Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (settlements)/Archive 8

message: There is a proposed move that goes against current naming conventions at Talk:Chicago/Archive#Name_format.  violet/riga (t) 19:41, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The decision made was to keep it at Chicago, Illinois, do not move to Chicago as it is an issue about naming conventions and not an individual move.  Petersam 19:39, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chicago 

message: I've added the outcome of the last vote to the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names) page, before we go round again. This convention has been the accepted practice for the last four months, at least. --ScottDavis 14:03, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australian town and suburb names (again!?) 

message: A WP:RM request has been placed to move the article New York City to New York, New York. If you have an opinion on this please express by following the link Talk:New York City#Requested move and adding your missive there. Philip Baird Shearer 10:55, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move of New York City to New York, New York 

message: How's this for a proposal on the U.S. cities: Articles on cities  in the United States that are regional centers go under City name when possible: Chicago, Illinois, New York City, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If disambiguation is needed,  City name, State, is used (the "comma convention", as in Phoenix, Arizona, Washington, D.C., or Portland, Oregon). Neighborhoods, community areas, etc. will be at Neighborhood, City name or Neighborhood, City name, State as appropriate, as in Near North Side, Chicago, or Lower East Side, Manhattan. Suburbs and smaller towns will be under  City name, State, such as West Allis, Wisconsin, Savannah, Georgia, and Fremont, California.
===Reasoning===
I submitted this rule to make U.S. cities consistent with nearly every other country. (See my list of cities that can be just City name articles at User:Dralwik/Cities to suggest changes in what cities are important enough for inclusion.) This proposal will be changed often.
The suburb rule is due to their relative obscurity outside of their respective metro areas. 
Dralwik 1 July 2005 21:05 (UTC)
===Support===
#A good policy would be to name a city article based on whatever the majority of its inter-wiki links call the place. For instance, almost all articles referring to Chicago would link to just "Chicago" while smaller cities would be far more likely to link to a "city, state name" format. One reason to do it this way is because it is a good indication of what title most people would likely type into the search box for that city. Redirects might seem rather innocent at first, except you need to consider that these always get routed through the search quiry and can lead to considerable delays for people with slower connections. We should always think of the readers in cases like this, and not create needless formalities that slow things down. --Jleon 1 July 2005 23:59 (UTC)
#Support. See my comments in the above page. G-Man 2 July 2005 18:51 (UTC)
# This is late, but nothing is ever too late with software...  no one ever brought up the common usage guideline of Wikipedia and how it should apply to cities and city neighborhoods.  Listing Hollywood under Hollywood, Los Angeles, California is a violation of that guideline, since the most common name for Hollywood is, well, Hollywood. --Serge 23:21, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Source of withdrawal? Theshibboleth 23:09, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you look at the page history, you'll see that Dralwik deleted this entire section on July 3 with a note that he was withdrawing his proposal.  I restored the section so that we won't have to thrash through these arguments all over again in the near future (at least for a year or two).  --Coolcaesar 03:02, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  New proposal on U.S. cities

message: #A good policy would be to name a city article based on whatever the majority of its inter-wiki links call the place. For instance, almost all articles referring to Chicago would link to just "Chicago" while smaller cities would be far more likely to link to a "city, state name" format. One reason to do it this way is because it is a good indication of what title most people would likely type into the search box for that city. Redirects might seem rather innocent at first, except you need to consider that these always get routed through the search quiry and can lead to considerable delays for people with slower connections. We should always think of the readers in cases like this, and not create needless formalities that slow things down. --Jleon 1 July 2005 23:59 (UTC)
#Support. See my comments in the above page. G-Man 2 July 2005 18:51 (UTC)
# This is late, but nothing is ever too late with software...  no one ever brought up the common usage guideline of Wikipedia and how it should apply to cities and city neighborhoods.  Listing Hollywood under Hollywood, Los Angeles, California is a violation of that guideline, since the most common name for Hollywood is, well, Hollywood. --Serge 23:21, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Support

