Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:03, 26 August 2006

Past discussion

Read the discussion contained in the archives:

• Talk Archive 1
• Talk Archive 2
• Talk Archive 3
• Talk Archive 4
• Talk Archive 5
• Talk Archive 6 - "City" vs. "City, State" arguments
• Talk Archive 7
• Talk Archive 8

New naming proposal on global cities

How about this proposal: All global cities (including ones with evidence of global city formation) are under the article, regardless of country. Cities requiring further disambiguation will be under Dralwik| 19:45, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Discussion will be closed two weeks after my post above (19:45, 19 February 2006 (UTC)), and if the proposal is adopted an administrator will be contacted to assist in city page moves.

Supporting proposal

1. Perfectly rational. Dralwik| 19:45, 5 February 2006
2. Support I agree ... in so far as it doesn't preclude simpler names for capital and other cities that are not in this somewhat contentious list (e.g., Canberra, Ottawa), which will variably be dealt with through specific conventions for those countries (a separate one to follow for Canada soon!), other overarching Wp naming conventions, or otherwise. Perhaps the proposal should be extended to include national capitals too? E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 20:06, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
3. Support - G-Man * 20:27, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
4. Support. I'm assuming this global convention would override any country specific convention. Paris should be Paris and Los Angeles should be Los Angeles, not Paris, France and not Los Angeles, California and not Los Angeles, California, United States. Same with Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Denver, Seattle, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, etc., etc. These are all global city names. --Serge 19:35, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
5. Support - anything that mitigates the unfortunate, overreaching rule concerning U.S. cities has my support. --Yath 22:27, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
6. Support It's ludicrous to have the world's most influencial cities having to be lumbered with this system - we aren't talking Cairo, Illinois or Paris, Texas here but cities like Chicago and Paris. Robovski 23:22, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
7. Support josh (talk) 04:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Opposing proposal

1. Oppose. The definition of "Global City" is vague and there is no definitive list. There is no reason to treat certain ctities different than the rest. -Will Beback 18:14, 7 February 2006 (UTC) I also object to constant polls on this question. We just finished voting on a very similar question. -Will Beback 18:16, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
2. Oppose. Who's to say what's a global city? The global city article is already vandalized with frightening regularity by country bumpkins who think Fresno or Grand Rapids are global cities. As I already noted at that article, the problem is that most people simply cannot afford the "grand tour" of several world cities that completes the education of a sophisticated adult (e.g., London/Paris/Rome or New York/Los Angeles/Chicago, all of which I have visited). We do not need a rule that will be impossible to enforce and will lead to utter chaos in the United States city articles. --Coolcaesar 18:20, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
3. Oppose. "Global city" not sufficiently well-defined, and no actual value in changing article names anyway. Stan 18:48, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
4. Oppose: we already have a clear policy for cities in the United States and I don't want to suddenly have a few hundred page move arguments from Portland, Maine to Anchorage, Alaska over whether these meet a poorly-defined term like "global city". In the recent vote on Los Angeles, every editor commenting who was part of the Southern California project opposed moving it. Many others opposed because having a lot of exceptions to a general rule makes linking less intuitive, and it was defeated. All other similar move proposals recently, including for Chicago, were rejected. Jonathunder 19:32, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
5. Oppose jengod 19:45, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
6. Oppose Global city is way to ambiguous — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reflex Reaction (talk • contribs) 20:01, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
7. Oppose --mav 22:05, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
8. Oppose on two grounds: The proposal is POV and the current convention assists readers.
   • I have visited 12 of the cities presently named on Global cities, and the airports of three others. One of the intersting things I have learned is that in fact the names of these are not universally recognised without a qualification. I found it quite confusing to be in Canada and hear something about Sydney, and eventually discover that the speaker meant Sydney, Nova Scotia. And people in Toronto who speak about London almost universally mean London, Ontario.
   • When reading articles in Misplaced Pages that are not primarily about a place, but mention it, it is very nice to be able to wave the mouse over the city name and have the tool tip tell me the country/state/province to give the quick familiarisation I need. For articles mentioning British places which do not do primary disambiguation in general, I frequently have to open the article to find out which country the place is in.

   --Scott Davis 23:31, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

9. Oppose it's all been said before. older ≠ wiser 03:11, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
10. Adamantly opposed. Too open to ambiguity, confusion, edit warring and page-move warring, POV, etc. 11:13, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
11. Oppose treating "global cities" different from any other cities. This way lies constant arguing on what is or isn't a global city. – Quadell 17:37, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
12. Oppose — even the ill advised Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Location Format dedicated to undoing the comma convention has to say "London (England)" to differentiate in its text. I'm tired of the incessant re-hashing of the same proposals by a small minority. The naming conventions are chosen by country, there is no "global" standard. --William Allen Simpson 13:16, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
13. Oppose The simplest solution with the least exceptions is always best. Formal names should be prefered. If it has a unique name, then a redirect will work great. Cacophony 07:10, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
14. Oppose --cj | talk 01:57, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
15. Oppose Disambiguation is best, as the whole idea of "global city" is definitely a big POV and bias issue right there. Adam 1212 02:30, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
16. Oppose. ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 03:20, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
17. Oppose. This proposal says that the naming of city articles should rest on arbitrary standards like "global city". Furthermore, Misplaced Pages is supposed to be a lasting resource. What happens when "global cities" are less well known in the future, and interested parties cannot find them?--Danaman5 23:19, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
18. Oppose. AFAIAC, the more disambiguous, the better. Link common names like LA, L.A., Los Angeles, to the article, but the article should be under Los Angeles, California (heck, include United States of America, too). Unless the city itself is ambiguous like Springfield in The Simpsons, the name of the article should include enough information that the post office could deliver a letter there (well, maybe not postal codes, but you get the idea). Cheers. --Enharmonix 00:27, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

• Comment. Pretty much the only cities that violate the above proposal are in the U.S. --Usgnus 03:25, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. That's because a bot was used to name all the incorporated cities in the U.S. using the ] format and there is a gang of enforcers that imposes their values of "consistency" and "standards" (contrary to WP:NPOV) above common sense and the Misplaced Pages convention using the most commonly used/known name, except when there is a conflict, which is followed not only on all global city names, but also for every article name in Misplaced Pages. And this gang imposes their will on every single U.S. city article where anyone tries to make an appeal to common sense. It is a disgrace to Misplaced Pages, and, arguably, WP:vandalism. Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, California, ... These are absurd. Thankfully, there are enough people from New York City to outnumber the gang on that one page and keep untarnished from their antics, but for all other cities there aren't enough people interested. --Serge 04:30, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Quite possibly, this presents us with a standard that should be more widely followed, than one that should be watered down. Having said that, I regret that we didn't end up with New York, New York (boom, boom). ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 04:56, 26 July 2006 (UTC) - actually, I take that back, there's a stack of them.

Yes, quite possibly, the standard should be followed if you're interested in making Misplaced Pages easier to edit. However, if you're interested in making Misplaced Pages be reader-friendly and encyclopedic, then any and all convoluted-for-the-sake-of-standard-naming conventions, like the ] U.S. city name convention, that dictate article names be different from the most commonly used names (except when there is an ambiguity) should be avoided. --Serge 05:32, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. Check out Category:Host cities of the Summer Olympic Games --Usgnus 16:58, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• Good example. --Serge 13:51, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it is quite stark. ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 23:15, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

• To be fair St. Louis would be questionable for St. Louis, Missouri, but not out of the question (Saint Louis would still point to the dab page). --Usgnus 23:50, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Abstentions

1. This proposal is too complex. It should stop at the first line ("All global cities (including ones with evidence of global city formation) are under the article, regardless of country.:). --Yath 07:39, 6 February 2006 (UTC) (stricken because the objection was addressed --Yath 22:27, 6 February 2006 (UTC))

U.S./Canada city name dispute statement

On 18:21 February 5 2006 ScottDavis removed the following statement, without any discussion on this page, from the United States and Canada section:

There is a dispute as to the general applicability of this convention, and the issue of whether it should apply to city names without ambiguity issues (like New York City and Hollywood) is currently being discussed and voted on. See the Talk page.

While the vote referenced had concluded, the dispute has not. That particular vote started on December 6th, 2005. Prior to that, the statement existed in the section in various forms for a long time, and I see no justification to remove it regardless of the outcome of this particular vote. Here is, for example, what it said back in August of 2005:

There is some dispute as to the general applicability of this convention and no real consensus to support it. See the Talk page.

The dispute continues, as is shown by the latest poll seeking a global city naming convention.

I have reverted the 12/5 statement, with a slight modification to reflect that there is no current ongoing vote, to this:

There is a dispute as to the general applicability of this convention, particularly whether it should apply to city names with well-known names and without ambiguity issues (like New York City and Hollywood). See the Talk page as well as the individual talk pages for such city names.

If you want to delete this statement, please discuss here. Until then, I will continue to revert any removals of it. --Serge 21:27, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

I deleted the statement ont he Naming conventions page as the statement has no place there. It is not part of the convention. A vote was held (again), and the concensus was not to change. If this place worked as a democracy, then I'd say "a vote was held and the proposal to change was outvoted", but then I'd have to consider whether each voter was entitled to vote. Either way, there is no need for the Naming conventions page to say that you continue to dispute the outcome. --Scott Davis 04:29, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Whether there is a "need" for a statement to say the dispute exists is a matter of opinion. I say there is; you say there isn't. But from a NPOV, the undeniable fact is that the dispute exists. And it's not only just me. And it's not only just those that voted in favor of the most recent proposal (which was unrelated to the statement you deleted, which existed long before I put that particular proposal up for a vote). It's also those who continue to question why well-known city names are named according to the convoluted format on individual well-known city name pages. The dispute is real, and it's not going away. The statement saying as much is true fact, and it should remain. If you want to remove the statement about the dispute existing, then create your own proposal/vote to determine if the dispute exists. --Serge 08:42, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I just updated the "dispute paragraph" to say the following:

There is an ongoing dispute as to the general applicability of this convention, particularly whether it should apply to city names with well-known names and without ambiguity issues (like New York City and Hollywood). A vote on a recent proposal to explicitly state that use of this convention is only required when an ambiguity existed failed to achieve a consensus. See the Talk page as well as the individual talk pages for individual city names.

I hope everyone agrees this is accurate and fair. --Serge 08:51, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

1. I don't see an "ongoing dispute" as part of the naming conventions, therefore the paragraph does not belong on the main page, only on this talk page. I have no intention of calling a vote to test this.
2. "Recent" is only true for a while.
3. There have been at least three votes to change this convention, none of which achieved even a simple majority in favour of change. I presume there was also discussion before the original convention was established.
4. The last sentence is unnecessary: The top of the page tells people to read the talk page, and most people will only have found this convention after being referred from a city talk page.

--Scott Davis 09:40, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

The back-and-forthing regarding the dispute statement on the project page is rather moot. Why? First: it's debatable that the current convention for Canadian cities, rolled in with US ones, was arrived at through appreciable consensus in the first place. Therefore, prior votes that continue to insinuate this convention for Cdn. cities (which runs counter to overarching naming conventions in Wp) is unreasonable. Second: its unequal application (as evidenced by some notable articles like Toronto, Vancouver, et al.) is fodder for its invalidity. Lastly: users in the know (many of whom have expressed reluctance to implement it) are discussing its merits or lack of same here, so a statement of the obvious is frankly unnecessary.

As stated earlier, a naming convention solely for Canadian cities will be proposed shortly ... or I'll be bold and make said edits anyway. Stay tuned! E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 10:00, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

U.S. and Canada "convention"

The section for U.S and Canada currently states:

Cities in the United States and Canada, however, will be disambiguated with a format of City, State or City, Province (the "comma convention"). Those U.S. or Canadian cities which need additional disambiguation will be disambiguated with their County (e.g. Elgin, Lancaster County, South Carolina and Elgin, Kershaw County, South Carolina).

Says who? There has never been a vote to establish a consensus for this convention (which is why the dispute statement was there until it was deleted a few days ago), which blatantly contradicts the primary Misplaced Pages naming convention:

Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.

Another way to summarize the overall principle of Misplaced Pages's naming conventions:

Names of Misplaced Pages articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists.

Because of the clear and blatant violation of Misplaced Pages's naming convention, and the lack of consensus for this exception, this false and baseless statement of convention for U.S and Canadian city names is POV and should be removed.

--Serge 07:51, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Dude, I initially thought you were reasonable, and gave you the benefit of the doubt for three months, but now you're just totally gone off the deep end. It's already clear that yet another poll has gone against you and the overwhelming consensus of English-speaking editors is in favor of the current City, State convention for U.S. cities. Someone should get Jimbo to permanently block Serge before he screws up the rest of Misplaced Pages! --Coolcaesar 20:09, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Be cool, dude. I realize it's not looking good for the home team here. I understand how this convention came to be, and understand why. I just think that a few key points were overlooked, and I'm hoping I can bring the issues to the attention of enough people for the mistake to be realized, and the decisions of the individuals responsible to be reversed. I realize it's unlikely, but I'd like to do what I can to help make Misplaced Pages be the best it can be (for the readers, not the editors), and will keep trying, because adherence to this arbitrary convention results is some really stilted Misplaced Pages U.S city article names. That reflects badly on all of us, but, more importantly, it reflects badly on Misplaced Pages. --Serge 23:53, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I just fixed the grammar:

The canonical form for cities in the United States and Canada is ] or ] (the "comma convention"). Those cities that need additional disambiguation include their county or parish (for example Elgin, Lancaster County, South Carolina and Elgin, Kershaw County, South Carolina).

There is no confusion or dispute. Consensus has long been achieved. Language (recently removed) confirmed that "ver 30,000 U.S. city articles are already in the form of "City, State" even if they do not need disambiguation." This conforms to Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (places)#Maintain consistency within each country.

--William Allen Simpson

If "consensus has long been achieved", then you should be able to cite where there was a vote to approve of the current U.S/Canada section wording (in concept is fine) that is in direct violation of primary Wikipedian naming conventions. Noting the 30,000 articles that are consistent with the convention is hardly evidence of a consensus, since they were mostly created by a bot. It is also apparent that you guys are putting the interests of editors over the interests of readers, which is also anti-Wikipedian. Noting that the consensus of the editors are in favor of this convention only makes this point. --Serge 23:25, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

By the way, ever look to see how the pros do it? Los Angeles, as listed at Britannica.com. If the pros at Britannica don't have a need to tack on the state, why do we? --Serge 23:57, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

As a group, we made a considered choice to do so. There is no confusion or dispute. There have been numerous straw polls to gauge consensus. There is no conflict with naming conventions. These titles are (1) "easily recognized," (2) "with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity," (3) "while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature."

