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

Daniel Mayer maveric149 at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 22 02:42:59 UTC 2002


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. :-)

maveric149



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