Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (settlements)/Archive 6

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Open issues

As noted before, two issues have been decided, but these leave lot of room for discussion.

The issue of using normal disambiguation rules should be clear; articles on cities get that name unless there are other topics with the same name.

Next, it has been decided that the "comma notation" ([City, Something]) is used for city names in stead of the parenthesis format. That still leaves the following possibilities:

  • Disambiguation is done at the necessary level. That is, if there are two different cities with the same name in two different countries, we use [City, Country]. If the two cities are within the same country, use the common local disambiguator for that nation in English language, or for that country if none available. If there are two cities within the same state (f.e.), use the common local disambiguator for that state in English language, etc., etc.
  • Define a natural disambiguator for each country and use it all the time.

The first option would give Sydney, Australia and Sydney, Canada, and Las Vegas, Nevada and Las Vegas, New Mexico (assuming both city names are equally common in use). The second option would give Sydney, Australia and Sydney, Nova Scotia.

I myself have no preference for either option. The latter may be easier to remember, but shows less consistency. However, since in many cases there will be many US cities and some foreign ones with the same name, that one seems the best and most logical option.

In either case, it should be investigated and listed what the standards for disambiguating nationally are per country. For the USA and Canada, these have already been established as being [City, State] and [City, Province]. For others this still has to be decided. A remaining question is whether to use the natural disambiguator for a country (be it in English language or not) should also be used if it doesn't have the comma notation. I'd say yes here - if Malta's (example) English language convention is to use City-Province, I'd say we should use that.

The last issue is the so-called "Paris" problem. As we're following "normal disambiguation" rules, it states that when one of the disambiguated articles has priority, it gets to stay at the main article (Paris, in our example). If none of the articles has priority, they're all disambiguated. The current disambiguation rules also state this decision must be made on a case-to-case basis. I think that solves our problem here. In case we decide (no matter how) that the French city has priority over the Trojan and all the other spots on the map, we put its article at Paris, and put a block-format disambiguation at the top. If we decide the city hasn't got priority, we use the normal disambiguation article. I don't see any other possibilities, but I may be wrong.

Summarising, we need to decide on :

  • the way to use the comma notation for disambiguation (I say always use the country-specific one)
  • whether to also use natural disambiguators without a comma (I say yes)
  • what to do with the Paris problem (I say use the normal disambiguation rules)

Jeronimo

IMOH some vote results were prematurely moved to archives.
Please let's not introduce another format as in [City-Province]; that can only promote more argument. It could also make things more difficult for the average searcher who will become confused about how to search for things.


With the parentheses format retained for non-cities we can know that [Paris (hero)] is not a city, and [Paris, Ontario] is a city.
I accept using [Paris] for the French city as long as it includes a disambiguation block at the beginning of the article.
"Has priority" needs some definition. To me this does not mean the historical priority that British cities of Boston, Perth and Halifax may have The criterion should be one of overwhelmingly common usage. The aqverage people in Paris, Kentucky can reasonably be expected to have heard of Paris, France, but the average people of Paris, France cannot reasonably be expected to have heard of Paris, Kentucky.
Eclecticology 11:16 Aug 18, 2002 (PDT)

I think "has priority" is "defined" at disambiguation as the most commonly associated meaning of the name, if any. For some, this is difficult to determine, but for a city like Rome, it is pretty clear that this one should has priority. Jeronimo


Archive 4 came from here.

Archive 5 came from here.

St. vs. Saint

I just got a note that somehow Wiki convention got established that "St." should be abbreviated in city names. For US cities, at least, this is contrary to the official US Government policy that states that "Saint" should be spelled out. I think it has to be agreed that, regardless of what we do in the case of other countries, "Saint" needs to be spelled out in US placenames -- BRG July 19, 2003

Hm. I guess the US Census is in violation of the federal mandate because the place names came directly from them. See user:Rambot. And we are not Wiki! Our name is Wikipedia. Haven't you noticed other wikis around? --mav 18:42 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Actually, IIRC, the Rambot uploaded duplicate articles for many places with "saint" in the name. Saint Albans, for example. Also, I thought the general convention was to spell out "saint" rather than using abbreviations, for both people and places. Martin
I used "wiki convention" because that phrase was used in the note to me. I should, I guess, have put it in quotes. -BRG

What the US Government's official policy is doesn't matter a damn, any more than the official French government policy, Italian government policy, Irish government policy etc does. If a city's official name uses St then it should go in as St. If it officially called Saint then that should be used. BRG's constant causing chaos in naming cities on wiki is getting ludicrous. He has already caused chaos by mucking up disambigulations and links with crazy name changes which no-one agreed to. Now cities with St is his next place to unilaterally cause chaos. FearÉIREANN 18:41 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What on earth does Jtdirl mean by "the city's official name"? The BGN is the agency that makes names official in the USA. Cities don't unilaterally name themselves, and nobody has the authority to make a name official but the US government. So I fail to understand what Jtdirl means by "What the US Government's official policy is doesn't matter a damn," especially when he couples it with "If a city's official name uses St then it should go in as St. If it officially called Saint then that should be used." The two statements are in conflict! - BRG
Not only does "St. Paul" MN yield 5 times as many google hits as "Saint Paul" MN, even the Saint Paul, Minnesota official website uses the abbreviation... it is located at http://www.ci.stpaul.mn.us/ Also, I believe that you are mistaken. I don't think that it is the federal government that makes local place names official. --Dante Alighieri 19:07 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
BRG keeps referring to the BGN, so I've provided a web link. Click here. I think it interesting to note that the following is the stated purpose of the BGN: "the Board is authorized to establish and maintain uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government". Given that the federal government is not local government, I take this to mean that local governments can damn well choose their own names for things like cities. On further exploration, it seems that the job of the BGN is to standardize names for geographic features (for example, mountains, lakes, valleys) rather than towns. --Dante Alighieri 19:21 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yup. That's what I understand its role to be too. BTW The Clerk's office in St. Cloud, Minnesota is also at St. Cloud, not Saint Cloud. St. Cloud city clerk page Is this another rerun of BMG's Exeter fiasco, when he decided to create a unilateral disambigulation approach that was contrary to wiki policy, contrary to the naming style used and contrary to logic, but defended it to the end even when users were queuing to tell him to stop? BTW, for all the renaming (which I have reversed) did BMG actually check to see if any links had been broken with his latest st. to saint batch of renamings? FearÉIREANN 19:31 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Someone needs to archive this page. It is now at 54K. I would do it but I am on a v-e-r-y--s-l-o-w- link from Ireland that can take minutes to form a page sometimes. If I tried, it would take so long I'd be caught up in edit conflicts. (I archived something recently and it took me nine attempts to save the changes because everytime I tried, someone else had added in a new comment.) It is best if someone on a fast link does it. (Either that or I'd have to protect the page for a couple of minutes to stop anyone editing it while I was archiving it. Hell on wiki is trying to do an archive on a slow link and then getting trapped in a constant edit conflicts.) FearÉIREANN 19:31 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Quoting from the BGN's site: "Although established to serve the Federal Government as a central authority to which all name problems, name inquiries, and new name proposals can be directed, the Board also plays a similar role for the general public." Therefore, as you can see, if _any_ authority has the right to be called "official," it is the BGN. BTW, The Postal Service does follow this rule as well: You can address a letter to "St. Louis" and it will get delivered but in all postal directories, the place is shown as "Saint Louis." I am still waiting to find out what Jtdirl seems to think _is_ official, since he has claimed that he wants to use "the city's official name"! (After all, that is what _I_ want to do as well!) BRG July 21

