Talk:List of places and things named Paris
Canadian city naming issue moved to wikipedia talk:naming conventions (city names)
Q: Do you think the format of Kent (list) is OK or is the more precise Kent (disambiguation list) better? I'm just worried that somebody might come up with an alternate use of Kent (list) that has nothing to do with disambiguation. --maveric149
- Amazing how Wikipedians get distracted into writing about things outside their field of interest! In looking at the general question of disambiguation the first question that comes to my mind is "Does the term have a single usage that overwhelms all other usages." "Paris" clearly does, but I would not say that about "Kent". Where there is no dominant usage the existing practice of the bare name for the disambiguating article seems to work very well, and its actual usage by a broad spectrum of Wikipedians says a lot in its favour. The list on the disambiguation list is getting a bit long and may need to be separated from most of the text on that page, but we must rember that its purpose is merely to keep the links on that page from becoming orphans.
- The difficulty before is relates to a positive answer to the first box in the disambiguation flow chart. (Do computer geeks still use them?) I had had the same concerns as the ones you express when I hesitated with alternatives to the long winded title of this article. The format {name (disambiguation)} would be adequate since "list" would be unnecessary in this context. I like the idea of a disambiguation block at the beginning of an article for a place like Paris. This would allow Paris to be used for Paris, France and the disambiguation block to point to Paris (disambiguation) where all the others are listed. In circumstances where there are at most three alternative uses for such a term the references could be made directly from the primary name page. I hope this helps. Eclecticology, Wednesday, July 10, 2002
- If we establish "disambiguation" as a "term of wiki art", then it is best, but I really like "list of places named foo" better. The (list) form is curt and the (disambiguation list" is unambiguous :=), but kinda geeky.Ortolan88
Well, you both convinced me and I also vote for [foo (disambiguation)], so I guess that's what we will use. I do have to disagree on the Kent issue though - nearly every single article that links there that I saw intends to go to the English county Kent. Furthermore, the English country is only called "Kent" and not anything else to my knowledge. The places named Kent in the US can be easily and naturally disambiguated in the [City, State] format.
If full disambiguation occurred at Kent then the county would have to be parenthetically disambiguated to [Kent (English county)] since it is only called "Kent" and [Kent (county)] would be too ambiguous -- I do hate parenthetical disambiguation. English counties are the closest things England has that resemble States in the US and Provinces in Canada -- so by their inherent importance they trump all cities and smaller places by the same name (unless they were truly famous - non in this case are).
To my knowledge the Brits talk about their counties without also saying "county" in the same way as most North Americans wouldn't say "Los Angeles city" or "Ontario city" (moving Kent would probably be as popular to the British contributors as would moving Colorado to Colorado (US state) would to the Americans or Yukon to Yukon (territory) would be the Canadians).
Besides, if somebody got lost, they are one click away from Kent (disambiguation) -- which is the beauty of the disambiguation block format This type of disambiguation works even when it is not super-obvious that a certain use of a word is the dominant one -- all that is needed is a preponderance of evidence that a certain use is the dominant one, not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt as now seems to be the case. --maveric149
- No matter how we define dominance there will always be specific items that can go either way. Kent falls into that gray area. I would tend to use Kent County, England in a manner parallel to the treatment of cities, but I'm not the one writing the article. Saying that the English don't use "county" as part of the name is not accurate. The suffix "-shire" effectively means county. Thus Oxford is the town, but Oxfordshire is the county. The term city does show up in a few US place names. Sometimes it's needed for disambiguation (New York and Oklahoma Cities), but sometimes not (Rapid City, Sioux City).
- Actually, it is entirely accurate. The term "Kent County" would never be used in England. Cadr 11:36, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
- Now I see that someone has moved the state Victoria, Australia to Victoria (Australia) and Perth WA surely seems irregular. Eclecticology, Thursday, July 11, 2002
- I'm not sure about Karen's move of the Australian state.... I need to talk to her about that again. As for the English county issue, I do beleive that is an ambiguitiy issue that some British contributors will have to address (I have been trying to avoid the issue of English county names for a couple of months now -- too many links to fix and I'm not satisfied with any yet proposed naming convention for those entries). However, the damage is already done with all the current links pointing to those articles (thus the redirect). Just trying to reflect reality and make the best of situations without having to result to unnatural naming. This only adds one click to anybody who arrived in the wrong place AND preserves hundreds of links to their intended targets. --maveric149
NOTE: I've moved the FIPS part of the discussion to Talk:Federal Information Processing Standard