--William Allen Simpson 13:58, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

This section should be renamed U.S. "convention" since Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal have since been moved to their correct names. This so-called "standard" violates the common names standard of Misplaced Pages policy. As far as I can tell, the United States is the only country left where major cities such as LA and Chicago have to have their state listed with them. The common usage is to just write the city name. The frequent argument seems to be that there are other cities with those names. Then by that logic, London should be moved to London, England since there's also a London, Ontario. It appears that the "standard" is to list major cities in every country in the world except for the United States under the city name, and cities in the US under city, state. Dbinder 15:55, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

You're preaching to the choir! :) I've already IDd this above, but it's good to know there's support for this. I'm on a wikibreak of sorts, but will draft a Cdn. specific policy in the next week or so ... stay tuned! E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 19:37, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

It annoys me too to be told that a consensus has been reached for Canadian naming conventions because 30,000 U.S. places follow the City, State format. I'm all for helping out on a Canadian policy! --Skeezix1000 17:56, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Consolidated Cities

User:Bearcat and I are having a debate over naming conventions for cities whose governments were formed as the result of municipal amalglamations, specifically in Ontario, Canada. As a result of municipal cutbacks in that province in the late 1990s, several city governments were merged with adjacent towns, villages and townships, and often the names changed. The examples brought up include:

• Greater Sudbury (formed as a result of the merger of the City of Sudbury with a group of smaller towns)
• Quinte West (formed by the merger of the City of Trenton with two other townships)
• Chatham-Kent (formed by the consolidation of the City of Chatham with Kent County)

I say that Sudbury, Trenton and Chatham respectively are still the most common terminology to refer to these cities, while Bearcat is saying that since they are now the legal names, they should take precedence, to the point where a list of Ontario radio stations lists Sudbury stations under G. What should be the correct use on Misplaced Pages? Kirjtc2 22:31, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

• This is not an easy one, especially considered the "G" problem. But I think that Misplaced Pages probably lists Burma as Myanmar, Siam as Thailand, Persia as Iran, and Upper Volta as Burkina Faso. So we should probably follow that logic. As to help people find their way around lists, put a "Sudbury -- see "Greater Sudbury"" and "Trenton -- see "Quinte West"". I could be convinced the other way though. Ground Zero | t 00:22, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Kirjtc2, before we even get down to debating the question you raise here, I need to point out that you're misrepresenting our initial dispute. You stated that "Sudbury" and "Greater Sudbury" actually designated two different things — your initial post on my talk page started out "Unless a meteor took out Coniston, Capreol, Hanmer, Chelmsford and wherever else, Sudbury does not equal Greater Sudbury." "Sudbury", in actual fact, does mean the whole city of Greater Sudbury, inclusive of Chelmsford and Coniston and Azilda — when people in the Sudbury area need to distinguish something in the old city from something in Coniston or Chelmsford, they don't contrast Coniston with "Sudbury", they contrast Coniston with "Gatchell" or "Minnow Lake" or "New Sudbury". Only people who don't know that the municipal amalgamation even happened use "Sudbury" to designate anything that doesn't include Coniston and Chelmsford and Azilda and Whitefish.

So, firstly, let's be clear: you didn't initially raise a "legal name vs. common name" issue with me — you claimed that "Sudbury" and "Greater Sudbury" weren't even the same thing in the first place. You didn't characterize this as strictly a common-usage matter until you raised it here — at the time, you misinterpreted the names as actually designating two objectively distinct things. In actual fact, if you had raised the issue as strictly "common name vs. legal name" from the beginning, I probably wouldn't even have objected to your edit; what I objected to was your false characterization of the names as actually representing two different things.

That said, Misplaced Pages does not have a rule that common names always trump accuracy. We have a preference for common names whenever possible, but there are situations where using the common name creates an unacceptable level of confusion or ambiguity. The city's article is at Greater Sudbury, Ontario; the title Sudbury, Ontario exists only as a redirect. I have no objection to Ground Zero's alternate proposal above, but I also don't particularly see why it's worth objecting to Misplaced Pages using a community's actual legal name. Bearcat 02:27, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I apologize for the confusion in my original post on your talk page (it's hard to think straight at 3 AM on a Friday :)), I had intended it as a common name-vs-legal name issue all along. I had never meant to characterize the City of Sudbury, as existed before 2001, as being equal to the City of Greater Sudbury, they are assuredly not. The question is that Sudbury is still a settlement, only that it is now under the supervision of the City of Greater Sudbury; and that the common term for the city in general is still "Sudbury". Highway signs, the local media websites, Canada Post, etc, still use "Sudbury" (this would be different from, say, Miramichi, New Brunswick, which have supplanted the Newcastle and Chatham names to the point where some people now call them Miramichi West and Miramichi East).

From my perspective (an outsiders', admittedly), "Sudbury", "Copper Cliff", "Coniston", etc. are seperate settlements that now share one municipal government, which was created for administrative purposes only. Geographically and culturally, they are still seperate places. This would put it more along the lines of the Halifax Regional Municipality, where the former local place names (Dartmouth, Bedford, Cole Harbour, etc) are still used as widely as before the merger, and the official name refers only to the entire metro area or the municipal government. As well, just like outsiders call still say "Sudbury" to refer to the area, they still also say "Halifax". My objection is that your edits (on the page in question and elsewhere) is that all references to "Sudbury", with respect to the former city, have been changed to "Greater Sudbury", unlike the Halifax example where the former names have mostly been left alone. Would it be safe to say that my position is that geographical and cultural references should trump the legal designation and yours is the opposite? Kirjtc2 03:11, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Nova Scotia Regional Municipalities are not cities. They are more like shire level government in the UK. Halifax and Cape Breton RMs include huge tracts of rural land, including farmland. Halifax RM is bigger physically than PEI. The issue here is that, in a Canadian context, the category needs to be about "100 biggest municipalities" not "cities." There is no City of Halifax, not according to the municipality, to Provincial statute, or according to the federal census. There is just HRM, a huge, rural, suburban, urban, county level government that has to pass laws about handling of livestock and the spreading of farm fertilizer, and then the next moment debate whether to allow 27 story office towers in the heart of the old heritage district. In time, it may become Halifax. Thank your lucky stars they did not change the name to Chubucto, it was discussed! Even if the guideline is common name (ie New York rather than Greater New York), the fact is that the whole area is referred to as HRM and Halifax Regional Municipality. There is a community called Halifax in HRM, but what is amazing is it is becoming known as "the peninsula" and "the Capital District".

I have to add that there is a concern about consistency in the Nova Scotia pages. No one ever calls Cape Breton RM "Cape Breton" because that would be wrong! Cape Breton means the whole island. Halifax, here, means the old city, not the new RM... WayeMason 03:32, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

That's also what the City of Greater Sudbury (and Chatham-Kent too) is. There isn't another level between city and province anymore, since the City of Sudbury was merged with all of the other towns in the former Regional Municipality of Sudbury (which was basically like a county). The other thing to note is that there is a Halifax, Nova Scotia (former city) article, but there is no such Sudbury, Ontario (former city) article. Kirjtc2 03:53, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

The other thing to note, which I haven't clearly stated so far, is that I have no qualms about there being a Greater Sudbury article, except that I'd prefer that there be a seperate Sudbury, Ontario article like there is about Halifax (and just like my opinion about Halifax, the history/culture/etc sections should be moved to that one IMO), and that references on other pages (unless referring to the municipal government or the area/population of the municipality as a whole) be just to "Sudbury". Same with Chatham, Napanee, etc. Kirjtc2 04:49, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

The City of Greater Sudbury is not analogous to a shire or county government, or to Halifax; it's analogous to (albeit a lot smaller than) Metropolitan Toronto becoming the city of Toronto, or Ottawa-Carleton becoming the current city of Ottawa. Regional municipalities in Ontario are not comparable to regional municipalities in Nova Scotia — they have a different structure, function and purpose, and are not strictly analogous to counties. And in Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto and (Greater) Sudbury, the RMs were later merged into single unified cities because for all intents and purposes that's really what they already were, with only arbitrary political boundaries actually separating one part of the RM from another.

Sure, it's accurate to say that Copper Cliff is a distinct settlement from Coniston, that Garson is a distinct settlement from Hanmer, that Lively is distinct from Minnow Lake, and on and so forth, but it's not accurate to say that any of them are distinct from Sudbury, any more than it would be true to say that Cabbagetown is a distinct community from Toronto or that The Glebe is somehow separate from Ottawa. There's no one part of the city that constitutes a distinct "Sudbury" for Copper Cliff or Lively or Minnow Lake or Coniston to be distinguished from. You can't divide the city into "Sudbury" and "Not Sudbury". You can't divide the city's history and culture into "Sudbury" and "Not Sudbury" — it's all Sudbury. They're just different parts of Sudbury.

I'm not disputing that. They're all part of one big metro area. What I am disputing is the use of "Greater Sudbury" in cases when "Sudbury" is still the most common way to refer to the city. Your original argument seemed to be that "Sudbury" (without the Greater), for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Doesn't the very definition of the phrase "Greater Sudbury" mean "Sudbury and its surroundings?" It seems to me that was the definition they were going for. In addition, most people from outside Ontario might not be aware of the amalaglamation, so they think the "City of Sudbury" still exists, and at the very least would just call the whole area "Sudbury".

Even when the Regional Municipality of Sudbury existed, in actual practice, people already used "Sudbury" to refer to the whole thing, and used their specific neighbourhood to denote which part they meant. You couldn't have gone to Copper Cliff and said "I'm from Sudbury" to mean you didn't live in Copper Cliff, because you hadn't even left the city limits. You couldn't even have gone to Valley East and said "I'm from Sudbury" to mean that you didn't live in Hanmer, any more than you could have said "I'm from Ottawa" to someone from Nepean to mean that you didn't also live in Nepean — it was an arbitrary political distinction that didn't mean very much in actual practice. "Sudbury" or "Ottawa" effectively meant the whole thing, so you had to be more specific.

That's exactly what I'm getting at. Even today, if someone from Sudbury goes to Toronto, does he/she say they live in "Greater Sudbury" or "Sudbury"? (with Sudbury in this case obviously not meaning the former city, but the general area.) My guess is the latter. The newspaper isn't the Greater Sudbury Star now.

And I have not changed references to the former city of Sudbury to "Greater Sudbury"; I've changed references to the current city to "Greater Sudbury". Alex Trebek's article, for instance, doesn't say he was born in Greater Sudbury, because it wasn't called that when he was born; it says he was born in Sudbury. Daryl Brunt's article, on the other hand, says he lives in Greater Sudbury, because he lives there now and that's what it's called now. In any Sudbury-related edits I've done, I've always used the name that is more appropriate to the time frame in question: if the Sudbury connection is current or time-independent, I say Greater Sudbury; if it predates 2001, I say Sudbury (or Walden, or Valley East, or whatnot).

What I won't do is let things like "The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is located 20 km west of Greater Sudbury, Ontario..." stand uncorrected; the observatory is west of downtown Sudbury, but still within the city limits. And we can't just say it's 20 km west of Sudbury instead — what boundary between "Sudbury" and "Not Sudbury" could we measure this distance from? There isn't a "Not Sudbury" and a "Sudbury" that can be distinguished from each other in any useful or objective way the way one can distinguish "Halifax" from "HRM-but-not-Halifax"; there's one Sudbury and a few different ways of referring to it. And unless you're seriously proposing that we treat Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton the same way you're proposing we treat Sudbury, with some kind of arbitrary division between the former city and the current one, I can't favour treating Sudbury as some unique case, because the only thing that makes Sudbury any different from the other three is the fact that the amalgamated city had the word "Greater" appended to its name. Are you actually going to propose that every single time any city in the world annexes a suburban town or two, we start a separate article for each individual boundary adjustment? Bearcat 06:20, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

The city added Greater to its name to reflect that it now includes the surroundings of the former city, but that does not mean Sudbury has been totally wiped off the map. Just like "Ottawa", "Toronto" and "Hamilton" have always been and will presumably always be the terminology to refer to the entire area, "Sudbury" is as well, Greater or not. It sure is from my east-coast vantage point. As I said before, even the city's own literature still uses "Sudbury" frequently, with the "Greater" either in smaller print or not used at all. Wouldn't this be an admission by the city that "Sudbury" is still the common term for the area?

As for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory article, Greater Sudbury is fine by me. It was never in the old city but is within the new one. Perhaps we could include what former town it was in, though. On the other hand, all Canadian Idol literature and graphics just listed "Sudbury" as Daryl Brunt's hometown, and I think the article should reflect that. But if he was from Coniston, however, I could see where you could say Greater Sudbury.

With regards to the radio listing that started this, Sudbury was listed as Greater Sudbury, but others like Chatham and Trenton were still as is until it was changed in the edit war. That's where some confusion on my part arose. Since most people looking for local stations on this list would likely be looking under "S", I think they should be listed there. It is in cases like this that I don't think Greater Sudbury should be used. (Trenton vs Quinte West might be a different matter since the name was completely changed - I've heard the local media has started using the new name as well a la Miramichi). Personally I think stations should be listed by BBM market (or something close to it) rather than strict city of license (like I have been doing on my Atlantic and Prairie lists) so confusion like this doesn't happen.

I guess to sum up, my position is this: "Greater Sudbury" referring to the city government (StatsCan stats, for example) and people/things in the new city but not in the old city (the phrasing of the Inco Superstack article sounds right to me), and "Sudbury" to refer to the city/area when no formal disambiguation is required or wanted (the radio market), and people/things still in the centre of the former city. Kirjtc2 01:03, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

You're still misunderstanding my point. I'm not disagreeing with you that people more commonly say "Sudbury" than "Greater Sudbury" — I'm saying that the term "Sudbury" is interchangeable with the whole city of "Greater Sudbury", while you're suggesting that the city has a "Sudbury" portion and a "Not Sudbury" portion, and thus has to be treated more like a county than a city. And the Inco Superstack, for the record, is a particularly bad example to cite — Copper Cliff and the Stack were both inside Old Sudbury's city limits.

The point is, you're still implying that "Sudbury" and "Greater Sudbury" are two different things, which they aren't. They're two strictly interchangeable alternate names for the same thing. Bearcat 03:26, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Wading into the debate a bit late, but here's my opinion. Sudbury, and Greater Sudbury are not exactly the same thing. I like the way the articles are set up now, with "Sudbury, Ontario" redirecting to Greater Sudbury, Ontario. In that article, the difference between 'Sudbury' and 'Capreol', for example, are dealt with. It is correct to say that something in Capreol is in 'Greater Sudbury'. It's not correct to say it is in 'Sudbury' though.