message: #Can you please give your reasoning for this proposal? We've pretty well moved everything to the existing naming convention, so a new change would involved a large effort. There are redirects for editors who are lazy and just write Chicago. Consistency is a useful quality in an encyclopedia. Also, how would this affect neighborhoods, which are currently named [placename, cityname, statename]. Would they also drop the extra designations? -Willmcw June 30, 2005 23:45 (UTC)
#I concur with Willmcw.  The current convention is consistent and works well.  Dralwik's suggested policy change would create a massive mess across WP, especially in the neighborhood articles.  I suppose that for some cities, we could rename them as follows: Westwood, Los Angeles, California --> "Westwood (Los Angeles neighborhood)."  But this would promptly break down for cities like Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine (and would result in even longer names for neighborhood pages than we already have now), which just goes to show the efficiency of the current system.  Even worse, there are situations where a place name refers to a city in one part of a state and a neighborhood within a city in another part of the same state.  Westwood and Los Altos are just two examples within California, and I'm sure I could easily find a few more if I had the time. --Coolcaesar 1 July 2005 00:19 (UTC)
#Even as amended I still don't think that Dralwik's proposal makes sense.  Another problem is that it is difficult to determine which cities are noteworthy enough to justify putting the main article at the short name, beyond the 10 largest in terms of population.  For example, most Americans on the West Coast know that Bakersfield refers to Bakersfield, California, but I'm not so sure if people away from here would know that.  WP already gets visited by wackos all the time who try to put obscure malls (in Alabama, of all places) into the List of shopping malls article, or who add small cities like Nashville to the Global city article.  The underlying problem is that most people cannot afford to do grand tours of world cities (e.g., London, Paris, Rome, or New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) to realize that their own local city is relatively small and unimportant.  Implementing a systemwide naming policy that is based on prominence or notability of a city would only make this existing problem even worse.  --Coolcaesar 1 July 2005 22:28 (UTC)
#The existing naming convention works well.  Leave as is. —Morven July 1, 2005 22:38 (UTC)
#I oppose as well. More and more countries are moving towards this method. (See Japan, Mexico, Australia, and of course Canada which was with the US from the beginning on this) --  Earl Andrew - talk 2 July 2005 07:46 (UTC)
#Oppose. Inter-country consistency is just not valuable enough to be worth the effort; the mechanical part is comparatively easy, but the real cost is in editors reprogramming themselves, and in arguing over whether Cupertino is important (hey, being the HQ of Apple Computer makes it important :-) ). We're continually making loads of busywork for ourselves - let's cut down on that and focus on adding new content instead. Stan 2 July 2005 23:28 (UTC)
#I a little late to the discussion, and its already been withdrawn, but I still want to register my oppose. BlankVerse ∅ 08:44, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Oppose

message: I don't mind that Los Angeles redirects to Los Angeles, California, but I think that it is highly wrong to have the CITY of Los Angeles at Los Angeles. As the Los Angeles (disambiguation) page clearly shows, Los Angeles is a city, a county, a geographical feature (Los Angeles Basin), a region with ill-defined boundaries, an airport, etc. The city of Los Angeles absolutely should not be at Los Angeles. BlankVerse ∅ 08:44, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments

message: For the benefit of any Wikipedians following this issue, now and in the future: Dralwik withdrew his proposal on July 3.  Current naming policy for U.S. cities remains in place.  --Coolcaesar 03:37, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Source of withdrawal? Theshibboleth 23:09, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you look at the page history, you'll see that Dralwik deleted this entire section on July 3 with a note that he was withdrawing his proposal.  I restored the section so that we won't have to thrash through these arguments all over again in the near future (at least for a year or two).  --Coolcaesar 03:02, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Final consensus

message: I was wondering if there was a convention for cities in Europe, as some names appear dozens of times.  For example, there are many cities named Bergheim.  If I were to link to one in Bavaria, should I use:
: Bergheim (Bavaria) or Bergheim, Bavaria
The former is the general way we disambiguate, but the latter would fall in with US and Canada conventions for including the state name (Bavaria is a state in Germany).
-- Reinyday 23:38, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Convention for Europe?

message: Proposal: Where possible, articles on places in Africa should go under placename. Where disambiguation is needed, they should go under placename, nation. Thus Addis Ababa but Shire, Ethiopia.
This convention follows current practice for every nation on the continent.  The only exception which may need to be made is in South Africa, where some towns are disambiguated in the form x, South Africa and others by province. Warofdreams 15:11, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Makes sense to me. - BanyanTree 16:30, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

text: Agree. The provincial disambiguation is presumably because there are multiple towns with the same name in South Africa. Are there no other African countries where this is the case? Greenman 20:04, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: While I've not come across any, it seems likely that there will be such cases when we begin starting articles on smaller towns and villages.  In this case, I would suggest a disambiguation in the form placename, province, nation.  But, regardless, this is not the reasoning for the disambiguation by province in South Africa - see, for instance, Charlestown. Warofdreams 09:24, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Convention for African cities

message: Please see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions for a discussion on consolidating Redundant or competing pages: Places, countries, etc. Maurreen (talk) 17:01, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Consolidating pages

message: A discussion of naming conventions for articles on Japanese cities has been opened at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles). john k 17:08, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Japanese cities 