Stop mis-interpreting the role of the BGN. The guide is obviously what the cities regard as their official name. The BGN plays the same role as other similar organisations in other states of co-ordinating names, of dealing with problems should one urban entity wish to use a name already being used elsewhere. But unless a problem occurs, the urban centre's chosen name becomes the one and when a city adopts a name that is it. The BGN may like people to use saint but if a city (as they have) adopt St., St. it is. It is that simple and this gross mis-understanding of the BGN's role simply making an issue of a non-issue. FearÉIREANN 19:24 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think you are being absolutely stupid, stubborn, and thick-headed. A web site is not an assertion of an official name. A city may use "st. Something" on its website, just as the FBI may use "FBI" on its website, but that has absolutely no official standing; it is just an abbreviation. I sign my name "Bruce R. Gilson" -- but my official name is "Bruce Robert Gilson," because that is the name on my birth certificate.
If you were to actually read the BGN's site, you will see that it is the authority; and while I don't know what the status of cities is in Ireland, actually a city does not have the legal power to adopt a name officially. Cities gain their existence from state governments, which may give them any power they choose to, or deny them it. If you were to argue that anyone other than the BGN has any authority here, it would be the state-issued charter defining the city (analogous to my birth certificate). And I don't know that you have ever looked at the charters of all these cities.
What right do you, an Irishman who I am certain has absolutely no knowledge of US laws, have to try to arrogate to yourself the decision as to what is considered official? Cities are created by state laws under the US Constitution. The US government normally is considered authoritative in defining standards, state governments are authoritative in defining city powers, and cities do not even have the right to amend their own charters without state permission! -- BRG July 23
BRG, with all due respect, you are wrong. I was just in communication with Roger Payne at the Geographic Names Information System (a U.S. Geological Survey database that works with the BGN). He imparted the following information. The legal name of a city (or what have you) is the name listed on the incorporation papers. In the case of St. Louis, it happens to be the abbreviated form. Therefore, the legal name of St. Louis is St. Louis (I am not dealing with the presence of absence of the state name from the legal name, but merely the spelling of "Saint"). The BGN's decisions have no legal binding on anything other than the federal government. Even if the BGN decided that the name of St. Louis was "officially" Jellytown, St. Louis would still be St. Louis IN St. Louis and everywhere except the US Federal Government. Furthermore, by its own mandates, the BGN limits its decisions to natural features, canals, and reservoirs. It leaves local administrative names up to the local administrators. Therefore, the BGN accepts as official whatever the local authorities accept as official. It IS the policy of the BGN that all words be fully spelled out in their official roles, thus they list St. Louis as Saint Louis. Nevertheless, even the BGN recognizes "St." as an appropriate abbreviation of convenience for "Saint", and you will therefore find countless federal documents (including USGS maps) using the abbreviation "St." instead of "Saint". I explained to him the purpose of my question and he agreed that it was "wholly appropriate" to have an article on St. Louis at [[St. Louis]] rather than [[Saint Louis]]. So, if you would like to note in the article, BRG, that the BGN likes has an official policy of spelling out Saint in its database, feel free. Of course, I think it more important to point out, in the article, that the legal name of the city is St. Louis. --Dante Alighieri 16:28 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Actually, if you noted what I wrote above, where I said that "Cities gain their existence from state governments, which may give them any power they choose to, or deny them it. If you were to argue that anyone other than the BGN has any authority here, it would be the state-issued charter defining the city (analogous to my birth certificate)," I am perfectly willing to accept the remark of yours that "The legal name of a city (or what have you) is the name listed on the incorporation papers." And if, in the case of St. Louis, that is what appears on the incorporation papers, fine and dandy. I'm not sure where you got access to the incorporation papers, but if someone is willing to check all these out, I'm perfectly willing to accept the result of this checking. But your earlier statement that the St. Paul Website uses the abbreviation, on the other hand, carries no weight. A Website has no official status. Of course, this doesn't help in the case of unincorporated entities, but I think it would take care of most of the "Saint"/"St." questions.
Assuming you are being honest about "St. Louis" being on the incorporation papers, then some such statement as "The city was legally incorporated as 'St. Louis' in 18__. However, the United States Postal Service and the United States Board of Geographic Names database prefer 'Saint Louis,'" would seem appropriate. -- BRG July 23
Sadly, I don't know how to go about getting hold of incorporation pages. Mr. Payne was kind enough to look up St. Louis for me. Since he didn't put me on hold and I heard keyboard typing, I assume he had some internet resource. I don't know what it is, and it may be government only, but if anyone wants to sleuth around and find such a database, I'm sure it would be useful to the Wikipedia cause. Of course, the SLOW way to do this is call the city hall for every city and just ask them. Or we could REALLY bother Mr. Payne and make him do it. ;) Those of you wishing to contact Mr. Payne for other reasons (PLEASE don't ask him to search for every incorporated city with the word Saint in it, he was very nice and helpful) such as asking him if we can get access to the incorporation database, the number for the GNIS is (703) 648-4544 which I found at the GNIS home page. Note that the GNIS is in Reston, Virginia so be sure to call during local business hours. --Dante Alighieri 22:15 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Okay, not to start another row here, . . . but I'm in the process of adding paragraphs of history info to the pages of Louisiana parishes (known as "counties" in the rest of the U.S.). I was taken aback to find that some (not all, mind you, only some) are listed as, e.g., "Saint Charles," redirected from "St. Charles." People, this is simply incorrect, inaccurate, and wrong. The formation and naming of the parishes of St. James, St. Charles, St. Mary, St. John the Baptist, etc., predates not only Louisiana statehood but, in some cases, the formation of the United States. They were and always have been recognized and cited as "St. Whatever" by the territorial and state legislatures, are listed that way in the Louisiana Statutes, and are universally so spelled by everyone in the state. The BGN doesn't enter into it. So how do I get those wrongheaded redirects undone? -- Michael K. Smith 21:47, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I've been trying to ignore the whole "St." vs. "Saint" controversy, but I'm finding it difficult. Having no clear Wikipedia policy is pretty annoying.
The arguments for spelling out 'St.' seem to depend on two things: U.S. Postal Service preferences and the BGN. These two arguments, combined, don't amount to much.
Let's start with the BGN. I downloaded the BGN file for Missouri and counted occurances of St. Louis and Saint Louis in the BGN file, with the following results.
  • occurances of Saint Louis - 37
  • occurances of St. Louis - 1653
That's right. The BGN, which has been cited as justification for spelling out St., used St. Louis over 44 times as often as it used Saint Louis.
The USPS prefers all caps and two-letter abbreviations for states. According to USPS preferences, the article on St. Louis would be entitled SAINT LOUIS MO or, perhaps, SAINT LOUIS MO USA. Clearly, USPS preferences are not Wikipedia policy.
Wikipedia naming conventions seem to be based on common usage. Common usage is St. Louis, not spelling out St. which, as much as I've tried to adjust to it, looks incredibly strange to me. Bluelion 01:53, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Commas vs. Parentheses

Someone has moved the discussion about disambiguating names of cities, towns, and vllages (commas vs. parentheses) to Talk Archive 5. However, as far as I am aware, the issue has not been settled yet. Talk Archive 2 seems to contain all the arguments, and Talk Archive 3 contains a vote which the comma style won by 10 votes to 4, but there are still a lot of people unhappy with the idea. Basically, it seems to me that we have a perfectly workable Wikipedia convention for most articles - to use natural disambiguators and then parentheses if that doesn't work - which we are arbitrarily overriding for the specific case of placenames, just because that's how the Americans like to do it. From the archives, it seems that Toby gave the most detailed arguments; those arguments were against the [City, Country] format, and I can't find any convincing argument against him. I don't consider a vote to be a satisfactory replacement for an argument, really. So can someone please explain why they think the argument is wrong? If not, I think we should get rid of the [City, Country] format altogether. -- Oliver P. 04:15 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I tend to agree (even though it was me who originally proposed that convention!). The only places that [City, Country] could make sense is for cities in the United States, Canada or Australia but those three nations prefer either [city, state/province] (much more-so in the US) or just [city]. So, I think, standard disambiguation should be used for reasonably ambiguous city names outside of those nations (that is, the use of parenthesis when and only when they are needed). The US has settled on [City, State] even for the rare cases where city names are unambiguous - I would be interested to know if our Canadian and Australian users are also interested in settling on preemptive disambiguation too (and for that matter what to do in cases of ambiguity). --mav

I agree with both Mav and Oliver. (See mav, an entire day cannot go by when he don't agree on something! :-) ) FearÉIREANN 05:34 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I actually quite like the comma seperated method (city, country or city, state, as appropriate). I'm not particularly fussed, so I won't bother voting, but my reasoning would be:
  • Fairly compatible with existing articles (dumb argument, but true)
  • Encourages people to write (for example) Kabul, Afghanistan - rather than writing Kabul or [[Kabul (Afghanistan)|]] and assuming that the reader already has an encyclopedic knowledge of geography.
  • Makes for a nicer header at the top of the page (real dumb...)
Whatever happens, I'd like there to be a worldwide standard - if we do articles on Afghanistan cities differently to US cities, then people wanting to make helpful links will need to know the different naming conventions for the US and for Afghanistan, and that's non-ideal. If people created copious redirects, maybe that'd make things easier, though. Martin
? Is there another Kabul that is so important that Kabul needs to be parenthetically disambiguated? US city names are given in the [City, State] format as if those are the real names (this is not really disambiguation as has already been pointed out; Auburn, California is treated as the full name of that city in very similar way as George Washington is regarded as a full name). That is how they are commonly used. Other cities around the world are not treated in this way so standard rules of disambiguation apply to those cities. --mav 10:11 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Martin wrote "Whatever happens, I'd like there to be a worldwide standard". It is fallacious to believe that a worldwide standard is going to be acceptable "worldwide". There's enough difficulty with the status of Cornwall let alone places with a more complex political and cultural history. A default method of disambiguation with exceptions as required is more tenable. Mintguy

In reply to Mav's query a few paragraphs above, here is one particular Australian's view. Just the plain city name is always best. Qualifiers (country or state, comma or parenthesis, etc.) should only be used to resolve ambiguities. This point is the only one I really care about, the details of how the disambiguation is handled I'm not too fussed about either way. I'd just like to have it settled so that I know what to do next time the question arises. So, should it be Armidale, New South Wales, Armidale (New South Wales), Armidale, Australia or Armidale (Australia? I don't much mind, but I've listed them in best-to-worst order (but even my "worst" is perfectly OK). Tannin (Actually, that was a bad example, as "Armidale" has to be listed with the New South Wales because there is another well-known Armidale in Victoria.) (PPS: I'm talking about Oz and rest of the world here - the existing US cities practice is clearly well supported and should be retained.)

I say we should use Armidale, New South Wales, for at least three reasons:
  1. At least one Australian, Tannin, seems to think it's the best choice (and I suspect most other Australians agree)
  2. It's consistent with our practice in the US and Canada
  3. It agrees with most of the material originating in Australia that I've seen.
-- BRG
I agree with the above Armidale, New South Wales kind of naming convention. See my repeated attempts at fixing suburbs of Sydney. Alex.tan 01:14, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Small cat among pigeons. The inner Melbourne suburb is Armadale, not Armidale. Gritchka
Well, so there are at least 2 Armadales in Australia; I found one in Western Australia! BRG
Tannin can't spell. Well-known fact. Tannin

It always gets really hairy when you have multiple places in the same state or county. For examples, Springfield Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania and Farmington (town), Maine. There are even some places that require both forms of the above disambiguation. Now this is only done on a case by case basis and is not done if not required. The rule is basically this: Use commas if it is part of the name or the physical location (State, County, etc) (i.e. Bradford County is where it is located) and parenthesis when it is not part of the name or location and just a descriptor (i.e. (town)). These are fringe cases and they are consistent. The comma notation for adding the County is a natural by product of using the comma notation when moving from the [[City]] to [[City, State]]. Really, not everyone may be happy with everything, but this is a workable solution and only done when needed. --Ram-Man 16:55, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Worldwide standard

Suppose we have:

I think this would be a very bad idea, and I would like it to be avoided. However, if we do end up with this solution, can we agree that the "default" name will always be redirected to whatever the "local" name might be. This will at least ensure that people can continue to make links freely with some confidence that they'll go to the right place. Martin 17:28 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Well the standard is to just write the name of the place. That should always lead to (at worst) a disambiguation place. -- Tarquin 17:39 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Districts and Provinces and Regions and Villages and ...

