Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (settlements)/Archive 7

message: I'm writing a FAQ for users who feel that Wikipedia is biased against their country/nation at User:Zocky/Country bias. It's partly tangential to this discussion and highlights some of the things that this policy should clarify. Zocky 21:41, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  FAQ for users who think Wikipedia is biased against their country 

message: I started a discussion with olivier concerning French communes disambiguation. The question is: should articles be titled Commune (departement) or Commune, departement?
*Arguments for the former:
**Looks best
**Follows general naming conventions
**Follows fr: usage.
*Arguments for the latter:
**Looks best
**Follows general usage for place names
**Follows current usage for French communes on Wikipedia.
Any thoughts ? _R_ 15:48, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure abou that "follows general naming conventions". On the English Wikipedia at least, cities in many countries are given in the form "City, {larger-administrative-unit}", not "City (LAU)". So I think "Commune, departement" is actually closer to current practise. Noel (talk) 16:44, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  French communes disambiguation 

message: Proposal: Where possible, articles on places in the UK should go under placename.  Where disambiguation is needed, they should go under:
*Placename, administrative county for English places - except places in Greater London, which should be at Placename, London
*Placename, County x for Northern Irish places
*Placename, council area for Scottish places
*Placename, principal area for Welsh places
*Placename, Isle of Man for Manx places
If the placename and administrative county are identical, in which case they should be at placename (city) or placename (town).
This proposal can be refined in future, but a basic consensus on the status quo would be a useful start. Warofdreams 17:00, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure using administrative counties in England (which includes borough-sized unitary authorities) is a terribly good idea. Similarly using UAs in Scotland and Wales is not much good when the UAs are small or confusingly named, eg. Falkirk, Caerphilly, &c. Also what happens when these areas change name or area? Obviously me vote would be to use the traditional county name for disambiguation. Owain 10:47, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I think we should use the traditional counties of Scotland (as using the subdivisions of Scotland would result in oddness (like X, East Renfrewshire) and using the Lieutenancy areas of Scotland would result in even more oddness (like X, Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale)) and the ceremonial counties of England. I'm unsure about Welsh places, though. My instinct would be to use the preserved counties of Wales, as the principal areas of Wales have lots of small and not very helpful divisions, but I don't know how much the traditional counties of Wales are used. Proteus (Talk) 11:32, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: IMO, if we're going to use the traditional counties of Scotland (Which I agree with, BTW) then we should use the traditional counties everywhere. The current lieutenancies are a mess and are subject to revisions to the LA 1997. I am against using the preserved counties of Wales as this will just cause more confusion. Owain 12:32, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I think using anything other than what the place is currently in ie - the current administrative area - is going to lead to more confusion for the reader than anything else.  We already battle over debates such as (just an example) Bletchley is in the traditional county of Buckinghamshire and in the unitary authority of Milton Keynes.  Moving the article that is currently at Bletchley, Milton Keynes to Bletchley, Buckinghamshire is going to muddy the waters of this debate and lead to more confusion, not less.  The administrative boundaries don't change so often as to make page moves impossible should they change again.  I think the current administrative area is the best approach, which is the approach employed at Streetmap among others. -- Francs2000 | Talk  15:14, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to be pedantic (which I guess is the whole point of this debate), the administrative area does not define 'what the place is currently in', it defines an area for the delivery of certain local government services. The whole 'where do I live?' debate has arisen because since 1889 people have used local government areas to define where they live. To use the Bletchley example, no-one would argue that it's part of the built-up area of Milton Keynes despite where it is administratively. Why do we need such a rigid structure anyway? Why can't we use our common sense? Owain 14:13, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Which is why I say it is completely subjective: I live near Milton Keynes and have need to go their fairly regularly.  I know as many people who live in the surrounding area (i.e. the villages) who are of the opinion that they live in Milton Keynes as those who still believe they live in Buckinghamshire, and the general split does tend to be based on their age and the amount of time they have lived in the area.  I know that we already use the ceremonial county for things such as Category:Towns in... and am perfectly happy to go with the flow should that be the consensus of wikipedia users however I can predict it causing conflict in the future with such people who identify with a geographical area or political division over a ceremonial county.  Also as towns such as Bletchley, Fenny Stratford, Stony Stratford, Wolverton and Newport Pagnell are now contiguous with the sprawl of Milton Keynes it is commonly assumed by many that they are now part of the greater "city" rather than towns in their own right. -- Francs2000 | Talk  22:10, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: But disambiguation should put places where normal people would describe them as being (as is suggested by the "most common name" policy), rather than where the government would describe them as being. No one, when asked "Where do you live?", is going to reply "I live in the Unitary Authority of Milton Keynes" or "I live in Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale". Obviously, a place's exact administrative location (or whatever you want to call it) is important, but it's not the natural way British people distinguish two places with the same name, as they almost always use the county instead. (As an aside, I've never looked at the Bletchley article, so I don't know what the debate there is about, but if you'd asked me ten minutes ago where Bletchley was I'd definitely have said "Buckinghamshire".) Proteus (Talk) 15:41, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Deciding where normal people would place locations around the country is very subjective and may differ depending on point of view: for example younger people may say "I live in Bletchley, Milton Keynes" whereas older people may stick with "Bletchley, Buckinghamshire".  