Wikipedia:WikiProject Location Format

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The goal of this WikiProject is to improve Wikipedia's Location Format to exhibit a worldwide view.

The members of this WikiProject believe that locations such as cities should be formatted canonically thus:

London, Ontario, Canada

rather than

London, Ontario

1 Principles
- 1.1 Exceptions
2 Advantages
3 Common objections
4 Tools
5 Participants

[edit] Principles

The country should always be linked, if it has not been linked earlier in the article.
- (The Manual of Style says United States should be "United States" or "U.S.".)

Every component of the location that has a Wikipedia article should be linked, i.e. London, Ontario, instead of London, Ontario

[edit] Exceptions

As per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages), disambiguation pages should not use piped links.

[edit] Advantages

Relevancy. In an article about a geographic location, person, building, etc., located in London, Ontario, Canada, if London and Canada are relevant, then Ontario is.

Consistency. The only reason "London, Ontario, Canada" becomes wikilinked as "London, Ontario, Canada" is usually of laziness, because it takes more typing. This can be seen in articles on world cities with single-name article titles or redirects such as London (England) or San Francisco are usually already canonically linked. It makes more sense to link every component.

Style. The ", " (comma+space) is ugly inside the wikilink.

[edit] Common objections

It's ugly.

You may think "London, Ontario, Canada" is ugly, but we in fact think "London, Ontario, Canada" is ugly.

It's useless.

You may think it's useless, but we think it's useful. See Advantages section above.

The city article will link to the state/province/etc in the first sentence.

That's still an extra mouse click, waiting for the page to load, locating the link, etc. Not a reason to remove region links.

Some objections seem to be based on the idea of "who would want to click on Ontario?" This is a fallacy born of limited worldview. Assuming you are not familiar with Germany, consider this link: Bevern, Lower Saxony, and compare to Bevern, Lower Saxony, Germany.