  • Districts - New Zealand has more of these than it has cities, but district and city councils have almost identical powers and the areas differ only in their ruralness (apart from a few historical quirks); treat as cities? - ie if thought to be unique in world (even if a locality within the district has the same name?), such as Kaikoura, just the name like that?
  • Provinces - Canada has them officially - see list of Canadian provinces and territories - but New Zealand had them officially from 1840-1876 and the term is still in some use; any ideas or link?
  • Regions - several countries have or had these "above" the city and district level - link?
  • Villages - apparently mentioned in one of the archives, but robinp can't find it there so would welcome a link from here
robinp 04:55, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)
  • No response in 2 months - surely some kind soul can point me in the right direction for these? Robin Patterson 03:31, 12 May 2004 (UTC)


Standard for United Kingdom?

Maybe the attempt on a worldwide standard was too much at the moment?

It seems pretty clear that the comma-notion is preferred for Australia, USA and Canada.

Other important English-language countries are for instance UK, Éire, South-Africa and India. Should UK do as a start?

Do we agree that the wikipedia standard disambiguation system (i.e. parenthesis, and of course only when needed) is appropriate for UK?

Can "(Wales)", "(England)", "(Scotland)" and "(Northern Ireland)" be deemed sufficiently known in the rest of the world to be used instead of "(United Kingdom)" also in the cases when the place in question wouldn't need to be disambuguated within UK?
--Ruhrjung 18:23, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

People seem to be using the sensible comma-notation for the UK. The disagreement is over what the second part of the designation should be. I suggest for somewhere like Hope, England, where all other similarly named towns are in other countries, [Hope, England] suffices, while where there is more than one town in England with the same name, Newport, Shropshire and Newport, Isle of Wight (and Newport, Wales) provide the clearest method. Warofdreams 18:40, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)

In the UK there is one standard, unique, geographical identifier that isn't arbitrary (South Wales, East Anglia, etc), isn't tied to current local government areas (subject to change) and doesn't favour nationalists over unionists: the traditional county. User:Owain Genealogists, among others, still use them because they were relevant for many centuries of parish and civil registration of personal events. Some are rather fragmented, however, which would be a disadvantage for some purposes. :robinp 19:27, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The usual US convention in normal usage is to specify the state. The usual UK convention in normal usage is to use the county or, very often, perhaps more often, the traditional county. That works for us as well, since it's usual local usage and disambiguates better than a large territory within the UK. Jamesday 20:59, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Standard for Australia?

What about the following?

Articles on towns and cities in the United States and Canada are always named according to the format [[City, State]] or [[City, Province/Territory]] (the "comma convention"). Those U.S. cities which need additional disambiguation will be disambiguated with their County (e.g. Elgin, Lancaster County, South Carolina and Elgin, Kershaw County, South Carolina).
For towns and cities in Australia disambiguation is, when needed, in the format [[City, State/Territory]] (the "comma convention").

--Ruhrjung 18:23, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think we should use the City, Province/State/Territory/Whatever format whenever that is the prodominate form within the country. This applies at least to Canada, the US, and Australia.

If use this format for a country, it should apply to all cities, not just the ambiguous or lesser-known ones. - Efghij 01:27, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)

City, State is a good format for Australia, given that there are instances of the same city name may occur in more than one state - for example Mitcham in both Victoria and South Australia. Some, like Nunawading, are quite possibly unique, however, and may even get away with just city name; no disambiguation necessary... user:AmishThrasher
Has anything been decided about this? At the moment, I have edited articles Burnie, Hobart, Australia and Glenorchy, Tasmania, Australia - I must check each city name to see if there is an existing entry for a city of the same name, and if so, in which country/state it is. It would be easier if each city was in the City, State, Australia format. City and City, Australia and City, State could be re-directs or disambiguation pages as needed, and no guessing or research would be needed when naming articles. This is particularly handy with the List of localities (Victoria) page as well - check out the different naming formats used there. --Chuq 02:52, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I like that idea, Chuq, for page names but would want to save time typing new refs just as the city name if poss. :robinp 10:27, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Ok. I used to be using <City>, <State>, Australia for any names that needed disambiguating. The reason for this was that while most state names are unique, Victoria is not (check Victoria (disambiguation)). However, it is unique as a subnational entity? (this includes, articles named <Suburb>, Victoria where Victoria represents a city.) I have just gone through and changed all the Tasmanian cities towns and suburbs that need disambiguating to the <City>, Tasmania format. (all except Hobart, Launceston, Devonport, and Kingston so far, but eventually will change them too - they just have more pages linking to them) --Chuq 07:03, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Wow. I just read what I wrote above, and I can't make any sense of my own writing. Lets try that again. I am now using <City>, <State> as a naming convention for australian cities/towns that need disambiguating (note - I do this whether the other city is interstate or in another country), rather than <City>, <State>, Australia. However, while most state names are unique, Victoria is not. This means that there could be another <whatever>, Victoria elsewhere in the world. So the question is, what to do with Victorian cities/suburbs/towns?
Also, I will add the <City>, <State> format to the main Naming conventions (city names) article?? --Chuq 13:22, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Let's see if we can express this simply. The preffered format is:

  • City
    • City, State (if disambiguation needed)
      • City, Australia (if City, State can't be used for some reason, such as the ambiguity with Victoria)
        • City, State, Australia (if all else fails)

Make sense? Tannin 13:42, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)


Looks good - except I would suggest skipping the third one, and only using the fourth one for Victorian locations which have a "Victoria" ambiguity. This way, the majority of locations only go as far as the second option City, State.

I have also redirecting City, Australia to City, where City is a disambig page, there are multiple Australian locations by that name, AND there are international locations by that name. See Cheltenham, Australia. This way only one disambig page (the main one) needs to be kept up to date. --Chuq 04:22, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Has this discussion been moved elsewhere (seeing as this is on an archived page)? If not, is it agreed that it be "official" (moved off the talk page) ? -- Chuq 01:35, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Standard for Spain?

See: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names)/Spain.

What about the second comma?

This is my pet peeve. In uses such as --

John Jones was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where his parents were on vacation.

-- that second comma is mandatory to set off the apposite.

This usage --

John Jones was born in Jackson, Mississippi where his parents were on vacation.

-- is just wrong, wrong, wrong. -acsenray

A Protest

Based on the discussions at Talk:New York, New York, I shall protest the entire system whereby American (and Canadian) cities have to have articles at City, State/Province. I don't see any reason why this should be the case for cities where there is only one famous city of that name. Why do we need the article to be at Chicago, Illinois when there's only one important city named Chicago and Chicago redirects to the article on the Illinois city? There is only one Toronto of any note, but the article is at Toronto, Ontario. Why do we need to do this? Why are we fetishizing consistency at the expense of using the shortest name possible? What on earth is the advantage behind having the article at Chicago, Illinois or Los Angeles, California as opposed to simply Chicago and Los Angeles? john 07:11, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Well Chicago and Los Angeles divert to Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California - so I dont see much of a problem - but then, it could just as easily be the other way round (the City, State articles divert to City). Australia uses the latter method (ie. Sydney, Melbourne for the bigger cities, but Richmond, Victoria and Brighton, Tasmania for the smaller areas, which also often need disambiguating) --Chuq 11:23, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

But this is much more sensible. You Australians are sensible people in your city naming policies. My whole point is that because Chicago and Los Angeles redirect to Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California, there's no good reason for those articles to be, as Mav put it at Talk:New York, New York, pre-emptively disambiguated. I think this is fine to do with small cities, because people generally haven't heard of them, so even when there's no need for disambiguation, there's reason to be more specific. But it's completely ridiculous to do this for major cities. Here, for the sake of stimulating further discussion, is Mav's reply to my objection to the current standards at the New York page: john 17:50, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

