[Wikipedia-l] Naming conventions for US States

Manning Bartlett manning at bartlett.net
Wed Jun 19 20:25:43 UTC 2002


Re the recent (and excellent) efforts being made to apply consistency for naming conventions, I would like to throw a mild spanner in.

How come cities in the USA are identified simply by [[City, State]] and not [[City, State, USA]]? There would seem to be a presupposition that *everyone* will recognise US state names. 

Admittedly you'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of California. However a lot of people might not have heard of Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Montana, or Louisiana, or would not know that New York, Mississippi and Washington are also states, or that New Mexico is actually in the USA. 

I did a quick survey of people in my office (all of whom can be regarded as quite highly educated), and in each case I managed to find a US State they had never heard of or were confused about. By means of comparison, those US editors might try and name the 6 states of Australia, or the 9 provinces of South Africa, or the I-don't-know-how-many Provinces of Canada (with due apologies to my Canadian colleagues). And that is only considering the English-speaking world...

Manning
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