Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:31, 11 December 2004

This page has gone back and forth a few times between being called "City Island, New York", and "City Island (New York)". Please leave the title in the comma style, as that is the wikipedia preferred style. See Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (city names).

I strongly disagree. It is not the preferred style, since City Island is not a city. It is an island, that is, a geographic feature. The policy in Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (city names) does not apply in this case. Geographic features, in my opinion, are must better designated by commas parentheses, since it avoids confusion with U.S. cities, and there a quite a few cases where geographic features straddle state boundaries. We have a long-established tradition of U.S. and Canadian rivers and lakes, for example, of using parentheses over the comma. Islands should be the same way, unless there is actually a city by the name that is coincident with the island itself. Neither Hart Island or City Island should have the comma, in my opinion, since there is no such municipality as "City Island, New York". If a comma is to be used, it should be City Island, Bronx, New York in parallel with List of Bronx neighborhoods (the comma is conventional in neighborhoods). Using the comma with the state New York puts it into the false representation as a census-designated place in the United States, which it is not. "City Island, New York" is simply unacceptable by that standard.-- Decumanus 17:39, 2004 Dec 11 (UTC)

Hmmm. I was just trying to help, but it seems I stepped into a minefield by accident. I saw an inconsistency, asked for advice (on the helpdesk page, which you apparantly saw), and just followed that advice. In fact, I didn't even get a chance to follow the advice, User:Ferkelparade stepped in and did it for me. I did however follow-up with similar changes to Hart Island, and High Island.

I'm a newcommer here. The last thing I want to do is get involved in a religious war between two old-timers, so I'm bowing out of this until you two can agree between yourselves what's right and what's wrong.

By-the-way, when you wrote, "Geographic features, in my opinion, are must better designated by commas", I'm guessing you really meant, "... better designated by parenthesis", since that would fit better with the rest of your statements :-)

Yeah, a typo. I should avoid editing before coffee :). I meant parentheses, which is a harder word to type. In any case, don't feel bad. This is definitely something that should be debated, so it's good to get it out in the open.

Basically my position is this: the items that should be disambiguated with a comma are those that should always have a comma because of what they are, even when they don't require disambiguation. Cities in the U.S. are like this. They always take a comma, even when they don't require disambiguation. Even if there is only one Jersey City, the article is still Jersey City, New Jersey. That is, the New Jersey part of the title is inherently part of it, and not really used for disambiguation.

On the other hand, things that normally don't take a comma should not take one when they require disambiguation. Islands are like this. When an island doesn't need disambiguation, it normally just stands on its own, like Oahu. This is the case in general with geographical features, which stand on their own unless they explicitly require disambiguation. To take another example, Long Island is notable enough to get that title all by itself. If it required true disambiguation, it would not become "Long Island, New York" (which has no official meaning in New York state government, U.S Census Bureau, or United States Postal Service, etc.) but would get the parentheses. One reason in favor of this is that there may in fact be cities that have the form "XXX Island, YYY", where YYY is a state, like Grand Island, Nebraska, which indeed is a municipality. There could well be both a muncipality and an island, with the municipality occupying only a small part of the island. If the island needed disambiguation, it would conflict with the name of the muncipality. In cases where the town occupies the entire island, that is not so bad, but there are exceptions (I know I've run across them).

Note that actually this article could just as well live at City Island, since right now there are now other articles with that title.

Another reason is that sometimes geogrpahical feaures straddle state boundaries in a way that works much better with parentheses that with commas, e.g. Bear Lake (Idaho-Utah), which is about half in either state. A third reason I personally prefer parentheses over commas is that it allows for easier pipe disambiguation like this ] gets automatically expanded in the markup to ] whereas the comma never does. But that's just a freebee add-on. The other reasons are the really reasons.

I know not everyone agrees with this policy as I've outlined it. Naming conventions are all over the map. At Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Rivers, we spent a lot of effort hashing out how to disambiguate rivers. A great many rivers cross state, province, and national boundaries, making parentheses much better than commas. But contributors in New Zealand and Great Britain established the comma convention, possibly because rivers in New Zealand are only in New Zealand, and likewise with Great Britain. They never cross national boundaries. That's a guess. All the rivers in North America, on the other hand (of which there are many more articles) take parentheses when requiring disambiguation. -- Decumanus 19:17, 2004 Dec 11 (UTC)</nowiki>