Lets look at another, well-known example. The City of Toronto now encompasses North York, Etobicoke, and several other communities. They've got one town council. It's accurate to say that something in Etobicoke is part of the Greater Toronto Area. It's more accurate to say it's in Etobicoke. I'm not convinced that it's accurate to say things in Etobicoke are in 'Toronto'. I believe that if something is in Capreol, then it's ok to say it's in 'Greater Sudbury' but not in 'Sudbury'. ColtsScore 08:02, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Still wrong...a person in Capreol couldn't and wouldn't say "I'm going to Sudbury this afternoon" to mean she was heading downtown to go shopping; it would be a meaningless statement. She'd have to just say she was going "downtown". There is no part of the city that is distinguished by the name "Sudbury" from a non-Sudbury part of the city. To mean that you're in the old pre-2001 city, you can't just say you're in "Sudbury"; you have to say you're specifically in "New Sudbury" or "Minnow Lake" or "Lo-Ellen". I grew up there, and I've never had a conversation in my life in which "I'm in Sudbury" would have been understood to mean "downtown Sudbury or Minnow Lake, but not Val Caron or Lively or Capreol"; it could only be understood as "maybe downtown, maybe Val Caron, maybe Lively, maybe Garson, maybe Capreol, but not North Bay". Bearcat 06:36, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Violations of the naming convention

Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver violate the naming convention. How shall this be addressed? Acegikmo1 00:04, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Has there been previous discussion on the talk pages? As with any important pages, they shouldn't be moved without discussion. -Will Beback 10:17, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, there has (e.g., Toronto, and more recently resurged): as above, this is the choice of Canadian editors. And, arguably, it is the American cities that are in violation of the overarching common naming convention. There is no apparent consensus (at least it hasn't been demonstrated) to justify the grouping together and similar treatments of Canadian and American cities (q.v., the UK/Ireland?). Though mildly tardy, I'm working on a proposal to cleave the Canadian cities from the American ones and will place it shortly or I might just go ahead and do it. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 10:55, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I would counsel against significant movement of pages about cities and towns in Canada (other than in accordance with the current published conventions). I suggest the best spot for an initial discussion about changing the Naming convention currently on this page would be to take it to the Canadian discussion board and hold most of the conversation there where a wider range of Canadians can be involved with less interference from us foreigners. Once consensus is reached there, it would be reasonable to just put a note here linking to that discussion and then update the conventions (if required). --Scott Davis 05:05, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I concur with ScottDavis's analysis. I do not have any problem with the Canadian Misplaced Pages editors going differently from American editors on this issue, if that is what they prefer, but such a drastic change should be discussed first. --Coolcaesar 05:14, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I do not necessarily disagree – discussion is always prudent. Throughout, however, I believe a question that has remained unanswered is the nature of the consensus leading to the current convention for Canadian cities and why it was bundled with the American convention. At face value, it seems unbalanced. If it is routed in consensus, it has never been demonstrated. If it does not exist, discussion regarding the current convention and its applicability might be moot anyway. In any event, an apt and revamped proposal will stem from this. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 05:20, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

There are some special legal units in Canada which complicate the usual arrangement, so it's worth reviewing the issue to see if a more definite, yet still flexible, guideline can be developed. Is there a "Canada" wikiproject that could bring in editors with a broad view? Not to offend to anyone, but I've seen instances where primarily editing just one city article can give editors a narrow view of the issues. These issues cross all the english-speaking countries because so many place names have been re-used. Vancouver is one example which has which has naming repurcussions for the U.S. city as well. -Will Beback 07:28, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Anomalies exist in any jurisdiction, hence conventions judiciously applied and discourse. As well, the comments above presuppose that the status quo for Canadian cities is routed in consensus – I see no evidence that it actually is; even if it is, I see little reason to maintain/impose an arguably imbalanced convention that lumps Canadian cities with American ones when other apt examples exist (e.g., UK/Ireland). Moreover, the current convention does not at all accommodate for bilingualism in Canada – e.g., many Quebec locales share the same name, accented, in English and French. In any event, the imminent proposal will accommodate for this, extraterritorial commonalities (including the overarching common naming convention), et al., and will be noted on the Cdn. Wp noticeboard. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 06:25, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

How do you handle bilingual place names? This being the English Misplaced Pages I'd have thought that you'd simply use the English version. Are the French versions made into redirects? -Will Beback 07:06, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, all official place names in Canada are those prescribed by the appropriate jurisdiction (federal, provincial, or territorial) and are generally those that prevail locally. All of these are maintained by the feds and contained/searchable within the (online) Gazetteer of Canada. Only very few of the names – those of pan-Canadian significance – have dual bilingual versions. If the name is French, it is generally rendered that way even in English (e.g., Montréal-Nord, Quebec, not Montreal-Nord). Other toponymical details are outlined in The Canadian Style, a style guide produced by the federal government. (Other style guides may vary.) Of course, sometimes popular usage translates or renders a name with no formal English equivalent (and v.v.) and have varied use (e.g., Montreal is common, whilst 'Montreal-North' is not). In any event, these are the sorts of things that should/will be embraced in a Canadian naming convention while being cognizant of over-arching ones. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 07:30, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

It is tricky, no doubt. When I checked the Gazeteer for Montreal the only name they have is " Montréal". I think that south of the border the USGS and US Post Office have both frowned on accents or punctuation in place names. -Will Beback 09:29, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

The naming convention as it stands is "city, (province, state, county, whatever)" if disambiguation is necessary, but "city name alone" if it's not or if the city at hand is overwhelmingly the most significant use. Nobody's actually violating the naming conventions; the cities noted here are all obvious and inarguable "primary meaning of the name" cases, whereas cities like London, Ontario or Buffalo, New York are equally obviously "disambiguation required". The convention specifically allows for either naming format to be used depending on the specific situation. Bearcat 06:49, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

dab international city names

The city name Hyderabad is common to both India and Pakistan. The dab CITYNAME, COUNTRY is too similar to the US convention of naming international cities. We prefer the dab style CITY (COUNTRY). This dab style applies to only Indian cities with share similiar names with other international cities. We hope to put this into policy by this week. Thanks and regards, =Nichalp «Talk»= 08:24, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Since there is no opposition to this. I will put it up on the project page. =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:44, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

India should not have special rules. I will remove this from the project page. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:01, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

It is unreasonable to announce without reason that a 2½ - month old proposal reached the "wrong" conclusion, and remove the result from the guidelines page without opening a new discussion. Nichalp waited ten days for discussion - you waited 7 minutes. --Scott Davis 00:43, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

You are wrong, it is very reasonable. Because he stated there was no opposition, but very well knew that there was opposition by me to his India-city-moves he was making a misleading statement here.

1. he moved may 1
2. I reverted may 5 12:59
3. he moved may 6 8:15
4. I reverted june 1
5. june 24 8:53 he moved again pointing to his newly introduced rule
6. I discovered his move and his new special India guideline not before today

I have no oppostion should comma be changed to parathesis, but not on a country by country user by user approach. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:44, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Belarus

Initial bid:

1. Major cities (voblast (province) capitals) by the most common English usage
2. The rest by national rules
3. Exceptions always exist; may be discussed case by case.

See List of cities in Belarus. `'mikka (t) 03:22, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable and fair. abakharev 03:44, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

By national rules do we mean Lacinka, or one of the many Belarusian translit systems or the officially state preffered language of Belarus - Russian? --Kuban Cossack 05:04, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Neither Russian nor any other languge should be a medium for Belarusian names. Original source should be used firstly. By the way Belarusian language has Łacinka script based on the Latin alphabet, with some diacritic signs, which has deep history, established rules and spreading sphere of usage. If official regime of Łukašenka doesn't applies it, this cannot be a reason for denying it in wikipedia. --Zlobny 20:04, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Belarus Article titles

Mikka suggested a sensible set of rules which in the absence of WP:Dick-like behavior would have been enough already (plus a separate issue on the translit system but let's not throw everything together). However, just to make this clear to all:

1. First, we are discussing only the article titles here, right? Not an in article usage or the names listed in the first line following the article's name. Let's be clear that this is about titles only and discuss those other two issues separately. So we are discussing the article titles only.

2. The issue still consists of two subissues. Which name name we choose and which transliteration system we choose if there is no established English usage. If there is an established English usage, the issue of transliteration is moot. If there is none, we transliterate from the Belarusian name according to the transliteration rules discussed separately (please discuss them separately and not at the same time)

3. Exceptions always exist, as Mikka says. As long as there is good faith and old feuds are put aside, they can be discussed case by case.

Let's discuss the details (like what constitutes an established English usage, what transliteration system we use, etc.) separately. If we just agree on these points, some articles can already be sorted out. --Irpen 05:39, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

The problem with Belarusian names is that I feel we have a Kiev/Kyiv scenario for ALL titles, the only difference is that the official Minsk is not attempting to have the latter installed. That means we have to look at this realisitically. Do we title Kazan or Qazan? No because the Tatar name is not widespread. That is why we have to respect the use of names in English language. --Kuban Cossack 13:32, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Shall we continue here Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (Cyrillic)#Proposal for Belarusian. I have proposed to remove Lacinka from wiki altogether. It is just archaic and compleately unsuitable for wikipedian use. There are other many Belarusian translit systems, we need to identify which one is more widespread and use it (presentely ALL are more widespread than Lacinka). --Kuban Cossack 13:54, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Neither Russian nor any other languge should be a medium for Belarusian names. Original source should be used firstly. By the way Belarusian language has Łacinka script based on the Latin alphabet, with some diacritic signs, which has deep history, established rules and spreading sphere of usage. If official regime of Łukašenka doesn't applies it, this cannot be a reason for denying it in wikipedia. --Zlobny 20:04, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Spreading usage has to take place before it can be used in Misplaced Pages, President Lukashenko has nothing to do with this. Misplaced Pages shall not be a platform to encourage Lacinka's spread. The admin board will back this point. --Kuban Cossack 14:03, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I propose to use the official transliteration system applied by State Cartography Committee. It is not exactly Lacinka (although it has most features of it) and is actually used on maps. The official transliteration should be in the article's name - all other former and Russian names shall be redirects. We have Mumbai as the article's name - and not Bombay, don't we? Even if Bombay used to be the traditional and most widespread English name for the city. So, I think, it would be logical--Czalex File:Belarus Coat of Arms, 1991.png 12:50, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I propose we stick not to official or unofficial titles but to the names that have the most common English version - by checking the ones sources like encarta, Columbia and Britanica use. NONE of which have anything to do with Lacinka and all are BGN/PCGN. --Kuban Cossack 14:03, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Belarus transliteration system

Which one? Lacinka? Official (aren't there several official systems)? Let's discuss this separately in this section to make it all easier. --Irpen 05:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Official iz one: http://pravo.kulichki.com/otrasl/zem/zem00063.htm . You know others? Lacinka is not official.

Cities in Turkey

I see three articles in Category:Cities in Turkey have a non-standard form of ", Turkey" instead of the usual disambiguation "(Turkey)" so it might make sense to add a sentence or two about Turkey. Ah, and since it's Eurasian/mainly Asian in its geography, put the new sub-heading under "Asia"? Any thoughts?--Mereda 10:15, 20 June 2006 (UTC) Whoops, got that wrong! But maybe have a look at Sinop anyway for an example of city/province names. --Mereda 11:40, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Spilt Canada and USA conventions

While not wanting to reopen a recurrent topic, the edit on 17 June by Bearcat appears to have been intended to add Toronto as a Canadian exception to a convention that covered both Canada and USA cities. This seems to have had a perhaps unintended effect of changing the semantics of the documented convention for USA cities. Does anyone object to separating the two national conventions into separate subsections, so they could (if required) develop separately, and restore the USA to the pre June 17 version? --Scott Davis 07:41, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I have no objection. --Coolcaesar 09:48, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree. There's no reason that Canada and the United States should be treated together. Due to the complexites and variations among municipal and town districts we almost need to have state/province-specific guidelines. -Will Beback 10:05, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess I agree. I'd rather we just ditch the stupid American convention altogether. But at the very least we shouldn't force the Canadians to abide by our stupidity. john k 11:36, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Firstly, I don't think I've ever seen any notion that the American convention is to go with a strict "city, state" at all times with no exceptions under any circumstances whatsoever. And even if that is the convention, New York City is still out of sync with it. But other than that, I have no objection to splitting Canada and the United States into separate conventions — I agree entirely with Will Beback above. Bearcat, away from home and not logged in 02:37, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess you weren't here when we had to fight tooth and nail to prevent New York City from being at New York, New York to accord with the convention. When, on the basis of that silliness, some of us tried to work out a more flexible convention for US cities so that major ones like Los Angeles, Chicago, and such like could also be listed without state name, we got pretty much nowhere. john k 19:17, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I have split that section into separate sections for each country, and attempted to faithfully represent Bearcat's edits for Canada, and the previous status quo for the USA. I don't know if "county or parish" is the right phrase for either or both countries, so kept it. There may need to be other minor tidying up now that the two are separate. Thankyou. --Scott Davis 03:04, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Disambiguation of Italian towns and cities

Following a lengthy debate in Talk:Syracuse about another matter, discussion has turned to the best way to disambiguate Italian towns and cities. With less than 50% of all Italian comuni completed, this is an opportune time to revisit an existing policy in relation to this matter to ensure that it is in fact the very best policy for en.wiki. The current policy is to follow the it.wiki practice of using the official two letter abbreviation of a province, e.g. Augusta (SR). While this approach has merit (in terms of being an effective format for disambiguation consistent with another major wikipedia project), the discussion at Talk:Syracuse and Talk:Syracuse, Italy makes the following points: 1. we would often effectively be mixing the Anglicised form of a name with the official Italian abbreviation in a title; and 2. for the most part, English speakers would generally not be familiar with these abbreviations - indeed in many cases the town/city name would be more familiar to them than the name of the province itself. The suggestion is that the full name of the region would be an effective form of disambiguation, certainly in the vast majority of cases, e.g. Syracuse, Sicily. I have actually come across all three formats (including ], and I think it is appropriate that one format be used consistently, being one that is readily understandable to the English speaker. I would like to propose that the format:

] replace the current policy of ], e.g. Syracuse, Sicily. ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 06:14, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Discussion will be closed two weeks after my post above (6:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)).

Supporting proposal

1. ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 03:54, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
2. Well, I agree, obviously. john k 18:37, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
3. Support. I think this is a very reasonable proposal. older ≠ wiser 01:29, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Opposing proposal

1. Oppose.--Serge 19:08, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
2. Oppose use of comma, okay with spelling out province abbreviation; e.g., Syracuse (Syracuse) instead of Syracuse (SR) (current standard). --Usgnus 19:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure if I explained the proposal well enough, but it is to combine the name of the comune with the region, e.g. Syracuse, Sicily rather than Syracuse, Syracuse. ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 23:51, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

1. Oppose, on balance, and especially where we are disambiguating two Italian communes. Quite happy, however, for this system to be used to distinguish between (say) the two Syracuses.

Discussion

I see no value for readers in imposing a consistent naming standard, even for disambiguation. Each Misplaced Pages article should be considered on a case by case basis, and the most commonly understood/recognized form for that article should be used, period. The need for a "standard" naming format is an understandable gut instinct artifact from paper encyclopedias when format determined the ability for users to find various articles, but has no application in modern on-line encyclopedias with wide open search. It's contrary to Misplaced Pages policy and philosophy for us to hold ourselves hostage to such arbitrary shackles. --Serge 19:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that we throw out all naming conventions? john k 12:48, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

No. I'm okay with the naming conventions and guidelines that allow for using the most commonly used/recognized name, which is most of them. I am suggesting we throw out the arbitrary, counter-intuitive standards-for-the-sake-of-standards anal-retentive format templates like ] and ]. --Serge 00:34, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Serge, I've asked you before to stop calling your fellow editors "autistic". It's a personal attack and it doesn't help your argument. -Will Beback 17:41, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

I am not quite sure. But I would begin by noting that there are two different kinds of case where disambiguation is needed.

1. The first case is where there are at least two Italian comuni with the same name. There is a Brione in the province of Brescia and another in the province of Trento. In this kind of case I would see a very strong argument for using Brione (BS) and Brione (TN) as the disambiguating titles because, in effect, Brione (BS) and Brione (TN) are their common names.
2. The second case is when the name of an Italian comune clashes with other article names: Gavi is uniquely (IIRC) a commune of the province of Alessandria. But it is also the name of a wine and the name of an island. In this case I guess that I would vote for Gavi (Italian commune). I would find Gavi (AL) a little odd (albeit not indefensible). I would find Gavi (Piedmont) a bit useless, though, as the wine (though not in this case the island) is also Piedmontese.

Hmmn. I am becoming convinced that the simplicty and consistency of the current convention Gavi (AL) has a lot to be said for it. I am aware that Turin (TO) would be idiotic. But are there any actual cases where we would have to mix an Englished name with a targa suffix? The only one that springs to mind is Florence: is she in Tuscany or in the Magic Roundabout? But in that case Misplaced Pages has already decided that the major Florence is Tuscan.