The standard in the U.S. for naming cities is the [City, State] format - this is the standard that the US Postal service uses as well as just about everybody else in the US (so much so that many of us refer to Paris as Paris, France). The reason why this is needed is due to the fact that city names in the U.S. are not at all unique - there are literally dozens of cities and towns with just about any U.S. city name you can think of - thus we preemptively disambiguate them all. The name of this city is New York, and to distinguish it from other things called New York we use this standard as well. I see no reason why this U.S. city should have special treatment and all the other 35,000+ should be be in the standard format. We have also already gone over this at great length well over a year ago on the mailing list and developed Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names) as a result. Other names, especially non-federal ones, do not have such a severe naming conflict issue as to require a naturally (outside of Wikipedia)-developed standard for disambiguation. We should follow outside standards like this whenever they solve real issues we have here. --mav 02:03, 2 May 2004 (UTC)
Let me throw in my views. To quickly summarize, I prefer the existing method because it is clear and is the same for everything, that is, predictable. Now, one argument for having, say Paris, France and Paris is because it is the most commonly refered to usage. However, what we are saying is that this bias should be policy of Wikipedia. Now contrary to the U.S. notion that bias means evil, this is simply a matter that more people use that term that way, but by no means does everyone in every context. Nevertheless, the bias of most people is to use Paris to refer to the one in France. Adding bias to Wikipedia would only lead to fights, as it is now. I don't understand the aversion to using redirects and disambiguation pages. Is everyone that lazy? I think articles look out of place when they have something at the top that says "This is the article for X, for other meanings, go to Y". --Ram-Man 16:37, May 4, 2004 (UTC)
On a side note, a little something should be said about the rambot. The rambot has added automatic redirects and disambiguation pages from the generic name to the the more specific name. For instance, Eugene redirects to Eugene, Oregon because it is the only place with that name. If there were another place with that name, the Eugene article would be a disambiguation page. See Springfield for example. The rambot went through its database and created a good number of these pages so that people could find what they wanted either directly or by a redirect/disambiguation page. So the standard is City, State with the City article either being a redirect or disambiguation page as appropriate. The thing is that the rambot had not finished this task. But this was the intention. Oh and the rambot will not overwrite or modify articles that are redirects or it doesn't know what to do with them. I usually do all that manually to prevent errors. --Ram-Man 16:37, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the explanation about the ram-bot. At any rate, the argument that "introducing bias" is leading to disputes now is a straw man. The dispute now is about whether or not the general rule makes sense. If the general rule were not to use city, state, I see no reason to expect that there will be any more problems than there are now. I can't believe that anybody would advocate having the article on New York City at New York, New York if that were not a general policy to be used without exceptions. Similarly, do you really think there would be any articles about what Los Angeles the article Los Angeles should refer to? As I've repeatedly said, it's often not that difficult to determine what the most famous city of a particular name is, and when it is difficult, we should maintain the current system. But why should we have unnecessary disambiguation in article titles? As to the aesthetic value of disambiguation notices, I suppose that's a personal matter - I find it aesthetically unpleasant that the article on New York City is at New York, New York and that Chicago is at Chicago, Illinois. So I suppose it's a matter of personal taste. You can find my fuller thoughts on this stuff at Talk:New York, New York and Mav's talk page. john 18:14, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, I don't care if we make an exception here and there, but as I can tell there is no compelling reason for NYC to be at either location other than the arbitrary standard. A redirect is cheap and we have them all over the place. No matter what is chosen, a redirect will fix it. This is a Wiki, nothing is final anyway. If someone creates a new article, like Chicago, and then redirects Chicago, Illinois to it, I wouldn't care that much because in reality I can't think of any reason other than personal preference that puts one over the other. Except, that is, that if we always do it the same way it is consistent. Many times people have asked me to change ways that I do things that I thought was good and I changed it anyway. This is just one of those things that we should just stop worrying about it and get back to work. Is is that bad to just do whatever the standard says when we already have redirects? Put aside personal preference. --Ram-Man 12:06, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

Here's my problem - I think the specific standard conflicts with general wikipedia standards that we should use the most commonly used name. And I see no compelling reason to do this. Australia is able to get by with only using the state name when necessary, without getting into many problems. I don't think any German cities use this form of disambiguation. English cities only use it when appropriate. So why is it necessary to have a uniform standard for U.S. city names that results in hideous article titles like New York, New York? If I could see a compelling case for why this uniform standard is necessary, I would agree with you, but I am still unclear as to what that compelling case is. That is to say - I don't like the fact that European cities are located at nice, clear places like Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and so forth, the big Australian cities are just at Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, and so on and so on; while major American cities have to be at annoying looking locations like New York, New York, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois, and completely unambiguous Japanese cities are at places like Kyoto, Kyoto, Osaka, Osaka, Hiroshima, Hiroshima, and so on and so forth. This is just ugly and unnecessary. john 18:50, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

A proposal

Now, here's my proposal after reading all of these debates. It's certainly not meant as a voting issue (yet), but perhaps it could serve as a basis for changes and development into a convention to be agreed upon.

  • For U.S. cities, use City, State as it is the official way. I may be stupid or just European, but I don't see what's wrong with Los Angeles, California or Chicago, Illinois just because they are less common (cf. the peerage discussion at Mav's talk page). It would have been a quite different matter if they were actually never referred to in this way.
    • The one exception I can think of would be the controversial New York, New York, which should be moved to New York City iff (1) it is agreed that the two names officially refer to different entities, the latter being the one the article deals with, as suggested by Alex756 on its talk page, or (2) it is agreed that the title causes confusion as people will connect it with the song rather than the city (I admit to this myself).
      • What does it mean to say that "it is the official way"? That's nonsense. It's used in postal codes. The cities themselves are not officially named New York, New York or Los Angeles, California. They're the "City of New York" and the "City of Los Angeles". john 19:39, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
Um, well, no. Los Angeles is "El Puelbo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciuncula". RickK 04:07, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
My bad. But it's not Los Angeles, California, is the important point. john 04:28, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
  • For other federations (such as Australia, Germany, India etc), do the same thing iff the local Wikipedians find it non-ridiculous. They really should know best. Personally I would be perfectly happy to have Adelaide, South Australia etc.
It's certainly ridiculous, and largely unnecessary, for Germany (although I'm not a local, so don't quote me). I don't see why this should be the default, anyway. Disambiguation should be used when necessary, not unless ridiculous. john 19:39, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
  • In all other cases, use only City unless disambiguation is needed. Use commonsensical judgement for whether If one of the cities is famous enough to gather a consensus to remain at City, it should do so.
Why is this okay for cities in countries that are not federations, but not okay for cities in federations? john 19:39, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
  • Try disambiguating using, in the following order, City, Country; City, Region; City, Region, Country (might be needed in cases like Victoria or Georgia). If none of these work, add lower levels as needed. -- Jao 12:58, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
I am pretty happy with most of Jao's proposal; the only problem is "Use commonsensical judgement for whether one of the cities is famous enough to remain at City." I got into a terrible edit war with Mintguy about some tiny English cities like Exeter, which he thought was "famous enough." I would want to have some sort of criterion that could be more unambiguously applied. - BRG 14:33, May 5, 2004 (UTC)
The proposal, while it is not all my preference, sounds acceptable to me. As for the "commonsensical judgment", the most famous city depends really on your context, such as what country you live in. I propose that if no mutual agreement can be reached after discussion that the city article simply be the disambiguation page, so that Exeter would be what is now Exeter (disambiguation) and what is now Exeter would be moved to Exeter, England. Personally that is how I would always do it, then there is no arguing as to what should go in the Exeter article. --Ram-Man 16:17, May 5, 2004 (UTC)
Agreed. I think I worded that sentence a bit poorly, see changes above. It has to be based on consensus, of course, and if none of the cities gather such a consensus, clearly none of them are famous enough. Needless to say, all this would be easier if there was an objective set of criteria, as BRG suggests, but I suspect that any such set of criteria would result in obviously weird decisions in a few cases. -- Jao 18:35, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
I wish that Ram-Man had had a chance to be heard when Mintguy and I had been arguing about Exeter. His position is identical to mine. - BRG 19:10, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

I don't see why we can't have cities anywhere named under the city, assuming that there can be a consensus that it is famous enough to do so. john 19:39, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

In my opinion, the current standard for US city naming is a good thing. It simplifies. It frees us from constant move and edit wars about where things should be. It means that when I'm writing an article and want to link to a US city, I know exactly what I should link to without having to check.

It also removes the nasty pro-US bias that would inevitably occur, because so many American cities are named after places in Europe.


I think this proposal is highly damaging, and is attempting to disturb and displace a useful and peaceful consensus just to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of a few users. I urge my fellow Wikipedians to leave the stable status quo well alone. —Morven 00:36, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

What evidence is there that there would be constant move and edit wars? I'm suggesting that we use disambiguation only when necessary. I don't see why this is so hard to figure out - we do that with every other article in the wikipedia, without constant move and edit wars. john 00:47, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

What reason, besides personal preference, is there for not having disambiguation pages or redirects (redirects may be most common for the majority of cities) that point to the main articles? --Ram-Man 02:44, May 6, 2004 (UTC)
Because disambiguation should only be used when it is necessary. No other encyclopedia includes the state name in the title of its articles about major cities. john 04:03, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Speaking more broadly, a city is a kind of thing with a clear definition, and there should be a broad, flexible policy for naming all cities, rather than a bunch of narrow, restrictive policies for naming cities in different countries. Why should world cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City be named according to completely different standards from great cities of other parts of the world? john 00:52, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't see why we can't have cities anywhere named under the city. I don't see why we can't have cities anywhere named under the compounded name. The point is that for most cities we can have an article in one name and redirect from the other. For all practical purposes these are the same. I agree for the most part that it doesn't matter what the name is, in either fashion. Are we really fighting over something this minor? I don't get it. Whether Hempfield or Hempfield, Pennsylvania, they both should go to the same place. If you insist on one in particular, you better have a real reason other than preference because it has no functional difference. The *only* very minor reason I can think of in this scenario is that it is more predictable if you use the latter form. For instance, when I do bot updates, I don't want to have to manually edit the Hempfield article if there is more than one city by that name and one of them happens to be at Hempfield. It is *much* easier if they all have their own individual article and if it is always in a single format. This is the reason for "disambiguating", although I think this really is very loose as both names are perfectly valid representations and it is hard to argue that one is a disambiguation title. Now it may be true that most people in the town call it by its name without the state, anyone who does not know of it beforehand would have no idea. In that respect, adding the state allows you to know MORE about the city in question, or even that it IS a city. Again this is only a very minor point. Since most of the 30,000 U.S. city articles are rarely ever manually editted, maintaining them via the bot is vitally important. It would take too long to do it otherwise. Having a consistent format is VITAL for this to take place. I don't care what you do with non-U.S. cities, and I don't mind the occasional exception to the rule in the U.S., but changing the current U.S. city layout will cause massive headaches when trying to update the 30,000+ city articles with new census data. Maybe it won't get done! If we change the format to use more of the City names, who else is willing to perform the updates to all those 30,000 cities? --Ram-Man 02:37, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