message: User:Owain has been moving some articles on Welsh towns to "netural names" - i.e., names which do not mention the county.  For instance, Bethesda, Gwynedd has been moved to Bethesda, Wales and Talybont, Barmouth, Gwynedd to Talybont, Barmouth.  While these names are uncontroversial in the sense that it is universally accepted that they are accurate, they differ from conventions applied across the UK and are therefore unpredictable.  We could change the convention for Wales so that all place in the principality are disambiguated in this new fashion.  Does anyone have any opinions on this? Warofdreams talk 16:57, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I had another look at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names) and some of my original points listed on that page! :) I don't think we ever got to an agreed position regarding the actual naming of the articles in contentious cases, but in conjunction with the current "Neutral naming" thinking on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (places)#Neutral naming I was bold and extended it to the naming of the contentious articles themselves. I have noticed that various other articles don't use the "Town, county" format, such as Lancaster, England, Perth, Scotland, &c, so my changes shouldn't be controversial. Owain 14:41, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I can see your thinking, but it doesn't look like there was ever agreement on the "neutral naming".  As you point out, there wasn't agreement on which counties to use, either, but it was agreed to use counties - which is in line with the practice across the rest of the UK, so it'd be good to discuss changes to this policy on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names).  I'll copy this discussion there. Warofdreams talk 16:57, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Neutral names"? 

message: I initiated a Category rename of Cat:Washington, D.C. to Cat:Washington, District of Columbia to resolve the issue of the proper category name for that city.  Participants in this project may find the supporting list of naming conventions useful.  (SEWilco 06:43, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category:Washington, District of Columbia as conventional category name 

message: I've added the guideline tag because it looks like discussion has died down here, and also, being a guideline doesn't remove the fact that discussion can be ongoing. Hiding  talk 13:26, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  guideline 

message: Should neighborhoods in major cities be named as:
# Lower East Side, Manhattan
# Lower East Side (Manhattan)
# Lower East Side - in this case, disambiguation isn't really an issue and this could work.
When there is issue of disambiguous names, then we need to use #1 or #2.  I primarily use style #1, as that's what I most often see used, but sometimes there is inconsistency (see: :Category:Washington%2C_D.C._neighborhoods).  Before moving articles such as Logan Circle (Washington, D.C.) and Chinatown (Washington, DC), I want to make sure there is consensus about the naming styles for neighborhoods.  In the case of Lower East Side, Manhattan, I'm tempted to move it to just Lower East Side. ---Aude 15:21, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would suggest that moving to an non-disambiguated name should only be done after a bit of research to see if any other city has a Lower East Side, or equivalent.  Neighborhood names have a habit of being re-used.  Of course, if one usage is so much more prevalent than the other, then perhaps primary topic disambiguation is warranted. —Morven 17:45, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neighborhoods 

message: The standard of [city, state] has been well-established. However there does not seem to a comparable standard for neighborhoods. In :Category:Los Angeles neighborhoods we moved all such places to [district, city, state]. This seems like a logical extension of the city convention. I had recently gone through some cities and moved articles into this format, ones which had been a variety of different formats - [district], [district, city], [district (city)], [district, state], and [district (city, state)]. Even within a single city many variations were present. Though this standard seems logical and desirable to me, some editors have raised questions about this naming. Is there any reason it should not be a formal convention? -Willmcw 01:04, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I , for one, do not see any.  I agree with you that the most logical format is [district, city, state].  --Coolcaesar 01:39, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Districts and neighborhoods of American citites 

message: I totally and completely disagree with the proposal of the district, city, state convention as it totally violates a governing convention of Wiki naming to use the most commonly used names for article when possible.  Hollywood, Los Angeles, California?  Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, California?  La Jolla, San Diego, California?  These are totally contrived and completely uncommon.  This convention is a terrible idea and I suggest that all articles that were changed to conform to this contrived standard be changed back to refer to their common names (except when there is an actual conflict and the name in question is an actual disambiguation page, of course).  --Serge 23:15, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: So your suggestion is that every place name be decided upon independently - that La Jolla be just La Jolla, that Hollywood be just Hollywood, and that other places are fought over place by place, with no consistent plan? How do we decide, place by place, whether one name is more common than another? The lack of a convention leads to anarchy, which is what we've had in some place names. See above. -Willmcw 23:25, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If there is a conflict, then there is a conflict, and the name with the conflict should be a disambiguation page.  That's a standard way for dealing with conflicts in Wikipedia for all articles.   For example, in the case of Brentwood, there should be a disambiguation.  And, there is!  In the case of Hollywood, there is no dispute.  The CA one is clearly much more famous then the FL one, which hardly anyone has heard of.  Hence, the Hollywood page redirects to the CA Hollywood.  That's a done deal.  No conflict.  All I'm saying is it should just be named that, and Hollywood, Los Angeles, California (Jeez that is cumbersome!) should be the redirect.  Nothing else changes.  In the case of La Jolla, there is no conflict whatsoever.  It's a contrived convention for the sake of itself and creates more  problems than it solves.  --Serge 23:28, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Put the articles in [district, city, state] and quibble over redirect pages.  And I'll use "Springfield" as my example of fame fighting multiplicity.  (SEWilco 05:08, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  And that solves what?  You still have the squabbles (so it doesn't solve that), and it creates names for famous places like Hollywood to be something contrived and cumbersome like Hollywood, Los Angeles, California (a new problem).  Hmm, solves nothing, and creates clunky names for pages that get the most visits.  What is the point?  --Serge 23:28, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The point is to avoid situations like these: :Category:Oklahoma City neighborhoods, :Category:Cincinnati neighborhoods, in which each place's title uses a different form. -Willmcw 00:06, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Also, let's not re-write the guideline until we've finished discussing the matter here. Thanks, -Willmcw 00:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I did not re-write the guideline.  I only updated it to reflect the consensus that has actually been achieved here, rather than to leave the false impression that there is a consensus to use the contrived and cumbersome convention even for city names that have no conflict.  I am going to revert your revert of my update.  If you feel it's not an accurate assessment on the status of this issue, then improve its accuracy, but please do not simply remove it again.  Thanks. Also, your last update to this page reverted corrections I made to my own comments. Please be careful. Thanks for that too.  --Serge 00:30, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Where exactly do you see a consensus for the change that you made? older≠wiser 00:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry about taking out Serge's corrections, the software has recently changed how it handles editing from a diff, making it easier to inadvertently revert a recent change when making an edit. -Willmcw 01:00, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

