Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (geographic names)

message: I would like to initiate a discussion on whether USPLACE should apply to US territories as well as US states. I will not propose anything on places in US states since the discussions of those have been exhausted with no consensus to change. There didn't seem to be much discussion on whether US territories should be included in the guideline as well. I would like to discuss the applicability of the guideline for US territories. The question I would like to answer is "Should the guideline apply to US territories?" Please discuss here. Interstellarity (talk) 14:06, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Now, the ngram viewer (which can't search for commas but omitting it find all occurrences) shows us that Barrigada is far more commonly used than "Barrigada, Guam" , so I think  was clearly correct in saying the ", Guam" is unnecessary disambiguation, and I see no basis for applying the USPLACE comma convention by default, even when disambiguation is not necessary, for this or any other US territory cities (Barrigada redirects to Barrigada, Guam). Of course, if a city's name is actually ambiguous, then the comma convention is appropriate disambiguation, as in Piti, Guam (see the Piti dab page for other uses), but that falls out of general WP:TITLE and WP:D policy, not USPLACE. As a reminder, the only way to justify the USPLACE default comma convention for US cities as not contradicting WP:TITLE/WP:D is, again, by the claim that including the ", state" is simply reflecting COMMONNAME, because "City, State" is so commonly used for (non-AP) cities. The claim that "City, Territory" is as commonly used cannot be made for cities in US territories. --В²C ☎ 04:23, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The basis of USPLACE is widespread adherence to the AP Stylebook (or its reflection of widespread usage), which for non-independent territories prescribes the use of "the commonly accepted territory name after a city name." Regarding your Barrigada example, additional context is necessary. Taking, for example, newspapers.com results and excluding "Barrigada Heights," "Mount Barrigada," and "Mt. Barrigada," the 2229 results outside of Guam break down as 1322 (59%) including the phrase "Barrigada, Guam" or "Barrigada, GU"; 842 (38%) excluding those phrases but including Guam or GU elsewhere on the page, providing context; and 65 (3%) without Guam or GU (and most of those either refer to a horse or are transcription errors). Star Garnet (talk) 07:32, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm also sketpical that random off-site usage is more often just "Barrigada" than "Barrigada, Guam", since hardly anyone knows where Barrigada is. Tooling around in Google News results, use of "Barrigada" alone seem to be mostly confined to news sources in Guam or nearby. Use of it alone appears in plenty of headlines that aren't from the region, but their actual article texts tend to specify that it's in Guam. At any rate, the argument that Barrigada by itself is not ambiguous and is in popular enough use to stand alone isn't really an argument against USPLACE at all, since it just has "Foo, Bar" ; we have lots of places at article titles like Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis, etc., when an overwhelming commonness and pattern of undisambiguated usage justifies it. But there is no such overwhelming pattern for Barrigada.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:23, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

text: (I guess not completely neglected: there were discussions on Talk:Amouli and Talk:Futiga about whether or not to move them to match the other AS articles that include the territory name, but I guess concerns over lack of broad enough participation are what prompted this discussion. -- Beland (talk) 00:17, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

text: One difference about American Samoa is that birth-right U.S. citizenship does not apply there. People born there are instead United States nationals. Persons born in the other territories do have birth-right U.S. citizenship. I would still argue for using [placename], American Samoa, for articles about places there, as the territory is under U.S. jurisdiction. Donald Albury 17:55, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

text: Not sure my long comment adds anything new; if there are no replies within a week, I'd say it's time to wrap this up one way or another. -- Beland (talk) 00:06, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should [[WP:USPLACE]] apply to US territories? 

message: From 2024, the county equivalent in Connecticut is not "county" itself, but "council of governments". Maybe we should clarify whether "county" or "council of governments" in Connecticut should be used for disambiguation one day (but not now, because I have not found any two cities/towns in Connecticut with the same name). John Smith Ri (talk) 14:09, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps not a big impact on article titles, but may be a bigger impact on categorization. For example, :Category:Populated places in Connecticut by county. Discussion perhaps woul be best done at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Connecticut as to whether to convert the existing county-based categories or to erect parallel sets. older ≠ wiser 14:58, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Counties still exist there on paper, but have not had any governmental functions since 1960. I don't know if they are still used for non-governmental purposes, but CT petitioned the Census Bureau to recognize the councils as county-equivalents and this was accepted. Agree that a discussion should take place there to determine what changes should be made. It could be that this will end up like parishes in Louisiana and boroughs in Alaska. 331dot (talk) 15:09, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: From what I can understand, they aren't even there on paper, other than as a historical artifact. It may be that people still identify with them somehow, but the Councils for Governments appear to be completely distinct from the historical counties. For example, Bridgeport, Connecticut was in Fairfield County, Connecticut but is in the Greater Bridgeport Planning Region, Connecticut rather than Western Connecticut Planning Region, Connecticut which has much of the are formerly in Fairfield County. older ≠ wiser 15:54, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the county equivalent in Connecticut and possible influence in naming convention 

message: Can we add some specific guidance for Turkish cities? For some cities, this is almost getting to ridiculous levels. For example, count how many Smyrna's are in the lead of İzmir in this version  (there's one extra in the footnote as well). Btw, there's also Smyrna and Old Smyrna articles. Historic names should usually be presented in "Names" or "Etymology" sections, except significant ones such as Constantinople in the lead of Istanbul for example. However, non-English alphabet versions should also be in "Names" or "Etymology" sections. Turkish is spoken by 85-90% of the population. The rest is mostly Kurdish. Except Arabic, other languages would be less than 0.1%  Bogazicili (talk) 16:41, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Region-specific guidance for Turkish cities 

message: Could we get a section addressing users adding Türkiye or replacing Turkey with Türkiye? I usually revert those edits and point to wp:commonname or another MOS-related guideline, but it would be helpful to point here. Classicwiki (talk) If you reply here, please ping me. 05:54, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably easier to have a generic “use the main articles title”; we may eventually move the article to Türkiye, and even we do we will have the problem in the opposite direction. BilledMammal (talk) 06:13, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Türkiye