Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (U.S. schools)/Archive 1

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents 1 New proposal 2 Disambiguation 3 Nearly there? 4 Guide to help determine consensus 4.1 Support the proposed guideline 4.2 Have issues with the proposed guideline 5 City High School (City, State)?

New proposal

Following discussion at WT:NC(S), I have created a new proposal for naming conventions solely for US schools. Hopefully this will allow for consensus to form more easily. The version I have created is a draft and I welcome some input on getting it to guideline status. I am going to alert all relevant WikiProjects and the village pump to this new proposal. WP:NC(S) will remain a separate proposal for now, which will hopefully one day replace this as a guideline. Camaron1 | Chris 17:12, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Disambiguation

It seems a little excessive to use (City, State) if only one disambiguator is needed. I think the order of disambiguation should be:

1. Country
2. State
3. City
4. County (I know there's at least one state in the USA with two towns with the same name)

Thoughts? shoy 19:23, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I think that the full city and state is more uniform, easier to link to and much less ambiguous. The way it's written now is both consistent and easily applied in the vast majority of cases. While there may be two cities with the same name, are there identically named schools in the two identically named cities in the same state? This has also been argued before. Adam McCormick 23:29, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The current (Municipality, State) setup is inherited from WP:NC(S), where it was generally voiced that double disambiguates are the best option for US schools; as it can be easily applied - the problem comes when you try and apply it to schools outside of the US. This proposal might need to be expanded a little for special cases, but the current version is OK for most cases and is simple. Camaron1 | Chris 12:44, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the current proposal is good, but I would clarify that it should be used in all cases where there is obviously likely to be a conflict, not just where one already exists. DGG (talk) 18:34, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

We around the block on that point for a month at the parent guideline. There is significant resistance to any such connotation. Nice though that would be preemptive disambiguation is generally discouraged. Adam McCormick 23:01, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Nearly there?

This proposal has been around for a while, and feedback so far has generally been positive. I do generally think we are not to far away from reaching consensus on what appears to be a non-controversial proposal. Any thoughts? Does anyone have any concerns that need to be addressed? I might bring this back-up again at the village pump and related WikiProjects to generate further discussion so consensus can be reached. Camaron1 | Chris 12:49, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

considering the extremely high amount of possible duplication of school names, I think the possibility of making this an exeption to the prospective conflict guideline might need further discussionDGG (talk) 16:34, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes I agree I think it does and has been brought up before. I deliberately did not include pre-emptive disambiguation into this proposal as in the older version of WP:NC(S) it was a central feature of the proposal to pre-emptivley disambiguate nearly all school articles, which met huge opposition and resulted in the proposal failing. A very limited element of pre-emptive disambiguation might be sensible, such as when it becomes obvious there is going to be a conflict, such as after internet research. Camaron1 | Chris 18:52, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Could someone provide a link to "pre-emptive disambiguation"? I have no idea as to what you are talking about, and a search in Wikipedia yields only 8 entries that do not help much in understanding it's usage here. Thank you, and sorry for my lack of understanding. Dbiel ^(Talk) 17:21, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I didn't at one stage know what it meant either - though fortunately another project provides the answer [1]. It means disambiguating pages (such as adding the location in brackets to the article title) to avoid a article naming conflict on Wikipedia which has not yet occurred, but could happen in the future. Pre-emptive disambiguation can vary from disambiguating all school articles to just a few where a naming conflict looks very likely to occur. Camaron1 | Chris 18:03, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

The guideline looks good to me. I have been spending much of my time working in Category:Education and sub category Category:Schools, try to clean them up. So this guideline is of a great interest to me. I am going to add a new section and hope that it is not out of line. Realizing that votes are never taken, it is still helpful to know how many users are supporting or opposing this guide line. It can also be used to address the issues of individual users who have issues with the guideline.. If it is considered inappropriate, please feel free to delete it. Dbiel ^(Talk) 17:21, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with it, I understand guidelines are not supposed to be passed by counting votes, but I see nothing wrong in using straw polls to find out where people's opinions are, and it has been done for past proposals successfully. I am going to alert relevant WikiProjects and the village pump to allow people to participate. Camaron1 | Chris 18:03, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Without wishing to seem unduly negative, is this guideline necessary? It doesn't actually seem to contain anything specific to US schools, and the only provision which seems to differ from WP:NC is the recommendation to use the official name unless a common name is 'significantly' more well-known (as opposed to the usual rule to use the common name). I would have thought that if such an exception is necessary, room could be found for it in WP:NC.

