why two pages now i'm not an authority such as people here claim to be i don't hold any phds nor do i feel i posses a body of knowledge that is very likely to dismiss innocent guesses or fractal knowledge i have however spent some time in russia and in kazakhstan specifically almaty that is the name i always hear people use almaty the russians however still call it alma ata for example i was living in nizhny novgorod for awhile and no one there knew what i was talking about when i said almaty all the people i met in almaty however say almaty when i see the name written on signs and billboards in the city it is also written as almaty from my experience only the russians continue the use of alma ata as another example the train station in moscow says alma ata however it also says gorki instead of nizhny novgorod most everyone there says nizhny novgorod or nizhny for short i can't recall actually hearing gorki used beyond the train station also it's not just the kazakh government who uses that name it's a lot of people many books about the region published nowadays also use almaty they sometimes mention the soviet alma ata much like bishkek is the soviet frunze as for using the scientific scholarly approved approach for naming wikipedia doesn't do that as mentioned above see the scientific or academic method for writing the offical name of the country is actually qazaqstan the letter being offically transliterated as q in english there area few academic books do that look at works from indiana university for example but outside of these small circles people by and large write kazakhstan with a k including wikipedia if people say we should use alma ata because it's the correct name as dictated by academics why no qazaqstan anyway my point is that i found it surprising there are two different articles almaty and alma ata i think there should only be one since regardless of the name it is still the same place all the pictures and information should be seen together on one page they should be merged oh one more thing i just went to google and looked up almaty hits i then looked up alma ata only