Verging on voting against—but happy to be covinced otherwise ≠Ian Spackman 23:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Ian - the unique two letter province identifier certainly has the advantage of working pretty much every time there is a need for a disambig. So ultimately, if we don't mind the look of it too much (since, as you point out, Turin (TO) is likely to confuse as much as elucidate) the current standard does serve that primary objective very well. The way it's going, we are probably likely to keep it - and as long as we all know where we stand, I'll be happy enough to run with it. I just want to know the best way to go before I do too much more work in this area, because as I have said, I have come across three disambig formats in actual use (in relation to the Italian comuni), and at least one more has surfaced in this discussion alone! ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 23:57, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, how can I be so thick? Syracuse is the particular example of of a problem. I think I would just say treat it as a special case and call it Syracuse (Italy) Syracuse (Sicily) or Siracusa. I don’t see that it greatly matters which. But nor do I think that this special case has to determine a general rule on Italian comuni. ±Ian Spackman 23:56, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

The current policy is clear though, and it does favour Syracuse (SR). However, and I think this is where you are coming from, because we are not really talking about an ambiguity between Italian comuni as often happens, but rather between cities in different countries, that an alternative form of disambig for Syracuse would be acceptable. Have I got that right? Would that reasoning apply even within the context of the current policy? ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 00:02, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, Pippu, I was (still am) thinking rather than voting and hadn’t reached a consistent position. I believe we all want to avoid Syracuse (SR)—in my case because mixing the English word with the Italian-language convention feels clumsy. That means, at a minimum, relaxing the current convention in the case of Syracuse and any other similar cases. If indeed there are any. The seven cities with Anglicized names which I checked out had no problems: we have squatters rights on Rome, Florence, Turin, Venice, Naples and Milan, while Leghorn points you to Livorno on the basis that the English form is archaic. (Which made me feel perfectly ancient.)

I tend to think that the simplest solution might be to use Siracusa for Syracuse. But if we did go for Syracuse (Italy), or Syracuse (Sicily) I would not want to use that as a basis for a general disambiguation convention: Gavi (Italy) could refer to the island as well as to the comune. While Barolo (Piedmont) isn’t the most obvious way to distinguish the commune from the wine. (Wine clashes are going to be common, and very often the wines will be better known than the villages.)

Well, that’s my 5 (ancient or modern) centesimi. —Ian Spackman 23:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

In terms of province name abbreviation, I can understand that this is natural in Italy, but I don't feel like any native English-speakers would have any sense of what the abbreviation means. On the other hand, I think a lot of people do have a general sense of the Italian regions, and so long as there's not too much repetition, this seems like a sensible way to disambiguate. I am indifferent to whether it is done with a comma or with a parenthesis. john k 12:48, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

English form of the Italian word comune

Following on from the last discussion, this is a separate but related issue, and once again, it is an opportune time to think about it before more headway is made on completing all the Italian comune. As one can see from this link, this Italian word translates pretty accurately as "municipality", and that is what we started using for our categories in the Sicily Wikiproject. But someone alerted me to the fact that "commune" is a legitimate English word to describe this. In the Sicily Wikiproject we had initially discounted its use because of its hippy meaning. I note it is used to describe all the French communes. So this isn't a suggestion, because I really don't know which way to go, but I am looking for a show of hands of the best word to use to translate Italian comune: commune or municipality? Obviously, I do not ask this just for Sicily Wikiproject, but rather, to be applied to all Italian towns and cities. ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 06:30, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

My hand rises for commune. (Two syllables good; six syllables bad.) —Ian Spackman 08:42, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

As I've said elsehwere, I also prefer commune. john k 01:04, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Canada

Trying to get consensus on wording for naming convention. It's not too different from the new (July 23) split-out version: Misplaced Pages:Canadian wikipedians' notice board/discussion#City naming convention poll 2 --Usgnus 17:55, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Why don't we adopt for Canadian cities the same convention that applies to Australian cities?: that is, all town/city/suburb articles are at Town, Province no matter what their status of ambiguity, except for capital cities, which may be unclaused where no ambiguity exists.--cj | talk 05:46, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

The reason to not adopt any fixed-format convention for any country is because having a standard for the sake of having a standard is a lousy reason for imposing a standard. In particular, imposing an arbitrary standard on any article name should never override the main Misplaced Pages naming convention: to use the best known or most recognized name. --Serge 20:34, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

A much better system is one where cities are placed at their name alone when they're the best-known city with that name. It works for the rest of Misplaced Pages, and it works for cities too, where it's allowed. And frankly, it's surprising sometimes when a well-known city ends up at some long disambiguating name (e.g., Chicago, Illinois). It makes one immediately wonder: what, there's some other well-known entity named "Chicago"? Oh, no there isn't, how mysterious. In that case, the encyclopedia deviates from the reader's expectation, but for no good reason, apparently, other than some editors' exaggerated fear of squabbles in a few cases (when the most prominent entity with a certain name isn't obvious). --Yath 21:32, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Australian political geography is different than that in Canada. In Australia, each state has one major city that dwarfs all the others in population, and that city is also always the state capital (and if I'm not mistaken, the 6 largest cities are the 5 mainland capitals plus the federal capital of Canberra). It's not that cut-and-dry in Canada. The 2nd, 3rd and 5th largest metro areas in the country aren't even capitals of their own provinces (the 4th isn't either, but it's the national capital). Meanwhile, the largest city and capital of PEI is smaller than 30-40 cities in Ontario. The question then becomes, where do you draw the line? It's a lot more ambiguous here. Kirjtc2 18:03, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Cities in the United States whose titles have no state suffix

Anyone able to explain why Canada is allowed to have cities with no province suffix in their title besides Quebec City but the United States doesn't besides New York City?? Please make sure you know what difference there is between the two countries so that it can be understood. Georgia guy 22:20, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

There is no objective reason, of course. The real reason is pathetic: there is a gang of editors that favors the ] format for American cities, because they care more about ease of use for editors than Misplaced Pages being encyclopedic or reader friendly, or abiding by the Misplaced Pages naming policy to favor the most used/recognized name, that is large enough in number to force or outvote any effort to stop them on any given city, except for New York City (but believe me, they've tried there too - it's the only place they failed). This is blatant violation of WP:NPOV, but for any given city but one, there aren't enough people who care. --Serge 23:53, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

gang of editors? Cool down. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:57, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Agree with Serge. The forced <city, state> titling does not reflect what the city is actually called. At a minimum, it should only be used when disambiguation is necessary. Furthermore, the use of a comma does not even make it easier for editors as opposed to the use of parentheses since the latter are amenable to the use of the pipe trick. It is much easier to type ] rather than ] to create a wikilink for "City". --Polaron | Talk 23:17, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

gang of editors? Cool down. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:57, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

New "General rules"

User:Tobias Conradi made a series of 5 edits to the guideline page this morning (just after midnight 7 August UTC) to remove India and Africa sections, introduce "General rules" and rename "By country" to "Special rules". I believe this has changed the tone of the guideline (and maybe the meaning for some cases), without any discussion here first. Are other regular participants in discussions here happy with his changes? My specific concerns are:

• I thought there has been a general preference to avoid "place, country" in preference of either "place (country)" or "place, state"
• The specific India guideline was proposed here for 10 days before being added, but was removed (and the resulting guideline changed) on 7 minutes' notice.

--Scott Davis 01:01, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

• I thought there has been a general preference to avoid "place, country" in preference of either "place (country)" or "place, state"
  • if so than please state this in the guideline. I thought once have read somewhere that the general rule is comma. This also is what I mostly see in WP.
  • if there are no general rules one would have to set up rules for each country, province whatever. I stronlgy favor a general statement.
• The specific India guideline was proposed here for 10 days before being added, but was removed (and the resulting guideline changed) on 7 minutes' notice.
  • The special-rule-for-India proposal was made by Nichalp, who was aware of opposition.
    1. he moved may 1
    2. I reverted may 5 12:59
    3. he moved may 6 8:15
    4. I reverted june 1
    5. june 24 8:53 he moved again pointing to his newly introduced rule
    6. I discovered his move and his new special India guideline not before today

Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:50, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm. The intro is clearly rather too short on this convention. There is a better general intro on Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (places). The intro here should give a better explanation of purpose than it does, then note that there are specific rules for towns and cities in a number of countries detailed below, then what the default naming convention is for town and city articles not covered by those country-specific guidelines.

The next question then is exactly what we think is the default naming convention for towns and cities not covered by specifics. If there is no ambiguity, it appears to be the common English-language name of the place if there is one, or the local language name if no English name is common. Ambiguity could be against other places in the same or different countries, objects, people or concepts. A number of countries have adopted ] as the style of disambiguated names - some (e.g. the USA and Australia) have chosen to do this for all town names, and others (e.g the UK) have chosen to only do it when required. African places have chosen to use ], although South Africa appears to ignore that, and use the province name more often than "South Africa" (but is not consistent). India seems to have a leg on each side of the fence at the moment. I thought I had seen ], but I'm failing to find many of these now that I'm looking for them. --Scott Davis 02:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not surprised that Tobias has acted unilaterally without discussion. I had proposed this on the Indian wikipedians' notice board, without opposition, and later over here, again without opposition, before I modified the conventions for India-related cities.

Disambiguation can also be effected with the use of parenthesis, and it a perfectly acceptable way of separating identical terms. One problem with using the comma for dab is that we feel is that is that is conforms to the local (not Misplaced Pages) US style of nominclature, where the use of CITY, STATE for US places, and CITY, COUNTRY for international locations are used.

Secondly, we have a number of Indian cities that have the same name, and are located in different states. So to maintain consistency for India-related places, we'd prefer to use the comma when the city when it conflicts internally (ie CITY, STATE), and use CITY (COUNTRY) when it conflicts internationally. To add to this point, it's obviously inconsistent to have Hyderabad, India and Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh when we're talking about places in India. They both aren't at the same hierachy level to merit the same comma for the international dab.

Lastly, Misplaced Pages *recognises* regional diversity for naming conventions, that's why we have the use of British and American spellings here. --Nichalp (logged out) 12:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

• I'm not surprised that Tobias has acted unilaterally without discussion.
  • so you knew your action deserved being reverted without discussion? Why than have you done it?
• I had proposed this on the Indian wikipedians' notice board
  • I am not an Indian Wikipedian thus not reading this board. I still want to use Misplaced Pages. I told you so several times before.
• _we_ feel is that is that is conforms to the local (not Misplaced Pages) US style of nominclature, where the use of CITY, STATE for US places, and CITY, COUNTRY for international locations are used.
  • who is this _we_? IMO it is hard to explain to the reader why WP uses "City, State" and "City (Country)" for Cities in India, while allmost all other cities use only comma. Shall we say some people felt soething, that's why we use () for these cities? Of course I acted "unilateral" if you add such stuff in a guideline without informing opponents. You were well aware of the opposition.
• To add to this point, it's obviously inconsistent to have Hyderabad, India and Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh when we're talking about places in India.
  • this is done so in several countries. We can change this, but I don't see why India should be treated different. Furthermore since you deleted the comma it is not clear anymore that the article is about the city. Could now also refer to the Hyderabad District, India.

Please come out from your India-is-so-special-island and work with other editors. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:19, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Calm down Tobias. India is not the only country with its own section in this naming convention. It's been quite common in other countries to hold most of the discussion about naming conventions on the national noticeboard, wikiproject or similar place, then post the consensus decision here or wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (places) and update the guideline. That seems to be what Nichalp did.

Nich, What's wrong with Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh? Providing a link to the previous discussion is fine. --Scott Davis 14:37, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I know, there are also other people that think they have to re-invent the wheel 100 times around the world. It's just not good for WP to have 100 dab styles. Nichalp did something special: He knew! that there was opposition. He could have informed me. But he probably wanted to get it through as quick as possible.

For him nothing is wrong with Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, but he prefers Hyderabad (India) over Hyderabad, India. I am fine if this is implemented worldwide. But I disagree to do this only for India. And I am absolutly not fine to introduce it hiddenly. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:07, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

From what I've seen of other naming conventions, the use of parentheses is more frequently restricted to non-settlements, such as schools and physical features. -Will Beback 21:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

naming conventions (toponyms)

moved to Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (toponyms) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:37, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

settlements

should this be called settlements? including village, towns, cities ... Tobias Conradi (Talk) 14:36, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was Move. New name seems a little cheesy to me. Hopefully folks can find a better alternative but, if everyone is satisfied with this new one for now... —Wknight94 (talk) 11:01, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

WP:RM

This template must be substituted. Replace {{Requested move ...}} with {{subst:Requested move ...}}.

• support other conventions use NC (places) so it should at first be NC (cities). No need to put ...names. But this would not include the very similiar with respect to naming villages, towns, hamlets. neighborhoods etc. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 11:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose change to "settlements", as that word has a fairly specific connotation. I don't think any native speaker would consider New York, London, or Tokyo "settlements". I would support a move to Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (place names) (but not "toponyms", as that seems a bit overblown) . Kafziel 11:51, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • we already have NC (places).
  • the word settlement is also used at Misplaced Pages:Naming_conventions_(categories)#State-based topics
  • "inhabited places" would be an alternative for the natives that have problems with their language. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 11:55, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
    • How is that an improvement on the current name? Countries are "inhabited places", too. Kafziel 12:27, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
      • it is broader. But if it includes countries it's too broad. And mountains can be inhabitad too ;-) But this is NC (landforms). I came to this proposal because of getty.edu (geo-researh currently offline, will have to re-check)Tobias Conradi (Talk) 12:59, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Berlin (inhabited place), source getty.edu - Tobias Conradi (Talk) 14:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose the suggested name (per Kafziel), but not very happy with the existing name either. Why not Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (cities, towns, villages)? I have seen the collective name "populated places", but I'm not sure if that's acceptable. -- Eugène van der Pijll 12:41, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • would not like such a long name, does not include hamlets, neighborhoods, CDPs. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 12:59, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support Of course New York and London are very large settlements. The convention already covers the full range of "cities or town", so the renaming only makes it more self-evident. —Michael Z. 2006-08-14 13:00 Z
• comment "city or town" is a recent addition to this page (I put it there), although I believe the intent had always been to include any populated places worthy of articles in Misplaced Pages. I think "(populated places)" is most likely to be a dialect-neutral term to accurately describe the intended coverage: named concentrations of habitation, either official or unofficial. The problem with any more precise terms is that they either mean different things in different places, or the list of names of types of places grows extremely long to be all-inclusive. --Scott Davis 14:29, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • are countries and mountains places too? populated is not the same as inhabited, is it? A building can be populated during day and not so during night. But anyway, what about former/abandoned settlements? These probably are not populated nor inhabited anymore, but still would qualify as (former) settlements and could be included. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 14:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

But you simply can't delineate the range of this naming convention in one or two words, so you have to take something that comes close. As for your original proposal, Liebeck v. McDonald's Corp. is a settlement too. Eugène van der Pijll 15:30, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

yes. Initially I forgot that settlement is used not only in geography but also in law and similiar in finance. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 20:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• Neutral. Regardless of what it is called, it is superfluous. The standard naming conventions provide for more consistent conventions than do the country-specific sets of rules that have developed into the inconsistent mess we have now. In the vast majority of cases where there are no ambiguity issues, cities, villages, communities, etc. should be named according to their most common name: Tokyo, New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, Moscow, Hollywood, etc. In the cases where there is an ambiguity issue, additional specific information should be in parenthesis: Moscow (Idaho), Paris (Texas), etc. Simple. Consistent. Anything else is in violation of WP:Naming. There is no need for any city-specific or settlement-specific conventions. They only lead to inconsistencies between countries, and bizarre unencyclopedic entries like Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. --Serge 15:23, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • somehow agree. Especially I am not to much a fan of country specific aproaches. The only diff with standard naming is the comma convention and the pure quantity of ambigous places names that maybe need more pre-emptive dab/linking. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 20:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support. "City" is way too narrow. I would rather prefer "inhabited place/locality", but "settlement" is acceptable as well.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:03, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support to prevent NC(town), NC(hamlet), NC(village), etc. (SEWilco 19:30, 14 August 2006 (UTC))
• Support. It may not be ideal, but the reasoning for why "settlesments" is better than the alternatives is convincing. -Will Beback 19:41, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comments 1) I searched the "Naming conventions (city names)" article last night and found 'settlement(s)' only appears in it once, while 'city' or 'cities' appear about 22 times. 2) I always thought one of the cool things about Misplaced Pages was the ability to do redirects. Why not just put in a bunch of redirects to whatever name is decided on and add all other possible names to the article - something like "Note: this also includes cities, towns, boroughs, villages, hamlets, etc.". 3) The convention mentioned by Serge above is in conflict with the WikiProject Rivers naming guidelines for Rivers in the United States, Canada, and Australia at least. In the following sentence (quoted from the Project page) the first example is a river, the second example is a town: " For example Indian River (Michigan) not Indian River, Michigan which is actually a town." I also think local usage trumps (or should trump) everything having the same format. Very few Americans would think to search for "Moscow (Idaho)" before "Moscow, Idaho". So I agree it needs a better name, can't think of one myself though. Hope this helps, Ruhrfisch 18:58, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Renamed and reverted

Note that the poll above continues in parallel with the following discussion.