If this can't reduce to WP:NC, can it reduce to WP:NC(S)? That already seems to contain most of the same content, including some content specific to US schools (and seems to have become inactive largely because of lack of participation, which I'm not sure bodes well for a guideline covering a more limited set of articles.

I'm just wary having watched WP:MOS for a long time and seen a lot of guidelines spun off to their own pages, which in my experience in all but the most pressing of cases largely only results in confusion of precedence, gradually-emerging contradictions between the specific and general guidelines, and lack of oversight of the spun-off guidelines. TSP (talk) 18:47, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Some very valid questions and suggestions. This may help explain why it is being done. This guide line is not intented to be a long term guideline and has the goal of being deleted after the WP:NC(S) guideline is approved. The problem is that we do not currently expect that guideline to be approved in the near future, too many international issues involved. The US schools are a real mess. That is way this guideline is being spun off as a separate guideline. We believe that we have a chance at getting this one approve quickly. Work will continue on the parent guideline, and if or when that is finally approved, this one will become a simple redirect to the parent. There is not need for a separate guideline; but right now, there is no guideline. I hope this helps explain why we feel it is necessary at this time.Dbiel ^(Talk) 18:58, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

This proposal was created after discussion at WT:NC(S), the reasons for it are covered there. In particular see comments under "Is this proposal dead?" and "The de facto standard for everything but populated places is "name (location[, location])". There is hope that a accepted WP:NC(S) will supersede this proposal one day, but that currently stalled by the comma v. brackets debate and the significant variation in school disambiguation practises between countries. Camaron1 | Chris 19:06, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

What sort of mess are the article titles currently in?

It just seems to me that these guidelines are basically just a repetition of WP:NC and WP:DISAMBIG; in which case I would have thought that what is required is not a new guideline, but simply an agreement on the part of the relevant Wikiproject to apply the existing ones. TSP (talk) 19:14, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

They are in a mess. A lot of school use commas and others use varying types of parenthesis in disambiguation. The US generally use double parenthesis, India uses mostly commas, and Australia (with WikiProject Western Australia using only commas) and the UK use both. There is nothing I can find in either WP:NC and WP:DISAMBIGUATION which specifies when to use parenthesis or commas. A WikiProject agreement is simply not workable, there are simply to many relevant WikiProjects that have differing precedents on how to disambiguate, and in the UK and Australia there is simply no agreement. I see nothing wrong with having a specific naming conventions guideline for schools, which will provide guidance on how to name schools correctly while not been generalised, like the main guidelines are. WP:NC(USS) is a start on standardising naming conventions for U.S schools, where there is the highest level of agreement in disambiguation. Camaron1 | Chris 19:46, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

WP:NC already has a section on schools - "When disambiguating a school because an article already exists, the most general locale of the school should be used in parentheses to all articles, and a disambiguation page should be created" - which seems pretty clear. WP:D has "A disambiguating word or phrase can be added in parentheses." - while it doesn't explicitly forbid other disambiguation punctuation, its instruction appears to be to use parentheses.

