[WikiEN-l] City names argument resurrected

[Tim Starling]

Jimmy Wales said:

>A horse! A horse! my kingdom for a horse!

Oh, no hang on, that was Richard III. ;) He actually said:

>(Tim accidentally attributed some remarks to me that were actually
>made by Ed Poor.  No big problem, I just note it in case it comes up
>in the future!)

Sorry.

I'm also sorry that I missed Eclecticology's post (Tue, 25 Mar 2003 08:40:45 
-0800) last time. I will reply to it now:

>I object because it takes these Australian city names as though they were 
>the only uses of those names.  There was certainly a well-lnown military 
>aircraft called the Canberra.  Perth is also a significant city in 
>Scotland.  Sydney, Nova Scotia was at least big enough for an English 
>travel agent to mistakenly send a young honeymooning couple there a year or 
>two ago.

The decision to implement "primary topic" disambiguation is made all the 
time around Wikipedia. Will you also be arguing for [[Cream]] to be moved to 
[[Cream (dairy product)]]?

There may a plane called "Canberra", but it's not in Wikipedia at the 
moment, so it's obviously not *that* well known. However, if we later 
discover "Canberra" has an important meaning other than the city name, we 
can move the article at that point. There is no need to pre-emptively 
disambiguate since moving an article and changing all references is a 
relatively simple task. Preemptive disambiguation has the disadvantage that 
it requires people to write [[Canberra, Australia|Canberra]], even though 
the chance [[Canberra]] will some day become a disambiguation page rather 
than a redirect is fairly small.

I'm not suggesting that all Australian cities should have a simple name. The 
decision whether to use primary-topic disambiguation or some other more 
neutral form should be made on a case-by-case basis. Perth is a good example 
of a page which should probably stay as it is (although the Australian Perth 
has 30 times more population than the other two combined).

Now back to Mr Wales (at least I think it was him):

:I think we should do the same thing for all countries, or at least all
:English speaking countries, or for all cities that meet some popular
:recognition threshold, whatever that may be.

I don't think "popular recognition threshold" should enter into the 
*preemptive* disambiguation decision. The one horse town Ebor currently has 
the simple name, and I think it should stay that way for now. If another 
Ebor becomes evident, the town can be moved, but that's no big deal. We 
don't preemptively disambiguate albums, books or movies, so why do it for 
(non-American) towns and cities?

Also, doing the same thing for all countries would mean using [[City, 
State]] convention, i.e. [[Canberra, Australian Capital Territory]] or 
[[Perth, Western Australia]]. I don't think anyone wants that.

Preemptive disambiguation is necessary for American towns and cities because 
the chance of a name being ambiguous is very much higher. Also, even 
contributors naive in the ways of the 'pedia have a fair chance of typing 
[[City, State]] because that's the way it's usually done.

I think my position and Mav's are basically identical. He said:

]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").

How does this "payment for post" thing work? Can I use my 983 edits to date 
as a kind of bank? ;)

-- Tim Starling

_________________________________________________________________