This is a discussion to determine whether there is support to change the naming convention for articles about cities, towns, and villages (settlements) so that all are named [[City, State]] like most Australian, Canadian and USA city articles are now.
The general rule is to name an article about a city or town with a name that does not conflict with any other town or concept as city name. The rest of this naming convention contains guidelines about naming the articles where disambiguation is required. Articles about cities and towns in some countries should be "pre-disambiguated", by having the article named as if there is a name conflict, even if one is not known at the time of writing the article. In these cases, a redirect should usually be created at the primary name, pointing to the new article, until such time as a disambiguation page is actually required.
The most common way of disambiguating town and city names is to follow the name with a comma, a space and the name of the state, province, or county that it is in, or the name of the country if no second-level administrative region applies. Note that this is different to the common ways of disambiguating other kinds of places and objects, which usually place the disambiguating term in parentheses instead of after a comma.
The primary goal of this naming convention is to achieve consistency within each country. It does not necessarily achieve complete consistency across countries. Hence the remainder of the page is divided into specific guidelines for individual countries where required.
If disambiguation is needed this can be done
where Y is a higher level entity, e.g. a province or the country.
Using "X, Y" is a little bit like saying "X (city in Y)".
This is proposed to replace the "General rules" section of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements).
The general guideline is to name an article about a city, town or village with a name that contains the name as it is commonly known in that country, followed by a comma, and the name of the state, province, territory, county or similar entity that contains it ( City, state). For towns and cities in non-English speaking countries (this is the English Wikipedia and so is likely to cover many more smaller towns in English-speaking countries) and smaller countries with no significant smaller administrative boundaries, the name of the country itself should be used ( City, country). This form of qualifying the names of articles provides the reader with a little more context when they move their mouse pointer over a link, and ensures that articles about cities have a consistent style. Editors are helped by the pipe trick, where they can enter the article name as [[city, state|]] and the wiki software will automatically insert the part before the comma again between the pipe and the closing brackets.
To assist searching (and editors who have not read or remembered this guideline), there should always be a redirect or link from an article with the title of just the unqualified cityname.
Note that this convention for a qualified name is different to the common ways of disambiguating other kinds of places and objects, which usually place the disambiguating term in parentheses instead of after a comma. Also notice that the name of the state, province or country should be written in full, not as an abbreviation (to avoid confusion between PA meaning both Pennsylvania and Panama, or WA meaning both Washington and Western Australia, for example).
The primary goal of this naming convention is to achieve consistency in naming articles about cities and towns, which tend to be linked to by lots of other articles compared to articles about other kinds of things.
The remainder of the page is divided into specific additional guidelines for individual countries and situations where required.
Before the end of 2006, this naming convention in its current form was only broadly applied to articles about cities and towns in Australia, the USA and Canada. Articles on places in other countries sometimes followed this convention if required for disambiguation, but in general was not applied otherwise. Many (tens if not hundreds of) thousands of articles will need to be moved to make this convention be applied universally. At least initially, articles should not be moved wholesale without understanding and support of the regular editors and stakeholders of those articles. There may be good reasons why articles of a particular area should not be named according to this convention, which the people drafting it have not thought of.
Georgia refers to both Georgia (country) and Georgia (U.S. state), and thus towns in either of those will end up being named Town, Georgia. While odd, this is not a problem unless there are in fact a pair of towns in those places with the same names.
If there are two towns in the same state with the same name, the disambiguation should be done according to the local custom. For example Elgin, Lancaster County, South Carolina and Elgin, Kershaw County, South Carolina or Kingston-On-Murray, South Australia and Kingston SE, South Australia.
Please discuss the proposal here. This is a first attempt at seeking consensus towards this style of naming convention as the default for most of the world. It is partially a response to the continued bickering over naming articles for cities in the USA. Note that at the moment, this is a discussion, not a vote. -- Scott Davis Talk 10:19, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
The comma convention is, despite the insistence of some editors, the default when disambiguation is needed and it is not clear how English disambiguates: if Brixen needed to be disambiguated from Brixen im Thale (in Austria), it would be Brixen, Italy; it was there for a while. That should be stated somewhere; but this proposal is both vague and, naturally read, much stronger. Septentrionalis 15:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Thankyou all for the comments so far. I understand this would be a big change for a lot of articles, so would need widespread support and fine-tuning. If it could achieve acceptance, then the bickering over US article names looking different to article names for cities in other places would go away. The comments so far demonstrate that the issues for Europe at least need to be redone somewhat. It is likely that there would be similar problems to be clarified for Asia, Africa and South America too.
To the people who object to "predisambiguation", this is a proposal for using "qualified names" for cities, a bit like using genus and species for plants, or first and last names for people. Yes, it is a change to the standard, but I would hope that it could make the encyclopaedia better (in the long run) by making it easier to recognise articles about towns, and making it look more professional due to the consistency it would introduce.
I did not expect this proposal to be accepted without change or discussion. Thankyou for your help. There is a suggestion on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (settlements)#Cease_fire.3F to put all renaming on hold for a month to let the dust settle and allow people not regularly watching naming conventions the chance to realise. If there are people who think this could become a workable new convention and want to help improve the words and finer points, you are welcome. -- Scott Davis Talk 04:35, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
This is a discussion to determine whether there is support to change the naming convention for articles about cities, towns, and villages (settlements) so that all are named [[City, State]] like most Australian, Canadian and USA city articles are now.