text: The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed change of the naming convention for USA and Canadian cities below. Please do not modify it.  No further edits should be made to this section.  
The result of the debate was no consensus to change. In fact a majority preferred to retain the current convention. Scott Davis Talk 01:21, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  district,city,state violates common name guideline 

message: A mandatory City, State rule results in absurd looking entries like New York, New York (instead of New York City), Chicago, Illinois, and, if extended to neighborhoods, even the contrived and cumbersome Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.  For what?   For the sake of a standard?  So that city and neighborhood names line up nicely when looking at Categories? (that can be resolved other ways).  
It should be noted that a mandatory City, State rule does nothing to resolve naming squabbles.  If the simple name (e.g., Portland) has significant ambiguation issues, then the main page is a disambiguation page using either approach.  If the ambiguation is between a famous name and less well-known name, (e.g., Hollywood and Hollywood, Florida), then the famous name gets the simple name as a redirect page anyway.  For example, Chicago is currently a redirect to Chicago, Illinois, and Hollywood is a redirect to Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.  This proposal is essentially about reversing these redirects, to be in line with common sense, rather than tunnel vision standards for the sake of standards.
Join me in saluting the wisdom of the main rule for city names, which is: there are no special naming conventions for cities, unless multiple cities with the same name exist., by voting in favor of this proposal.  It is unfortunate that we have to clarify it further at this level, but so it is.
Please indicate whether you support or reject this proposal, reasoning is optional but appreciated.   --Serge 02:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Rationale

message: (Add your arguments of support here.  Vote below.)
*It would seem that the idea that this allows editors to know exactly where articles are isn't working. Several of the larger/more famous cities have a number of links to their redirects, (note Los Angeles especially). The current policy relies on people reading it first. In the majority of cases that isn't going to happen. josh (talk) 07:59, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Other arguments in support

message: (Add your arguments to reject here.  Vote below.)
*This issue was already debated and resolved back in August.  There is no intelligent reason to debate and vote on this issue again so soon, when the majority of American editors have already indicated their support for the existing standard.  
:: I see a 2 day vote was held in July that had a handful of participants.  That's not very serious.  There are complaints about the cumbersome names on almost every major city page, yet none of those people voted here.  This vote will be held for over a month to give people a chance to learn about it, think about it, and vote seriously.  --Serge 08:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please read the wording of the proposal.  This proposed change would affect current redirect pages with unambiguous names like Chicago, Hollywood and San Francisco (making them be the names of the respective main pages, instead of redirects to unnecessary, cumbersome and contrived names for these well-known and unambiguous places).  The proposal would clearly not affect disambiguation pages like San Jose, Portland and Kansas City.  --Serge 06:43, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Arguments for rejecting this proposal

message: *This policy seems to already to apply to canadian cities (See Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa). josh (talk) 07:59, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point.  Montreal is an excellent example of what I'm talking about.  If this policy is not clarified, they will try to change it too, if they haven't already.  Note how the current "convention" is worded, referencing City, Province.  --Serge 08:06, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Notes

message: # Voting for my own proposal!  --Serge 02:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: VOTE TO SUPPORT the above proposal here

message: #Serge
#Yath
#Answar
#Quasipalm
#::You could go even further, with Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York City, New York — too cumbersome. ---Aude 22:44, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments on votes of support

message: # Voting to reject for the reasons I have stated during the past two weeks and also back in July and August.  --Coolcaesar 05:55, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: VOTE TO REJECT the above proposal here.