I asked whether this should be moved, found no opposition and did it. William Allen Simpson reverted and edited the target, so now admins have to do the move. Why did he not discuss? Why did he not give reasons against the renaming itself? He said it was not official. But hearing this from him, who altered a whole guideline by inserting his point of view is not something I believe in.

William can you please state what are your real reasons? Is it because I uncovered so many of your false claims that now you want to revert as much as possible of what I do? Would you have reverted someone who is not me? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 11:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

William doesn't have to explain his reasons. You made a unilateral move and were reverted, as is proper. You say you asked and had no opposition, but I don't see your request anywhere. Can you point it out to me? Kafziel 11:59, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

He does not have to but to die. There are millions of what you call unilateral actions. WP would not be here without them. Your posts are unilateral too.

The question was made at Tobias Conradi (Talk) 12:15, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Unilateral moves are permitted, but so is reverting them if anyone disagrees with them for any reason. That's why we have the Requested Moves page. Those who revert unilateral moves do not need to defend themselves, and you should assume good faith in that regard rather than attacking his character. Kafziel 12:27, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

but he did not provide any reason against the renaming itself. And just move back and claiming at other places the move was undiscussed (I proposed it, if nobody comes to discuss, so what?) is borderline disruptive. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 12:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Please refrain from making personal attacks against other users in your edit summaries. Those are meant to be used to describe your contributions, not to post unanswerable jabs at others. He is not required to specify a reason for reverting. It's an accepted part of the move process, and it happens all the time. Kafziel 12:58, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

for me it is not acceptable that people just revert others without giving true reasons or making claims like "undiscussed, unauthorized": for me this looks only like disruption. I should maybe have choosen another edit summary, thanks for pointing this out to me. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:41, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Let's wait a bit for the straw poll to come to completion. A week should be sufficient. -Will Beback 19:41, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

(SEWilco 21:06, 14 August 2006 (UTC))

When do certain place names always have a disambiguating term?

-- moved back to Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (places) since this question addresses a statement on Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (places), not Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (city names).--Serge 15:27, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

....you are right, my mistake. sorry Tobias Conradi (Talk) 21:16, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

not all populated places are dabed with comma

copy from Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (places) Not all populated places are disambiguated with a comma - which not? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:52, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

• For places outside the U.S. (and some other places), the comma-separated convention for disambiguation is not as well established. For example, Wah (Pakistan), Punjab (Pakistan), Jamalpur (India), Seoni (Himachal Pradesh), Mandi (India), Mataram (city), Malamir (Iranian city). Usage seems to be inconsistent outside of those countries where long-established, centralized postal service customs have made comma-separated disambiguation almost second nature. I'm really not so sure it is a good idea to impose such a format on articles about places where such a custom is not readily recognizable. older ≠ wiser 14:20, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Also Tongan towns appear to be disambiguated where necessary by the island in parentheses. e.g. Mu'a (Tongatapu), Ha'afeva (Ha'apai). There are several lists of redlinks in that format, so the minimal articles in categories do not represent the full work of changing that. --Scott Davis 15:18, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Punjab (Pakistan) is actually a province. The other towns are a mess. Recently someone argued India towns should be "Delhi (India)" but "Sompur, Pradesh". (pradesh = state). The latter, he argued is more common for inner-Indian dab. So we could well "impose" the general city-dab rules. About Tonga, I don't know. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:24, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

• I wish you'd stop moving discussions from one page to another. I just pulled Punjab (Pakistan) out of Category:Cities and towns in Punjab (Pakistan) -- it wasn't top-sorted, so I assumed it just another entry like all the others in the category. As for "imposing", it would be best if the folks who care about the articles for an area and edit them regularly (and are likely to notice any new articles being created) buy into the naming conventions. It doesn't especially bother me that places outside the U.S. use different conventions, so long as there is reasonable internal consistency amonst places of the same type within an area.
  • I am of course concerned that readers can easily use WP-city pages and this on a cross border level. What is your definition of "within an area"? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 21:11, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

• • • A good starting point for an area to have internally consistent naming conventions is a country. That is how this convention has been organised, is a layer in the category hierarchy for city articles, and generally is a level of focus for editors with either a wikiproject or noticeboard to attract discussions. The way places are identified locally often changes at national boundaries, too. Nearby countries are likely to have similar conventions, but not always identical, and larger countries often have similar conventions, but different to smaller countries. To help readers, we need to have redirects and disambiguation pages/links to help them easily find what they are looking for from whatever article they found. --Scott Davis 02:27, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
      • In-country dab rules do not help that much in a worldwide WP. Nice if Liechtenstein never dabs their cities, but how does this help the readers WP? Secondly the articles are not written for the inhabitants of those settlements but for readers worldwide. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:32, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Canada and U.S.

I merged the 2 sections back into one to make this consistent with the consensus-reached move from Chicago, Illinois to Chicago. However, someone reverted me. Any discussion?? Georgia guy 00:39, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

The separation was to allow the two to develop independently if required. Perhaps you intended to add Chicago to the parenthetical exception, and initiate a discussion somewhere about modifying the US rule by establishing some sort of guide as to which (few) cities should be at the primary name? I'd suggest the discussion should be on Misplaced Pages talk:U.S. Wikipedians' notice board or a subpage (since WikiProject U.S. cities seems dead) with a note here (and on possibly-affected city talk pages) to point to the discussion, and a later note to link to any conclusion. Most people who care will be watching one of those places.

Incidentally, you should fix any double redirects as part of renaming Chicago, Illinois to Chicago. One advantage of linking to the qualified name is that it saves someone having to scan the links to the primary name to guess which ones would better point elsewhere. --Scott Davis 03:02, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Scott's right. The Canadians would like to go their own way on the naming of city articles. As a matter of courtesy, most American editors (myself included) don't mind. --Coolcaesar 04:06, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Among other things, the merger changed the U.S. convention on how to name cities, a change which we haven't addressed. While two cities have been named in exception to the convention due to the decision of the editors of those articles, the overall convention is to name all U.S. cities in the same manner, without a general exception for "unique names or are unquestionably the most significant place sharing their name". -Will Beback 07:28, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any discussion of the Canadian convention in the discussion of the move from Chicago, Illinois to Chicago. In any event, even if it had been discussed, that would not be the appropriate place to discuss eliminating the separate Canadian convention. Skeezix1000 20:32, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Naming communities withing cities

There have been quite a few debates on how to name communities within a city. Recent examples include Hollywood, La Jolla, and Anaheim Hills. There is a new poll on naming communities within cities at Misplaced Pages:Communities strawpoll. Participants on this page should add their votes and comments to the discussion so that hopefully there will be a clear consensus and that will then stop most of the interminable debates on this issue. 11:50, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Changing the U.S. Convention

I think it's about time that the U.S. convention be changed to be similar to the Canada convention so that city names that are unique, or clearly the most significant, don't require the state name. Examples:

• Los Angeles, California → Los Angeles
• Houston, Texas → Houston
• Miami, Florida → Miami
• Boston, Massachusetts → Boston

...and so on.

NOT

• Phoenix, Arizona → Phoenix (note Phoenix (mythology))
• Portland, Oregon → Portland (given both Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine, among others)
• Washington, D.C. → Washington (given state name, among other uses)

It seems quite silly that a city like Vancouver (metro pop. 2.1 million) isn't at Vancouver, British Columbia, but Los Angeles (metro pop. 12.9 million), with an equally unique name, is at Los Angeles, California. I'm sure I'm far from the only one who feels this way. However, now is the time to get the ball rolling on getting the convention changed. -- tariqabjotu 20:52, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. For one thing, what about Vancouver, Washington? As an American, I could make a strong argument that Vancouver, Washington should be at Vancouver, since it is a major suburb of Portland, Oregon, and a significant contributor to the economy of Washington state. Plus there is the Kansas City mess, the Augusta mess, the San Jose mess, etc.

Besides, we have debated this issue many, many times over the past three years and the consensus has always been to keep the city, state convention which practically all Americans are accustomed to, because they write city and state on their mail all the time. --Coolcaesar 21:44, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure how Vancouver, Washington is relevant here. Sure you could make a case that Vancouver, Washington is more significant than Vancouver, British Columbia. But perhaps someone could do that for Moscow, Idaho, home to the University of Idaho, being more significant than Moscow, Russia. But those both are really stretches. The current naming convention already addresses this, as Vancouver, British Columbia is already at Vancouver and Moscow, Russia is at Moscow. Regarding Kansas City, Augusta, and San Jose, those would be examples of city names that wouldn't have the state name omitted. What I am referring to are the major cities with unique names (like the ones mentioned in my first post), in then same manner that major Canadian cities with unique names have the provinces omitted. And in regards to the last statement, I'm not sure why you would say that most Americans refer to American cities with their state names (I couldn't disagree more, particularly with major cities). Americans may write state names when addressing mail, but they also write zip codes. And Canadians also use province names (and zip codes). The similarities are so plentiful that it doesn't make sense not to be consistent between Canadian and American city articles. Perhaps you (or someone else) could reiterate some of the major selling points behind the current system. -- tariqabjotu 22:25, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

• If one wants to make CA and US the same, could he also change the CA convention? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:41, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Be careful what you abbreviate; please don't abbreviate it so it can be misinterpreted; CA is widely known as standing for California. Georgia guy 23:01, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
    • maybe widely in the narrow context of Northern North America. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
• Americans may write state names when addressing mail, but they also write zip codes. And Canadians also use province names (and zip codes). The similarities are so plentiful that it doesn't make sense not to be consistent between Canadian and American city articles.
  • Isn't Canada in America?
  • Shall all city articles of countries that use province or state names and use zip code be handled by one convention? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:18, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Tariq's suggestion. It should only be done for major cities where there is no ambiguity, but if that is held to, I see no reason to be slavishly devoted to the "City, State" format, which was overwhelmingly voted down in the recent move of Chicago. john k 23:24, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

then let's drop the US convention and only use one global convention. But apply the primary topic very strict. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:27, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Agree with Tariq as well. We should determine which cities should be moved on a case-by-case basis. Kirjtc2 23:32, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

This topic has been discussed repeatedly. A strawpoll on a similar proposal was held earlier this year, and is still at the top of this page. Since then it has been raised from time to time. There are many benefits to using the "city, state" format for U.S. cities. For starters, it is already in place in tens of thousands of articles. Consistency is an important quality in an encyclopedia. The convention allows readers to instantly identify the topic of an article or link as a city. It is much easier for editors to know what the name of an article will be, without having to search around. The existence of a convention avoids (most of) the numerous debates that would exist of what to name cities. -Will Beback 23:36, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

The change of title of the article from Cityname, State to plain Cityname should only be done if there is no doubt that it will ever need to be returned. The work of checking and fixing all the links would be huge. As it is now, some of these have thousands of links to the Cityname redirect, making it difficult to decide that the redirect should be changed to point to the disambiguation page instead (this was a recent issue with Philadelphia).

I suspect there is a case for using the primary name for the Alpha and Beta U.S. cities on Global city, but probably no further down. --Scott Davis 00:56, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

IMO, drop US convention and implement strict Alpha-only primary topic convention for all settlements around the world. Primary topic should only be used if there is no doubt that other uses may outweight the topic in the next 10 years. Case by case poll with 1000 of places is IMO not in the current interest of WP. Can be done if WP is near complete in year 2020. Until then, postpone this please. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:04, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm... I don't think we need to just stick with alpha cities; that seems like too small a set with primary name. -- tariqabjotu 01:37, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Possibilities

Below are the fifty largest cities in the United States. Crossed out are the blatantly problematic, while I commented on a few others. Perhaps this would be a reasonable launching point:

• Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Arlington, Texas
  • Far too common of a name. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Austin, Texas
  • Too common, not a very well-known city to begin with. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Baltimore, Maryland
• Boston, Massachusetts
• Charlotte, North Carolina
  • Common name for people could be a problem, but Charlotte already redirects. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • remove the US-biased redirect! Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:29, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Chicago – already done
• Cleveland, Ohio
  • There's a region of England called "Cleveland," but I think it's mostly defunct now. john k 02:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Colorado Springs, Colorado
  • I sense this being a problem, but right now Colorado Springs redirects here. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Why a problem? I don't think there are any other Colorado Springses. john k 02:20, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
      • The use of spring being a geographical feature concerned me, but moving this to Colorado Springs probably wouldn't be a problem. -- tariqabjotu 02:25, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Columbus, Ohio
  • Definitely not. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Dallas, Texas
• Denver, Colorado
• Detroit, Michigan
• El Paso, Texas
  • City in Mexico and U.S., among other issues. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Ciudad Juarez is in Mexico, not El Paso. john k 01:52, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Indeed you're right. El Paso doesn't redirect, though. -- tariqabjotu 01:56, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
        • It should, I think. All of the other El Pasos, besides places called El Paso County, seem to be quite small. john k 02:20, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
  • "El Paso" is common spanish. You are going to create a mess if this does not stay the dab. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:32, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Fort Worth, Texas
• Fresno, California
  • Fresno doesn't redirect. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Honolulu, Hawaii
• Houston, Texas
  • The city near the NASA control centre--Scott Davis 05:19, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Indianapolis, Indiana
  • The city near the speedway - I'm surprised that neither Indianapolis 500 nor Indianapolis Motor Speedway are on the disambig page! (to be fixed shortly)--Scott Davis 05:19, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Jacksonville, Florida
  • There are a lot of towns called Jacksonville, including one in North Carolina that I'm aware of, but the one in Florida is by far the largest. john k 02:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Kansas City, Missouri
  • Major conflict with accompanying Kansas City, Kansas. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Long Beach, California
  • Many conflicts; Long Beach doesn't even redirect. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Los Angeles, California
• Louisville, Kentucky
  • Doesn't seem like a very large city, but it probably is the most well-known; Louisville redirects. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • I thought a 'Louisville' was a truck - but I see Ford Louisville is a red link, so obviously the city is more important. --Scott Davis 05:19, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Memphis, Tennessee
  • Conflict with Memphis, Egypt. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Mesa, Arizona
  • Conflict with geographical feature. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Miami, Florida
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Nashville, Tennessee
• New Orleans, Louisiana
• New York City – already done
• Oakland, California
  • Oakland doesn't redirect. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • It probably should. What other Oaklands are there? john k 01:52, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
      • I was quite surprised by this as well. -- tariqabjotu 01:58, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Besides Oakland County, Michigan, which wouldn't be expected to be at Oakland, being a county, all of the other places named Oakland are tiny. The largest by far is Oakland, New Jersey, which, at about 12,000, is nearly ten times the size of the next largest Oakland. john k 02:20, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • I changed the redirect; Oakland now redirects. -- tariqabjotu 02:25, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
      • partly reverted the mess you created. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
        • What mess? I don't see why you changed to redirect back to Oakland (disambiguation); Oakland, California is most certainly the most well-known Oakland as far as I, and apparently john k, can see. See also Talk:Oakland (disambiguation) which appears to concur with this opinion. -- tariqabjotu 20:09, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
          • 1. i do not contest that it is by far the most important one
            2. even if it is the most important, this is not enough to get primary.
            3. mess referred to what links here. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 20:16, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
            • • Regarding the second point, what would be enough to get primary? Regarding the third point, I still don't know what mess you're talking about. As a redirect to Oakland (disambiguation), none of links to Oakland go to the correct page. As a redirect to Oakland, California, however, at least some of the links to Oakland would go to the correct page. Since Oakland, California is the most well-known Oakland, it's likely that quite a few of the links would go to the correct page. I don't see that as a mess, but an improvement. -- tariqabjotu 20:21, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Omaha, Nebraska
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • Apparently, this is already a problem (most likely due to Philadelphia (film)). I'm curious as to why Chicago (film) didn't become an issue with the Chicago move. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Film title is based on city name so probably not a show-stopper. --Polaron | Talk 01:50, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • The film is obviously a secondary usage. john k 01:52, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
      • I misread the issue Scott Davis mentioned in his statement in the previous section (he actually was talking about an issue changing Philadelphia to redirect to Philadelphia (disambiguation). I agree that the film is directly named after the city and would advocate moving the city article. -- tariqabjotu 02:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Phoenix, Arizona
  • Phoenix (mythology), among others. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Portland, Oregon
  • Name too common. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Sacramento, California
• St. Louis, Missouri
  • Conflict with religious figure. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• San Antonio, Texas
  • The city is not incredibly well known. I'm not sure why it should be considered okay for single name, but El Paso and Austin are not. john k 02:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• San Diego, California
• San Francisco, California
• San José, California
  • Conflict with San José, Costa Rica, among others. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Seattle, Washington
• Tucson, Arizona
  • Not quite single-name recognition to the average reader, but Tucson does redirect. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • There's no other place of note called "Tucson." john k 02:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Not quite single-name recognition to the average reader, but Tulsa does redirect. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Virginia Beach, Virginia
• Washington, D.C.
  • The city is probably best known as "Washington, D.C." rather than as "Washington," which is always ambiguous. john k 02:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
• Wichita, Kansas
  • Not quite single-name recognition to the average reader, but Wichita does redirect. -- tariqabjotu 01:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Wichita seems to be a disambig page to me --Scott Davis 05:19, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Not sure how I missed that. -- tariqabjotu 05:27, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

