also be organized as [[city, state]] � but only if the reuse of city names is as bad a problem there as it is in the US states (this goes for any other country as well).
Paris, Rome and a few dozen other cities are noted exceptions � although we may eventually simply just give these cities redirect priority so that [[Paris]] redirects to [[Paris, France]] and the article actually lives at [[Paris, France]] for nothing more than consistency � but that would require some tweaking of the software to make the existence of redirects more obvious.
In short: KISS and follow the general trend already establish by many other articles. With so many city articles already in existence, it�s too late in the game to start such a (re)naming rule � It might have worked if it was started a year ago.
maveric149
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On Fri, 21 Jun 2002 04:43:57 Daniel Mayer wrote:
Magnus wrote:
For the naming conventions of cities, IMHO the important thing is that the different articles can be
told apart ("Paris, Texas"). That Texas is in the US can be mentioned within the article.
I could not agree more. The whole idea of disambiguation was to <i>differentiate</i> two articles that would otherwise have the exact same name and <i>not</i> to immediately give the average person a geography lesson this is information overload just for a page title. Geographical and important political information can, and should be stated in the first line of the article. Technical matters such as ease of linking and true disambiguation trump any overly hierarchical naming scheme. Besides, there are already hundreds of cities in wikipedia and probably thousands of links to them and if you really wanted to give a geography lesson you would probably want to list section of continent too.
Our naming conventions state that names should be chosen that have a <i>reasonable minimum</i> of ambiguity. Therefore simply go up only to the level of detail needed to differentiate one item from another in preferably natural and mostly consistent manner (consistancy <i>within</i> a particular country is highly desirable).
For example: Americans are notorious for reusing the same darn name for cities in several to a dozen different states. Therefore, for the United States [[city, state]] is fine. Most other countries dont have such rampant reuse of city names, so [[city, country]] is fine unless there is a naming conflict (or a noted exception: see below). Australia is a matter to consider and could also be organized as [[city, state]] but only if the reuse of city names is as bad a problem there as it is in the US states (this goes for any other country as well).
As far as Australia goes, we have so few cities that name clashes aren't really a problem.
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.
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