Incidentally I only used Bletchley as an example because I didn't want to single out particular users.  I do remember a very heated debate over the location of Eton, Berkshire, a user whoshallremainnameless insisted that it was still Eton, Buckinghamshire. -- Francs2000 | Talk  15:55, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I'm hardly old. :-) Anyway, I'm not suggesting we use the traditional counties (I'm sure most people would say Solihull was in the West Midlands rather than Warwickshire, for instance, and I really don't want to get into "Which county is X in?" arguments), but I think that using the administrative ones would be counter-intuitive and cumbersome (North East Lincolnshire and Bath and North East Somerset are hardly convenient disambiguation suffixes). Proteus (Talk) 18:40, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: What about situations where there are two places with the same name in the same county?  For example, it Buckinghamshire there is Burcott, Bierton, Buckinghamshire and Burcott, Wing, Buckinghamshire.  Are these article names too long or are those respective names the most appropriate location for those articles? -- Francs2000 | Talk  15:35, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say Burcott, Bierton and Burcott, Wing would probably suffice. We definitely don't want a US-style "disambiguate even when it's not needed" policy, with Buckingham, Buckinghamshire and the like. Proteus (Talk) 15:45, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No I agree.  I was the one who actually disambiguated a lot of Buckingham links.  I also had quite an argument with someone over the location of Aylesbury rather than Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire: he only ceded to my point of view after trying to fix the multitudinal links from A to A, B and giving up half way through. -- Francs2000 | Talk  15:55, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: We should definitely insert a "default is no disambiguation" clause when we write the guidelines. Proteus (Talk) 18:40, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Except that in the case of Scotland, Wales and a fair bit of England they are useless. I've never seen any justification for such a concrete policy anyway - why can't we use common sense? Owain 19:32, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: No need to be so belligerent - Here's an example of common sense: If we stick to a rigid policy of using administrative areas or 'ceremonial counties' then where is Bristol? Where is Glasgow? Where is Belfast? I think even you can see that using administrative areas or lieutenancies in those cases would be utterly pointless. I have no problem with listing such information on the page along with the much more useful traditional county information. Similarly, such articles can quite happily be in multiple categories. After all, the purpose of a encyclopaedia is to facilitate people finding articles where they expect them to be; not deliberately restricting the ease of location because of some arbitrary 'policy'. Owain 10:31, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Those are just examples where, if we were to use administrative areas or lieutenancies, it would add no information. Obviously in the context of the UK those cities don't need disambiguation, but Wikipedia is supposed to be country-agnostic. Just for the record there are 17 Bristols, 7 Glasgows and 4 Belfasts in the US alone. The articles themselves can (and should) contain any relevant disambiguation - administrative, traditional, &c. Going with administrative areas is likely to be controversial where the area is named after a town but is significantly larger - e.g. Caerphilly, Stirling, &c. So we have a choice of geographical areas - traditional counties or lieutenancies. In Scotland, Wales and large parts of England these aren't very helpful either... Owain 19:21, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I tend to agree with everything you say except for Newport, Monmouthshire being inaccurate. It is inaccurate if one is talking in terms of local government areas, but not if one is talking in terms of general geographical disambiguation. :) Owain 16:25, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Another point -  Newport has never lay in an administrative area called Monmouthshire. Prior to 1889 there wasn't one, and between 1889 and 1974 it was administratively independent county borough. Despite this I've never heard anyone say that Newport is not *in* Monmouthshire, because they aren't talking about (and probably don't care about) the local government situation. Owain 16:40, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I suggest that Northern Ireland placenames follow the disambiguation convention used for other Irish placenames, i.e. town, county, where county is one of County Antrim, Down, Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone or Londonderry (we use Londonderry for the county, Derry for the city). zoney ♣ talk 00:22, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: See Washington, Tyne and Wear.  Washington is the best known place of that name, not the first to be called that - for instance, see Boston and Boston, Lincolnshire from the example on the project page. Warofdreams 11:44, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: General usage of county names needs to be discussed at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places)#Counties of Britain, where there is a consensus not to use traditional counties.  The convention applies specifically to Britain, not to Northern Ireland.  The traditional counties of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are widely used, universally understood (unlike those of Britain), and the current method allows one scheme to apply to the entire island of Ireland. Warofdreams 12:45, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: UK placenames