What was going on would be a lot clearer if Tobias could write properly in English. I don't really understand what is being discussed. In terms of which cities, I'd suggest everyone go to United States metropolitan area and look at the main cities that are not ambiguous - New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Diego, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Denver, and Cincinnati would all seem to be primary topics with little risk of confusion, and most, if not all, already redirect to the American city of that name. Cleveland and Tampa would perhaps be on the borderline. New Orleans is a place outside the top 25 that would probably qualify. There's a lot of smaller cities that could theoretically be moved, but could also be left as is, depending on how radical we want to be - Louisville, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Nashville, Knoxville, Indianapolis, Tucson, Sacramento, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Honolulu, Spokane, Boise, Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Wichita, Topeka, Omaha, Salt Lake City, Des Moines, Oakland, Milwaukee, New Haven, Annapolis, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Raleigh, San Antonio, Jacksonville, Shreveport, Chattanooga, etc. I think in all of these cases if one refers to the city with no further elaboration, there is only one city that is arguably meant. There are other cities that we obviously shouldn't move. In the top 25, Washington, St. Louis, and Portland are clearly ambiguous. So also the aforementioned Kansas City, Memphis, Phoenix, San Jose, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Worcester, Springfield (of course), Madison (probably), and so forth. Most places that the average person won't have heard of should have the state name regardless - I'd say any places with less than a few hundred thousand people should have no debate, and should remain where it is regardless of uniqueness. john k 01:48, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Just to note, I somehow wrote all this without realizing that Tariq had alread made out a list. Cities that I mentioned that don't seem to be on his list are Knoxville, Boise, Spokane, Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Topeka, Des Moines, Annapolis, ], Salt Lake City, Shreveport, and Chattanooga. john k 02:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

As the list above shows, there are plenty of problems, just with these cities. Why change such as simple, easy-to-understand and implement solution as the current naming standard, and replace it with something that ends up with lots of exceptions and problems. 02:41, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

BlankVerse, I don't see "plenty of problems". All I see is that some city names are ambiguous and some are not. Some of the ones that aren't ambiguous aren't terribly well known outside the United States. What exactly would be the exceptions and problems if we replaced the current rule with one that said that lesser known American cities, and those that need to be disambiguated, go at City, State, while well known cities that are not ambiguous go at City? Obviously, the exact boundaries of this would need to be ironed out article by article, but each article would remain where it is (i.e. at City, State) in the absence of a consensus to move. What exactly is the huge deal about this? This is how article titles generally work for other articles on cities in Misplaced Pages, and, for that matter, for most subjects in wikipedia. john k 15:31, 22 August 2006 (UTC)q

Some of the names in the above list surprised me that they're in the 50 biggest cities in the USA. Some names to my (non-US) mind do not indicate the city at first glance (although they might mean something named after the city), and some seem to always have a state attached for no good reason - Atlanta, Georgia always seems to be named that way in my head, even though I have no idea what else Atlanta would mean. I've added some other remarks next to a few - they're a bit lighthearted, but are intended to point out that people don't always think the same way about a word when they already have a different context in mind. None of my examples are wildly contrived in common use compared to the city.

Tobias' idea below that the city should only get to be the main page for a name if more than 50% of all the links to any of the disambiguated meanings are to the city seems like a fairly objective measure. I think I'd still prefer that most of the articles stay at the Cityname, State page, with a redirect from the plain name though - it just provides that little bit more help to readers. --Scott Davis 05:19, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Why not simply do away with the convention altogether, and use the same naming scheme as the rest of the encyclopedia? If some 2000-person town in central Utah has an entirely unique name, their article gets that name. That way, we don't have to make all kinds of lists about cities here, away from their actual articles. --Yath 18:44, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. --Serge 18:56, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Why not simply do away with the convention altogether, and use the same naming scheme as the rest of the encyclopedia? - Because wikipedia is not complete yet. To avoid future changing of millions of links, currently preemtive dab is used for geographic topics where future collisions can be expected. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 20:24, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

You exaggerate. And if people need to jockey a little to determine which (if any) city gets a primary article, it is not your place to decide that none will. The idea there will be great edit wars, dogs and cats living together, has been repeatedly overstated and abused. Wikipedians are grownups and can handle it. That's how we figure out what's best, not by dragging everything to the lowest common denominator. --Yath 20:45, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I have news for you, Tobias. Misplaced Pages is as "complete" as it is ever going to be - because it will never be complete. The amount of information out there is practically infinite and is growing all the time. There is no end in sight for Misplaced Pages, by any measure. Misplaced Pages is an evolving process and entity. In the mean time, dealing with each ambiguity as it is encountered is the best way to go. The concept of "pre-disambiguation" is a non-starter. Articles with disambiguity issues should be disambiguated based on the other articles with which they have ab issues. The only way to do that correctlty is on a case by case basis. This is the system that is used for all Misplaced Pages articles, I don't see why cities should be exceptions. Plus, what Yath said. --Serge 20:58, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Firstly, it depends on future definitions of completness, whether this will be reached. Secondly, in geography I could well imagine that one day it is complete with respect to whether each city, village, town, neighborhood etc has an article. At this time, we could maybe start moving. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:45, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Like every other field that has a naming convention, it is better to have a consistent approach to naming cities in the U.S. then to have the chaos of ten thousand case-by-case decisions. -Will Beback 21:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. Which is why city article names should be consistent with the conventions of all Misplaced Pages articles: use the most common/used name if there is no ambiguity issue. --Serge 21:22, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

this will be done when all cities have an article. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:45, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Possibilities simplified

How about this? For any article about a city named city that is currently entitled city, state, if ] redirects to that article, then change the article name to city (and make ] redirect to ]). Simple. No lists. --Serge 21:22, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

This seems very sensible. If the redirect was already well-established, then that means there is already consensus that the unqualified name primarily refers to the city. --Polaron | Talk 21:32, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

That seems reasonable. -- tariqabjotu 21:35, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

If the redirect is happily in existence why do we need to change the article name at all? Also, some cities have several redirects. -Will Beback 21:47, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The reasons TO change an article name from CityName, StateName to CityName are:

1. The title of the article should specify the most common name that is used to reference the subject of the article (e.g., New York City, Chicago, water).
2. CityName, StateName is NOT the name of the subject of the article about a city named CityName (e.g., San Francisco, California).
3. CityName is the name of the subject of the article about a city named CityName.
4. There is no ambiguity conflict with CityName since CityName already redirects to this page.

• Note: As part of the change, when applicable, any other redirects to CityName, StateName should be changed to point to CityName.

--Serge 22:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The purpose of every convention is to standardize naming. This change would make city names non-standard. I oppose any change which will result in citynames which aren't consistent. That would be unprofessional and chaotic, both for readers and editors. -Will Beback 22:06, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Whether you like it or not, the well-established standard in Misplaced Pages, that you insist on being inconsistent with, is to use the most common name, unless there is an ambiguity issue, in which case the ambiguity is supposed to be resolved with a parenthetic remark. There is nothing professional about naming an encyclopedia article San Francisco, California that is about the city of San Francisco. And "consistency for the sake of consistency, at all costs", which is what you favor, is a juvenile approach, not a professional one. --Serge 22:23, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

There is a huge ambiguity issue with U.S. cities, hence the need for a naming convention. -Will Beback 22:25, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Sigh. We've come full circle. There are no ambiguity issues for ] when ] redirects to the page in question, which is what we're talking about in this section. If there is a "need" for a naming convention (which I question also, but that's a separate issue), it is only for those cases where there is an actual ambiguity. --Serge 22:31, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

WRONG: There are no ambiguity issues for ] when ] redirects to the page in question, which is what we're talking about in this section. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:34, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. But there are no known dab issues for Name if the ] page redirects to a particular article. If a new article is created with a Name that does have a name collision, then the dab issue can be dealt with, and it's the responsibility of the creator of the new article to manage it. This is standard stuff, and consistent with Misplaced Pages policy, including the primary naming principle of putting the interests of the readers ahead of the interests of the editors. --Serge 23:00, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Serge's original idea is simple and easily comprehensible. I don't understand the claims by editors opposed that this will lead to "chaos." This seems to be meaningless hyperbole. In terms of ambiguity, the whole point is that cities with ambiguous names stay where they are. I don't believe anyone has suggested otherwise. john k 23:13, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. No "chaos" happened with the recent move from Chicago, Illinois to Chicago. The fact that the unqualified name already redirects indicates that people already agree that it is the primary usage. --Polaron | Talk 23:16, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Agreed indeed. The Canadian convention has yet to produce chaos; I'm not sure why a similar convention for U.S. cities would. -- tariqabjotu 23:20, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

• Call me an idealist, or a simpleton, but I prefer Serge's suggestion to use Misplaced Pages's fundamental naming conventions rather than to write up a bunch of special-case rules for every topic on Misplaced Pages for which someone foresees a naming conflict. The conventions account for conflict and it is not beyond the capacity of an encyclopedia with tens of thousands of editors to resolve them as they arise. --Dystopos 23:23, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The chaos at talk:Chicago was made up of the many debates and strawpolls over what to name the article. The bigger chaos would be if the process is repeated at dozens, hundres, thousands of other articles, and then city names are open to changing again every time someone wants to argue over who gets "Lancaster". As for Dystopos comment about writing up rules - The rule is in place already, used in tens of thousands of articles. There is a very strong status quo in existence already which doens't need any special rules. All we need is one simple guideline, the one we already have: U.S. cities are titled "cityname, "statename". Like any guideline, article editors can decide to override the rule for particular articles, as was done recently in Chicago. -Will Beback 23:43, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

You've got to be kidding. The root cause of the chaos at Talk:Chicago (and countless other city article pages) was the promotion and application of the unconventional predisambiguation naming convention for cities. If you and the rest of your gang abided by the standard Misplaced Pages naming convention, to use the most common name when there is no ambiguity, it would have remained Chicago from the start, and there would have been no chaos. Note that in the last vote, it was still the same bunch of usual chaos-makers, including you, causing all the trouble, supporting the non-standard name of Chicago, Illinois. It's laughable that one of the primary creators of the chaos is now using the chaos that you created as an excuse to defend your chaos-causing naming convention. Unbelievable. Seriously. --Serge 23:56, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. I believe the move of the city article to Chicago was incorrect because the article on the band would be more appropriate under that article title. For one thing, the band is probably much better known, due to the daily airplay of its hits on radio stations throughout English-speaking North America. In contrast, I haven't seen Chicago's skyline regularly on a TV screen since Perfect Strangers and Family Matters went off the air; after all, ER doesn't film on location in Chicago. Also, out of curiosity, Serge, how do you address your mail? City and ZIP only? No state? Because it wouldn't be encyclopedic? --Coolcaesar 02:40, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

But the band is named after the city, isn't it? Also, the way postal addresses are formed don't have anything to do with what the city is called. Would you support moving the state names of the U.S. to something like Georgia, United States. Don't you need yo put the country name when addressing international mail? --Polaron | Talk 02:51, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

The idea that the band is more central to the concept of "Chicago" than the city baffles me. In any case, I don't mean to get caught up in an ongoing dispute about one article. My opinion is with regard to the general practice of elaborating rules that work quite well enough on their own. In the same way that I prefer to go by the Golden Rule than by the Halakha. When there is conflict, I would rather hold our options up to an ideal than to a preconception. --Dystopos 04:46, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I hope Coolcaesar was being facetious. Otherwise, I have to imagine he spends a lot of time listening to "25 or 6 to 4". john k 10:19, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

The opposition to changing the convention seems to be based around a) the straw man notion that articles on obviously ambiguous city names like Lancaster or Portland would come under dispute; and b) a bizarre distaste for the normal processes by which article titles are decided. It really is not that hard to determine if a city is the primary use - we've already determined this for most major US cities by having CityName redirect to CityName, StateName. There is rarely any controversy over decisions to do this, that I am aware of. If there's a considerable dispute over such a usage, then that's obviously a sign that it isn't the primary use. I think this is true of most American cities named for British places, for instance. The basic fact is that there's nothing so unique about the United States that requires different treatment from cities everywhere else in the world. The fact that opponents of a change seem to be resorting to incomprehensible computer science jargon only strengthens the case. john k 10:19, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

primary topic

• how come that Augusta, Georgia get's the Augusta link? Can this one really outweight all the other Augusta?
• how come that Zaragoza, Spain is at Zaragoza? Can this one really outweight all the other Zaragozas?

Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:50, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Augusta seems unjustifiable. Augusta, Maine, as a state capital, is arguably as important as the one in Georgia. Augusta is also a personal name held by various royals. I think there's a very good case to move Augusta (disambiguation) to Augusta.

