Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (landforms)

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Please advertise this page at the Village pump and any relevant WikiProjects to get broader input on the subject. This NC sounds like a good idea but it could benefit from other people's opinions. >Radiant< 21:06, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I merely stumbled onto it myself, having recently worked on a group of river and mountain articles with inconsistent naming. The idea and discussion should be revived. Duja► 14:10, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problem

There's a class of mountains, (I'm talking about Slavic countries), which have the name form of Foo+ska planina/gora or, worse still in plural Foo+ske planine/gore. Foo may be practically any root, and it's often near-meaningless in the source language. See e.g. List of mountains in Serbia (plenty of redlinks). There are few options, none particularly appealing:

• Leave them as-is: "Jezerska planina" (Lake Mountain), "Ravna planina" (Flat Mountain), "Svrljiške planine" (Svrljig Mountains) (Note: there's also a catch in WP:CAPS#Capitalization of expressions borrowed from other languages; planina should be lowercase according to that)
• Translate only the planina: "Jezerska Mountain", "Ravna Mountain", but "Svrljiške planine" can sensibly become only "Svrljig Mountains"; "Svrljiške Mountains" is plain silly.
• Discard the mountain/planina altoghether: Jezerska, Ravna, (but what about "Svrljiške"?)

Note that some mountains have seemingly established usage: Stara Planina, Fruška Gora. I'd say a similar problem can occur with rivers and lakes. Duja► 14:25, 8 November 2006 (UTC)