There won't be new census data for ten years, will there? And the purpose of an encyclopedia is not to report census data about US cities, or to make things easy for a bot. I'd also note that your example of Hempfield is a complete straw man - I'm not proposing that small towns that nobody's heard of be listed without the state, just major cities where there would be no confusion about what city is meant. And my real reasons for this are that a) no other encyclopedia uses the city, state formula for articles on major cities; b) it results in deeply ugly and, to be honest, weird and actually ambiguous, article titles like New York, New York, which are only justified by this policy; c) it results in a standard whereby American city articles are titled differently from articles on cities in other parts of the world, for no reason other than so that a bot can work more easily; and d) the basic wikipedia policy is to use disambiguation only when necessary. After all, it would be completely consistent if every individual had an article at their full name, no matter how long, because there might be another person of the same commonly used name. But we don't do that, because it's silly, and we can use judgment. The same applies in this case. And, once again, I am not suggesting that most American cities be moved - most American cities are little known, and share their name with cities in other states. Such articles clearly shouldn't be moved. I'm not talking about Hempfield, Pennsylvania, or Storrs, Connecticut, or whatever hell tiny town nobody has heard of before. I'm talking about major American cities, where there is no confusion as to what is being referred to, being located at silly unnecessary disambiguating locations. And, so far as I can tell, entirely for the convenience of a bot. Wikipedia is supposed to be for the benefit of readers, not for the convenience of a bot updating census data nobody's really interested in anyway. john 04:02, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

The bot example is hardly the reason for the current policy. I am not sure that anyone but me even thought of it. And the census bureau does give updates more frequently than 10 years, although 2010 is the next full census. With regards to your points, it doesn't matter if other encyclopedias have a different name because this is not a standard encyclopedia. It is not difficult in actuality to get to the article you want no matter the title. It is sometimes automatic. As I said before, even though wikipedia policy is to only use disambiguation when necessary, using the U.S. City, State format is accepted by those in the U.S. and it has widespread usage. It is argueably not even slightly disambiguation. Do whatever you want with other country's towns. Nevertheless, if this is only for a few major cities, It doesn't bother me that much what format we use, as I said above that exceptions are not that big of a deal. --Ram-Man 12:12, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

Well, nobody agrees with me, as far as I can tell. So, whatever. If people want to have articles in ridiculous locations so that a bot can upload uninteresting census data, whatever. I'm done with this argument. In fact, why don't we have all U.S. cities at City, County, State? Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California would clearly disambiguate Los Angeles from any other possible cities named Los Angeles in California. Since there are a few cities that do share names in different states, it's pretty clear that we should name all articles this way, in order to preventively disambiguate, and prevent all these endless edit wars we've been getting into about whether Hicksville, Hick County, Arkansas or Hicksville, Dull County, Arkansas should get the coveted Hicksville, Arkansas location. And it would make it easier for the bot to upload data about the exact acreage of these municipalities! And let's add the département to the name of every French city. Paris, Seine is much better than just Paris. After all, we don't want to confuse it with Paris, Indiana. Unhappily, john 04:45, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

The US does have a long-standing tradition of using 'Name, State', though, which many other countries don't. That does make a difference. —Morven 08:01, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
I certainly agree with you. New York, New York looks absurd to me (and Los Angeles, California and Chicago, Illinois almost as silly), and "everything must be consistent" seems a pretty silly reason to disambiguate major world cities. (There's also the factor that most non-Americans haven't the faintest what state most major cities are in, because everywhere else they aren't talked about with the state after them. I don't know where Detroit is, for instance.) And, to reverse the nationality situation, if consistency is reason enough to put New York at such a silly place as this, I see no reason why it's not reason enough to include peerages in the article title of every single peer. Proteus (Talk) 08:40, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
What is so absurd about Chicago, Illinois? I think that it is very common to refer to that city by that name. - BRG 19:10, May 6, 2004 (UTC)
I've never heard it called that. I only know it's in Illinois because I've been there. Proteus (Talk) 21:17, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
I have heard of cities referred that way too. WhisperToMe 01:43, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm sure people in the US call them that all the time, but this isn't an American encyclopaedia. Everyone else in the world calls Chicago "Chicago". Proteus (Talk) 09:25, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
With respect, NO. Here's a direct quotation from a judgment of the New Zealand Court of Appeal, which I came across this morning while editing a version of it: "[2] Mr K had applied to the Family Court, under the Guardianship Amendment Act 1991, for an order that his children, S and L be returned to Chicago, Illinois, United States of America under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (the Hague Convention)."
The trouble with the U.S. is that there are only a few examples of unique city names there. Americans have responded to this by having a convention of [City, State] whenever there is any question as to which city is being referred to. In fact, this tendency is so strong that even unambiguous city names are very often referred to this way ("Albuquerque" is a very unique name, yet I almost always here it referred to as Albuquerque, New Mexico unless New Mexico has already been established through context). The state name, in fact, plays a role not-unlike sir names do for people's names. So while Sacramento is perhaps unambiguously the capital of California, it would be odd to refer to it in the [City] format when nearly ever other U.S. city article is in the [City, State] format. Comparisons to other encyclopedias are not valid since no other encyclopedia has articles on nearly all cities in the U.S. When 30,000+ things are in one format, people will expect to see all of them in the same format. This is a very strong de-facto standard and we should follow standards that exist external to Wikipedia whenever possible. --mav 05:59, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
That may be the custom in the US, but this isn't an encyclopaedia purely for Americans. No one else in the world uses pointless disambiguation when talking about major US cities. And it isn't like the articles on US towns and cities exist in a vacuum. It's far more likely that a reader will say "Well, London is at London, Paris is at Paris and Madrid is at Madrid, so Chicago's probably at Chicago" than "Well, Freedomville, Alabama, is at Freedomville, Alabama, so Chicago, Illinois, is probably at Chicago, Illinois". Proteus (Talk) 09:37, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
I am really amazed that anyone finds it at all unusual to refer to "Chicago, Illinois." On the other hand, it is very common to leave out the state name when a place is nearby. I would guess that more often when people in this area (the near-Washington part of the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area) say "Vienna" they mean Vienna, Virginia, not the Vienna in Austria; when they say "Kensington" they mean Kensington, Maryland, not the one in London, etc. Since Wikipedia is fr worldwide use, it is better to disambiguate. On top of this, even many of the largest cities in the USA have namesakes elsewhere; there are Detroit, Texas, Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Boston, Virginia, for example. (And yes, there is even a Chicago, Wisconsin!) -- BRG 16:02, May 7, 2004 (UTC)
My wife has many freinds and relatives in Germany and we have lived in Chicago and currently live near Detroit. I think it's safe to say that all of them know of Chicago and Detroit, though many of them would not know Illinois from Michigan from Ohio, aside from a general sense that they are somewhere in the U.S. midwest. States don't generally have the same level of familiarity as these very large and well-known cities. So what if there is a Detroit, Texas, or a Philadelphia, Mississippi or any number of smaller places with the same name. This happens all the time and in most cases where one entity is extremely well-known in comparison to the others, that entity occupies the simple title with an alternate uses note directing users to a disambiguation page. So the fact that there are other relatively unknown places with the same name makes no difference. older≠wiser 16:40, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

I must say that I agree entirely with Bkonrad here, as I've probably already made clear. But, another point, related to the convention. The convention is partially justified on the basis that it conforms with US postal service usage. This can be misleading, though. In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I'm from, there are numerous post office designations that are much larger than the municipalities with which they share their name. For instance, my parents' home has the post office address of "Kensington, Maryland." However, it is not part of the Town of Kensington. The City of Rockville is considerably smaller than the area where people put "Rockville, MD" on their mailing address. So what are these articles referring to? From the Rockville article, I must say that I have absolutely no idea. So, then, the current, utterly unambiguous standard is not, in fact, all that unambiguous. At any rate, I find that the defenders of the current policy are using complete straw men. Of course Vienna, Virginia and Kensington, Maryland need to be disambiguated. No one is suggesting that they not be. That's a complete different matter from well-known cities where there is already a redirect from the city name to the city, state format. john 22:50, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

I think it should be obvious that this policy creates decidedly bad names in the cases of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. This fact in and of itself should be sufficient reason to revisit the policy and revise it so that it creates good names for those cities. We can't have multiple articles with the same name, so we have disambiguation. But disambiguation should only be a last resort for page naming, not something to embrace when things get slightly tricky. The whole policy of insisting on City, State for US cities is lame and those cities which are unambiguous should just be at City. The first sentence will explain what state it's in: why does that information have to be included in the page title. What makes the state a city is in such a privileged fact over any other fact about the city that it should be required in the article title? I don't see any good reason. Nohat 01:26, 2004 May 10 (UTC)

Moved from Talk:City of New York

[[1]] on the vote here, it was 4 yes to 2 no for the U.S. naming convention. 66% yes to 33% no. WhisperToMe 05:03, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

4 to 2? That's an intensely small number of votes, and it was taken two years ago. I think this decision ought to be revisited. john 05:06, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I assume there were not that many people on WP back then. WhisperToMe 05:18, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

One would assume. Given the number of people who've raised concerns with the policy recently, I think a new vote is absolutely in order - as I said at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names), I think this would be beneficial no matter how the vote turns out - I don't see a policy decided two years ago by four people as having any particular validity when more than four people are currently objecting to it. If a new vote showed solid support for this policy, I think it would be much harder for me and others to argue against it. john 05:34, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree: 4 to 2 seems more like an opinion in an ad hoc discussion group than any kind of consensus. Still in all, even if [City, State} is appropriate in most cases (as disambiguation), this seems foolish for well-known places. To state it yet again again, London, Rome, Berlin, and on and on, don't even have country names attached, even though there are other Londons, Romes and Berlins around the world. -- Cecropia | Talk 05:39, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