Zaragoza, though, is perfectly appropriate. The other Zaragozas are named for the one in Spain, which is also by far the largest - it is the fifth largest city in Spain, while the Latin American and Philippines cities of the same name are of only minor importance. john k 23:14, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Augusta (disambiguation) should be moved to Augusta, definitely. Bolivian Unicyclist 19:06, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

What is historically named for what is at least by the Naming conventions absolutely unimportant. E.g. me, I was surprised to see the Spanish city as primary, knowing that there are others around and even a province exists, which has more inhabitants than the city. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:24, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Spanish and Italian provinces are always named for the largest city in them. The province belongs to the city in such cases, not the other way around, it is the Province of Zaragoza, that is to say, the province of which Zaragoza is the capital. Florence, Naples, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, and so forth are all both the names of provinces and of cities in those provinces, but we use the main space for the city, not the province, as well we should. Someone going to a small town in Zaragoza province would never say they were going to "Zaragoza". The name, without modifier, indicates the city, not the province. This is pretty standard stuff. The other Zaragozas, as I noted before, seem to be quite small and unimportant. john k 23:31, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with John k. Augusta seems like a good case to be the disambiguation page. I note that there are very few links direct to Augusta, and several of those I think are intended to be ambiguous (like the one from State of Kanawha), as well as from conversations like this one. I disagree with john's reasoning about Zaragoza (about the one in Spain being first), but agree with the conclusion. The name is occupied by the most prominent use of the word and the largest competing article. --Scott Davis 00:42, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Being first isn't the only consideration, but it's worth noticing. It's certainly one of the reasons that a significant number of not so big English towns get to count as primary topics (and some of those are much more dubious, I think. Durham, for instance, is the article for the English city, even though the city of the same name in North Carolina is actually considerably bigger.) In the case of Zaragoza, though, I don't see how there can be any dispute. john k 01:28, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The most prominent use does not justify primary topic status. If the importance of the others topics combined is bigger, the plain title should be the dab page. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:08, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, it is not. Zaragoza overwhelmingly refers to the city in Spain. The name of the province is not a competitor, but a testimony to that - the province name merely indicates that Zaragoza is the capital. The other places named Zaragoza are tiny and unimportant - all of the articles on them are minuscule stubs. This is a very clear case of a primary topic. john k 01:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

• overwhelmingly - you mean 70% of all mentions in the world refer to the city?
• of course the province is competitor, since it has the same name as the city but is not the city. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 20:21, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

  I have no idea what percentage. And the province is named for the city. It is the province of the city. There are tons of cities in similar positions. We never disambiguate a city because there's a province named for it. john k 21:46, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Never say never. Bremen (city), Namur (city), Groningen (city), Appenzell (city). But in all these cases except Appenzell, most of the other provinces in the country are not named after cities, and so the provinces are not seen as the "territory" of the capital city. -- Eugène van der Pijll 11:01, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. The Bremen issue is interesting because the state of Bremen is almost equivalent to the city of Bremen. Bremerhaven was originally essentially a colony of Bremen. The issue of the other three are quite different from Zaragoza, in that Namur, Appenzell, and Groningen are essentially medieval entities. They are named for a town, it is true, but each also has a long and distinctive history of its own. The same is not true for Spanish or Italian provinces, or Russian oblasts, or whatever, which are purely administrative entities, with no real distinctive history of their own. (And the same can be said for Bremen, as well, which as a city-state goes back to the middle ages.) Belgian, Dutch, Swiss, and German primary subdivisions are, I think, of a different order of importance from Spanish or Italian provinces. The only comparable Spanish examples, I think, would be Valencia, which refers to both the city and the region (the province of Valencia is, I think, comparatively unimportant), and perhaps León, again for the (former) region, now combined into "Castile and León", and not the smaller province, which is not terribly important. I don't think there's any good Italian examples. Administrative entities dating back to the 18th or 19th century aren't really comparable to medieval polities with their own distinctive history. john k 11:48, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

• • it is irrelevant what is named for what. What counts is current importance distribution. If noone can approximate a percentage, it cannot be verified whether it is really sufficient important. Until this is not clear Zaragoza should get dab. In doubt, dab. Dab do avoid future problems. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:37, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
    • To dab "to avoid future (potential) problems" is in violation of Misplaced Pages policy, which is to use the most common name unless there is a (known, not potential) ambiguity issue. --Serge 22:53, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

What's this bizarre emphasis on quantitative estimates? I wasn't even aware that the other Zaragozas existed until yesterday, and the province issue is not unique to Zaragoza, and difficult to resolve by any quantitative means, at any rate. There are thousands of political units that are named after cities. In general, our policy is to disambiguate the province, and to reserve the main title for the city. In such cases, also, one is unlikely to use the name alone to refer to the province. If one said one was going to Zaragoza, without further elaboration, one would assume the city, and not the province, is meant. The same goes for other similar units. The problem here seems only to exist in Tobias's mind. john k 23:30, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't even aware that the other Zaragozas existed until yesterday - but now you are. And here is more: the province has more inhabitants and economic power than the city. Furthermore: the province is not only mentioned in contexts like "going to Zaragoza". You may read country subdivision and related articles to get more insight into where names of states, provinces, counties etc might be used. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:40, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

To be fair, the "problem" does exist in the minds of a few others that comprise a gang of surprisingly significant size, mostly of folks who come across as pretty reasonable and well-meaning. It's like they managed to convince themselves that the problem of dabbing was significant enough for cities that it warranted a "predab" solution, and they came up with this scheme to predab city names, "just in case". This turned out to be appealing to those who like to see all the names look the same. After all, that city, state format is so uniform and tidy. They just forgot, or overlooked, that the purpose of the encyclopedia article title is to specify the most common name used to refer to the subject of the article, which naming cities according to the city, state format violates. The gang was large enough to overwhelm most attempts to stop them on an individual city basis (notable exception: New York City). They certainly caused a lot of chaos along the way, but eventually wore down those who objected. One after another the proper city names fell, ultimately for no good reason. But now, finally, I believe enough people are waking up to the havoc that this gang has wrought. I sincerely hope Chicago was a sign of many more corrective improvements to come, not a rare exception. --Serge 00:16, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

please provide evidence for your claim that the problem is only in my head and in the heads of a gang. I.e. all persons that follow "city, state" and are not me, are in a gang. Otherwise withdraw this allegation, as it could be considered that you stick to a false claim. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:34, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I think this is about people who have training in object-oriented programming methodology versus those who don't. OOP is quite a clear and rational method for approaching probles once one invests the time into understanding it, which is why it is the dominant programming paradigm today. For example, C++, Java, and C# are all OOP languages. --Coolcaesar 02:46, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Cool! I'm a gang member.

Of course, the point of being in a gang is to fight against another gang, in this case the people led by Serge who want to overturn widely accepted naming conventions for articles about cities and towns, particularly in the USA.

Coolcaesar: Which gang is OO and which are procedura / functional / declarative / aspect-oriented? --Scott Davis 07:30, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

One International Naming Convention

I'm a bit flummoxed at the idea that different countries have different conventions. In any printed publication it is usually the publication itself that, in a goal of better reader comprehension, devises and exercises a naming convention consistent through the whole publication. This naming convention is usually tailored to its audience, and most of the world's publications until present cater to a language or locale often related to that of the publishing house. This is of course changing thanks to CD and DVD media, and online Wiki is of course a huge step ahead in this regard.

So who is Wiki's audience? I'd say that comes from an indiscriminate world over, and if this is not so than it should be treated like this is, or will be, the case. For this I find the name quibbling to be a bit narrow-minded in scope for its targeting only 'local' understanding. I am also of the opinion that the existing system has its a*s between two chairs.

A huge number of the world's people don't know that Chicago is in the State of Illinois. A fewer number couldn't even tell you that Illinois is a state in the United States of America. Yet an American encyclopaedia would never dream of publishing an article on Chicago under a Chicago, Illinois, United States title - but would a French one? My Larousse doesn't; Illinois is listed under Illinois as "a State of the US". Chicago also is under its own title. But imagine a publication listing every neighbourhood of every city in the world under its own namespace - would this be chaos - or natural in light of the media? In the single-name convention to the uninformed, between La Jolla and Illinois, which is State and which one is neighbourhood? What if there was a city that shared the same name as another city or even State, won't this create a sort of name 'hierarchy' as well? I think it all depends on organisation.

Myself I find a "Chicago, Illinois, United States" title bulky but highly informative. It is a walk down all the administrative steps until the subject proper. It also serves as a form of categorisation - a search for "Illinois" will turn up a city I am looking for in this state - but it is also true that Categories can serve to this end. But to me, from an international point of view, Chicago, Illinois seems incomplete without its country in the namespace - it is a trip half-complete.

Perhaps all I've done here is ask questions, but I think there are a few points that deserve consideration when devising naming conventions - namely audience, support, mechanical function (browsing, searching) of that support, and an audience's maintained comprehension no matter where it browses within. -- thepromenader 16:03, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

"Chicago, Illinois, United States" would force piped links in practically every article that links to it. It's good to use different standards for different countries because the articles that accompany them are generally written by those who know them. We should keep that in mind when naming each article. If there is some sort of confusion from "an international point of view", reading the first sentence of Chicago, Illinois will make it abundantly clear where it is. Titles should be accurate without being counterintuitive. If someone is basing all their knowledge of a subject on the title of an article, and succumbs to confusion without even reading a single sentence, then I think they've come to the wrong place. Misplaced Pages encourages the use of multiple dialects, and should encourage the use of multiple formats for place names. Kafziel 16:44, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

The information is also in the infobox. We don't need to provide it a third time. --Yath 17:12, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Promenader, while I agree with you that we should be consistent internationally, I believe you are confusing the purpose of the title of an encyclopedia article with the purpose of the text of the article. The purpose of the title is to specify the most common name used to reference the subject of the article, period. When there is an ambiguity, then disambiguation information (normally specified in a parenthetic remark) is used to distinguish the name in one context from other contexts. While adding disambiguation information also happens to add more information in the title, it is a mistake to start relying on the title field for that information.

With cities (and communities for that matter), I think part of the confusion stems from the fact that the disambiguation information is provided with the comma method rather than as a parenthetic remark. The problem is that the comma method makes it less obvious that the disambiguation information is disambiguation information; the comma makes it look like the disambiguation information is part of the name.

Once you see the disambiguation information as part of the name, it's tempting to see value in providing that information consistently. There is something appealing about seeing SomeName, California and knowing that the format alone tells the reader that SomeName must be a city in California. Once you see value in that, it's tempting to take it to the next step... and AnotherName, SomeName, California tells you that AnotherName must be a community in SomeName. But why stop there? Why not invent conventions for other categories too? Maybe ModelName , for example, should be the format used for titles of articles about car models? The reason we don't do that is because we would be solving a non-existent problem. All articles names are referenced in contexts that almost always make their "type" obvious.

Encoding information about the subject of the article in the title, beyond what is necessary for disambiguation, is using the title for something that it is not supposed to be used for... which is to specify the most common name used to reference the subject of the article. Adding any addition information contaminates the title. When disambiguation information is added inside of a parenthetical remark, at least the common name, outside parentheses, is still obvious. But when done with a comma, the very purpose of the title is not met because the common name specification becomes less clear.

So, I agree with you that we should be consistent internationally with city names. But I go beyond that. I think all Misplaced Pages articles, including all city articles, should be named according to one of the following two formats, period:

• CommonName
• CommonName (incidental disambiguation info)

Simple and consistent: the common name is always obvious. The content and format of the incidental disambiguation info in the parenthetic remark does not matter since its only purpose is to disambiguate Name in one context from all the others. This should be handled on a case-by-case basis, as it is for all Misplaced Pages articles.

By using the title of an article to specify information about the subject other than the name by which it is most commonly known, you are creating a purpose for the title that it is not supposed to have. --Serge 17:56, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

No, I was only speaking of Title. Some of you seem to be continuing your arguments from above here. Mine was an open question - there are many elements to take into consideration when creating a convention, not only one point de vue. thepromenader 18:53, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I know you were speaking only of the title... but you seem to be assuming that information in the title about the subject, besides specifying the name that is used most commonly to refer to the subject, is reasonable and appropriate. Any information beyond the name belongs in the text of the article, not in the title. That's why I said you seem to be confusing the purpose of one with the other. --Serge 19:04, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

In other words, we are saying that the purpose of a title is not to be "highly informative", as you put it, but simply to be useful. The purpose of the article is to be highly informative. The title is just a way for people to find what they're looking for, not a way to try to answer all their questions. Kafziel 19:12, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

In particular, the purpose of the title is to answer exactly one question: What is the most common name used to reference the subject of this article? Specifying in the title any information beyond that solves no problems, except when there is an actual ambiguity issue. And using the comma convention to specify disambiguation information (like the state), muddles the purpose of the title: since it makes the common name unclear. --Serge 19:34, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Let's just say that we're trying to designate as simply as possible, for the uninformed researcher, exactly what he is looking for. How better can we pinpoint this research, out of the hundreds of thousands of article possibilities there are in Wiki, than in the title itself? You must also consider the media and the way it is used by those unfamiliar with the subject in which their query lies. thepromenader 20:01, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep in mind that this is the English Misplaced Pages. We don't need to compromise the quality of the site to try to cater to every culture on Earth. If a person can negotiate English-language websites well enough to find and navigate Misplaced Pages, they can certainly make their way through a disambiguation page (and actually, for most places, it's just a redirect and requires no additional input at all). I don't agree with Serge's view that parenthesis are always the way to go, but we certainly don't want more information than is absolutely necessary. There's only one place named Chicago. Chicago, Illinois would be unnecessary, and "Chicago, Illinois, United States" would be extremely unnecessary. We want the simplest, most useful title for the purposes of linking and searching. Kafziel 20:19, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

What people might search for should definitely be taken care of by redirects. But that should not be the main criterion for deciding what to title the article. The Misplaced Pages-wide standard for most articles is to use the common name and disambiguate only when necessary. --Polaron | Talk 20:36, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but this is exactly what I am asking you to consider. As it is a reference available to all (and English Wiki is the most consulted), optimal wiki "quality" == "comprehension for the user no matter his level of education or provenance". I don't think our goal here is to predict who will use what in what way with what knowledge - with all the information to choose from, it would be "most useful" to call a cat a cat, and more quickly than that.

It is also worth considering that most navigation to articles here is a result of either the Google SE or direct links from one article to another. I do quite understand the difficulties caused by 'piping' - yet couldn't reidirects, save questions of ambiguity, take care of such problems? "Chicago" for example could redirect to "Chicago, Illinois, United States" - wouid this bother? How about a link to Tashkent - is this clear for you to which country this belongs? Must you really read the article first before you know? Or would you, unaware of where this locale is, prefer to see Tashkent, Tazakistan and understand immidiately that it is not what you are looking for? You must remember that Wiki visitors often do not have the same knowledge nor habits as we contributors.thepromenader 20:52, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is not a directory. If you want to know where Tashkent is without reading any part of an article whatsoever, then you're better off just using google. What would you do if you only had a paper encyclopedia? We are infinitely more accommodating than that, but in the end you can't expect to have every bit of research handed to you without the slightest effort. Besides, you've picked a pretty poorly formatted article as an example. There should be an infobox, and the first sentence should make it clear. We don't format Misplaced Pages based on exceptions, ignorant users, and laziness. Kafziel 21:03, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

PS- just wanted to make it clear that I'm not applying those descriptions to you. I'm just speaking in general of the kind of people who would expect a title to contain every bit of info they could want. Kafziel 21:14, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I see you, and from my end please be reminded that my only goal is to consider the question - conventions - in every way possible, and especially outside of a US-only point of view. All of us searching for anything on the web are ignorant about what we are looking for - no matter what country we come from. I also ask if it is so damaging , to cover all bases, to have the full name as an article title, and the "shortest name", save disambiguation, as a redirect? Now I've gone beyond simply asking questions as now I'm forwarding ideas.... thepromenader 21:27, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

PS: Wiki is not a paper encyclopaedia, and this is another very important part of my question. thepromenader 21:33, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Please explain exactly how naming Chicago Chicago, Illinois or Chicago, Illinois, United States, will help any reader-researcher. In other words, please provide an example of what exactly a researcher might be doing such that he would be helped if the title had more information in it besides just the most common name, Chicago, used to reference the city. --Serge 22:10, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

If you're going to ask me that, then please explain how a reader-researcher wouldn't be helped by such information : ) thepromenader 22:22, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

No, really, please consider my questions from an objective view as possible. I'm not here to support any other argument on this page. thepromenader 22:26, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I can't show you how a reader-researcher would not be helped by such information, any more than you can show me how someone would not be helped by lining their toilet bowl with fur. The only way to "show" either is by a lack of any examples of how it can help. So, for those of you who are promoting more information in titles, please provide an example of how that might help. --Serge 23:23, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

The title should reflect what the thing is called. Anything else should be in the article text. Context should of course be indicated in the very first sentence. We don't put people's occupations or place of origin or who their parents are in the titles of articles about people. I'm sure an article entitled George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States, son of George H. W. Bush would be more useful but inappropriate.We don't put articles at Dog, Carnivore, Mammal, Vertebrate, Animal - I'm sure that title is helpful in some cases but it is not what the thing is called so should not be the title of the article. --Polaron | Talk 22:37, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. --Serge 23:23, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

By following a convention we impart information to a reader. Naming a city, to make up an example, "Green River, Wisconsin" imediately alerts readers that they are looking at a city rather than a river, or "Fort Wayne, Indiana" tells readers that it is a city, not a fort. -Will Beback 22:45, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

In what context, exactly, do we impart this information to the reader? Can you provide any actual examples? But, in that example, say the example is on a biography of John Doe it indicates he was born in Green River, Wyoming. Do you really need to float your mouse pointer over Green River to learn that Green River (in this context) is a city? Of course not. So can you provide a realistic example where that would actually be useful?

