User:Serge Issakov

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[edit] Cities with current polls to move from city, state to city

20 August 2007:

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions#Requested_moves

[edit] Cities with successful moves!

[edit] Reasons

Here are some reasons to use the most common name for a city, rather than to follow the city, state convention. They may not all apply to all cities.

To use this as part of a poll on a Talk page of a city, edit, copy, paste and then edit as required (at least fill in CITYNAME and STATENAME as appropriate). See WP:Requested Moves for instructions on how to request a move and setup a vote.

  1. The convention to use the city, state format for U.S. cities allows for exceptions (e.g.,Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia). The issue here is whether CITYNAME should be an exception.
  2. CITYNAME, like Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia, is well known... no need to specify the state.
  3. All articles in Wikipedia should follow the Wikipedia naming conventions for common names, which dictate that CITYNAME (alone) be the title of this article; there is no reason that cities, and CITYNAME in particular, should be an exception to these rules.
  4. Professional encyclopedias, both published and online, typically do not "pre-disambiguate"... neither should we.
  5. Chance for confusion with anything else named CITYNAME is negligible.
  6. The name of CITYNAME alone redirects directly to here, therefore there are no known disambiguation issues, and no reason to disambiguate.
  7. Following the city, state so-called "comma convention" in the title makes it impossible to convey to the reader the one piece of information that the title is supposed to specify: the most common name used to refer to the subject of the article. Is it CITYNAME or CITYNAME, STATENAME? Titles that use the "comma convention" make it impossible for the reader to know!
  8. There is no reason to specify any information in the title (when there is no disambiguation issue) except the most common name used to reference the subject of the article. Specifying any other information (except to disambiguate, when necessary, and then in a parenthetic remark) is consistent with how articles are named in Wikipedia.
  9. If a new article is created in the future with a common name that collides with CITYNAME, it will be the responsibility of the creator of that article to manage the ambiguity according to Wikipedia guidelines. This is true for any new article in Wikipedia. It is not our responsibility to solve this problem ahead of time "just in case".
  10. The name of the city is CITYNAME; that should be the name of the article.
  11. Waiting to change the city, state convention does not make sense, since the way to change the convention is one article at a time, like this one.
  12. CITYNAME, STATENAME is part of a mailing address, not the name of the city.
  13. A world famous city like CITYNAME should be treated consistently with other world famous cities, both inside and outside of the U.S. (Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Paris, London, Montreal, etc.): use the city name for the article title, period.
  14. CITYNAME is better known than STATENAME.
  15. Following a convention that pollutes the article title for readers (by making the common name unclear) in order to supposedly make life easer for editors, violates the overall principle of Wikipedia's naming conventions:
Names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists.