[WikiEN-l] Re: City names argument resurrected

[Daniel Mayer]

On Tuesday 25 March 2003 10:22 am, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>...
>I have no desire to take a side on this issue, except
> (as mentioned above) I will side with whatever Mav wants.
>
> Ed Poor

Well my personal opinion on this has changed a bit but we did vote on the 
issue. The results are below:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(city_names)/Archive_3

Summary: In general there is no special naming convention for cities but when 
there is a reasonable ambiguity then and /only/ then do we add additional 
distinguishing information to the title. 

The only exceptions are the United States and Canada where nearly every city 
name is used multiple times within their respective borders /and/ many others 
are shared between them (there are several Richmonds in Canada and a couple 
dozen in the United States, for example). So cities in these nations are to 
be pre-emptively disambiguated because city naming in the United States and 
Canada is /so/ ambiguous /and/ these cites are very often expressed in the 
[city/plane name, state/province] format ("Richmond, California" or 
"Richmond, Ontario"). 

Another thing that was voted on was the method for disambiguating 
non-US/Canadian cities when it is needed. I voted for the method that won; 
the comma convention. I now think this is a very bad choice because the comma 
convention is only widely used in the US and English-speaking Canada (and to 
a less extent in other English speaking countries) for disambiguating cities. 
Many other countries place the nation/sub-national entity in parenthesis and 
some, especially in continental Europe, use river names. 

This is something that IMO we should discuss some more. But tentatively I 
would suggest that ambiguous city names outside the US and Canada should 
follow normal disambiguation. That is; if there is an unambiguous alternative 
name that is often used by English speakers, then we should use that 
('Frankfurt (Oder)' for the Frankfurt on the Oder river in the state of 
Brandenburg - not to be confused with the more famous Frankfurt on the Main 
river - , for example). But if there is no natural disambigutor then we 
should use more standard parenthetical disambiguation (Cologne (Germany), - 
not to be confused with the perfume for men, for example). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)  

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