[WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

[Matt Brown]

On 4/10/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Just ask yourself: if Georgia (US state) was not, in fact, a US state,
> but an Australian state, or a British county, or ... whatever ... would
> we have had all those arguments?  I suspect it would indeed have been
> "obvious beyond words" if the grand ol' US of A wasn't involved.

You're still trying to argue based on taxonomic importance, which is
NOT what Wikipedia's naming conventions are supposed to be about.

In other words, you think that Wikipedia's naming conventions should
recognise a natural order of primacy, and the MOST IMPORTANT user of a
name by that order should get the name, and the others should have to
be disambiguated.  You think that a nation should automatically have
primacy over a subdivision of another nation, simply by fact of the
one being a nation and the other one a state in a larger nation.

That's not the way our naming conventions work (except in a few
specific areas where we've decided that consistency is good). 
Instead, something gets the primary article if it overwhelms other
meanings of the word, and we disambiguate at the primary spot if
nothing overwhelms.

Yes, this IS english-speaker-centric, but the very fact of writing an
encylopedia in English is already deciding to do that.

-Matt