To state yet again, specific naming policies override general ones. And in addition, there are cities out there which some would consider a world city, and that others wouldn't. WhisperToMe 05:49, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are not among these. At any rate, to state yet again, this "specific naming policy" is based on the votes of four people two years ago. It ought to be revisited. john 05:53, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Maybe not, but what about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Should it recieve special treatment? WhisperToMe 05:56, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

There is no other notable city named Pittsburgh. It should be at Pittsburgh. Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati, San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Virginia Beach, Oklahoma City, Topeka, Santa Fe, and so on and so forth, have no particular reason not to be at those locations, either. I'd say that Boston and Cleveland, Ohio, which are named for places in England, have probably sufficiently outstripped their namesakes to warrant this treatment as well, although I'm ready to be convinced otherwise. I mean, I'd say that a city should have to either be a state capital or have more than 100,000 people or so to be considered for not having to be disambiguated. Once you get to that point, you should have to use normal disambiguation rules - are there other cities of that name? Is the largest city of that name sufficiently better known than the others to deserve the main article space? And so on. I see no reason to think this will cause any particular problems - it has not done so with the many cities in other world countries that we have articles on. john 06:04, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

This is really not rocket science. Cases where disambiguation is needed are fairly obvious. Example: Kansas City, MO or KS. And it might be useful in very small locales or those with seconary meaning (or both): Intercourse, PA. -- Cecropia | Talk 06:12, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Or places named after people - Bismarck, North Dakota, Saint Louis, Missouri, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I'd say that most of the 30,000 articles on US municipalities are almost certainly fine where they are. john 06:20, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Again, what constitutes as an "important city", and what doesn't? There are obvious ones, yes. But there are also not-so-obvious ones. This is a bit closer to rocket science than one thought... WhisperToMe 06:23, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I said state capitals and cities with populations of over 100,000 probably qualify as important. These should not be disambiguated unless a) there are multiple cities where it's hard to say that one is particularly more famous than the other; or b) the city has a secondary meaning deserving of its own encyclopedia article. When in doubt, disambiguate. john 06:29, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

And when there's no reasonable doubt, don't! Like ... erm ... New York City! :) -- Cecropia | Talk 06:32, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

But some people will not like seeing NYC get special preference in opposition to other cities, e.g. Los Angeles. Either way, this is a no-win issue. WhisperToMe 06:35, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Huh? We're saying do the same thing for Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. as for New York. We can address the question of, say, Tempe, when we get there. (assuming that people decide to revise the current policy). But perhaps this should all go at the Naming conventions page. I'm going to copy this discussion over there. john 06:37, 10 May 2004 (UTC)


A motion for reconsideration

Given that WhisperToMe has just pointed out the actual vote whereby the US city naming policy was determined, I note that only six people actually voted on this policy - 4 in favor and 2 against. Whereas more than six people have in the last few days expressed an opinion on this subject, and many have expressed doubts about whether this policy is a good idea (including Cecropia (maybe - I'm not sure if he was disagreeing with the policy in general, or just its application to New York), BKonrad, Nohat, Proteus, and myself - that is to say, almost as many people as voted in the original decision), I move that this policy (and, by extension, that for Canadian cities) be reopened for a new vote. I think that, as it stands now, a policy decided by four people nearly two years ago cannot be used as an argument for preventing any further discussion of this question at all. A new vote would either a) provide greater legitimacy for the current policy if it is supported by a majority; or b) justly overturn a policy for which there is no longer a consensus. Do I have a second? john 05:17, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Vote and vote and vote and vote until you get your way. You've already gotten your way despite the vote, so why bother? You are all going to do whatever you want to do. RickK 05:20, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I have not moved the page. Furthermore, the vote was in favor of moving the city to New York City. The page is currently at City of New York. I 1) resent being accused of doing things that I had nothing to do with; and 2) am trying to come up with a way to resolve the dispute, which currently seems inresoluble within the confines of the New York page. Furthermore, I'd like to see you defend the principle that a 4-2 vote from two years ago supersedes the outcome of a 17-15 vote from yesterday. john 05:30, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree; the vote actually was in favor of New York City by a small majority, countering a long ago vote of 4-2. In general I second John Kenney's proposal for a complete reconsideration of the policy. I feel that the [city, state] or [city, province] convention is only appropriate when there is a clear need for disambiguation--for example, two well-known cities like Portland, ME and Portland, OR. Common sense tells us that New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and many other cities need no disambiguation in the title. If Rome can take you straight to Rome, Italy, with the notation that there are other "Romes", we can do the same for well-known US and Canadian cities. Cecropia | Talk 05:49, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
Partly, this is a continuation of a long-existing Wikipedia problem that page naming is, unfortunately, POV. A decision has to be made on the primary name of a page, and thus it's one of the most contentious choices here.
This then leads to the disambiguation question: when name collisions happen, should we take the more neutral but less useful tactic of having a disambiguation page and make all the meanings the same level, or do we promote one of them to the highest level on the basis that it is 'the most important' (that's a very POV use of language in itself) and make all the others hang off an 'other meanings' link.
I'll lay out what I consider important here: firstly, that [[City, State]] should ALWAYS work either directly or as a redirect. And that it should be policy NOT to edit articles to remove the redirect if that points to a redirection page. If I link to Boston, Massachusetts that says I want to be precise; if it's decided, say, that Boston should be occupied by the American city and the British one demoted, that's a POV decision that may be altered later to go the other way round. I don't want all my links to the correct place broken by people messing around with renames in future.
While I'd disagree that this is (exactly) a POV decision - it's no more POV than the implicit statement that Boston, Lincolnshire, is as important as Boston, Massachusetts which would be supported by using disambiguation - but this seems like a fair thought - certainly, I agree with the first part. john 09:43, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
I think you misunderstand me here: ANY decision here is inherently taking a certain point of view. This is why page naming causes a lot of controversy. It's POV to put one above the other; it's also POV to declare them of the same status.
Secondly, I will be personally VERY unhappy if anyone decides to do page moves like that Boston example. I do NOT think that American cities named after European ones should take primacy at the bare city name page. Wikipedia is Americentric enough.
As I said above, I'm not sure about examples like this. Boston, Massachusetts is a much larger, and more famous, city than Boston, Lincolnshire. On the other hand, the Cambridge in Cambridgeshire is clearly more famous than the one in Massachusetts. BTW, Boston currently redirects to Boston, Massachusetts. john 09:47, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
Ah, it does? Should have checked first. Actually, on reflection, I see the point on Boston; it was a bad example. I'm more concerned about closer-run cases, such as ones where the American city might be larger but the European one more famous. I'd say in any case where both places are well known outside their local area that we should disambiguate by default. —Morven 14:17, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
Richmond upon Thames and Richmond, Virginia, perhaps? I'd agree that disambiguation by default is the way to go in such cases. As I said, when in doubt, disambiguate. Only for obvious cases where one might say "why the hell are we disambiguating this?" should we not. (I am sad to note that the English city of Richmond is apparently no longer in Surrey, assuming it every was, but is rather in Greater London...ah well) john 15:06, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
Richmond upon Thames (not a city by the way) is administered by a London borough council, but is still situated within the traditional county of Surrey, and unless every brick is moved to another county, no amount of meddling with administrative borders will change that. Owain 09:35, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
Thirdly, I think any decision made in either direction on this should only affect the very largest and best known American cities. Leave all the small fry alone; there are better things to be done on Wikipedia than fighting a rename war on every piddly town. —Morven 08:58, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
Well, I think, say, Virginia Beach, or Oklahoma City, or what not, should probably be included, too. But, as I said, when in doubt, disambiguate. If there's any reasonable amount of confusion to be considered, stick with including the state. john 09:43, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Some observations

Before there is any vote on this cluster of issues, I hope that we can at least come to a clear sense of just what is being voted on. There have been two fairly contentious votes over naming issues recently, and both have been flawed (IMO) by a lack of clarity in framing the issues being voted on. In both cases, a vote was held concerning the naming of specific cities, while the actual issues concerned how to interpret policy statements.

In the recent Wikipedia:Naming policy poll vote concerning Kiev/Kyiv, Calcutta/Kolkata, Mecca/Makkah, and Gothenburg / Göteborg, ostensibly the vote was about agreeing or disagreeing with the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names); however the vote was largely a popularity poll on the names. IMO, the real issue was that there is no incontrovertible method for fairly assessing what is really the most common current usage throughout the english speaking world. At best, the Wikipedia:Google Test offers only a **very** rough indication. IMO, the vote would have been more productive if it had tried to establish some criteria for determining the "most common usage" rather than voting up or down on four separate specific instances as a group.

The more recent New York City naming poll was a vote on five different names for the article, but did not directly address the underlying issues about the applicable policies, which as I see it are 1) whether the specific U.S. city naming policy should take precedence over the more general Use Common Names policy; and 2) whether the specific U.S. city naming policy to preemptively disamiguate names should apply in all cases without exception.

FWIW, my position on Kiev/Kyiv and related items is that for international place names and in the absence of an incontrovertible method for establishing the most commonly used name throughout the entire english-speaking world, we should by default defer to the expressly declared official english spellings of a place where that spelling is recognized by other international entities such as the UN and various national embassies. Without such a default position, we need to establish exactly how we determine what is the "most commonly used" name, otherwise these sorts of controversies will continue to reoccur. I don't want to reopen the Kiev/Kyiv debate here, but I do want to suggest that we NEED a clear statement about how to determine "most common" usage.

