New subject: City, state convention for Australian cities

20 Jun 2002

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 differentiate two
articles that would otherwise have the exact same name
and not 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 reasonable minimum 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 within 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  

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com

RE: naming conventions for cities