message: I had a question posted here that may also be appropriate for this talk page.  When there are many cities around the world with the name "Cleveland", shouldn't the page for Cleveland be the disambiguation page, with a link to Cleveland, Ohio among other places?  Even if Cleveland, Ohio is the most well known "Cleveland" to most Americans? -- Planders 20:14, 25 Jan 2005
Reposting from the How to rename a page page: It's not assuming an American audience.  The best known and largest city named Cleveland in the world is the one in Ohio.  Using UK Google, the first several pages of results seem to entirely consist of references to the one in Ohio.  Same deal with Australian google.  Similarly, Melbourne is the article on the Australian city, with links to the American cities of that name at Melbourne (disambiguation).  York is a page on the city in England, despite the fact of their being numerous Yorks elsewhere.  This has nothing to do with US-centrism.  It has to do with the fact that Cleveland, Ohio, is by far the best known place in the world which is called Cleveland.  The change seems perfectly appropriate to me.  I would suggest moving the current Cleveland to Cleveland (disambiguation), and then making Cleveland redirect to Cleveland, Ohio. john k 20:32, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cities disambiguation question 

message: What I mean is this: Corinth is a disambiguation page, and so is Palmyra. I feel that the first almost always refers to Corinth, Greece, and the second to Palmyra, Syria (although there is a secondary problem that its less well-known modern name is Tadmor). However, the main pages are disambiguation pages. They, thankfully, list the obvious meaning first and then go through mostly unimportant US towns. I'm not a deletionist, I'd love to visit Corinth, Jones County, Texas. Can we move these disambiguation pages to 'NAME (disambiguation)', and put the obvious target on the main page (as Corinth or Palmyra) with a link at the top to the disambiguation page for those who are looking for these small towns? Gareth Hughes 21:02, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think both of these are pretty straightforward candidates for the "most common meaning" guideline. zoney ♣ talk 21:23, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Can we do a bit of a straw poll here? I've found that there are two articles for the same place: Tadmor and Tadmor, Syria. I'll merge them at Tadmor as that seems the sensible thing to do. It is likely that the Aramaic name for the place has always been Tadmor, or Tamar, meaning palms. The Greeks named it Palmyra, and that is the traditional name: so much so, that there is a long list of US and other places named Palmyra. The small town that exists in the Syrian Desert beside the ruins of the ancient city is called Tadmor in Arabic. Should the main article be at Tadmor or Palmyra? Gareth Hughes 19:24, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should disambiguation be so public? 

message: I post this after changing the table of host cities in Olympic Games article. There the state/province was mentioned near all American/Canadian cities, which made corresponding entries of the table to take 2 lines (at least in my 640x480 resolution) while entries for other cities took one line. I changed it, because I think, that the internal (e.g.American) conventions for city names are appropriate and can be used without any doubts in the articles, which deal mainly with internal or native topics to that country (e.g. for US - in biographies of US people etc.). But in the articles where the cities from other countries are mentioned, the use of different internal conventions always makes the cities in one countries over the cities in other countries in various (sometimes unexpected) senses. Cmapm 12:42, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you were right to make the change (you could try a bit of cellpadding too). I'm sure the US convention of place, state is due to so many places being named in a fairly short space of time. Other countries do have the occassional instance of two places with the same name, but there is no need to make every placename distinctive. Concerning the Olympics, the world spoke about the Atlanta Olymics, and Georgia is not a necessary addition. I even wonder if someone living a few miles outside of Atlanta would say "I'm going into Atlanta, Georgia, to do some shopping". Usage note: the comma in these names is a bracketing comma, and so, if this name is placed in the middle of the sentence, a second bracketing comma is needed after the state name. Gareth Hughes 13:00, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: internal/native topics vs international topics