The general rule is to name an article about a city or town with a name that does not conflict with any other town or concept as city name. The rest of this naming convention contains guidelines about naming the articles where disambiguation is required. Articles about cities and towns in some countries should be "pre-disambiguated", by having the article named as if there is a name conflict, even if one is not known at the time of writing the article. In these cases, a redirect should usually be created at the primary name, pointing to the new article, until such time as a disambiguation page is actually required.
The most common way of disambiguating town and city names is to follow the name with a comma, a space and the name of the state, province, or county that it is in, or the name of the country if no second-level administrative region applies. Note that this is different to the common ways of disambiguating other kinds of places and objects, which usually place the disambiguating term in parentheses instead of after a comma.
The primary goal of this naming convention is to achieve consistency within each country. It does not necessarily achieve complete consistency across countries. Hence the remainder of the page is divided into specific guidelines for individual countries where required.
If disambiguation is needed this can be done
where Y is a higher level entity, e.g. a province or the country.
Using "X, Y" is a little bit like saying "X (city in Y)".
This is proposed to replace the "General rules" section of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements).
The general guideline is to name an article about a city, town or village with a name that contains the name as it is commonly known in that country, followed by a comma, and the name of the state, province, territory, county or similar entity that contains it ( City, state). For towns and cities in non-English speaking countries (this is the English Wikipedia and so is likely to cover many more smaller towns in English-speaking countries) and smaller countries with no significant smaller administrative boundaries, the name of the country itself should be used ( City, country). This form of qualifying the names of articles provides the reader with a little more context when they move their mouse pointer over a link, and ensures that articles about cities have a consistent style. Editors are helped by the pipe trick, where they can enter the article name as [[city, state|]] and the wiki software will automatically insert the part before the comma again between the pipe and the closing brackets.
To assist searching (and editors who have not read or remembered this guideline), there should always be a redirect or link from an article with the title of just the unqualified cityname.
Note that this convention for a qualified name is different to the common ways of disambiguating other kinds of places and objects, which usually place the disambiguating term in parentheses instead of after a comma. Also notice that the name of the state, province or country should be written in full, not as an abbreviation (to avoid confusion between PA meaning both Pennsylvania and Panama, or WA meaning both Washington and Western Australia, for example).
The primary goal of this naming convention is to achieve consistency in naming articles about cities and towns, which tend to be linked to by lots of other articles compared to articles about other kinds of things.
The remainder of the page is divided into specific additional guidelines for individual countries and situations where required.
Before the end of 2006, this naming convention in its current form was only broadly applied to articles about cities and towns in Australia, the USA and Canada. Articles on places in other countries sometimes followed this convention if required for disambiguation, but in general was not applied otherwise. Many (tens if not hundreds of) thousands of articles will need to be moved to make this convention be applied universally. At least initially, articles should not be moved wholesale without understanding and support of the regular editors and stakeholders of those articles. There may be good reasons why articles of a particular area should not be named according to this convention, which the people drafting it have not thought of.
Georgia refers to both Georgia (country) and Georgia (U.S. state), and thus towns in either of those will end up being named Town, Georgia. While odd, this is not a problem unless there are in fact a pair of towns in those places with the same names.
If there are two towns in the same state with the same name, the disambiguation should be done according to the local custom. For example Elgin, Lancaster County, South Carolina and Elgin, Kershaw County, South Carolina or Kingston-On-Murray, South Australia and Kingston SE, South Australia.
Please discuss the proposal here. This is a first attempt at seeking consensus towards this style of naming convention as the default for most of the world. It is partially a response to the continued bickering over naming articles for cities in the USA. Note that at the moment, this is a discussion, not a vote. -- Scott Davis Talk 10:19, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
The comma convention is, despite the insistence of some editors, the default when disambiguation is needed and it is not clear how English disambiguates: if Brixen needed to be disambiguated from Brixen im Thale (in Austria), it would be Brixen, Italy; it was there for a while. That should be stated somewhere; but this proposal is both vague and, naturally read, much stronger. Septentrionalis 15:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Thankyou all for the comments so far. I understand this would be a big change for a lot of articles, so would need widespread support and fine-tuning. If it could achieve acceptance, then the bickering over US article names looking different to article names for cities in other places would go away. The comments so far demonstrate that the issues for Europe at least need to be redone somewhat. It is likely that there would be similar problems to be clarified for Asia, Africa and South America too.
To the people who object to "predisambiguation", this is a proposal for using "qualified names" for cities, a bit like using genus and species for plants, or first and last names for people. Yes, it is a change to the standard, but I would hope that it could make the encyclopaedia better (in the long run) by making it easier to recognise articles about towns, and making it look more professional due to the consistency it would introduce.
I did not expect this proposal to be accepted without change or discussion. Thankyou for your help. There is a suggestion on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (settlements)#Cease_fire.3F to put all renaming on hold for a month to let the dust settle and allow people not regularly watching naming conventions the chance to realise. If there are people who think this could become a workable new convention and want to help improve the words and finer points, you are welcome. -- Scott Davis Talk 04:35, 4 November 2006 (UTC)