For NYC, my position is that the fact that the undisambiguated names for so many of the large cities ALREADY redirect to the City,State forms is de facto evidence that a decision has been made that those names are most commonly used to refer to those cities. In typical usage, people are far more likely to use the undisambiguated names, such as Chicago or New York City, or Detroit, rather than the city,state form. Certainly people do use that form in some contexts, but most of the time it is not necessary to specify the state--the cities are well known on their own. I think john's suggestions above for a cutoff at 100,000 is reasonable (i.e., unambiguous names for cities larger than 100,000 would be titled simply by the Cityname (with City,State as a redirect). Places smaller than 100,000 would be named City,State (and in cases where there is no ambiguity, the Cityname would redirect to City,State).

In sum, I think john is quite right in moving this discussion to the policy page, as the issue is better addressed as policy rather than application to a specific instance. older≠wiser 14:03, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I absolutely agree that if there is to be a vote on this policy, we need to be absolutely clear what is being voted on. I suggest that we bat around the wording on a temp page or something and get it so that it's as immaculate as possible before we open voting - for this to have any value, we need to a) be absolutely clear about what we are voting on; b) run the vote in as fair and open a manner as possible. I'd prefer not to have RickK coming in all "you're just holding votes until you win," if that's possible (I suspect that it is not, though, but we can always try.) john 15:13, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

John's comment here meets with my approval. There are a number of different issues here, and it's not just a case of "sufficiently large" (I think there are at least two famous Portlands in the USA, besides a lot of smaller ones, yet there is probably only one place named Ronkonkoma). Let us be clear that even "City, State" does not disambiguate completely, but even there, there are some cases where one is much bigger than another (I have noticed that someone has made the article on Rochester go to "Rochester, Monroe County, New York" -- despite the fact that "Rochester, New York" would always be understood as meaning that one, becaise there is a much smaller Rochester in NY State as well.) And while we are trying to come up with policy, let's revisit these tiny British cities that have gotten priority over American cities named for them, like Exeter, Colchester, etc. I still feel that these should be qualified with country name, whether you make it "Exeter, UK" or "Exeter, England" (putting both "England" and "UK" would possibly be overkill!) For the record, I support maximum necessary disambiguation; therefore, since there is a Philadelphia, Mississippi (and even a Philadelphia, New York!), I would make Philadelphia a disambiguation page, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the article on the biggest of the Philadelphias. -- BRG 14:41, May 11, 2004 (UTC)
Just for the record, I think it would be more appropriate if UK places that need disambiguating were disambiguated with Place, County rather than Place, Country or Place, UK. It's always struck me as quite rude to put most other countries in the world on the same level as US states. (Anywhere big enough to cross county boundaries, like Bristol or Peterborough, is probably too important for disambiguation anyway.) Also, you can't generally judge the importance of cities purely by their population - their political, cultural and historical significance has to be taken into account as well. Exeter may not be enormous, but it's certainly far more significant than any US place called Exeter. Proteus (Talk) 18:29, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
I think it's quite rude that everywhere in the US, even famous cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are disambiguated, while even smaller cities in much of the world are just listed under their city names, as though they were the only ones that existed, or mattered. -- Cecropia | Talk 18:36, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Agree with Proteus and Cecropia, actually. English cities should be disambiguated using county, rather than country. Big American cities should be treated like big cities anywhere else. john 19:33, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Let the English do what they see fit for their cities, but given the pattern that 99% of U.S. cities follow the [City, State] format is not so much about disambiguation as it is a standard naming system that makes every city name predictable and consistant. We should follow that since it avoids naming issues. Redirects and disambiguation pages will direct people to the standardized names - they will not be lost and Wikipedia's set of articles on U.S. cities will be consistant. It is simply jarring to mix an extreme minority naming scheme with a supermajority one in the same set of articles. --mav 08:40, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Proposed policy

Please see my proposed policy for handling the naming of geographical places at Wikipedia:Geographical names naming policy (proposed) Nohat 18:51, 2004 May 11 (UTC)

I agree with some of it, but I think any policy which results in articles at Some Place, United States is to be avoided. john 19:33, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
Then why on earth should [[Someplace, United Kingdom]], or whatever country, be used?
James F. (talk) 09:15, 12 May 2004 (UTC)
Belatedly, I completely agree - British places should use traditional county, if it's necessary to disambiguate, I think. Other countries should use the disambiguation that is naturally used within that country. If there is no typical disambiguation, I'd prefer parentheses to commas - Tripoli (Libya) and Tripoli (Lebanon) rather than Tripoli, Libya and Tripoli, Lebanon. john 16:30, 18 May 2004 (UTC)
Why do we even need such a rigid naming scheme? Surely the purpose of an encylopaedia is to give information to the potential audience in a way they can understand it? US "City, State" and UK "City, Traditional County" are the way people name places in those two countries, so why try to force a universal format on everyone? Think of the audience! Owain 10:56, 12 May 2004 (UTC)
Can anyone explain to me what the controversy is about "traditional counties" vs. "administrative counties"? As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to let UK place names be disambiguated by any subdivision the UK people feel comfortable with; I just can't abide the blanket decision that Exeter, Colchester, etc. (unqualified) be used for the one in the UK. But I'm much more familiar with the use of one of the names in the set {England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland} (what are these subdivisions referred to as?) so at least if it is decided to make it [[Exeter, Devon]] we have a redirect from [[Exeter, England]]. -- BRG 14:45, May 25, 2004 (UTC)
Explain the controversy is about "traditional counties" vs. "administrative counties"? Oh boy, that's one big can of worms! Basically until 1888 everyone knew what county a place was in (its traditional county), then 'administrative counties' were created that mirrored the traditional ones almost exactly. Then since 1965 those administrative boundaries have been messed around with to the point that nobody knows where a place is anymore! e.g. Leicester is in the administrative county of Leicester, not Leicestershire! As for placename, England, Scotland, Wales, &c, hardly anyone outside the US uses that notation. I'm all for a flexible structure wherever possible. "Think of the Audience!" Owain 14:59, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

The current policy says, "there are no special naming conventions for cities" and, in the following sentence, sets out a special naming convention for cities. Then it identifies the problem: "Over 30,000 U.S. city articles are already in the form of "City, State" even if they do not need disambiguation." So, the policy of disambiguating when there is no need already has the weight of inertia on its side. The statement, "There is some dispute as to the general applicability of this convention" is no doubt true (and is about the only statement on that page that makes any sense). A dispute would seem unavoidable since the special policy contradicts the general policy (not to mention the fact that it is being used selectively). If I can vote, I vote for any proposal that repudiates the convention of unnecessarily disambiguating US and Canadia cities. Bluelion 13:41, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

I really think we're never going to achieve anything resembling consensus here. I doubt that any policy that Bluelion accepts will be acceptable to me, and vice versa. And we have John who seems to agree with Bluelion, and Ram-Man who (I believe) agrees with me. This is going to be an extremely tough nut to crack. -- BRG 14:38, May 18, 2004 (UTC)
Yes, I see nothing resembling an incipient consensus coming out of any of this. Which is why a vote is in order - hopefully we could all agree to respect the results of a vote? I'd note that BRG's proposed policy - of pre-emptively disambiguating every city name, was strongly rejected at the time of the original votes. I'd also agree with Owain that we should have a flexible disambiguation policy that allows for use of disambiguators commonly in use in the area in question. john 16:25, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

I think the big problem is that place names fall into three groups:

  1. Unique names like "Ronkonkoma," "Twentynine Palms," and "Ouagadougou"
  2. Non-unique names, where one of the places is much more significant than all the others, like "Vienna," "Philadelphia," and "London"
  3. Non-unique names, where at least two of the places are significant enough to matter, like "Portland" and "Springfield"

If all we had were the first and third, there would be little to argue about; it hardly matters whether "Ronkonkoma" is the main article, with "Ronkonkoma, New York" being a redirect to it, or vice versa, and surely nobody, not even Bluelion, must doubt that "Springfield" has to be disambiguated. The problem is that there is this second group, which I want disambuguated and Bluelion/John do not. There is also a secondary problem, that many of us disagree as to whether a given name belongs in the second or the third category. Hence my edit war with Mintguy over Exeter. I think that because it is so hard to draw the line between category-2 and category-3 names, it is better to treat all non-unique names as if they were in category 3, and then, because category 1 is so small, to disambiguate those names (but with redirects) for consistency. Part of the reason I feel this way is that I have probably constructed more disambiguation pages than any other Wikipedian (and I would not be surprised to find that I have constructed more than all other Wikipedians combined!) and added to most of the ones that I have not constructed. And whenever I build a new one I have to check to see that the name has not already been pre-empted by someone who has decided that the name in question is in what I have here designated as category 2. It would be much simpler if any disambiguation page for a city name would be at "Cityname" rather than some being at "Cityname" and others being at "Cityname (disambiguation)." -- BRG 13:31, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia policy is that the main thing with a particular name gets the main title and that everything else is disambiguated ("if one meaning is clearly predominant, it remains at "Mercury", the general title"). If you don't like that policy, then try to change it (perhaps here would be the appropriate place to start), but you haven't actually presented any arguments to explain why cities should be different in this respect from every other topic in Wikipedia. At the end of the day, pages should be named to help the average user, not to help editors. The vast majority of people looking for big cities will look for them at London, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit, and making those needless disambiguation pages will be unhelpful and will probably make Wikipedia look stupid. Proteus (Talk) 14:45, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Of course it can be difficult to draw the line between your category 2 and your category 3. That does not mean the attempt should not be made. I've already agreed, at any rate, that in cases where it's uncertain, we should disambiguate. But there are many cases where it's not at all unclear. john 16:12, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I think that BRG's assessment is quite accurate. While BRG would rather just make every category 2 into a category 3 for reason of simplicity and consistency (and frankly to avoid fighting over it). I agree with this, however, if put to a vote i'd accept any result. What i'd prefer to see is that if category 2 conflicts are not able to be resolved without consensus, then it will have to be treated as a category 3. But if a consensus can be found on the most important city in a category 2, then I suppose we should allow it (if the vote turns that way that is) in the main article. Note: The common error repeated is that adding the State to a U.S. city is considered to be disambiguation. In the U.S., both forms are equally acceptable names. It is a variation of the name, NOT disambiguation. So whether we have Chicago or Chicago, Illinois should not be decided because one is a disambiguation but because one is clearly more popular or because we have a consensus opinion on it. --Ram-Man 16:26, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

