[Wikipedia-l] Re: City, state convention

Sat Jul 13 09:29:51 UTC 2002

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>On Friday 12 July 2002 12:01 pm, : Karen AKA Kajikit  wrote:
>  
>
>>I don't think it sounds silly... sure within the context of a single
>>country it's wierd and wouldn't be used, but when you're talking
>>worldwide then it's quite normal to use the country name as well as the
>>city just as an identifier. You want to make it obvious to people who
>>are ignorant just where Sydney is, and if they don't know where
>>AUSTRALIA is then the situation is hopeless and you can just give up
>>    
>>
>This is called a disambiguation block and this form of disambiguation is 
>useful in cases like this where a famous thing has the same name less famous 
>things.  Paris is an even more obvious example. 
>  
>
The point of my "disambiguation block" suggestion was that at least one 
city would get the plain, unquantified name.

I agree with Lars:
 > "Sydney, Australia" and "Stockholm, Sweden" just sound silly in any 
text.  It would be as strange as "floppy, computer device" or cheese, 
food item". Writing [[Sydney, Australia|Sydney]] is not a good solution.

I've suggested before that for countries which do not have an existing 
disambiguation nomenclature, we use standard Wikipedia format: "Paris 
(France)"

Someone just created "Shikoku, Japan" -- AFAIK there is no other 
"shikoku". There may be a need for "Shikoku, Japan" to exist, should 
another writer link to it, but the article should be on "Shikoku".

In general, like Lars said, phrases such as "Paris, France" are poor 
style. If the context is not already clear from the article -- "French 
composer, born in Paris" for instance -- it is better to write "Paris, 
in France" or even "Paris (France)".