Daniel Mayer wrote:
On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, Robert wrote:
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.
Opps! Sorry, I seemed to have given the wrong impression: I wasn't advocating moving Australian city articles to the [[city, state]] format, but was just asking if Australians reused city names as often as Americans and only <i>if</i> they did, then the [[city, state]] format would need to be used -- which you indicate isn't the case.
So then, why don't we just take the path of least resistance and use whatever format is the dominant one? Oh drat, I just checked and found out that that path is to not disambiguate at all.....
If city names in Australia are unique within that country (or any country for that matter) why not simply have [[Perth]] or [[Sydney]] live at [[Perth, Australia]] or [[Sydney, Australia]] giving these notable examples redirect priority over their one word names (only since they are the most famous cities by those names -- in the same way as [[Los Angles]] redirects to [[Los Angeles, California]])? Side note: It would be nice for the existance of redirects to be made more obvious -- at least in "pages that link here".
Again, either way, we should name city articles consistently within countries. However, [[Sydney, New South Wales]] sounds like an unnecessary amount of information to my American ears and I would wager that most netcitizens wouldn't know which Australian state Sydney is in (and therefore wouldn't be likely to either link to or search for it by that name -- What netcitizens search for on Google and how Google ranks pages is also important to consider). So the format of [[city, country]] would appear to be the best choice for Australia after all.
But then what I think is worthless if the Aussies disagree. Please take the above as a somewhat well-reasoned suggestion. :-)
I would think that the best policy is consistency... no, Australian placenames do not repeat from state to state (much). Not to the extent that it would interfere with entries... but at the same time I think that if the policy for other countries is city,state then we should stick to that. I know that whenever I refer to an Australian city in writing an entry I refer to it with that format because I've seen it elsewhere. But then I generally link to them as [[Sydney]], [[New South Wales]] rather than as a single phrase because there IS only one Sydney (and one Melbourne, one Darwin etc)!