It is a longer variation of the name whose sole purpose is disambiguation. At any rate, I agree with the idea of using disambiguation if a consensus cannot be arrived at that there should not be. This is just common sense, and general wikipedia policy. I see no reason why we need to needlessly disambiguate when there's no reason to do so except a general policy to disambiguate. john 19:22, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

While I basically agree with john about this, I don't think its quite accurate to say the city,state convention's "sole purpose is disambiguation"--another agrument is consistency. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the consistency argument, especially for the myriad tiny villages and unincorporated communities across the U.S. But I do think it is a bit silly for an internationally well-known city like Chicago to be at Chicago, Illinois, where Illinois is a far less well-known entity world-wide.
Echoing Ram-Man, I think we need to keep in mind there are two separate issues here. One is BRG's proposal to require that every common name be a disambiguation page, regardless of whether any one entity is the one primarily intended by the name. Second is the issue that john, bluelion, myself, and others have objected to the U.S. cities naming convention where all the cities are named city,state, even in cases where the unmodified city name automatically redirects to the city,state form.
Personally I think BRG's proposal is horrible and would quickly lead to absurd situations. If I understand it correctly, under what BRG proposes, even "New York" would be a disambiguation page since it can refer to either the city or the state (and maybe there are some other New Yorks somewhere?) and "Illinois" would also, since there are contexts in which reasonable persons might use the names to refer to entities other than then ones typically intended outside of those specific contexts (i.e., the Illinois River, the Illinois tribe, even the University of Illinois (e.g, "Purdue is playing Illinois today")). older≠wiser 14:43, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Proteus that no case has been made for even having a special convention for cities, and I agree that it only serves to make Wikipedia look stupid (understatement of the century), since it contradicts the general Wikipedia convention that article titles should be based on common usage. Those who don't like the general Wikipedia convention that titles should be based on common usage should have the decency to stand up and admit they want to change the general convention rather than taking the coward's way out by trying to sabotage it. Bluelion 20:45, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

But it's a general convention that article titles follow common usage, mostly because "common usage" itself varies from place to place. This is why we disambiguate. - jredmond 22:21, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm fine with large U.S. and Canadian cities breaking from the existing naming convention, provided that

  1. there's consensus that common worldwide usage for a particular city name refers to a particular city — Paris=city in France, even though there's a Paris, Texas, Paris, Kentucky, etc., and even though the locals in those towns don't include the state name in their own common usage
  2. smaller cities, towns, etc. stick to the existing [[Cityname, State]] convention
  3. where there is conflict between a state or nation's name and a city's name, the larger entity gets the main article but links to the city — Washington=state; has disambig link to Washington, D.C.
  4. when the city article is moved to [[Cityname]], links to [[Cityname, State]] redirect to the correct place — so Chicago, Illinois will always point to that city's article
  5. there is disambiguation where applicable

Is this workable? - jredmond 22:21, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

That looks mostly sensible. I'd suggest that some smaller cities could also profitably used without the state name. Oklahoma City and Virginia Beach are obvious examples... john k 23:23, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm thinking that we'd make the exception on a per-city basis, so Oklahoma City and Virginia Beach would definitely work on their own without state names, while Kansas City would lead to a healthy debate. - jredmond 00:18, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas are separate cities with different mayors, aren't they? But yeah, I think case by case is clearly the way to do it.john k 00:33, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
Jredmond's proposal is pretty close to what I thought was the convention before this discussion. While it's not what I favor, it isn't horribly abhorrent to me, and if there is a large body of support for it, I won't scream about it. I still woud prefer "Paris, France" as the primary entry, but I thoroughly understand that I won't be able to carry the day for it. -- BRG 17:53, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

Personally I think it's daft that major cities should get the same treatment as tiny villages. I would say that perhaps 99% of people looking up say San Francisco are looking for the famous city rather than some obscure village somewhere which may share the same name.

I also dont think many people will agree with BRG's idea of turning everything into a disambiguation. As BRG keeps bringing up the Exeter situation. BRG seems to think that if somewhere is not well known in the US then it obviously should not be regarded as being "common usage" of the name, which is IMO horribly US centric. G-Man 22:56, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

No, I'm not saying that "if somewhere is not well known in the US then it obviously should not be regarded as being 'common usage' of the name." I'm saying that "if somewhere is not well known in a country foreign to the one it is in, then it obviously should not be regarded as being 'common usage' of the name" -- hardly US centric. - BRG 17:53, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

Even in the US, it is not as though there are any very famous cities named "Exeter." The most well known is probably Exeter, New Hampshire, which is not all that well-known. john k 23:23, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Exeter, N. H. is the best-known one, but in fact I think the best-known Exeter in the US isn't a town, but a school (officially known as Phillips Exeter Academy). -- BRG 17:53, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

jredmond's proposal sounds good to me, and reasonably in keeping with the existing "put articles at their most common name" rule of thumb we use for non-city topics. I have no problem with erring on the side of disambiguation, as long as the major cities are at simply their bare names. Paris, not Paris, France, and similarly San Francisco, not San Francisco, California. One thing that should not happen, which currently happens a lot, is a non-disambig. location being a redirect to a disambig. location, which is completely out of keeping with the purpose of disambig. pages. Cityname should either have the city name, or be a disambig. page, not redirect to Cityname, somewhere. The redirects make for all sorts of unintuitive things, like Cityname, state having a link to Cityname (disambiguation at the top, which we have to explain as "Cityname redirects here; for other uses see Cityname (disambiguation), which is a pretty screaming red flag that we set up something very unintuitively if we have to explain things like that to our users. --Delirium 05:13, May 23, 2004 (UTC)

And yet that is exactly what the situation between Napoleon (a redirect) and Napoleon I of France (the article) is. There are many cases were a shortened name, such as Einstein, are made into redirects to full common names, such as Albert Einstein. Many of those redirects will have varying degrees of ambiguity and will sometimes require a disambiguation block at the target. The [City, State] form of a U.S. city name is not unlike the full common name of a person - it would be very odd indeed to have Einstein's article at Einstein.
The reason why all our aricles about modern European Kings and ruling Queens are in the same format is due to the fact that there so much ambiguity between their names that a widely-used convention was developed outside of Wikipedia to deal with that. So we put all those names in this same format even for the rare famous cases that are either not ambiguous or are so famous that other uses are not significant. Wikipedia is less disorganized as a result and looks more professional. Same goes for adding the hull numbers to modern U.S. military ship artilces, the manufacurer's name to aircraft articles and also for using the [City, State] format for U.S. cities. --mav 11:25, 23 May 2004 (UTC)~
The [City, State] form of a US city name is very much unlike the full common name of a person. The full postal designation of cities is [City, State, USA], but usually the USA is omitted, and in many contexts the State is also omitted, especially with famous cities. This is true of Paris, which by your logic ought to be at Paris, France, since there are lots of Parises. In addition, we do not have all nobility at the "standard" location: a vote to that effect was proposed and failed, with the outcome being that the titles should be used, except in cases where the person is more commonly known by their personal name without the title. Result of the vote is at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Peerage#Second_Poll. If you check current policy at Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(names_and_titles), it contains a similar exception, "If a person is best known by his cognomen, or by a name that doesn't exactly fit the guidelines above, revert to the base rule: use the most common English name. Examples: Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Henry the Lion". This is why Bertrand Russell is still at the short location as well. I also disagree with your assertion: on the contrary, rigid use of systematized naming formats makes Wikipedia much more disorganized as a result, and it looks much less professional, requiring all sorts of explanatory nonsense in italics at the top that is highly counter-intuitive to anyone not steeped in Wikipedia culture. It also looks like Wikipedia was put together by anal-retentive librarians or auto-generated by computer rather than by actual humans. Don't equate overuse of systematic categorization with professionalism, as they're usually quite the opposite.
So, basically, we have sensible policies for titles, with a standard format and exceptions for well-known names, but for some reason cities do not have a similarly-sensible policy. --Delirium 19:23, May 23, 2004 (UTC)


Delirium, systematic categorization IS professionalism in the case of an encyclopedia. Having everything in the same format keeps consistency, which is important in this encyclopedia. WhisperToMe 19:43, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Agreeing with Delirium, I think that if consistency allienates a substantial share of the users, then credibility must have priority for consistency. The notion with comma is perfectly suitable for towns, cities and other localities in those countries where the comma notion is the local norm. To use it for other countries gives an unwished impression of exaggerated US-centricism, and it does also invite to overuse of disambiguations for towns and cities that don't need it, or that have a natural disambiguator, as Frankfurt an der Oder. I concur with John Kenney that Tripoli (Libya) and Tripoli (Lebanon) (and Chicago and Virginia Beach) are to prefer as titles for the articles in question.
--Ruhrjung 18:24, 2004 Jun 17 (UTC)

Well said Delirium!. Any sensible system of naming conventions should have a certain amount of flexibillity to deal with sensible exceptions, rather than trying to squeeze everything into a rigid format whether or not it's sensible. What's so hot about consistency anyway, I seem to recall a saying which goes somthing like "A follish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" (not that I'm suggesting that any of you have small minds of course). G-Man 18:24, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)


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