[Wikipedia-l] Re: City, state convention for Australian cities

[Daniel Mayer]

On Friday 12 July 2002 12:01 pm, : Karen AKA Kajikit  wrote:
> I don't think it sounds silly... sure within the context of a single
> country it's wierd and wouldn't be used, but when you're talking
> worldwide then it's quite normal to use the country name as well as the
> city just as an identifier. You want to make it obvious to people who
> are ignorant just where Sydney is, and if they don't know where
> AUSTRALIA is then the situation is hopeless and you can just give up

I agree with Karen here. Since [[Sydney]] redirects to [[Sydney, Australia]] 
you still will be able to simply type [[Sydney]] and end up in the most 
famous Sydney. 

However, since [[Sydney]] redirects to the Australian city it is necessary to 
have the following statement at the top of that [[Sydney, Australia]]: 
"[[Sydney]] redirects here. There is also another article named [[Sydney, 
Nova Scotia]]." 

And if there were a long list of other, even less well know uses of the word 
"Sydney", then they would be in [[Sydney (disambiguation)]] and linked to 
after the above mention of the Nova Scotia city.

This is called a disambiguation block and this form of disambiguation is 
useful in cases like this where a famous thing has the same name less famous 
things.  Paris is an even more obvious example. 

All this has already been worked out to a great deal of detail here on the 
list and in about a dozen talk pages. 

More documentation can be found at: 
[[wikipedia talk:naming conventions (city names)]] and 
[[wikipedia:naming conventions]]

BTW, it looks like Canada has systemic internal naming conflict issues with 
the [[City, Nation]] format and I am considering whether it would be a good 
idea to advocate moving Canada to the [[City, Province]] name format (similar 
to the USA) because of this (most of the Canadian cities are already in this 
format anyway). For example, there appears to be several significantly 
important places named Richmond in Canada. 

As for every country, whatever is decided should be internally consistant for 
that country (per the naming convention).  

--maveric149