Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (settlements)

Past discussion

Read the discussion contained in the archives:

Open issues

As noted before, two issues have been decided, but these leave lot of room for discussion.

The issue of using normal disambiguation rules should be clear; articles on cities get that name unless there are other topics with the same name.

Next, it has been decided that the "comma notation" ([City, Something]) is used for city names in stead of the parenthesis format. That still leaves the following possibilities:

Disambiguation is done at the necessary level. That is, if there are two different cities with the same name in two different countries, we use [City, Country]. If the two cities are within the same country, use the common local disambiguator for that nation in English language, or for that country if none available. If there are two cities within the same state (f.e.), use the common local disambiguator for that state in English language, etc., etc.
Define a natural disambiguator for each country and use it all the time.

The first option would give Sydney, Australia and Sydney, Canada, and Las Vegas, Nevada and Las Vegas, New Mexico (assuming both city names are equally common in use). The second option would give Sydney, Australia and Sydney, Nova Scotia.

I myself have no preference for either option. The latter may be easier to remember, but shows less consistency. However, since in many cases there will be many US cities and some foreign ones with the same name, that one seems the best and most logical option.

In either case, it should be investigated and listed what the standards for disambiguating nationally are per country. For the USA and Canada, these have already been established as being [City, State] and [City, Province]. For others this still has to be decided. A remaining question is whether to use the natural disambiguator for a country (be it in English language or not) should also be used if it doesn't have the comma notation. I'd say yes here - if Malta's (example) English language convention is to use City-Province, I'd say we should use that.

The last issue is the so-called "Paris" problem. As we're following "normal disambiguation" rules, it states that when one of the disambiguated articles has priority, it gets to stay at the main article (Paris, in our example). If none of the articles has priority, they're all disambiguated. The current disambiguation rules also state this decision must be made on a case-to-case basis. I think that solves our problem here. In case we decide (no matter how) that the French city has priority over the Trojan and all the other spots on the map, we put its article at Paris, and put a block-format disambiguation at the top. If we decide the city hasn't got priority, we use the normal disambiguation article. I don't see any other possibilities, but I may be wrong.

Summarising, we need to decide on :

the way to use the comma notation for disambiguation (I say always use the country-specific one)
whether to also use natural disambiguators without a comma (I say yes)
what to do with the Paris problem (I say use the normal disambiguation rules)

Jeronimo

IMOH some vote results were prematurely moved to archives.

Please let's not introduce another format as in [City-Province]; that can only promote more argument. It could also make things more difficult for the average searcher who will become confused about how to search for things.

With the parentheses format retained for non-cities we can know that [Paris (hero)] is not a city, and [Paris, Ontario] is a city.

I accept using [Paris] for the French city as long as it includes a disambiguation block at the beginning of the article.

"Has priority" needs some definition. To me this does not mean the historical priority that British cities of Boston, Perth and Halifax may have The criterion should be one of overwhelmingly common usage. The aqverage people in Paris, Kentucky can reasonably be expected to have heard of Paris, France, but the average people of Paris, France cannot reasonably be expected to have heard of Paris, Kentucky.

Eclecticology 11:16 Aug 18, 2002 (PDT)

I think "has priority" is "defined" at disambiguation as the most commonly associated meaning of the name, if any. For some, this is difficult to determine, but for a city like Rome, it is pretty clear that this one should has priority. Jeronimo

What's up with the subject page? I thought we worked out that we would use commas when needed, disambiguate US cites in the [City, State] format, Canadian ones in the [City, Province] format and most other cities in the [City, Nation] format (all of course only when needed). The current subject page says nothing of this. Please redo the main page to be similar to the movie naming convention which is disambiguation based and is only used when ambiguites exist (therefore it is a set of guidelines on how to disambiguate -- which is what I thought we agreed to). --mav

I wanted to, but some details aren't worked out yet. Therefore, I wanted to discuss that here first. For example, the USA/Canada thing was agreed on, but do we always disambiguated a city like [City, State], even if all other cities are abroad? To prevent a load of commments when I put it as a "policy" page, I wanted to talk about it here first. What is on the page right now is the _only_ thing that is absolute clear after the vote, at least as far as I'm concerned. The rest is just details, but details also count. Jeronimo

Jeronimo, by your own comments we have only agreed on two issues 1. Don't disambiguate pre-emptively, and 2. Use commas instead of parentheses. That should have gone on the revised subject page. Your comments also seem to suggest agreement on the default [City, Country] format as well as the [City, State/Province] for USA and Canada, but a reference to the vote on these points is completely missing. I know that this entire discussion has been very messy, and I may be saying the same thing as Mav by asking that the subject page should at least include th points on which we have come to an agreement. A clearly identified listing of items still under discussion would be optional. Eclecticology 12:09 Aug 18, 2002 (PDT)

Yes, the second issue was voted on, but still contains several points that are not clear enough to put this on the subject page (IMO), and these details were not included in the vote. It has been reasonably well established that the [City, State/Province] format is the natural English language disambiguator for cities in these countries; there's been enough input from US/Canadian wikipedians for that, and I can support the format as well, having read enough texts where the format appears. If you feel there's an agreement on more points: go ahead and add it. I won't, because I'm not sure what the agreement is exactly on. Jeronimo

I cannot figure out what this means: "If the two cities are within the same country, use the common local disambiguator for that nation in English language, or for that country if none available." Can someone help me? Does "if none available" mean "if there isn't one in English"? What does "or for that country if none available" have us doing? Vicki Rosenzweig

What I meant to say, but didn't was:

if there's a natural English disambiguator, use it
if there is no such one, but a natural disambiguator used in that country, use it

An example of the second could be Frankfurt-am-Main and Frankfurt-am-Oder, which the Germans use to distinguish between the two cities of Frankfurt. Jeronimo

It's "Frankfurt-an-der-Oder", or better still why not the accepted English versions "Frankfurt on the Main" and "Frankfurt on the Oder" Eclecticology 10:16 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)

Because if I'm looking for a foreign city I would search for that country's spelling convention (if I knew it). Of course, in this example I would probably search only for "Frankfurt"... At any rate, for the Wikipedia to be complete the native spelling should exist, at least as a re-direct. But then there's the counter-example where an English version of a city name is more common than the foreign country's spelling, eg. "The Hague" vs. "Den Haag"... Bob Jonkman [email protected]

I'm all for disambiguating city names when necessary. I would suggest beginning any city entry as a disambiguation page (unless we're sure the city is the only one with its name, which is possible) and then going to city, State or city, country from there. J Hofmann Kemp

I'm starting to get confused again. I thought we had decided that all U.S. cities would be in the [City, State] format; now it seems that this only happens when disambiguation is necessary. Being in favor of the second, I would not mind, but it does means I have misunderstood the question when answering it; maybe others have as well.

I personally am in favor of 'necessary level', but if the other is chosen, then please take a better way of stating it than 'natural disambiguator for each country' - because to me that sounds like we should use some disambiguator within each country, rather than having the country itself being a possible disambiguator. Only when the example was given, did I understand what was meant. Furthermore, I would favor having the possibility of using different levels of ambiguation within one country where appropriate - using a courser disambiguation when possible, a finer one when necessary.Andre Engels