[Wikipedia-l] Re: City, state convention

[Daniel Mayer]

On Saturday 13 July 2002 12:01 pm,  tarquin wrote:
> Someone just created "Shikoku, Japan" -- AFAIK there is no other
> "shikoku". There may be a need for "Shikoku, Japan" to exist, should
> another writer link to it, but the article should be on "Shikoku".

This person also made [[Shikoku]] into a redirect to  [[Shikoku, Japan]]. 
Although this may need to be changed because Shikoku is also the name of a 
breed of Japanese dog. That's one of the reasons why the city naming 
conventions were developed -- you can't expect a user to know all uses of a   
non-disambiguated term so having a system for naming similar things is 
useful. So long as it is consistant within the country in question.   

> In general, like Lars said, phrases such as "Paris, France" are poor
> style. If the context is not already clear from the article -- "French
> composer, born in Paris" for instance -- it is better to write "Paris,
> in France" or even "Paris (France)".

I've never seen "Paris in France" used a noun before. And the chances of 
[[Paris (France)]] being linked to without using pipes is about nil.  This 
perhaps isn't a good example because [[Paris]] redirects to [[Paris, France]] 
since the city in France is far and away the most widely used meaning of 
simply [[Paris]]. 

Also, when a person visits [[Paris, France]] the disambiguation block at the 
top of the article makes it very clear that [[Paris]] redirects to that 
article (a link to other uses is provided there too). I don't expect 
contributors to start using pipes to link directly to the most famous city by 
the name "Paris". Thus the redirect priority the French city has over 
[[Paris]]. The software handles this fine in "pages the link here"

City disambiguation wasn't really made for the most famous examples anyway -- 
it was made for the thousands of other less well known cities that have 
naming conflicts. We shouldn't expect a contributor to know that there are at 
least 20 places called Richmond in North America alone. All they need to know 
is that the one they are writing about is in California, so following the 
city naming convention for the United States, that article should be titled 
[[Richmond, California]].

The trouble is, that new contributors tend to first follow famous examples 
before looking into [[wikipedia:naming conventions]] (usually looking at and 
contributing for cities in their own country first). So the most famous 
examples have to be disambiguated too. W can't have naming conventions 
without at least some kind of logical consistency for naming similar types of 
things. Redirects can take care of the oddities like Paris so as not to break 
any links. 

--maveric149