This guideline doesn't offend me or anything; I'm just always wary about the creation of multiple levels of guidelines which make it hard to find the instructions you should actually be following, and which contain a lot of duplicated material which is likely to fail to be updated if general naming concensus changes. TSP (talk) 20:09, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

If I remember correctly the WP:NC section on schools was created to summarise the original proposal at WP:NC(S), which was basically to disambiguate all schools using parentheses, and it appears to have not changed since that proposal was rejected. In any case, it certainly is not enforced that much, at the present moment if we try it will likely cause uproar. Camaron1 | Chris 21:13, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps an uproar would get things moving. I am totally in support of this policy. As an editor trying to clean up school and church dab pages, I feel this is a real problem that requires resolution, and the precedent in disambiguation policy is to use parentheses. If members of the community disagree, they need to be involved in this discussion (or they need to state their opinion regarding the current policy), and they don't seem to be doing so. In the absence of dissenting discussion, it seems time to move ahead. SlackerMom 18:37, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Guide to help determine consensus

OK, I have edited the proposal to try and address the concerns - though it might need reviewing. Any feedback would be appreciated. Camaron1 | Chris (talk) 14:54, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for addressing even my small concern. I believe I'm happy with the naming convention. (Great job, Camaron1 | Chris on all you've done for this proposal.) --Hebisddave (talk) 22:27, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I think it looks good the way it is now. When can it become a policy? --Dan Leveille^TALK 01:30, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

City High School (City, State)?

Should schools like Rochester High School (Washington) be named Rochester High School (Rochester, Washington)? That seems a bit redundant. But the guideline doesn't state anything different. There should be some clarification because many schools are named "[City] High School". --Dan Leveille^TALK 11:35, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Good point. I will add it as a exception in the proposal that if a school has the municipality or state name in the schools name, it does not need to be repeated in the parameter. Camaron1 | Chris (talk) 12:21, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Oooh, I'm not so sure this should be an exception. I think I prefer the redundancy for the sake of uniformity. There could be a Rochester High School somewhere else in Washington, but the current title seems to imply that this is the only Rochester High School in the entire state of Washington. Obviously the (fictional) other school could be disambiguated with the name of its city, but I think the point of the guideline is to establish some across-the-board uniformity that is now lacking. SlackerMom (talk) 15:04, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I have put it in for now as I would have included it in this proposal originally, as my interpretation of longterm past discussions is that the parameter added should not repeat the schools name, though that exception can be removed if necessary. The original proposal called for ultimate uniformity with all school articles been disambiguated regardless of if it was needed or not, that was rejected. This proposal does try to keep redundant disambiguation to the minimum. Rochester High School (Washington) would only need to be further disambiguated if it is actually found that there is another high school in Washington with this name, in which it could be necessary to add more information to the guideline on what to do in this event. Camaron1 | Chris (talk) 17:20, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I doubt there would be schools with the same exact name in one state, since there are obviously not going to be two cities/towns name the same. Even if this would happen, then both schools become Rochester High School (Rochester, Washington). I doubt we would ever run into that - the government would have more problems with that. --Dan Leveille^TALK 02:29, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I retract my last statement. I just found Jackson High School (Jackson, Ohio) and Jackson High School (Massillon, Ohio). I guess I do agree that the town should be included in all cases. There are some high schools with the same name as a town in the city, and someone who sees Jackson High School (Ohio) may not know which. Camaron1, could you remove that from the proposal, I disagree with my original claim. --Dan Leveille^TALK 03:12, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Dan, in most cities the highs schools are not named after their location (my city is named Rochester, but the only school in the entire city with that name is an elemntary school named after the found of the city Nathaniel Rochester). TJ Spyke 05:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

In many cases in New Hampshire (where i'm from), there are quite a few that are named after their location. But if you read the above conversation, I do agree that it should always be City High School (City, State). If we don't be consistent, it'll get confusing. --Dan Leveille^TALK 09:10, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

My bad, i've never lived anywhere else so I don't always know how things work in other places. Not that it matters, I agree with you about how they should be named (especially if it is a generic sounding school name, the high school I went too is not likely to have to have a disambiguation due to it's length). TJ Spyke 09:30, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

OK, I have removed it. It is good if we keep it as simple as we can anyway. Camaron1 | Chris (talk) 11:54, 2 January 2008 (UTC)