By the way, note that you used the phrase, "naming a city". By naming the city Green River as Green River, Wyoming, we are misnaming it. And that's the point. At best, we are blurring the information... is the most common name for the city Green River or Green River, Wyoming? It's not clear when the title is Green River, Wyoming! --Serge 23:23, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps we could move Chicago to ] and just make Chicago a redirect... In all seriousness, being unnecessarily specific makes linking to articles that much more cumbersome. I understand if many feel Chicago, Illinois isn't unnecessarily specific, but Chicago, Illinois, United States, to many, is. Also, I'm not sure how the use of the state only in the title of an article indicates an American bias. We don't mention the country after Tehran or Paris or Nairobi either. We can leave the specifics to the article (well... not what supercluster the city is in; that's for another article). -- tariqabjotu 22:50, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Those extremes aren't necessary. But it would be nice if Highland Park, Illinois's neighbor was Evanston, Illinois, rather than "Evanston" or "Evanston (Illinois)" or whatever variation the editors of Evanston decide on from week to week. Other countries have other conventions, that doesn't mean the U.S. can't have one too. -Will Beback 00:01, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Ya think those extremes aren't necessary? Do you have a sense of humor?

What would be nice is if the Illinois cities of Highland Park and Evanston were disambiguated in a manner consistent with the convention used by every other article with an ambiguous common name in Misplaced Pages: CommonName (disambiguation information). The titles Highland Park (Illinois) and Evanston (Illinois) make it clear in no uncertain terms that the common names for the two cities are Highland Park and Evanston, respectively. But the current titles of Highland Park, Illinois and Evanston, Illinois, leaves it unclear what is the most common name used for each... is it Highland Park or Highland Park, Illinois, for example? There is no way for the reader to know!

The city, state "comma convention" makes it impossible for the title of a city article to clearly convey the one piece of information that it is supposed to specify: the most common name used to reference the subject of the article! Is it city or city, state? The "comma convention" make it impossible for the reader to know! --Serge 00:51, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, look, exaggerations aside, you have two extremes. You have the "one name only" choice which is the name of that entity and none other. This would make linking things up easy, but would require that the first line of each article state exactly where that entity is. On the other hand, you have the "what it is and where it is" naming convention that would name not only the entity itself but its locale - this is cumbersome, and this is also where conventions would most come into play. Again, I don't see the point in "half describing" where that entity is, that is to say stopping short of its largest administrative entity that would be country - and I see only confusion in treating neighbourhoods one way and burgs another - if this convention is to be effective and comprehensive to all, the comma must separate a name from its next largest entity, and so on up the chain.

I'd like to propose a mix of the two. Why not have the article final destination (explained just ahead) in a 'full name' format, and place redirects in the short-name format? This I think would be both informative, cover all technical bases, and eliminate all ambiguity. thepromenader 10:15, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

(OK - I'm 24 hours behind - sorry). Serge has said and repeated The purpose of the title is to specify the most common name used to reference the subject of the article, period. Please cite a reference that this is a) a purpose of an article title in Misplaced Pages and b) the only such purpose.

In my view, purposes served by an article title include:

• A unique identifier to use in the URL for the page.
• Something to type in the search box that will take me to an article I've seen before without having to scan a search results page. This is the distinction between the Go and Search buttons. Redirects and mnemonics help here (such as WP:NC:CITY).
• Use as the text for a tooltip on links to this page from other wikipedia pages if piped links are used.

None of these need to be the title, but neither does Serge's stated purpose. The URL could just as easily be a sequence number, the Go button could be replaced by "I'm feeling lucky" which just returns the first article that would be in the search results list and links could be to the sequence number in the URL, so the visible text is the user information. The most common name to reference the subject of an article could (and should be) in the first sentence of the article. As a reader, I frequently use the article title for one of the purposes Serge says I shouldn't: I wave my mouse over a link to get the little bit of context about a place that saves me the time and cost of downloading a potentially large article just to see where the town is.

The purpose of this naming convention is to provide a consistent appearance to the names of articles about cities and towns in Misplaced Pages. For various reasons, the way we name and disambiguate town names varies in different countries in the real world, so this article naming convention is also divided by country, and has some variation across countries, especially federations, large countries, small countries, and by local language. --Scott Davis 14:26, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I frankly don't get the "common name" part - shouldn't the official name hold sway here? How would the namespace be referenced? I doubt that local common usage should be the norm here... unless I'm missing something. In any case "common use" as it is cited here seems more an interpretation of a rule than a rule itself. thepromenader 22:27, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Not to be Mr.-Let's-Do-a-Straw-Poll

But let's take a look at the options (regarding the U.S. convention). Add others at your leisure and support more than one if you so desire.

Adopt The Canadian Convention

The canonical form for cities in the United States is ] (the "comma convention"). Places which either have unique names or are unquestionably the most significant place sharing their name, such as Atlanta or Los Angeles, can have undisambiguated titles. Those cities that need additional disambiguation include their county or parish.

An article for a city in the United States, however, should never be titled simply "city, United States" (e.g "Phoenix, United States".)

1. Support this fully. -- tariqabjotu 13:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
2. Second choice. Unlikely to be more than 20-30 exceptions. --Scott Davis 15:03, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
3. Support. There would only be a couple dozen cities that would be moved. Kirjtc2 16:37, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
4. Support. Would be better than the current mess. --Yath 19:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
5. Support. Having to type ], ] instead of the simple ], ] is simply annoying with no benefit at all. Can someone explain the benefit to doing the former? To my knowledge, the city articles were originally generated from the U.S. Census and that's the main reason for the easily-programmed ] convention. —Wknight94 (talk) 23:51, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
6. Second choice. My first choice is to eliminate the US standards completely, but I am willing to accept this as a compromise.--DaveOinSF 20:25, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
7. Support this as a compromise as well. --Polaron | Talk 20:29, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
8. Support as compromise and step in right direction. --Serge 21:42, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
9. Oppose. That would once again lead to disputes at every major city over whether it is sufficiently major to qualify. This is simialr tot he "global city" exception that was the subject of a straw poll earlier this year (see above). -Will Beback 22:09, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

• You're kidding, right? Those disputes exist only because you guys keep insisting on enforcing the city, name convention where it makes no sense, where no disambiguation is required. If you didn't do that, then there would be no dispute. --Serge 22:33, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Comments

• Especially small cities, regardless of whether a redirect exists, will not be moved. -- tariqabjotu 13:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
• I'm not clear on how this differs from the current state of the guideline. Isn't this the same as "maintain status quo"? Kafziel 14:06, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • The current convention would state that even major U.S. cities with unique names or that are the most significant place sharing their name would have the state. Thus, under this idea, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the other cities listed under #Possibilities would be at Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. Under status quo, they would be at Atlanta, Georgia, Los Angeles, California, San Francisco, California, etc., as they are now. -- tariqabjotu 14:15, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
    • The current convention does have exceptions, though. So it seems to me that the point of this option is to make a longer list of exceptions, but there's not really a need to do that. Since it's just a guideline (not policy) exceptions can be made at any time. Kafziel 14:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

The effect is to make a "standard exception" that can be pointed at rather than long protracted discussions on the talk page of each city. --Scott Davis 15:03, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Move US Cities Across Redirects

All U.S. cities that have the name of the city without the state name redirecting to the name of the city with the state name will be moved to the location without the state name.

1. Support -- If the unqualified name already redirects, then there is already wide agreement that the city name by itself refers to the city. --Polaron | Talk 18:43, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
   • WRONG!!! Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:03, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
2. Support. This would fix a lot of cities right away. --Yath 19:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

   So why don't you just do it? That's what I don't understand with all of this stuff. Kafziel 19:58, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

   Because existence of the current U.S. city naming guideline motivates people to oppose such no-brainer moves as Miami, Florida to Miami. --Yath 20:59, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

3. Strongly Support. There is no downside to doing this - it only improves Misplaced Pages and makes city naming convention more consistent with the conventions used by all other Misplaced Pages articles. Consistency... good! --Serge 21:47, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Comments

• Evanston, Illinois, as mentioned in an example above, actually will not be moved under this proposal. The same goes with Highland Park, Illinois. -- tariqabjotu 13:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
• Not a bad idea, although I envision this being difficult to put into words for the convention. -- tariqabjotu 13:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • It's easy to say... The title of any wikipedia article should be the most common name used to reference the subject of the title, unless there is a known ambiguity issue; do not use a disambiguated naming convention unless there is a known ambiguity issue with that name. --Serge 16:44, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
    • This and the Canadian convention are actually quite similar. Perhaps we should merge the two options (although this is just a non-binding straw poll, so I suppose it doesn't matter that people support two very similar proposals). -- tariqabjotu 19:20, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
      • In fact, both of those options are very similar to the last option of just leaving it alone. Places with unique names are already exceptions as it is, and none of these conventions are binding policy anyway. But, as you said - straw poll. No biggie. Kafziel 19:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Hey Serge you voted in the comments section. --Yath 19:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
          • Doh! Fixed. --Serge 21:47, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
        • The problem is a lot of people don't treat this like a guideline, but instead policy. See Talk:Los Angeles, California#Requested move where almost every oppose !vote says, in one way or another, per the convention, with little to no discussion over the rationale behind the move. A couple !voters said get the convention changed first. And I can't blame them either; guidelines are, after all, created for a reason. And thus, here we are. The Canadian convention makes it very clear that well-known major cities can be at just ] despite the general guideline that they should be at ]. The U.S. convention, however, does not make that clarification and instead of saying that there can be exceptions says there are two exceptions: Chicago and New York City. It appears as though the naming convention specifically designated Chicago and New York City as exceptions, instead of that a consensus to change the page name, despite the general guideline, resulted in those exceptions. At the very least, the convention should be clearer that if there is a good enough reason, the city article can be moved to just ]. That way, future move requests will be discussions regarding the goodness (is that a word?) of the requestor's reason rather than a tug-of-war with a guideline. I'd be happy to hear (read) what others believe. -- tariqabjotu 22:49, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

City, State, Country

Move all U.S. cities to ] (e.g. Chicago, Illinois, United States).

1. Oppose. That would be going from bad to worse! --Serge 21:51, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
2. Oppose. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:01, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Comments

• Most English readers would recognise the names of the States of the USA (and of Australia, provinces of Canada and counties of the UK) even if they can't list many of them. Therefore the third level in the titles is not required for comprehension. --Scott Davis 14:43, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
• This would be horribly cumbersome.--cj | talk 16:19, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
• Please, no. Even at present, there are some editors who believe linking to redirects is evil and who, instead of spending their time adding content, take the trouble to (i) chide others who do link to rd's and (ii) open up articles to change a piped link in order to "skip rd"). And how would this affect cities in other countries? Paris, France, as someone rightly pointed out on Talk:Chicago, sounds rustic; and Paris, Île de France, France, actually imposes a POV about the relative importance of France's regions vis-à-vis its departments. (Which also serves to underscore that one-size-fits-all won't necessarily work for every single country in the world.) Sgt Pinback 13:28, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

  France's département/région example is a good point - not because of any animosity or POV, as a région is an undeniable administrative step up from a département - but because of the recently-changed status. The région area has only officially existed administratively since around '72-'82. What of other changes in other countries? I also see your point about the 'evil' of linking to redirects... thepromenader 14:21, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

] with redirects from ] and ]

Move all Cities to ] and redirect all 'shorter' namespaces (City, State) and (City) there.

Comments

• The clumsiness of a highly-informative longer title would be eliminated by redirects from shorter namespaces. With this solution the pipe trick would not be needed at all save for cases of disambiguation. Also, anyone looking for any item of the three combinations will fall upon the correct article. This will also help searches - searching for a state will turn up not only the state, but the cities in that state. Et cetera. ThePromenader 15:38, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
• Same comments as above. Some users hate seeing "redirected from" at the top of the article. Sgt Pinback 13:42, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

  *smacking forehead* - right. But quite honestly I see little use in that message - other than its role as an access to the redirect itself. thepromenader 14:08, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Status Quo

Don't change the U.S. convention at all.

1. It works. Each article should be named based on most common usage by that country's populace, as those are the editors most likely to work on articles associated with them (and therefore create links to them). That goes not just for the U.S., but Canada, Uzbekistan, and everything in between. Kafziel 14:01, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
2. It works and is consistent with other English-speaking federal countries. --Scott Davis 14:59, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
3. As above. It ain't broke in my opinion.--cj | talk 16:19, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
4. Strongly agree. -Will Beback 18:15, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
5. Considering that the WIkipedia is an international English-language encyclopedia with readers and editors from across the globe, choice 1 is the most precise and least ambigous, as well as the least likely to lead to misunderstandings about the status of a particular community. It is also the clearest instruction on naming a community article so that hopefully it will lead to an end to the interminable debates on naming various community articles (for examples, look at talk:Anaheim Hills, Anaheim, California or talk:La Jolla, San Diego, California. 22:04, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
6. I agree. Why fix it if it ain't broke? --physicq210 22:46, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
7. Oppose. It IS broken, and it needs fixing. These constant debates keep occuring because the current convention is fundamentally broken: it violates the primaring naming principles, including title specifies common name and don't disambiguate unless there is a name collisions. It results in silly and unprofessional article titles like Los Angeles, California. It uses the comma for disambigutation when the parenthetic remark is the standard. It's an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Broken, broken, broken... But it's easy to fix (see proposals above). --Serge 21:56, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
8. Oppose Mandating disambiguation when no such ambiguity exists is ridiculous. If I go to Cher, it's about the singer/actress. As Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions says: there may be cases where a particular convention is "obviously" inappropriate. Following one convention for Los Angeles and a different one for London is stupid.--DaveOinSF 23:30, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
   1. since wikipedia is not complete yet, we are probably not aware of all current ambiguities. Leaving alone things that will be created even in the real world only in the future. And now, since we know that we don't know all ambiguities it may be wise to disambiguate. This is called planning. Some people do not plan, and then have to fix and fix and fix all the time. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:46, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
9. Support to secure correct linking. There are too many equal toponyms, especially in english and spanish speaking countries. I expect similiar amount of ambigous toponyms for chinese, indian and maybe arabic places in the future. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:58, 25 August 2006 (UTC)